Mr. Buckley, We Hardly Knew Ya
I FINALLY WATCHED the recent PBS/American Masters profile of William F. Buckley, the late founder and editor of The National Review, a magazine sometimes credited as the Rosetta Stone of “the modern conservative movement.” Buckley was probably better known as the host of Firing Line, the bear-baiting PBS talk show where he customarily ambushed liberals willing to take one for the team while proving that PBS was “balanced” after all.
I learned a few things from The Implausible Mr. Buckley but found the title unwittingly accurate in that the version of Buckley served up by the American Masters crew is indeed implausible: he was such a nice guy, such a good friend, such a mensch. Really? Maybe if you were in his family or inner circle. But the two-hour profile was way too sympathetic, I thought, given the evidence he used his considerable gifts to promote segregation, war, and other evils. The filmmakers avoid underlining the harsher truths of his ruling class sympathies and pretensions, cloaked in buttoned-down bonhomie. The notion that he was “anti-establishment” is risible when you consider he was a member of Skull and Bones at Yale (as was George W. Bush a generation later), the most exclusive club at the most elite of universities. His dinner party pals were Milton Friedman, Henry Kissinger and Mike Wallace! Head shots of the American Empire. Buckley was one of them, indisputably a self-curated celebrity and unapologetic power broker.
Yes, he was smart and multi-talented (and, damn, a fast writer), but I agree with historian Rick Perlstein, who wrote a column in The American Prospect complaining that his own sound bite in The Implausible Mr. Buckley was neutered, misrepresenting his low opinion of the man in question. “Many dedicated historians have done serious work during the Trump era,” Perlstein wrote, "uncovering facts that have radically revised the scholarly understanding of William F. Buckley and his work. That new scholarship suggests that Trump’s rise was not a reversal of what Buckley was up to, but in many ways, its apotheosis. This, the producers determinedly contrived to ignore.”
Despite the hagiography, we can infer that Buckley was often up to no good — for example, trying to discredit James Baldwin during a debate at Cambridge University in 1965. (Baldwin nevertheless carried the day and got a standing ovation from the Cambridge undergrads.) Two weeks later, John Lewis, Hosea Williams and Martin Luther King led the historic Selma to Montgomery march to register Black voters in Jim Crow Alabama and were beaten bloody by local law enforcement on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Buckley’s embarrassing response was to insist that the cops had shown restraint! No doubt this counter-factual claim stemmed from the aristocratic prejudice that Blacks were not yet ready to have the vote. (Maybe when more of them could graduate from Yale.)
A strident anti-communist, Buckley defended Joe McCarthy, befriended Richard Nixon, promoted Barry Goldwater and supported the Vietnam War. Later, he championed former Democrat Ronald Reagan’s political ascendancy, demonizing the liberalism and the egalitarian policies of FDR’s New Deal while saluting the union-busting oligarchy that replaced it. Before he died in 2008 at the age of 82, the father of Firing Line ginned up the red-baiting cant that produced Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, the Tea Party and eventually (by Perlstein’s calculus) Donald J. Trump. That’s a lot to answer for. But these conspicuous blemishes on his hail-fellow-well-met resume are presented as footnotes, overshadowed by assertions of his legendary personal charm.
THAT CHARM didn’t always come across on television. Dustin Hoffman once told me in an interview that in order to play the villainous Captain Hook in Spielberg’s 1992 version of Peter Pan, he drew on memories of Buckley’s nasty persona on Firing Line: his tongue darting like a snake’s, his implacable stare camouflaged by those wildly fluttering eyelids. Such grandiose affectation gets no judgment here.
American Masters informs us without a hint of mockery that Buckley was an advocate of the “Noble Remnant Theory,” a hoary notion that an enlightened and intelligent few, descendants of white European elites, were meant to rule over the less privileged. He came by such arrogance naturally, growing up in a mansion in Connecticut that had six pianos (one for each child) and its own stables. His father made a fortune in the oil business in Mexico (a fondness for colonialism was passed on, it appears). He was an intellectual Catholic and a devout one. He believed in heaven. “Religious faith was the molten core of his being,” says his son, the writer Christopher Buckley. I am surprised we didn’t hear from Garry Wills, another Catholic intellectual, who worked at National Review before apostasy took him to more liberal mags. Wills might have demurred.
Many of the show’s talking heads (mostly disembodied voices) were identified as “historians,” but they seemed to be largely fans — like Geoffrey Kabaservice, director of the Republican Main Street Partnership. Son Chris is given a lot of airtime to wax nostalgic about what a great guy Dad was. The show steers clear of the numerous skeptics and naysayers who might have presented a different view of Captain Hook in tweeds.
And there you have it: an air-brushed 8x10 glossy of a right-wing public intellectual who was memorably misguided yet destructively influential — still, given the prominence of this documentary. I long ago lost any expectation that PBS news programs would be digging up much inconvenient truth, but, like Charlie Brown in Peanuts, we keep hoping against experience. Educational television was a nice idea when it started, but PBS has been co-opted by the powers that be in DC and NYC, no matter what the members of the Congressional Freedom Caucus might tell you about its “leftist” slant. We need a much braver and more independent-minded Fourth Estate, but The Implausible Mr. Buckley is the latest example that’s not happening right now.