Posted on 10/19/2004 5:29:08 PM PDT by buckeyesrule
'Miles Gone By': Bill and God's Excellent Adventure
By JON MEACHAM
It is a long-ago afternoon in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and Trish Buckley has just won a blue ribbon in the annual Dutchess County Horse Show. In a box next to Trish's parents sits Franklin D. Roosevelt, squire of neighboring Hyde Park and president of the United States. ''Protocol requires the winner to ride around the ring to receive the plaudits of the spectators,'' Trish's brother recalls. ''When she rode by the president's box, F.D.R. applauded lustily, whereupon Trish abruptly turned her pigtailed head to one side.'' Arriving shortly thereafter in the Buckley box, bearing her ribbon and her riding crop, Trish faced her curious -- and somewhat embarrassed -- father. ''Why didn't you nod to the president?'' he asked. The girl's face was ''pained with surprise'' as she replied, ''I thought you didn't like him!''
Poor Trish. Had the observant brother who remembered this scene -- the showman, sportsman and political soldier William F. Buckley Jr. -- won the ribbon that day, he would have relished paying his respects to Roosevelt. Even at this distance, we can imagine young Buckley riding past the president with great flourish and a jaunty wave. In Bill Buckley's universe, showmen, sportsmen and political soldiers should be known to one another, respected and saluted as fellow voyagers on the seas of the engaged life. Long caricatured as the consummate upper-class conservative -- his ''Masterpiece Theater'' air, his unabashed intellectual self-confidence and his supply of words from the Oxford English Dictionary have made caricature all too easy -- Buckley is a more complicated figure than his prevailing image suggests.
Reading ''Miles Gone By,'' his latest collection of autobiographical pieces, a book of charm and grace and wit, one finds it virtually impossible to envision Buckley as his liberal critics have for so long: as a dark Goldwaterite, even a pro-crypto Nazi (Gore Vidal's phrase), who hides his extremism beneath a sophisticated Manhattan veneer. He is a partisan combatant, a key figure in the right wing's journey from the fringes of American politics to the mainstream -- from, roughly, Joe McCarthy's sweaty brow to Ronald Reagan's sunny smile. But agree or disagree with the conservative creed he helped shape and promulgate, Buckley is the happiest of warriors, an exuberant man of the right, a Roman Catholic who has apparently taken the reassurances of Scripture to heart. ''In the world ye shall have tribulation,'' Jesus says in the Gospel of St. John, ''but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.''
Buckley's world was comfortable from the beginning. His evocations of a childhood spent sailing, swimming and riding are lovely; one can almost hear the din of the 10 Buckley children clamoring on the lawn while their father, a Texan who made money in oil and came east, chooses the evening's red wine from the cellar. Born in 1925, Buckley grew up at Great Elm, a huge house in Sharon, Conn., learned repartee at the family dinner table, was educated privately, went to Yale, served briefly in the Central Intelligence Agency and became one of the most celebrated -- deep breath here -- authors/editors/columnists/pundits/political activists/novelists/Catholic apologists/bons vivants of the American century. His has been a life lived in the spotlight, savoring things that entertained him, fed his ego and tended to his comfort: klieg lights, applauding audiences, Atlantic sails, annual Swiss ski vacations, good wine, a custom-made limousine. He can be an Olympian name-dropper, but if you have to drop names, Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Clare Boothe Luce, Tom Wolfe, Vladimir Horowitz, David Niven, Murray Kempton, William Shawn and Princess Grace are the ones to drop. He loves his family, his fame and his faith; and he loves stories -- especially those drawn from his own remarkable life. ''Only the man who makes the voyage can speak truly about it,'' he writes in ''Miles Gone By.''
Buckley has spoken volumes about his voyages. An inveterate chronicler of his journeys at sea (including a trip to the bottom of the North Atlantic to see the ruins of the Titanic), he has also charted his soul's journey in ''Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith.'' As a writer of fiction he created Blackford Oakes, the handsome, Yale-educated spy, and has also written novels about, among other things, McCarthyism and Elvis Presley. ''Miles Gone By'' is an elegant book, one of Buckley's best, and the man the reader meets in these pages is the Platonic ideal of a dinner companion, a raconteur whose pomposity is calculated and whose self-deprecation charms.
IN the long run, Buckley, who retired this year from National Review, the magazine he founded, after five decades, will be remembered as a man of ideas who took his show on the road and into the arena. In the most elite educated circles after World War II, being a conservative was pretty much out of the question. The right was still reeling from its isolationist stand against F.D.R.'s engagement in the war against totalitarianism and had lost the essential argument over the expanded role of government in American life: the work of the Eisenhower presidency was less about undoing the New Deal and the Fair Deal than it was about managing the growth of the state. Even when conservatives' instincts were right, as they were in the battle against Communism, they seemed (with a good deal of justice) extreme, paranoid, overreaching.
Then came Bill Buckley. Witty, deft in argument, willing to assert that the secular left had no monopoly on truth, he helped change the way the country thought of the right, beginning with his first book, ''God and Man at Yale.'' Published in 1951, it is one of those books people talk about but today hardly ever read. Its essential argument was that the loftier realms of higher education were increasingly hostile to religion and to conservative viewpoints. ''I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world,'' read a controversial passage in ''God and Man.'' ''I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.'' (Interestingly, this precise formulation was not Buckley's but his mentor's, a Yale professor named Willmoore Kendall, who edited the manuscript. In part out of loyalty and in part because he was ''tickled by the audacity of the sally,'' Buckley writes, he never disavowed it.)
In the book and in the founding of National Review four years later, Buckley was forging a coalition of ideas and interests that had not come together before. In Hollywood, Ronald Reagan started reading the magazine; as a sophomore at Georgetown, Patrick Buchanan did. What they found was the first union of free-market economics, anti-Communism and antisecularism. Suddenly, tax cutters, cold war hawks and churchmen found themselves worshiping under the same roof. Buckley was the movement's intellectual pastor, Reagan its successful political hero.
In National Review's inaugural issue, the mission could not have been clearer. The magazine, it said of itself, ''stands athwart history yelling Stop.'' But the forward motion of history is not intrinsically bad, a point, one suspects, Buckley himself understands, despite the sharper edges of his rhetoric. From the 50's onward, he emerged as one of the more practical, even -- dare we say it -- moderate figures in the movement he made. He is one of a dwindling band of 20th-century giants who lived and worked at the nexus of books, politics, op-eds and New York cocktail parties. Like John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Buckley embodied an unapologetic ideology but was such good company that even his most virulent foes were able to separate the personal from the political. As an editor, he gave platforms to such writers as Joan Didion and Garry Wills, who would part political company with him, and to George F. Will, who would not. Through National Review, Buckley ultimately embraced many of the great reforms of the age. A supporter of segregation in the 50's and a foe of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he came to regret his opposition to civil rights legislation and backed the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. He denounced the extremist John Birch Society, and has stood resolutely against anti-Semitism.
Not every conservative is as intellectually gifted or as cheerfully inclined as Buckley is. Far from it: the tent he pitched in the 50's has attracted all sorts and conditions of bitter-enders, and the fringes of the right (like the fringes of the left) can be grim and regrettable. Still, we could use more, not less, of the Buckley style in politics today. ''I have always held in high esteem the genial tradition,'' Buckley says. In this tradition he thanks Galbraith for writing ''pleasant tributes to my own books, inevitably advising the reader that my political opinions should be ignored, my fiction or accounts of life at sea appreciated.''
BUCKLEY was an early political celebrity, a master of argumentative television long before cable news, and a tireless public lecturer. Writing in The Washington Monthly in 1988, Nicholas Lemann, now the dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, observed that Buckley ''could be a great thinker, but he's too busy running to the airport.'' Even here, though, Buckley turns a possible vice into a literary virtue. In ''Miles Gone By,'' he writes brilliantly of life on the road, and in sheer volume his work dwarfs even Trollope's: more than 45 books, 40 years of newspaper columns and 33 of ''Firing Line,'' untold hours speaking and editing. ''Miles Gone By'' is at once entertaining and instructive, and in this way it is a conservative version of Schlesinger's 2000 memoir, ''A Life in the Twentieth Century,'' a delightful book that took us into the realms of ideas, celebrity and politics. Schlesinger's world tacks left; Buckley's, of course, tacks right. Read together in decades to come, the two books will shed light on a fascinating era in America's intellectual life, the years of our greatest strength abroad and greatest soul-searching at home.
Lord knows Bill Buckley -- like all of us -- can be wrong, but he has fought the battle of ideas with grace for more than half a century and is an emblem of a time when the life of the mind and the life of the nation seemed intertwined. To frustrated liberals or disappointed conservatives, the world can seem a gloomy place. ''But,'' Buckley writes, ''all is not lost; all is never lost'' -- a warm benediction from a man who has long found joy in the journey.
Jon Meacham, the managing editor of Newsweek, is the author of ''Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship.''
I've been reading it slowly with 3 dictionaries at my side.
"Plaudits"? Ok Bill, you're a smart guy, I get the point.... :-)
Not merely ONE of the greats--THE GREAT--WFB.
I thought Buchannan went to Gonzaga, not Georgetown.
The book is a great read.
I thought it was Godzilla.
< ]B^)
Without those two gentlemen, there would have been no "conservative movement".
bttt
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