William F. Buckley, RIP

[jmichna]

William Buckley, an outstanding conservative writer and essayist, passed away today at the age of 82. His command of the English language and vocabulary kept me on my toes long after school was finished.

Requiescat In Pace.

[Palmguy]

Just heard this at lunchtime...I always enjoyed reading Buckley's columns from time to time. You're absolutely right about his command of our language; incredible.

Great man.

[Frenchy]

Another "old guard" Conservative gone.

[tbhahn]

Sad to see the passing of another one of our nation's great thinkers...

[XDMickey]

Yep RIP.

[Frenchy]

William F. Buckley: R.I.P., Enfant Terrible
by Ann Coulter (more by this author)
Posted 02/27/2008 ET
Updated 02/27/2008 ET


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."
Writing in defense of the rich in 1967, Buckley said: "My guess is, that the last man to corner the soybean market, whoever he was, put at least as much time and creative energy into the cornering of it as, say, Norman Mailer put into his latest novel and produced something far more bearable -- better a rise in the price of soybeans than 'Why Are We in Vietnam?'" (For you kids out there, Norman Mailer was an America-hating drunkard who wrote books.)
Some of Buckley's best lines were uttered in court during a lengthy libel trial in the '80s against National Review brought by the Liberty Lobby, which was then countersued by National Review. (The Liberty Lobby lost and NR won.)
Irritated by attorney Mark Lane's questions, Buckley asked the judge: "Your Honor, when he asks a ludicrous question, how am I supposed to behave?"
In response to another of Lane's questions, Buckley said: "I decline to answer that question; it's too stupid."
When asked if he had "referred to Jesse Jackson as an ignoramus," Buckley said, "If I didn't, I should have."
Buckley may have been a conservative celebrity, but there was a lot more to him than a bow tie and a sailboat.

[Etta Place]

I wonder if many conservative tributes will mention that Buckley thought the Iraq War a failure.

February 24, 2006, 2:51 p.m.
It Didn’t Work


"I can tell you the main reason behind all our woes — it is America." The New York Times reporter is quoting the complaint of a clothing merchant in a Sunni stronghold in Iraq. "Everything that is going on between Sunni and Shiites, the troublemaker in the middle is America."

One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. The same edition of the paper quotes a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Reuel Marc Gerecht backed the American intervention. He now speaks of the bombing of the especially sacred Shiite mosque in Samara and what that has precipitated in the way of revenge. He concludes that “The bombing has completely demolished” what was being attempted — to bring Sunnis into the defense and interior ministries.

Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols.

The Iraqis we hear about are first indignant, and then infuriated, that Americans aren't on the scene to protect them and to punish the aggressors. And so they join the clothing merchant who says that everything is the fault of the Americans.

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elucidates on the complaint against Americans. It is not only that the invaders are American, it is that they are "Zionists." It would not be surprising to learn from an anonymously cited American soldier that he can understand why Saddam Hussein was needed to keep the Sunnis and the Shiites from each others' throats.

A problem for American policymakers — for President Bush, ultimately — is to cope with the postulates and decide how to proceed.

One of these postulates, from the beginning, was that the Iraqi people, whatever their tribal differences, would suspend internal divisions in order to get on with life in a political structure that guaranteed them religious freedom.

The accompanying postulate was that the invading American army would succeed in training Iraqi soldiers and policymkers to cope with insurgents bent on violence.

This last did not happen. And the administration has, now, to cope with failure. It can defend itself historically, standing by the inherent reasonableness of the postulates. After all, they govern our policies in Latin America, in Africa, and in much of Asia. The failure in Iraq does not force us to generalize that violence and antidemocratic movements always prevail. It does call on us to adjust to the question, What do we do when we see that the postulates do not prevail — in the absence of interventionist measures (we used these against Hirohito and Hitler) which we simply are not prepared to take? It is healthier for the disillusioned American to concede that in one theater in the Mideast, the postulates didn't work. The alternative would be to abandon the postulates. To do that would be to register a kind of philosophical despair. The killer insurgents are not entitled to blow up the shrine of American idealism.

Mr. Bush has a very difficult internal problem here because to make the kind of concession that is strategically appropriate requires a mitigation of policies he has several times affirmed in high-flown pronouncements. His challenge is to persuade himself that he can submit to a historical reality without forswearing basic commitments in foreign policy.

He will certainly face the current development as military leaders are expected to do: They are called upon to acknowledge a tactical setback, but to insist on the survival of strategic policies.

Yes, but within their own counsels, different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat.

William F. Buckley Jr. on Iraq on National Review Online

[Frenchy]

Originally Posted by Etta Place

I wonder if many conservative tributes will mention that Buckley thought the Iraq War a failure.



William F. Buckley Jr. on Iraq on National Review Online

I very much doubt it, Etta. That kind of truth disturbs them, and causes them irregular bowel movements.

[Etta Place]

Regarding Gore Vidal, he and Buckley had some pretty famous debates. It was during the 1968 Democratic Convention that Buckley and Vidal had the exchange that Coulter spoke about.

Political Animals:
Vidal, Buckley and the ’68 Conventions

In all of Vidaliana, there may be no more famous moment than the evening of Wednesday, Aug. 28, 1968. It happened at 9:39 p.m. EST, on live TV, with Gore Vidal on the Left, William F. Buckley Jr. on the Right, and the esteemed ABC newsman Howard K. Smith figuratively stuck in the middle (he was actually at an anchor desk in another room). The place: Chicago - at the Democratic National Convention. The times: a’changin’.

Vidal and Buckley had long been ideological enemies, and naturally, that made good television. In fact, before the legendary encounters in 1968, they had debated twice before: first, in September 1962, for two hours, with David Susskind as the moderator of his syndicated show Open End; and in July 1964, during the Republican convention in San Francisco, with Susskind again as moderator. So ABC invited them to conduct a series of debates at the summer’s two big political shows. The men met four times at the GOP convention in Miami, and then four more times at the Democratic show in Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley had mobilized a massive police force to make sure protesters - bitterly angry at President Lyndon B. Johnson’s policies in Vietnam - didn’t disrupt the show. Each encounter lasted between eight and 22 minutes.

At the Aug. 28 debate in Chicago - the penultimate encounter in the series, with an estimated 10 million people watching - things began with relative calm. But it didn’t stay that way, and before long the men began exchanging words that one simply didn’t hear on TV at that time (see box below). Vidal called Buckley a "pro-crypto-Nazi," a modest slip of the tongue, he later said, because he was searching for the word "fascist" and it just didn't come out. Inflamed by the word "Nazi" and the whole tenor of the discussion, Buckley snapped back: "Now listen, you queer," he said, "stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in you goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered." Smith attempted to calm the exchange with "gentlemen, let's not call names," but the damage had been done. The two men, considerably subdued, met the following night for the last of their week of debates.

By early 1969, Vidal said he had put the incident behind him. But Buckley had not, and so he proposed to the editors of Esquire that he write a piece about his exchanges with Vidal. Naturally, seeking fair play, the magazine asked Vidal if he would like to write about Buckley, and it was agreed that the pieces would run in consecutive issues - Buckley's in August 1969, Vidal's in September. The requisite lawsuits ensued at the time, and Vidal, who made it clear to Buckley that he would not back down, won something of a pyrrhic victory: Buckley, told by a judge that he probably would not win if his suit went to court, agreed to let Esquire pay his legal fees and issue an apology, after which he dropped his lawsuit. Vidal's legal fees went unreimbursed.

But in a strange twist, the conflict resurfaced more than 30 years later when Esquire, in violation of a 1972 settlement, mistakenly republished Vidal's article in a 2003 book, Esquire's Big Book of Great Writing. The magazine had to apologize for its error, make Buckley's original essay available online for a few months, and, once again, pay a settlement to Buckley. The incident caught the attention of The Village Voice, which published a short piece about the revival of the brouhaha, and a doctoral student at Columbia University has put Vidal's essay online.


Harry Kloman
University of Pittsburgh
kloman@pitt.edu

http://www.pitt.edu/~kloman/debates.html


This website has links to recordings of the Buckley/Vidal debates.

[Frenchy]

I got back from Vietnam the day before.