April 5, 2024

The American Masters film on William F. Buckley Jr., The Incomparable Mr. Buckley, has just concluded its premiere on PBS. Here are my notes from Friday night’s broadcast. (My apologies for the length. If I’d had more time, it would have been shorter.)

• First, the obligatory disclosure. I was asked by the producer, Mr. Barak Goodman, to appear in the film. He had apparently concluded that I was the sole survivor of the spirited crew that worked closely with Buckley in his prime (which most of WFB’s biographers have reckoned to be the years between 1955 and 1970). I declined, politely. I got off television a few years ago when a close associate, known to my creditors as Mrs. Freeman, whispered that I was manifesting symptoms of early-onset Biden Syndrome.

• I then offered to advise the producer, with the objective of helping him to eliminate any “whoppers” from the final cut. In my exchanges with him, I sensed that, while he was deeply versed in the history of racial injustice, he had little background in politics and none at all in politics of the conservative sort. He declined, politely.

• What is my immediate, rubber-hammer-meets-knee impression of the film? The producer seems to have chosen as his matrix the 1988 John Judis biography of Buckley, Patron Saint of the Conservatives. In that otherwise laudable book, Judis had summed up Buckley as a warm and charming man whose career had been something of an exercise in triviality: He was, that is to say, a man of large promise, much of it unrealized.

• So let’s begin with the errors of omission.

• Bill Buckley captured, first, the imagination and then the allegiance of one of the world’s great political parties and held it close for two generations. From Barry Goldwater in 1964 to Mitt Romney in 2012, every Republican nominee for president was a Buckley conservative — or somebody who at least occasionally pretended to be one. (To launch his presidential campaign, Romney, who had been a moderate governor of Massachusetts, moved to Utah and ran as the man who saved the Salt Lake City Olympics.) The producer does not recognize this accomplishment.

• The great ideological struggle of the 20th century, waged for more than 70 bloody years, was the protracted conflict between the Soviet Union and the alliance of democratic nations led by the United States. Who was the single most important figure on the Western, winning side? You could make an argument for George Kennan (who might have been willing to make the argument himself). You could make an argument for John Paul II (who would have dismissed the idea with a wave of the papal hand). You could make an argument for Ronald Reagan (who might have deflected credit to his mentor). Or you could make an argument for Bill Buckley, who, from the first days of the Cold War to the last days of the Berlin Wall, reified the hard, spiritual case against Communism. The producer does not recognize this accomplishment.

• During the Reagan presidency, the top individual tax rate was cut from 73 percent to 28 percent. This geo-disruptive change produced a burst of innovative economic activity, a burst of employment, a burst of investment, and a burst in market revaluations. America was back-back-back from the Carter malaise, with patriotic juices stirred, the industrial base invigorated, the Soviets startled, and soon thereafter, and much to the surprise of the best and brightest, the rich paying a still larger share of the nation’s tax bill. Buckley gave due credit to the intellectual architects of the supply-side revival — Robert Mundell, Arthur Laffer, Craig Roberts, et alia — as also to the evangelical popularizers – Jude Wanniski, Robert Bartley, George Gilder, Jack Kemp, et alia – but it was Buckley himself who persuaded Reagan to go all-in. The producer does not recognize this accomplishment.

• I could go on, but we must save room for the errors of commission.

• One of the cheesier tricks in the producer’s bag is to have somebody make an extravagant claim, and then play a clip undercutting that claim somewhere around the knees. Here, the producer has some off-camera voice claim that Buckley was one of the great wits of the century, and then follows the claim with a clip of mayoral candidate Buckley saying, “It’s good to be here at the Overseas Press Club. I sometimes wish that all of the press were overseas.” That line, written by me or a member of the campaign staff, was a placeholder. We would top his speech texts with a cue, a reminder that, as he polished copy in the green room, he should replace our dog-eared gag with a Buckley-grade witticism. For some reason, he failed to do so on that day at the OPC. We are thus left with the claim of an Oscar Wilde–grade wit supported only by a Rodney Dangerfield–grade rimshot.

• It’s by no means a whopper, but it drives me nuts every time a commentator asserts that Buckley and Norman Mailer were “close friends.” You had only to be in the same room with the two of them for five minutes, no more, to conclude that they had not been, they were not then, and they were highly unlikely ever to be “close friends.” They bantered, and were occasionally useful to each other.

• Another of the disembodied voices states that Buckley instructed his brother James, then a U.S. senator, to call for the resignation of President Nixon in 1974. Some documentation is required here. I knew both brothers well, and I would be astonished if that statement were true.

• But on to bigger things . . .

• The producer hangs his narrative from two tentpoles. The first is a National Review editorial published in 1957 and headlined, “Why the South Must Prevail.” The editorial aligns the magazine with the Democratic grandees in the U.S. Senate against the civil-rights movement then emerging. (Later articles in the magazine would oppose President Johnson’s civil-rights bills.) Buckley was raised by a daughter of the Old South and was by temperament wary of sharp change. He either wrote or approved the editorial. He was wrong.

• It would have been useful context for the producer to note that, unlike the Democratic grandees who went to their graves with views pristinely unreconstructed, Buckley wrestled with his own opinion, changed his mind, admitted his mistake, and then ventilated the process in public and in full.

• From his days at Yale in the late Forties until his retirement in the early Nineties, Buckley was always up for a public debate. He was good at it. I saw, reviewed, or produced approximately 175 of those debates and he lost only two in definitive form — one to Ronald Reagan on the subject of the Panama Canal and the other to James Baldwin on the subject of racial injustice. The producer dwells at length on only one of Buckley’s debates, the one with Mr. Baldwin.

• The second pivotal moment, in the producer’s singular view, is Buckley’s debate with Gore Vidal at the Democratic convention in 1968. On live television, after Vidal had called him a “crypto Nazi,” Buckley lost his temper, called Vidal a “queer” and threatened to punch him “in the goddam face.” It was not Buckley’s finest hour.

• Context here would also have been useful. To begin with, almost all of the people who claim to have been offended by Buckley’s performance never saw it. It was a case of manufactured outrage. The exchange appeared only on the live ABC telecast, which placed a distant third in the ratings to Walter Cronkite’s CBS and Huntley–Brinkley’s NBC. After the broadcast, ABC refused to release the pertinent footage, an embargo it maintained for more than three decades.

• I was at the studio that night, picking up Buckley for dinner after the show. He had done a similar series of mini-debates with Vidal at the GOP convention in Miami earlier that summer and had spent the intervening weeks trying to get out of his ABC contract. He couldn’t stand Vidal, but ABC wouldn’t budge.

• Buckley had then broken his collarbone in a sailing accident. A deadline-meeter to his toes, he swallowed a fistful of painkillers and flew to Chicago for the second go-round with Vidal.

• As he walked onto the set, he asked me to hold his sling lest he be seen to be “playing the sympathy card.” I mention this point only to underscore how utterly empty was the threat to punch Vidal in the goddam face. Buckley couldn’t lift his arm high enough to touch his shoulder.

• At dinner that night, Buckley was inconsolable. He thought he had let down the side. He had given the Left a priceless gift — a veritable mugshot of a twisted winger, at once profane, homophobic, and violence-prone. Buckley had walked over the hot coals of live television a thousand times before — hundreds of those appearances had been memorably refulgent; grown men had made a good living doing impressions of them — and yet, he worried, some producer could one day choose to burn him with those ten seconds of angry tape.

• I spent the evening assuring Buckley that, because the episode was so strikingly unrepresentative of both his public record and his private character, no self-respecting producer would touch the tape. I was right, but for only 56 years.

• In the final scene of the film, the producer loses his grip on the steering wheel. He closes with a clip of January 6. Partisan zealots are seen smashing and grabbing, committing mischief and mayhem in the People’s House. The implication is clear, and it lingers after the film fades to black: Buckley’s politics had led to, or arrived at, or had in some attenuated way been connected to a violent riot at the U.S. Capitol 13 years after his death.

• What would have been useful there would be a sentence, perhaps even two or three, explaining the preposterous suggestion that Trump hooliganism was in any conceivable way an extension of Buckley conservatism.

• Buckley wrote 6,000 columns. I edited a few thousand of them. Of all the writers in the Hearst stable, Buckley was among the most deadline-respectful. He was scrupulous about names and dates and allusions, both literary and historical. Unlike lesser writers who would fight to the death for stylistic infelicities of their own devise, Buckley was joyously grateful for a suggested improvement, a smoothed elision. Even more important, he had a secure sense of proportionality. He knew that a single incident could rarely stand as synecdoche for some cosmic truth.

• The producer could have learned a lot from Bill Buckley.