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An Implausible Mr. Buckley

A new PBS documentary whitewashes the conservative founder of National
Review.

It's a funny thing, this sideline of mine as a talking head in history
documentaries. The work can be incredibly fulfilling. (Like when,
explaining how a majority of
Americans said the students shot dead at Kent State had it coming, often
with lusty relish, I almost cried.) It can be fun, especially when the
person in line to sit for the cameras after you is Henry Rollins
, or the guy
whose arrest set off the
Berkeley Free Speech Movement.

But it is also hard

****work, preparing, sitting still while they set up the shot-that can
take as long as an hour-then racking your brain to boil down your
points to elegant sound bites, in the hopes you might win more screen
time. So it's frustrating when the thing finally comes out and ...
well, it kind of sucks.

I had to wait 30 months after my interview for the

**American Masters**documentary The Incomparable Mr. Buckley

before it

****came out last Friday. It's not that I didn't enjoy some of what
I saw; Newsday

****called it "highly watchable," and it is. (Hell, watching the man
navigate a steep slope of moguls on skinny, stiff 1970s skis was almost
worth the time alone.) My frustration is that this exact same program
could have come out in 1996-well before the movement Buckley is said
to have founded ended up producing Donald Trump. Many dedicated
historians have done serious work during the Trump era 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.

I SAT IN PRODUCER/DIRECTOR BARAK GOODMAN'S INTERVIEW CHAIR in a
sumptuous apartment in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood, stocked
with gorgeous African traditional art, on a rainy fall day in 2021. I
remember the details clearly, because it was a notably pleasant
experience. I led Goodman through the emerging scholarly consensus in
short, punchy sound bites, as I have trained myself to do. He seemed to
take it all in with respect and an open mind. An exhausting but
gratifying day, even if it ended up being too rainy to go fishing
afterward in Lincoln Park's South Lagoon.

The story I told echoed what I set down both in a 2017

**New York Times**

**Magazine** essay
,
and in a piece I co-authored in the spring of 2021 in

**The New Republic**

****with historian Edward H. Miller, biographer

of John Birch Society founder Robert Welch. The old consensus, as I
wrote in that 2017 piece, was that, pre-Buckley, "conservatives had
become a scattered and obscure remnant, vanquished by the New Deal and
the apparent reality that, as the critic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950,
liberalism was 'not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual
tradition.'" And then came

**National Review**, founded in

****1955 with the aim of articulating, as Buckley put it, "a position on
world affairs which a conservative candidate can adhere to without fear
of intellectual embarrassment or political surrealism." There, he and
his cohort "fused the diverse schools of conservative
thinking-traditionalist philosophers, militant anti-Communists,
libertarian economists-into a coherent ideology, one that eventually
came to dominate American politics." Then, Buckley purged the lunatic
conspiracists of the John Birch Society and the antisemites, which was
what finally made conservatism ready for its mainstream success.

After establishing that standard interpretation, I guided Goodman point
by point through what we now understand about how misleading it is.

Buckley, a former CIA operative, was sedulously playing a double game.
Historian Joseph Fronczak
-in no less than
the field's journal of record, The Journal of American History
-has documented the
complicated story of Buckley's long relationship with one of his
biggest early influences, the American fascist Merwin K. Hart. Hart's
influence on Buckley is acknowledged in the documentary, as if a
youthful misadventure-but not that Buckley explicitly named him as the
kind of figure whose name would be kept

**out**of his new magazine, the better to spare the politicians he hoped
to influence any fear of intellectual embarrassment.

Then there are all those conspiracy-spouting Birchers Buckley supposedly
"purged." Historian Matthew Dallek has shown it to be a myth
.
Princeton's David Austin Walsh

argues the Buckleyites and Birchers are more accurately understood as
part of a "popular front." John Huntington

calls the far right-not Buckley-the movement's "vanguard." After
all, it was the Birchers who pioneered the use of cultural wedge issues
like abortion as recruitment tools; no modern conservatism without that.
And according to the work of Jeff Roche, it was Birch-style
conspiracists who built and grew the modern Republican Party in the
crucial state of Texas, a pattern I've noticed in other states as
well.

"Without William Buckley," a talking head in the PBS documentary tells
us early on, "conservatism, as we understand it, would never have
happened." But if he had

**actually** accomplished what the show says he did-purged its fringe,
made conservatism respectable-conservatism as we would have understood
it would not have happened, either.

[link removed]

THE SHOW ENDS WITH IMAGES OF DONALD TRUMP SPEWING HATRED and January 6th
rioters throwing metal barriers at cops. This, we are to understand, is
the direct antithesis of what Buckley had wrought: the reason, really,
he is a figure worth paying particular attention to now in the first
place. Goodman had to ignore great draughts of evidence to get there.

In my interview, I pointed him to this evidence. Another talking head
told me he spent some of his own two hours in the chair doing so as
well.

There's a whole article in Politico by a Buckley hagiographer

claiming Buckley supposedly "changed his mind" about the fitness of
Black people for democracy. But only in the United States, it turned
out. In "'Will the Jungle Take Over?'

**National Review** and the Defense of Western Civilization in the Era
of Civil Rights and African Decolonization
,"
a scholar named Jesse Curtis cited Buckley's writing that Africans
were "savages" who would be ready for self-government "when they stopped
eating each other." My co-writer Miller, the scholar of the John Birch
Society, avows he never

****witnessed racism like that even in Robert Welch's

**private** papers.

Regarding his

**National Review**confreres, according to a tidbit leaked to

**Spy**magazine for the 1989 article "The Boys Who Would Be Buckley
,"
his close friend and colleague Jeffrey Hart (I sat two seats down from
him at one of Buckley's fortnightly "stag dinners") once said at an
editorial meeting, "Under a real government, Bishop Tutu"-Desmond
Tutu, the Anglican priest who helped lead South Africa's
anti-apartheid movement-"would be a cake of soap."

Historian and journalist Jeet Heer

demonstrated as far back as 2015 how

**National Review** habitually minimized the Holocaust. And any claim
that Buckley forswore antisemitism was surely put to bed back in 2007 by
what biographer Sam Tanenhaus learned in an interview with an
unapologetic George Will, the magazine's longtime Washington
correspondent: He and Buckley agreed that a Jew could not be allowed to
replace him as editor
. (At the time,
rumors were that Jews David Frum and David Brooks were under
consideration. Sorry, Davids!)

It's interesting how much evidence contrary to the producers' own
interpretations is right there on the screen, in their own program.
Buckley is quoted at a gathering of New York City police about the
thwarted 1965 voting rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in
Selma, Alabama: "All of America saw the police charge at the
demonstrators and the blood on the bridge. They did not see the
restraint on the part of the officers and the sincere negotiations to
cool the tempers." This is disinformation on an Alex Jones level, though
PBS viewers would have no way of knowing that: The fiction just hangs
there without correction, like a Donald Trump interview on Fox.

We do learn that the enthusiastic response from the cops helped inspire
Buckley to run for mayor of New York City. But not, say, about
Buckley's campaign proposal for a "pilot program of relocating chronic
welfare cases outside the city limits." Drug addicts, too. A Buckley
position paper suggested they would be sent to "great and humane
rehabilitation centers." Critics said it sounded more like concentration
camps for the poor. It also sounds like a recent idea of Donald
Trump's
.

Who, it is true, said it with a lot less style and a far worse
vocabulary.

DURING WATERGATE, IT CAME OUT FOR THE FIRST TIME THAT BUCKLEY had been a
CIA operative in Mexico, with Watergate burglar Howard Hunt as his
handler. Here, we learn that Hunt would call Buckley and unburden
himself of the details of the crime, like a penitent before a priest.
Thus did Buckley hear the proof, before practically anyone else, that
the president of the United States was, indisputably, a criminal.

Sam Tanenhaus, who is completing a Buckley biography, speaks next: "Bill
Buckley saw the Republicans had to cut themselves loose from Nixon. But
somebody has to go first." It happened that Bill Buckley had a brother
who was a senator; "Buckley pulled Jim aside and said, 'Nixon has got
to resign. And you are the one who has to go out publicly and say
it.'"

Cut to Sen. James Buckley behind a podium: "There is one way and one way
only by which the country can be pulled out of the Watergate swamp ...
That act is Richard Nixon's own voluntary resignation as President of
the United States."

Tanenhaus: "There was a colder, calculating side to Buckley ... Here, he
saw Nixon was bad news. They were going down. And he prided himself on
not being simply a loyalist. He could say to his brother, 'Now,
Nixon's done.' And he was."

I don't know what Tanenhaus said next in his interview. That's the
thing about these exercises: You're at the director's mercy. I hope

****he went on to conclude what seems to me the obvious moral: that
however Buckley himself saw it, this was no courageous act of
public-spirited independence.

**That**would have been telling the public

****what he knew, and letting justice take its course. Leaking to his
senator brother instead, giving him the chance to appear a brave prophet
in the eyes of history-loyalty to the

**family-**was downright swampy.

But the producers seem to believe this tidbit establishes Buckley as
ineluctably noble-given that it introduces a series of scenes
illustrating his most impressive and charming qualities.

Here he is practicing Bach on his harpsichord ("Bill's musicality
really came out in his writing ... He wanted things to be in balance.").
Thrashing out columns with superhuman speed. Launching a sideline as spy
novelist. Skiing, sailing, consummating the romance of the century with
high-born Pat Buckley.

(Which is followed, creepily but without comment, by Chris Buckley
giggling at the recollection of mom, the only woman voyaging on the
Buckley family yacht, on her knees scrubbing the toilets. The show seems
to find something charming

****in this.)

Next comes some outright balderdash.

Reagan rises, Communism falls. A conservative talking head recalls
asking, "Where do we go from here?" Another characterizes what came next
as "what we now call 'the culture wars.'" Newt Gingrich sweeps
onstage, scourging Democrats like a frothing Maoist during the Cultural
Revolution; Rush Limbaugh rants about feminazis. Buckley is depicted
retiring from

**National Review**, then his weekly PBS program

**Firing Line**, appearing old and frail. This is the show's way of
suggesting William F. Buckley's supposedly more admirable

****brand of conservatism has been swept aside. Viewers are to forget
his avowals that John Lewis on Edmund Pettus Bridge must have had it
coming, that Africans were cannibals best kept colonized.

[link removed]

No, our era's is supposedly an entirely

**novel**sort of conservatism, driven by a new sort of media-here
depicted as developments Buckley had nothing to do with.

Clichés are recited: "There were 24/7 news channels, and then there's
social media, and that places a premium on clicks and on attention and
on grabbing it. And some of the best ways to do that is anger and
vituperation." No place for the urbane, British-accented Buckley amid
all of that.

Watch

****a typical

**Firing Line**episode. They're all on YouTube. Buckley is

**utterly**angry and vituperative. I defy you to find a single moment
when he displays an ounce of genuine curiosity toward one of his liberal
guests. They're there to be ambushed. Conservative guests were
coddled. It was a

**template** for partisan shout-fests, not an antithesis-even if it
was gussied up in orotund sentences and five-dollar words.

The kind of anti-liberal hate we now hear every day was ushered into the
public sphere by the way Buckley rendered it palatable to the kind of
people who watch, and produce shows for, PBS. At the same time, taking
Buckley's

**part**of conservatism and depicting it as conservatism's

**origin**-another myth scholars have debunked-just serves to make
it harder to understand how the actual movement, especially those parts
that would want nothing to do with PBS, came about.

I remember pressing this especially hard on that rainy day in 2021. I
argued why it was wrong to treat Buckley's little magazine, with its
circulation in the tens of thousands, as symbol and substance of the
conservative movement, instead of, say, the magazine of the biological
racist and flagrantly conspiracist Willis Carto, The Spotlight
, which reached a
circulation high in 1981 of 315,000. (Timothy McVeigh was a fan.)

I now see how artfully the authors of

**The Incomparable Mr. Buckley**have set themselves up to be protected
from such criticism. The technique is that old familiar moral evasion of
elite media discourse: "balance." Voices flattering Buckley and voices
(mildly) scourging him almost feel equalized down to the milligram.

Then, at the last possible instant, a biased thumb presses down on the
scale. It belongs to our hero's son Christopher, who, over scenes of
the worst violence of January 6th, reflects on the question of what his
father, who died in 2008, would have thought about Donald Trump. He uses
the same quip as his father, when asked in 1965 what he would do if he
found out he had just been elected mayor: "He might just have said,
'Demand a recount!'"

Clever quips were always how William F. Buckley distracted from the
ugliness of what he was trying to accomplish.

A recent book by journalist Jacob Heilbrunn cuts through that
conclusion.

**America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance With Foreign
Dictators**makes the simple point that if you really want to understand
what kinds of societies American conservatives want, look to the regimes
they most admired abroad. In Buckley's case, these included that of
the theocratic general who overthrew Mexican democracy
, whom
Buckley's father joined a counterrevolution to seek to restore, and
fascist Spain. Regarding the former, we learn only that William Buckley
Sr. "got caught up in a lot of revolutionary movements in Latin America,
and I think that instilled in him a distaste for disorder and a fear of
revolt." The latter,

**The Incomparable Mr. Buckley**passes over in silence.

But not the actual Mr. Buckley: not at all.

"General Franco is an authentic national hero," he wrote in 1957.

**National Review**'s longtime foreign affairs guru James Burnham
eulogized him in 1976 as "our century's most successful ruler."
Buckley assigned one of his brothers-not the senator-to pen one of
the magazine's two fulsome obituaries. He called Franco "a Spaniard
out of the heroic annals of the nation, a giant. He will be truly
mourned by Spain because with all his heart and might and soul, he loved
his country, and in the vast context of Spanish history, did well by
it."

Say it plain: These were regimes where setting loose violent mobs for
political ends was a

**normal**political practice.

Why do American elites seem to so desperately need this narrative of a
respectable right wing that Trump and January 6th have usurped? In the
case of the Public Broadcasting Service, maybe because it turns their
own complicity aside. They've invested a great deal in promoting this
interpretation: When I did a newspaper interview about the show, not one
but two publicists sat in. Publicists were also surely involved in
curating the chat accompanying the show on YouTube-crafted, it
certainly seems, with young and impressionable viewers in mind. One
prompt: "You can read about how Buckley's upper-class lifestyle was a
formative aesthetic for conservative influencers." It links

to a nifty visual essay on preppy fashion.

And what might be the consequences of all of this? I recently gave a
lecture to college students. I asked their professor how much they could
be expected to know about the history of conservatism. "Put it this
way," she replied, "they probably haven't heard of William F.
Buckley." Well, if they flipped on the telly last Friday, or Google this
show in the decades to come, what they will learn is that everything
would have turned out just ducky if only he could have stuck around, and
that maybe, just maybe, our monstrous political era could be repaired,
if only conservatism could become great again-with lots more boat
shoes and crewneck sweaters, for a start.

______________________________________________________________________

Extra! Extra! Got Infernally Triangular questions you'd like to see
answered in a future column? Send them to [email protected]
.

~ RICK PERLSTEIN

Follow Rick Perlstein on Twitter ,
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