The thing about William F. Buckley, deceased, is not that he was the arch-fiend of conservatism, the center of the vast right-wing conspiracy, but rather that he was the perpetual schoolboy. His conservatism was not so much that of armies and nations as of the mischievous prankster whose practical jokes would end with a chamber pot on the rector’s podium.
He certainly could charm his friends and who can blame them? He had a knack for good living with the best booze, the best speedboats, the best music and often enough, some pretty good company. But as Talleyrand said, there’s no better recipe for happiness than a good digestion and a hard heart. He could be the best of entertainers and, in his own way, the best of companions, serene in the knowledge that little by way of human misery would ever make it past the front gate.
Oddly, he became rather more of an impish schoolboy as he reached maturity. His early work—God and Man and Yale and McCarthy and his Enemies had a streak of bitterness and rancor unbecoming in one so privileged. At some point he must have decided that life was too short for bile, and the mere fact that other people took him seriously was no reason for him to take himself so. Thus he morphed from the combative aggression of his early work into the genteel self-mockery of what you could call his sesquipedalian phase—the Bill Buckley of the PBS Firing Line, whose serpentine smile was not so much the face of triumph as it was a throb of self-congratulation at his own elegance and wit.
I think in the end, you’ve got to give Bill Buckley two things: one, there’s no doubt that his National Review was seismic event in American journalism. It made conservatism relevant in debate and also, not least, often well-written and funny (but it might not do to go back and review all the early issues to see just how mean-spirited and ruffian-like some of it could be).
Two, for all his failings I think we do owe Buckley something for his efforts neutralize conservatism from some of its worst poisons. It may be hard for the current generation to grasp just how much closely wedded was traditional conservatism to nasty anti-Semitism. All this has changed now. I suppose it was Irving Kristol who led his battalion of tattered Trotskeyites into the castle. It was the Papist Bill Buckley who lowered the drawbridge and unlocked the gate.
Be nice if we could say as much about his relations with other outsiders—particularly Blacks—but nobody’s perfect.
His death is big news (cf. links here), and I expect his funeral will be a great social occasion. Fair enough. There are loads of people who loved him—who will regale you with stories of his grace and good nature; even (up to a point), his generosity. But in our time, we have not seen a more unapologetic apologist for the privilege of the wealthy and well-born. He never did much to afflict the comfortable nor, so far as I can tell, to comfort the afflicted. And so far as I can tell, that was fine with him; at the end of the day, for all those outside the charmed circle, he really didn’t give a damn.
Update: My friend from P.S. 109 invites me to recall also "this memorable insight:"
In 1967, William F. Buckley, an alumnus then running an insurgent campaign for a seat on the Yale Corporation, declared that Yale had ceased to be the "kind of place where your family goes for generations" and had been transformed into an institution where "the son of an alumnus, who goes to a private preparatory school, now has less chance of getting in than some boy from P.S. 109 somewhere."
And another afterthought: I see that Rosalyn Tureck is on my favorite music list. I have to admit I first heard about her via Buckley.
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