PBS premiered “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley” coincidentally on the same day that I visited Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library to explore William F. Buckley Jr.’s correspondence.

The epistolary Buckley encountered Friday morning clashed as much as he meshed with the pixelated Buckley who aired on PBS that evening.

The National Review founding father surely lent himself to pasquinade — such as when mimetic writers deploy quarter words when nickel ones work as well or better — more than most, but in presenting him not even as a character but in caricature, PBS caricatured itself. The cornball Buckley impersonator talking out his writings foreshadowed the rest of the broadcast.

Leftists made a documentary ostensibly about William F. Buckley that instead fixated on the causes and controversies in recent American history that animate leftists: McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, racism, Vietnam, Watergate, and even, bizarrely, Jan. 6, 2021. The insularity and narcissism of the Left resulted in a documentary taking a conservative out of his own context and placing him in the only one comprehensible to progressives. The 101-minute program mainly illustrated how little the Left understands what animates the Right.

How might the producers of American Masters react to a documentary about, say, Jesse Jackson that fixated on his views of defeating the Evil Empire, the Kemp–Roth tax legislation, and the Contract with America on the right, and such uncomfortable episodes on the left as the Zebra Killings and Jonestown? “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley” emitted this non sequitur quality. It missed the man’s point and saw his significance as when he entered the public stage with James Baldwin or Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal.

Buckley defended Joseph McCarthy in one of his better books and took on John Birch Society founder Robert Welch with increasing ferocity in 1961, 1962, and 1965. So, some of these topics naturally arise in any discussion of Buckley’s life. But the portrayal of him, for instance, as wishing to brush under the rug Welch’s excesses — when he more than anyone else who ever lived highlighted them — ranks as a falsehood, which one guesses found its way into the program to allow for an unhappy ending — showing the ugly right-wingers Buckley supposedly tried to hide — finally rising to the surface on Jan. 6.

Buckley’s correspondence that I reviewed Friday paints Robert Welch as an opportunist “corrupting the thought processes of a great many people.” In discussing with National Review cofounder Willi Schlamm his possible return to the magazine, he coaxes his frenemy into disassociating with Welch and his magazine American Opinion. “I have a private moral problem over Welch which I can easily handle,” Buckley wrote Schlamm. “But I have a very public one which has to do with the positive damage I feel he commits.”

After much back-and-forth, Schlamm agreed to part with American Opinion but told Buckley in March of 1962, “I think it is advisable to let some time pass between your murdering Bob Welch and my appearing in NR.”

Anyone familiar with 1962’s Buckley-authored evisceration of Welch grasps the correct word choice in “murdering.”

The program seemed to exaggerate, with an aid from talking heads, the influence of Albert Jay Nock — a figure whose biography I briefly explored writing — over Buckley. His presence in the Buckley household caused me to ask Bill Buckley’s older brother a few years before his death about his influence. Nonagenarian James Buckley, sharp and boasting an excellent memory on any number of events, could not recall anything specific regarding what Nock said within his home.

One does not come across Nock much in Buckley’s writings, and Nock’s notion of the Remnant seems to clash with the Buckleyism about a preference for the political wisdom of 2,000 random names in the Boston phonebook than the 2,000 faculty Harvard faculty members. In the hundreds of Buckley’s letters I have examined both at Yale and in private collections, I do not recall ever seeing Nock’s name. One could characterize Suzanne La Follette, among those in early National Review, as an acolyte of Nock. Emphasizing this association misses the mark with Buckley.

One character trait the program got exactly right. It tells an anecdote in which Milton Friedman queried partygoers about Buckley’s greatest talent. After hearing his “writing” and other such answers, the economist corrected all: Bill Buckley’s greatest talent was for friendship.

That seems not only true but the essence of the private man behind the public intellectual. The correspondence I read Friday in the Sterling Memorial Library between literary critic and scholar Hugh Kenner and his editor at National Review illustrated Buckley the generous friend. Kenner chronicled the deterioration of his wife, and Buckley consoled, throughout 1964’s exchanges. When cancer — whose won-loss record was more on par with the Harlem Globetrotters back then — finally killed her, Kenner received an enormous check from Buckley, which he used to pay for freshman-year expenses at Webster College for his daughter.

Kenner wrote Buckley regarding the gift of “bewilderment that such good-will can exist.” A half-dozen or so other similar examples come to mind, and they all share one quality: Buckley came to the aid of friends who needed it and did so very quietly, which makes one think many more examples of his friendship remain lost to history. Amid much to criticize — and some things to celebrate — “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley” nailed this one laudatory aspect of its subject.

American Masters produces some quality programming. The fact the show examined Paul Robeson, Allen Ginsberg, Lillian Hellman, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Dalton Trumbo, Anthony Fauci, and Jerry Brown before it arrived at William F. Buckley says much. But given cultural gatekeepers say so little — in biopics, documentaries, and history books — about figures of import on the American right, perhaps conservatives should chalk it up as a win that after 39 seasons American Masters finally deigned to say anything about one in our movement.