Posted on 02/27/2008 3:25:28 PM PST by Syncro
WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY: R.I.P., ENFANT TERRIBLE
February 27, 2008
William F. Buckley was the original enfant terrible.
As with Ronald Reagan, everyone prefers to remember great men when they weren't being great, but later, when they were being admired. Having changed the world, there came a point when Buckley no longer needed to shock it.
But to call Buckley an "enfant terrible" and then to recall only his days as a grandee is like calling a liberal actress "courageous." Back in the day, Buckley truly was courageous. I prefer to remember the Buckley who scandalized to the bien-pensant.
Other tributes will contain the obvious quotes about demanding a recount if he won the New York mayoral election and trusting the first 100 names in the Boston telephone book more than the Harvard faculty. I shall revel in the "terrible" aspects of the enfant terrible.
Buckley's first book, "God and Man at Yale," was met with the usual thoughtful critiques of anyone who challenges the liberal establishment. Frank Ashburn wrote in the Saturday Review: "The book is one which has the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night. There will undoubtedly be robed figures who gather to it, but the hoods will not be academic. They will cover the face."
The president of Yale sent alumni thousands of copies of McGeorge Bundy's review of the book from the Atlantic Monthly calling Buckley a "twisted and ignorant young man." Other reviews bordered on the hyperbolic. One critic simply burst into tears, then transcribed his entire crying jag word for word.
Buckley's next book, "McCarthy and His Enemies," written with L. Brent Bozell, proved that normal people didn't have to wait for the Venona Papers to be declassified to see that the Democratic Party was collaborating with fascists. The book -- and the left's reaction thereto -- demonstrated that liberals could tolerate a communist sympathizer, but never a Joe McCarthy sympathizer.
Relevant to Republicans' predicament today, National Review did not endorse a candidate for president in 1956, correctly concluding that Dwight Eisenhower was not a conservative, however great a military leader he had been. In his defense, Ike never demanded that camps housing enemy detainees be closed down.
Nor would National Review endorse liberal Republican Richard Nixon, waiting until 1964 to enthusiastically support a candidate for president who had no hope of winning. Barry Goldwater, though given the right things to say -- often by Buckley or Bozell, who wrote Goldwater's "Conscience of a Conservative" -- was not particularly bright.
But the Goldwater candidacy, Buckley believed, would provide "the well-planted seeds of hope," eventually fulfilled by Ronald Reagan. Goldwater was sort of the army ant on whose body Reagan walked to greatness. Thanks, Barry. When later challenged on Reagan's intellectual stature, Buckley said: "Of course, he will always tend to reach first for an anecdote. But then, so does the New Testament."
With liberal Republicans still bothering everyone even after Reagan, Buckley went all out against liberal Republican Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. When Democrat Joe Lieberman challenged Weicker for the Senate in 1988, National Review ran an article subtly titled: "Does Lowell Weicker Make You Sick?"
Buckley started a political action committee to support Lieberman, explaining, "We want to pass the word that it's OK to vote for the other guy or stay at home." The good thing about Lieberman, Buckley said, was that he "doesn't have the tendency of appalling you every time he opens his mouth."
That same year, when the radical chic composer Leonard Bernstein complained about the smearing of the word "liberal," Buckley replied: "Lenny does not realize that one of the reasons the 'L' word is discredited is that it was handled by such as Leonard Bernstein." The composer was so unnerved by this remark that, just to cheer himself up, he invited several extra Black Panthers to his next cocktail party.
When Arthur Schlesinger Jr. objected to his words being used as a jacket-flap endorsement on one of Buckley's books in 1963, Buckley replied by telegram:
"MY OFFICE HAS COPY OF ORIGINAL TAPE. TELL ARTHUR THAT'LL TEACH HIM TO USE UNCTION IN POLITICAL DEBATE BUT NOT TO TAKE IT SO HARD: NO ONE BELIEVES ANYTHING HE SAYS ANYWAY."
In a famous exchange with Gore Vidal in 1968, Vidal said to Buckley: "As far as I am concerned, the only crypto Nazi I can think of is yourself."
Buckley replied: "Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto Nazi, or I'll sock you in your goddamn face and you'll stay plastered."
Years later, in 1985, Buckley said of the incident: "We both acted irresponsibly. I'm not a Nazi, but he is, I suppose, a fag."
Read more at AnnCoulter.com
Mr. Buckley in his office at the National Review in 1965. Mr. Buckley's winningly capricious personality, replete with ten-dollar words and a darting tongue writers loved to compare with an anteater's, hosted one of television's longest-running programs, "Firing Line," and founded and shepherded the National Review.
Photo: Sam Falk/The New York Times
Mr. Buckley at a press conference in 1965. His greatest achievement was making conservatism - not just electoral Republicanism, but conservatism as a system of ideas - respectable in liberal post-World War II America. He mobilized the young enthusiasts who helped nominate Barry Goldwater in 1964, and saw his dreams fulfilled when Reagan and the Bushes captured the Oval Office.
Photo: John Lindsay/Associated Press
Mr. Buckley at a benefit in 1972. His vocabulary, sparkling with phrases from distant eras and described in newspaper and magazine profiles as sesquipedalian (characterized by the use of long words) became the stuff of legend. Less kind commentators called him "pleonastic" (use of more words than necessary).
Photo: Michael Evans/The New York Times
William Francis Buckley Jr., seen at his National Review office in 2004, was born in Manhattan on Nov. 24, 1925, the sixth of the 10 children of Aloise Steiner Buckley and William Frank Buckley Jr. In 1955, Mr. Buckley started National Review as voice for "the disciples of truth, who defend the organic moral order" with a $100,000 gift from his father.
Photo: Vincent Laforet/The New York Times
In his last years, as honors like the Presidential Medal of Freedom came his way, Mr. Buckley - shown here in the office of his Stamford, Conn., home in 2005 - gradually loosened his grip on his intellectual empire. In 1998, he ended his frenetic schedule of public speeches. In 1999, he stopped "Firing Line," and in 2004, he relinquished his voting stock in National Review. Mr Buckley, 82, suffered from diabetes and emphysema, his son Christopher said, although the exact cause of death was not immediately known. He was found at his desk in the study of his home, his son said. "He might have been working on a column," Mr. Buckley said.
Photo: Suzy Allman for The New York Times
Thank goodness we have Ann Coulter, et al, to carry on the tradition!
Is that Obama coming out of the pool? :)
When I used to subscribe to National Review, I wrote him a few times. I loved his responses.
I must confess, the folks here who try an imitate his intellect by copying his response to letters (his famous: Cordially) irritate me.
I don't have a genius IQ - but I do not try an fake it either.
Rush said as much today on his radio show. Conservatives should realize what Buckley was - and be proud of that.
Yep...our side had William F. Buckley and their side had pathetic, self-absorbed, little pukes who thought, because they could string a series of multi-syllabic words together to form a sentence, were just so much smarter than the rest of us.
Norman Mailer died and nobody even farted. And that's as it should be.
Actually, that was the Hidden Imam.
(and no - that is not photoshopped).
This is what the folks at Time magazine did not think should be on their news cover:
But this is what the employees of Time magazine did think was a good cover?
No bias here. No sir ma'am.
OMG!
Amen WT. You captured his gift and power by that statement.
About what my friend Ann? WFB, or Gore "the queer" Vidal?
If the latter, you must remember that is who Vidal is/was.
If the former, man - could he write, or what?
I recall meeting Mr Buckley in 1963 while attending an ethics course at the University of Texas. He was sharp, witty, and highly entertaining. How and why he was invited to UT, the rotten heart of liberalism in Texas, I will never know. But I knew that I couldn’t be a “yellow dog” democrat like my Dad after I heard him speak.
Thanks Mr Buckley for all your contributions to enlighten the masses on the principles of conservatism! RIP
R.I.P. Mr. Buckley
Semper Fi,
Kelly
I know what you mean.
My "Irish Catholic Democrat" family could not believe I "betrayed" the Kennedy family (my not too distant relatives) by becoming a Republican.
I was raised poor. We were lower middle class - and still my family believed the Democrats were the Savior.
It's not an obituary, it's a tribute. And a damned fine one!
My mother bought me a subscription to NR as I shipped off to the mental wasteland of public university in the Liberal Arts (emphasis on “liberal”) department. It was a lifeline. I would always jump straightway to the letters to WFB and would guffaw aloud as I read his always perfectly poignant responses.
RIP, WFB. Godspeed.
RIP in the title? It’s a tribute and an obituary. And as I said, fitting.
BTW, my fave quote in the article from Buckley to the judge in that trial: "I decline to answer that question; it's too stupid."
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