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OF A CONSERVATIVE
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How Buckley became a role model to a college boy
of TheColumnists.com
As role models go, it would be hard to beat William Buckley, the conservative writer, commentator and thinker who died recently at 82 at his home in Stamford, Connecticut. He was working on his twice-weekly syndicated column at the time.
A man of great charm, intelligence and accomplishments, Buckley’s lasting imprint will be his success in redefining conservatism and making it respectable again. The political line he espoused led eventually to the Ronald Reagan presidency and the end of the Cold War.
He had such personal magnetism that many leading liberals welcomed his company despite themselves.
I am not ashamed to say that Buckley’s writings in the 1950s had great influence on me in my college years. He surged into my life as I was undergoing a period of youthful experimentation and discovery. Self-reliance, self-interest and individuality - his essential virtues--seemed the best values going. To flesh out my prejudices, I was drawn to H.L. Mencken, Ayn Rand and finally to Buckley’s National Review.
In his second book, "Up From Liberalism", Buckley wrote, “I will not cede more power to the state…. I will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from me. I will then use my power as I see fit.” Those lines could have been from one of Ms. Rand’s works.
Wearing conservative colors on a college campus made me a bit of a maverick, which at that age was a large part of the attraction Buckley provided. Also in the package, however, were his extraordinary talents, cerebral powers and rapier wit.
Later, he would expand his range of interests to become a master of the spy novel, amateur harpsichordist, sportsman, and host of “Firing Line”, the longest-running television show with a single presenter in TV history. He exceeded Johnny Carson’s record by three years, finally stepping down in 1999 after 1,504 broadcasts. He managed to produce 50 books, plus four additional collections that he edited, and 5,600 newspaper columns.
I remained a lifelong admirer of Buckley’s work although I eventually drifted back into the liberal camp politically where most of my friends resided. I had enjoyed toughening myself up by trying to emulate Buckley’s high standards but eventually lost my zeal.
Buckley deserves full credit for saving the conservative movement from oblivion, providing intellectual leadership and a well-edited organ of opinion to expand its impact. Fringe elements of the movement such as the John Birch Society and George Wallace were swiftly marginalized.
I was such a fan of his National Review that I stretched my meager funds ($120 a week as a newspaper reporter in Hayward, California) to purchase hardcover binders for each year’s issues. They sat defiantly on my bookshelf, prompting jibes from friends.
The magazine, although doctrinaire, was also readable, clever and erudite. Leading Conservative thinkers were regular contributors. Underlying themes were free markets, traditionalism and anti-communism. And yet the Review was capable of surprising its readers and making them smile.
The light verse of W.H. von Dreele was a major attraction. One of his contributions from 1994:
Jesse Helms in Watching
As Mr. Clinton's dance card fills
With foreign-policy quadrilles
While polkas and the native reel
Lose their political appeal,
The gentleman who does the calls
Emits distracting caterwauls
Inhibiting the President,
Who wonders where the music went.
When Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, “Atlas Shrugged”, was published in 1961, Buckley assigned the review to Whittaker Chambers, the ex-Time writer who had traded his left-wing beliefs for militant anti-communism. Chambers was a senior editor at the magazine when he produced a devastating critique, dismissing “Atlas” as “a remarkably silly book”. I still have my copy, all 1,164 pages of it, with Rand’s best one-liners underlined throughout. I had to agree, though, that Chambers had a point.
Buckley managed his magazine staff in the best tradition of great editors. Rather than boast that he owned the store, he relied on hard work and he rewarded merit, according to New York Times columnist David Brooks, who worked there as a young man.
Brooks recalled with fondness how Buckley was willing to help develop young talent besides running editorial meetings and writing large sections himself, producing books and lecturing. Garry Wills and Joan Didion both worked under him. Brooks was first assigned to the magazine’s short commentary pieces, which were punchy comments on the political scene. “He worked hard on polishing my writing,” recalls Brooks. “My short editorials would come back covered with his red ink.”
The Wall Street Journal eulogized Buckley last week as a model of thoughtfulness and creativity. “Conservatively speaking,” the Journal wrote, “the life of William F. Buckley Jr. seems wildly improbable.” An editorial praised his desire to “engage in the controversies of the age, and the wonders of the mind”.
It was Buckley’s spoken English that first stopped me in my tracks. He entered the intellectual desert of television talk with a vocabulary rarely encountered in the modern age. He saw nothing wrong with the big words so long as they carried his precise meaning. Critics called him “sesquipedalian” and “pleonastic” (favoring long words and many of them), terms unlikely to appear outside SAT tests.
Critics included Norman Mailer, no stranger to the pleonasm himself. The New York Times obituary included a Mailer put-down of Buckley as a “second-rate intellect incapable of entertaining two serious thoughts in a row”. Buckley seemed to be playing “Commodore of the Yacht Club Joseph Goebbels, Robert Mitchum, Maverick, Savonarola, the nice prep school kid next door and the snows of yesteryear,” Mailer concluded.
I have no doubt that Buckley found those comments hugely jocose, perhaps verging on the amphigouri (burlesque writing filled with nonsense).
©2008 by Michael Johnson. This column first posted March 10, 2008.
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