Stay in the Loop
BSR publishes on a weekly schedule, with an email newsletter every Wednesday and Thursday morning. There’s no paywall, and subscribing is always free.
Bill Buckley reconsidered
Dan Rottenberg
Bill Buckley reconsidered:
The triumph of energy over intellect
DAN ROTTENBERG
William F. Buckley Jr. was 26 and fresh out of college in 1951 when he launched his career as a provocateur. In God and Man at Yale he excoriated his alma mater for its allegedly atheistic/collectivist leanings and called for the firing of faculty members whose ideas conflicted with his own conservative Catholic values. “I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world,” Buckley declared, sounding much like Martin Luther at Wittenberg. Four years later, in the maiden issue of National Review, Buckley declared, with similar puckish grandiloquence, “We stand athwart history, yelling ‘Stop’.”
These sweeping pronouncements tended to crumble upon even the most cursory examination. Why, a reader might have asked Buckley, did you stay at Yale? Was someone pointing a gun at your head? Are you not aware that fine Catholic universities like Notre Dame, Georgetown, Boston College and Villanova were established precisely to address your concerns? Where does your belief about Christianity and atheism leave the world’s billions of non-atheist non-Christians? On what rational basis did you arrive at your belief? As for stopping history, exactly where would you stop it? Before or after the fall of the Soviet Union? Before or after the development of antibiotics and anesthesia? Before or after the elimination of slavery? Before or after the invention of the printing press?
Buckley, the conservative icon who died February 27 at the age of 82, made a career of poking holes in liberal pieties, but he never sat still long enough to apply the same sort of Socratic analysis to himself. In an astonishingly hyperactive career as editor, essayist, TV host, novelist, yachtsman, arts connoisseur, political candidate and bon vivant, he produced 55 books, 5,600 newspaper columns, 1,429 episodes of “Firing Line” and 2,800 public speeches— a body of work that’s remarkable both for its sheer quantity and also for its inevitable shallowness. What else could you expect of a man who boasted that he could write a newspaper column in 20 minutes?
Fully formed at age ten
I say this as someone who read Buckley’s column and watched his TV show frequently until about 1975, when it occurred to me that Buckley had said everything he was ever going to say. Although I rarely agreed with Buckley, I read him and watched him as a way of testing my own ideas, a process Buckley never applied to himself. His ideas— essentially, a belief in the virtues of conservatism, Christianity, free enterprise and his own brilliance— were fully formed around the age of ten, and thereafter he resisted all efforts to test, question, modify or expand them. At each opportunity for personal growth in his life— and goodness knows he had hundreds— Buckley instinctively opted for style over substance, for celebrity over scholarship, for brilliance over wisdom, and for rhetoric (that is, the use of language to win arguments) over philosophy (that is, an open-minded search for truth).
Of course I am talking here not only about Buckley but also about the essential differences between liberals and conservatives, which to my mind are psychological rather than intellectual. The liberal is by nature a student, constantly searching for the truth that he knows he can never fully grasp; the conservative is by nature a teacher, dedicated to promulgating the truth he already grasps with certainty. Buckley was temperamentally a teacher from the time he entered Yale, which apparently had less to teach him than he had to teach it. His own authority was a given, which he constantly reinforced by all those mountains of columns, books, TV shows and speeches. He was allergic to self-doubt and introspection; his only real wrath was reserved for those benighted souls who failed to appreciate what Bill Buckley was all about.
Franklin Littell’s lesson
Dr. Franklin Littell of Philadelphia, for example, was a Methodist minister and Temple professor who was considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on religious liberty, church-state relationships and relations between Christians and Jews. But in Buckley's 1983 book Overdrive— which, like his 1971 book Cruising Speed, describes a week in the life of Buckley’s favorite subject, himself — he dismissed Littell with a single word— “jerko”— because Littell once compared Buckley to the Nazi diplomat Joachim von Ribbentrop. The man attacked Buckley; therefore the man must be cut down. As Voltaire remarked to Madame du Deffant, “You measure friendship, probity, wit— everything, in fact— according to the homage paid to you.”
Similarly, in Overdrive (the last Buckley book, I confess, that I read), Buckley vented his anger upon an unnamed Time Magazine reporter whose account of an SEC investigation of a Buckley family company, Buckley contended, was false and malicious. “What they (Time) have done,” Buckley wrote, “is as bad as could be.”
Yet what Littell and Time did to Buckley was child’s play compared to two gaffes, mentioned in the same book, that Buckley himself committed without apparent remorse.
Pat Boone’s complaint
In one case, Buckley had appeared on “The Merv Griffin Show” with the singer John Davidson. In the course of the show, Davidson remarked that he and his wife owned an X-rated film that they showed on their home VCR, and Davidson said he thought that was very healthy. A few days later and hundreds of miles away, Buckley wrote a column about that conversation. But by then he had forgotten Davidson’s name, and rather than check it out (must finish the column in 20 minutes, after all), he referred to the singer first as a “Pat Boone type” and thereafter in the column simply as “Pat Boone.” Needless to add, the real Pat Boone— a high-profile evangelical Christian— was shattered by the reference.
Buckley’s response to the error was to express his apologies, pay $5,000 to Boone and jest about the widespread ignorance of antonomasia, the device he had used in substituting Boone’s name for Davidson’s.
In another case, Buckley referred in a column to a fund-raising party thrown by the TV producer Norman Lear in 1980 for the presidential candidate Jerry Brown. After receiving a letter of complaint from Lear, Buckley “researched my memory” and found that the party in question was not thrown by Norman Lear at all, but by Francis Coppola. (All liberal producers look alike, right?) Buckley attempted to laugh the matter off with a charming note to Lear.
No appraisals of my work, please
At one point in Overdrive, Buckley wrote to Tom Winship, the editor of the Boston Globe, to complain that the Globe was buying Buckley’s column but rarely using it. Buckley contended that the editorial page editor, Martin Nolan, was biased against him and provided evidence that such bias was uninformed and unjustified. Winship passed the letter on to Nolan, who replied: “If any three of your columns were as well-researched as your letter to Tom Winship was, we’d all be better off. Many columnists, including George Will, whom we both admire, now write twice weekly. That schedule allows a more discriminating choice of subject matter and more time to write.”
Buckley summarily rejected this suggestion that he write less frequently (and presumably more carefully): “I have not approached you with a request to appraise my work,” he replied. Of course not. If God asked people what they think of Him, he wouldn’t be God.
His one big thing
Buckley, I would submit, accomplished one valuable and important thing in his life. He fathered and nurtured modern conservatism as a political and intellectual movement. He provided the incubator where deeper conservative thinkers than he was could develop and flourish. Through his own exuberant personal example he shattered the old stereotype of conservatives as suspicious crackpots and gloomy curmudgeons. In the process he performed a service not only for conservatives but for liberals as well, since both left and right need a healthy opposite in much the same way that, say, a human needs both a left leg and a right leg in order to walk.
This one big thing of Buckley’s, of course, is one big thing more than most of us achieve in our lifetimes.
Unfortunately, Buckley’s solution to the smug orthodoxy of liberalism was to replace it with the smug orthodoxy of conservatism. The real problem in this or any society, I would contend, is neither liberalism nor conservatism; it’s smugness and orthodoxy. But Buckley was too busy nailing his theses to the wall over and over again— albeit in new forms and with different tools— to pause for that sort of discussion.
The triumph of energy over intellect
DAN ROTTENBERG
William F. Buckley Jr. was 26 and fresh out of college in 1951 when he launched his career as a provocateur. In God and Man at Yale he excoriated his alma mater for its allegedly atheistic/collectivist leanings and called for the firing of faculty members whose ideas conflicted with his own conservative Catholic values. “I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world,” Buckley declared, sounding much like Martin Luther at Wittenberg. Four years later, in the maiden issue of National Review, Buckley declared, with similar puckish grandiloquence, “We stand athwart history, yelling ‘Stop’.”
These sweeping pronouncements tended to crumble upon even the most cursory examination. Why, a reader might have asked Buckley, did you stay at Yale? Was someone pointing a gun at your head? Are you not aware that fine Catholic universities like Notre Dame, Georgetown, Boston College and Villanova were established precisely to address your concerns? Where does your belief about Christianity and atheism leave the world’s billions of non-atheist non-Christians? On what rational basis did you arrive at your belief? As for stopping history, exactly where would you stop it? Before or after the fall of the Soviet Union? Before or after the development of antibiotics and anesthesia? Before or after the elimination of slavery? Before or after the invention of the printing press?
Buckley, the conservative icon who died February 27 at the age of 82, made a career of poking holes in liberal pieties, but he never sat still long enough to apply the same sort of Socratic analysis to himself. In an astonishingly hyperactive career as editor, essayist, TV host, novelist, yachtsman, arts connoisseur, political candidate and bon vivant, he produced 55 books, 5,600 newspaper columns, 1,429 episodes of “Firing Line” and 2,800 public speeches— a body of work that’s remarkable both for its sheer quantity and also for its inevitable shallowness. What else could you expect of a man who boasted that he could write a newspaper column in 20 minutes?
Fully formed at age ten
I say this as someone who read Buckley’s column and watched his TV show frequently until about 1975, when it occurred to me that Buckley had said everything he was ever going to say. Although I rarely agreed with Buckley, I read him and watched him as a way of testing my own ideas, a process Buckley never applied to himself. His ideas— essentially, a belief in the virtues of conservatism, Christianity, free enterprise and his own brilliance— were fully formed around the age of ten, and thereafter he resisted all efforts to test, question, modify or expand them. At each opportunity for personal growth in his life— and goodness knows he had hundreds— Buckley instinctively opted for style over substance, for celebrity over scholarship, for brilliance over wisdom, and for rhetoric (that is, the use of language to win arguments) over philosophy (that is, an open-minded search for truth).
Of course I am talking here not only about Buckley but also about the essential differences between liberals and conservatives, which to my mind are psychological rather than intellectual. The liberal is by nature a student, constantly searching for the truth that he knows he can never fully grasp; the conservative is by nature a teacher, dedicated to promulgating the truth he already grasps with certainty. Buckley was temperamentally a teacher from the time he entered Yale, which apparently had less to teach him than he had to teach it. His own authority was a given, which he constantly reinforced by all those mountains of columns, books, TV shows and speeches. He was allergic to self-doubt and introspection; his only real wrath was reserved for those benighted souls who failed to appreciate what Bill Buckley was all about.
Franklin Littell’s lesson
Dr. Franklin Littell of Philadelphia, for example, was a Methodist minister and Temple professor who was considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on religious liberty, church-state relationships and relations between Christians and Jews. But in Buckley's 1983 book Overdrive— which, like his 1971 book Cruising Speed, describes a week in the life of Buckley’s favorite subject, himself — he dismissed Littell with a single word— “jerko”— because Littell once compared Buckley to the Nazi diplomat Joachim von Ribbentrop. The man attacked Buckley; therefore the man must be cut down. As Voltaire remarked to Madame du Deffant, “You measure friendship, probity, wit— everything, in fact— according to the homage paid to you.”
Similarly, in Overdrive (the last Buckley book, I confess, that I read), Buckley vented his anger upon an unnamed Time Magazine reporter whose account of an SEC investigation of a Buckley family company, Buckley contended, was false and malicious. “What they (Time) have done,” Buckley wrote, “is as bad as could be.”
Yet what Littell and Time did to Buckley was child’s play compared to two gaffes, mentioned in the same book, that Buckley himself committed without apparent remorse.
Pat Boone’s complaint
In one case, Buckley had appeared on “The Merv Griffin Show” with the singer John Davidson. In the course of the show, Davidson remarked that he and his wife owned an X-rated film that they showed on their home VCR, and Davidson said he thought that was very healthy. A few days later and hundreds of miles away, Buckley wrote a column about that conversation. But by then he had forgotten Davidson’s name, and rather than check it out (must finish the column in 20 minutes, after all), he referred to the singer first as a “Pat Boone type” and thereafter in the column simply as “Pat Boone.” Needless to add, the real Pat Boone— a high-profile evangelical Christian— was shattered by the reference.
Buckley’s response to the error was to express his apologies, pay $5,000 to Boone and jest about the widespread ignorance of antonomasia, the device he had used in substituting Boone’s name for Davidson’s.
In another case, Buckley referred in a column to a fund-raising party thrown by the TV producer Norman Lear in 1980 for the presidential candidate Jerry Brown. After receiving a letter of complaint from Lear, Buckley “researched my memory” and found that the party in question was not thrown by Norman Lear at all, but by Francis Coppola. (All liberal producers look alike, right?) Buckley attempted to laugh the matter off with a charming note to Lear.
No appraisals of my work, please
At one point in Overdrive, Buckley wrote to Tom Winship, the editor of the Boston Globe, to complain that the Globe was buying Buckley’s column but rarely using it. Buckley contended that the editorial page editor, Martin Nolan, was biased against him and provided evidence that such bias was uninformed and unjustified. Winship passed the letter on to Nolan, who replied: “If any three of your columns were as well-researched as your letter to Tom Winship was, we’d all be better off. Many columnists, including George Will, whom we both admire, now write twice weekly. That schedule allows a more discriminating choice of subject matter and more time to write.”
Buckley summarily rejected this suggestion that he write less frequently (and presumably more carefully): “I have not approached you with a request to appraise my work,” he replied. Of course not. If God asked people what they think of Him, he wouldn’t be God.
His one big thing
Buckley, I would submit, accomplished one valuable and important thing in his life. He fathered and nurtured modern conservatism as a political and intellectual movement. He provided the incubator where deeper conservative thinkers than he was could develop and flourish. Through his own exuberant personal example he shattered the old stereotype of conservatives as suspicious crackpots and gloomy curmudgeons. In the process he performed a service not only for conservatives but for liberals as well, since both left and right need a healthy opposite in much the same way that, say, a human needs both a left leg and a right leg in order to walk.
This one big thing of Buckley’s, of course, is one big thing more than most of us achieve in our lifetimes.
Unfortunately, Buckley’s solution to the smug orthodoxy of liberalism was to replace it with the smug orthodoxy of conservatism. The real problem in this or any society, I would contend, is neither liberalism nor conservatism; it’s smugness and orthodoxy. But Buckley was too busy nailing his theses to the wall over and over again— albeit in new forms and with different tools— to pause for that sort of discussion.
Sign up for our newsletter
All of the week's new articles, all in one place. Sign up for the free weekly BSR newsletters, and don't miss a conversation.
