that financed Tampon Tim’s ‘Learing Centers’
We’re trying to get our book club to read a biography of William F. Buckley Jr., who died 18 years ago this February 27 at the age of 82. The text of the book consumes 868 pages — too few, in this hero worshipper’s opinion. But the tome’s girth runs up against an unwritten rule that our book club selections could be mailed with no more than a first-class postage stamp.
This gobsmacked reader is attempting to convince the club’s aging academics, politicians, lawyers, and écrivains that the subhead of the Buckley bio, “the Life and the Revolution that Changed America, is not hyperbole. Impact? Consider that Dwight Eisenhower (a previous book club subject) left the White House in January 1961. Less than four years later, Republicans nominate Barry Goldwater.
William F. Buckley Jr. did that. His movement employed the written and spoken word, not protest marches, boycotts, battered capitol cops, or toppled statues. He, his magazine, and its readers elected Ronald Reagan in 1980 and spawned acolytes like Newt Gingrich and Scott Walker.
Understanding that the education establishment was — then as now — the locus of the problem, Buckley wrote his breakthrough exegesis, God & Man at Yale, at age 25 in 1951. Secular liberalism and economic collectivism even then ruled the faculty lounge, curdling in our time into identity politics — mandatory recitations of DEI pledges, racial contrition, and verboten campus speakers. (La plus ça change …) Buckley created the weekly National Review in 1955 (the Libertarian feminist Suzanne La Follette was managing editor) to counter what we would today call The Deep State of media, academia, and government. Surprising number of ex-commies — apostates like Whittaker Chambers — joined the crusade. Notice that the possession arrow rarely goes in the other direction: conservatives going progressive.
Born to the manor, written
William F. Buckley Jr. grew up in a militant, pro-Franco Catholic family of 10 over-achieving siblings in protestant Connecticut sitting across the dinner table from a self-made father of fervent politics — much like the Kennedys. Bill Jr. introduced Kissinger to Nixon. Worked with E. Howard Hunt of Watergate infamy as a young CIA agent in Mexico City. Wrote a dozen spy novels and sailed the ocean blue. His high-born wife Pat was one of Truman Capote’s swans. “Why shouldn’t I be taller than my husband,” she once purred. “I’m richer, too.”
Buckley was often wrong — born to southern-born parents, he defended racial apartheid at first but also demanded his exclusive Yale clubs admit his Jewish friends. Probably wrote too much and too quickly. Fought communism and defended Joe McCarthy’s cause while pretending not to notice his methods. If the old Tailgunner couldn’t shoot straight, there actually were squirrels in the woods, actual communist spies like Alger Hiss and, more numerous, useful idiots like Henry Wallace and other collectivists up-selling Big Gummint dependency.
Author Tanenhaus closes Buckley, the Life, with this:
In clearing so large a place for himself, he left a vacuum no one since has been able to fill. This is the absence so many feel today — adversaries and apostates as well as advocates and admirers. … If only we can discover in ourselves the imagination and generosity, the kindness and warmth, that Bill Buckley demonstrated in his long and singular life.
We lost, didn’t we!
Or is Buckley spent fuel? The University of Wisconsin-Madison bans a 42-ton boulder after that inanimate object is accused of racism. A President who joked about his own near death (“I forgot to duck!”) is succeeded by a President who blames a murder victim for being killed. His feared welfare state is now so bloated that it could be looted of one billion dollars right under the nose of a single state’s Democrat(ic) governor. Buckley’s Big Apple elects a mayor promising to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” (Ask the starving Ukrainians how warm was their Holodomor.)
The Bottom Line: All the more reason, book clubbers and platinum subscribers, to revisit the life of Buckley. His story will revivify your spirits for another headlong charge on the intellectual ramparts, standing astride history!
10 responses to “Buckley led the revolution against Big Gummint”
Say it with me: I am William F. Buckley Jr.
Say it like Spartacus!
Very nice review. Buckley was a prize–although it took me some time to get past his highbrow mannerisms. The more I heard and read the more I liked what he said. Your post is timely, as I just finished reading God and Man At Yale. It was a recent memorial edition that was published, and I found the most interesting part to be the new introduction that described how much consternation an undergrads book could cause.
Try imagining an undergraduate today writing a book even remotely as erudite and eloquent as WFB’s. They’re trained to sniff out the faintest hint of racism anywhere, any time, but have trouble writing a coherent paragraph. On second thought, ANY undergraduate today could write a book–on any subject–thanks to AI, the final nail in the coffin of what we still choose to call “higher education.”
The Tower of Babylon
The Buckley vs James Baldwin debate at Cambridge in 1965 is well worth watching. The content and format are painful reminders of how far civilly and intellectually we have devolved in 2 or 3 generations.
Amen, brother. Amen! Watching Bill and James at the top of their game is like watching alien–and superior–life forms who speak a language vaguely similar to our own.
It’s going to take more than a pretty, conservative face from the past to fix the Republican party.
Curious statement as we watch the Democratic party implode. The import-illegal-alien-and-pay-for-their-votes grift has been discovered and will end. Dems know without it, they’re lost.
Since Dementia Don’s approval rating is lower than the temperature in Greenland that’s an interesting statement. Gop reps are retiring er, running in droves. You want to cancel midterm elections because you know your ass will be kicked. Donny has his shiny secondhand medal and a Qatar bank account full of stolen oil money. Ready to stick Vance with his mess and blow town. The AAAArabs even gave him a jet to get there. You need to drink more Hole milk and less of Sleepy Don’s kool-aid.