Engage your adversaries with verve and class!
It’s a textbook case of hero worship, mixed with a little Walter Mitty. Blaska is joy riding through the biography of William F. Buckley Jr., the Life and the Revolution that Changed America, and what a moveable feast it is! Taken in Bill’s top-down British Triumph through the streets of Manhattan, Bach blasting from the tape deck, portable Smith Corona in the jump seat, a debate stage waiting, a liberal to be bruised and bloodied with polysyllabic erudition before clinking congenial glasses afterwards.
The subject chose Sam Tanenhaus to write his story; the author devoted 27 years to the project until its publication just last year, 17 years after this sui generis renaissance man signed off on 02-27-2008. Must have been a labor of love, because Buckley made friends of his political adversaries — with the exception of a certain Gore Vidal.
Trying to get my book club — retired academics, writers, and political campaigners, like my hero — to reconsider their veto. The defense does not dispute the book’s 868 pages (not counting extensive bibliography and index) but argues readers will enjoy every page because William F. Buckley Jr. was a swashbuckling Quixote through the second half of the 20th Century, from the crash and burn of Joe McCarthy to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Joy of conservatism
As a freshman at Yale — on the GI Bill as a WW2 vet — and still taking flying lessons, young Bill piloted the open cockpit airplane he had purchased to his sister’s private boarding school. The student body, alerted beforehand, turned out to watch as he put down on the campus green. The landing went well until the single-prop plane hit a culvert and pitched forward, nose down, its tail now vertical. Pilot and passenger clambered out, took tea with the head mistress, then the bus back to New Haven. The plane was left vertical.
So that his companions sailing the coast of Maine in his 42-foot sailboat could dine in luxury, the weekend pirate raided lobster pots but left two bottles of Johnny Walker Black submerged in payment.
He was unsparing in debate, harsh, even malicious, but during the contests “he got rid of all his aggressions,” said a classmate, “and what was left over, among friends, was very mellow.” … Also kind, funny, spontaneous, quick to laugh, slow to judge, and less stingy with affection than many other men. What gave him the most pleasure … was involving others in his own enthusiasms. — Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley
Anticipated Charlie Kirk
Unlike works of fiction, one can pick up bios in the middle, book clubbers! We went straight to chapter 33 (of 50!), which recounts his 1966 run for mayor of New York against the Rockefeller Republican, pretty boy John Lindsay, and the machine Democrat, squat old Abraham Beame. Buckley is asked, what would be the first thing he’d do if elected? “Demand a recount.” How many votes did he expect to get. One, was the answer. Yourself? “No, my secretary.”
(If liberal squish John Lindsay turned out to be a disaster [he did!], how horrified would Bill Jr. be with Zohran Mamdani’s socialist ascendancy?)
Ronald Reagan, whose ascendence Bill championed, had the same sense of winning, self-deprecating humor. These days, neither our Presidents nor our Late Night TV hosts are funny. But Buckley was on to something. He learned then, a decade after founding his own magazine (the indispensable National Review), that his insurgent candidacy spoke to voters beyond his upper east side townhouse overlooking Central Park to the barkeeps, taxicab drivers, and dock workers. A constituency vital to Nixon, Reagan, and Trump. Buckley did that through his magazine, his speeches, and in his debates sparring with the leading liberals of the time — from James Baldwin at Oxford (the victor) to Malcom X (whom he admired) on his televised Firing Line.
“Till the end of his life, Bill continued to think of colleges as the most important fields of battle.” He was a precursor of Charlie Kirk.
Gore Vidal is the exception that proves the rule. As his adversary on perhaps television’s first point/counter point during the 1968 political conventions, he called Buckley a Nazi. Whereupon our hero threatened to sock Vidal in the mouth so that he “would stay plastered.” Our hero regretted that lapse in civility ever afterward.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: Who today in our public life has the sangfroid, that irreverent joie de vivre? Bill Buckley had adversaries, not enemies. Except for Gore Vidal.
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