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Atlantic
a day ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
What Made William F. Buckley So Unusual
The June issue of The Atlantic features an excerpt from Sam Tanenhaus's long-awaited biography of the conservative intellectual and polemicist William F. Buckley Jr. That book— Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America —will be published by Penguin Random House on June 3. Buckley exerted enormous influence not only on American politics but also on how political debate was waged (more and more, on television). I asked Tanenhaus to review the highlights of Buckley's 60-year career, and to explain some of the qualities of personality—incuding his sense of humor—that made Buckley such an unusual public figure. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Cullen Murphy: William F. Buckley Jr. died in 2008. Two generations of Americans have no real firsthand memories of him, and probably an even larger number don't fully appreciate the role he played in American political and intellectual life for almost half a century. Can you give us a quick overview of Buckley's significance and how it endures? Sam Tanenhaus: WFB—or Bill Buckley, as all who knew him learned to say, at his insistence—was too many different people to summarize easily. He is best-known for being the architect of the modern conservative movement that remade the party of Eisenhower in the 1950s into the party of Reagan in the 1980s. That was one Buckley. He was also the author of some 50 books. His very first, God and Man at Yale, a scathing and witty critique of his alma mater published in 1951, when he was 25, laid out the lines of attack being repeated today by the Trump administration and its allies, who like Buckley say that Ivy League institutions enforce anti-American orthodoxies and through them corrupt the broader culture. Buckley was also a pioneer in the uses of media. At his peak, he was a thrice-weekly columnist syndicated in more than 360 newspapers—this at a time when most people got their information from newspapers. His TV debate-and-discussion program, Firing Line, which began in 1966 and lasted until 1999, invented the talking-head cable-news programs of our own time. Bill Buckley the literary man and editor was also a discoverer and nurturer of talented young writers whose work he published in National Review, the magazine he founded in 1955. Some of the best American writers and critics in the second half of the 20th century—Joan Didion, Garry Wills, George F. Will, Arlene Croce, John Leonard, and more—got their start writing for National Review. And this doesn't touch on Bill Buckley the sailor, skier, best-selling spy novelist. Or Bill Buckley the devout Catholic—'our pope,' as one admirer told me. Murphy: What's astonishing to think about is how quickly he arrived on the scene with God and Man at Yale. He goes from being utterly unknown to nationally known with a snap of the fingers. Why did the book make such a splash? Tanenhaus: Novelty and timing had much to do with it. He excelled at choosing moments, and seeing where the argument was and also where it wasn't. In 1951, McCarthyism was a potent force, and Ivy League campuses were under assault—rather as they are today. The difference was that God and Man at Yale, or GAMAY in the shorthand acronym that Buckley and his publisher used, was the first assault to come from high up inside the ivory tower. Buckley wasn't a populist scourge or congressional Torquemada. He was Mr. 'White Shoe' Yale—editor of the campus newspaper, the 'last man tapped' for Skull and Bones, which meant the No. 1 big man on campus. He was chosen to give the Class Day oration—that speech, delivered before 10,000 people at commencement, presaged the book. Also, he wrote with wit and style. Even as he attacked left-leaning 'atheistic' professors, he learned from them. He wanted to write a book they would respect for its arguments and prose. From the April 1968 Issue: What makes Bill Buckley run And they did. When I was first getting to know him, he invited me to his home in Stamford, Connecticut, for lunch. I was amazed to see that the other guest was a distinguished Yale professor, Charles Lindblom, who is denounced in GAMAY. Of course, this was long afterward—40 years later. But still, I was surprised. When Buckley was out of earshot, I asked Lindblom what he'd made of the book at the time. 'Oh, that was Bill,' he replied. 'He had to do that to make his point.' Then he tucked into lunch on the lovely veranda with its view of Long Island Sound. I wasn't writing about Buckley yet. I was in the first stages of a biography of Whittaker Chambers. But moments like that—the sheer improbability of Bill Buckley, of which this was just one glimpse—made me wonder, Okay, this person is not like anyone else I've encountered. What makes him tick? Murphy: Well, what did make him tick? There was his Catholicism, as you've mentioned. He was preternaturally, to use a Buckley word, congenial, and his congeniality crossed party lines. Where did his conservatism—his type of conservatism—come from? It was not a populist conservatism. It had intellectual roots. Tanenhaus: It all began at home, the large rural estate in the northwest corner of Connecticut where he grew up, the sixth of 10 children. Later, when Bill was a fixture on TV—with his memorable voice and patrician style—many assumed he came from Old Yankee stock. He did not. His father, a lawyer and oil speculator, came from the Rio Grande Valley—in fact, from one of the frontier border towns that helped 'Landslide' Lyndon B. Johnson steal a Senate election in 1948. Bill's mother came from New Orleans. This made the Buckleys 'culturally southern,' according to Bill's older brother Jim, who became a U.S. senator and federal judge. That culture included southern courtliness and graces. I kept meeting brilliant people who said Bill Buckley was the 'best conversationalist in the world.' This seemed extravagant—until I got it. They meant the best listener. In the book, I call it 'predatory attentiveness,' the debater's habit of absorbing everything you said so it could be—elegantly most of the time, though not always—tossed back at you. Murphy: And his conservative philosophy? Where did that come from? What were its basic tenets? And how did it take hold of a Republican Party that mostly seemed to be living in an Eisenhower mold? Tanenhaus: The single greatest disappointment in Bill Buckley's intellectual life—letting down himself, friends and admirers, and, I increasingly feel, the country at large—was his failure to articulate a serious coherent conservative philosophy. He tried to do it, with a book he began writing in 1963 after the assassination of President Kennedy, which brought much hard scrutiny to the American right and its growing militancy. He wrote several chapters—some 60 pages—but could get no further. He kept promising himself and others that he would return to this book, but he never did, and by the end of the 1960s had given up. I knew about this book when I began work on the biography, and wondered, like his friends, why he was not able to finish writing it. But when I read the pages he did write, which are in the enormous Buckley archive at Yale, I saw that the problem was the opposite—not that he couldn't finish but that he didn't know where to begin. The few chapters keep circling back to a single point, contained in the title, The Revolt Against the Masses. Buckley was always good at book titles, and this one extends the argument made in José Ortega y Gasset's classic The Revolt of the Masses, published in 1930, which Buckley read at Yale in a seminar taught by his mentor Willmoore Kendall. Ortega's book is a learned aristocrat's complaint about the leveling sins of democracy and modern technology, which elevated the lower orders at the expense of their betters—people like Bill Buckley, with their taste and refinement, their respect for tradition, and, in Bill's case, the age-old Catholic Church, with its high dogma and sacred rituals. Ortega was a big influence on the first American thinker the teenage Bill Buckley met—he was a guest in the Buckley family's home in Sharon, Connecticut—the libertarian man of letters Albert Jay Nock. Any reader of Buckley can always tell when he's reaching for a big point because he'll quote Nock, usually on the debasement of American life in the modern era. Nock's most important book was Our Enemy, the State (1935). Ortega plus Nock equals aristocratic libertarianism. From the February 2008 Issue: 'We're on our way home now, duckie!' Another component, much the finest aspect of Buckley's thinking, came from Catholic teaching, in particular belief in charity—that is, the love one extends to friends and even adversaries. Out of this came Buckley's many philanthropies. When I told him about a young writer at work on a book about a Catholic school in Harlem, Buckley sent a substantial sum the writer's way so he could finish it. He very much believed in noblesse oblige, a belief he got from his father, a political reactionary who was also exceedingly generous. It was this idea of a kind of voluntarist society superintended by a small, enlightened group—Nock called them 'the remnant'—which Buckley and his allies developed into a hard-edged attack on the New Deal 'welfare state' and all its offshoots, including Eisenhower's modified version of it, sometimes called the Big Deal. Every national political leader Buckley ardently embraced for the whole of his life—in sequence, Charles Lindbergh (1939–41), Joseph McCarthy (1950s), Barry Goldwater (1960s), and Ronald Reagan (1970s–80s)—declared himself the enemy of 'big government,' meaning our own federal government as it expanded under Democratic and Republican leaders alike during the period many look back on as the American Century. Buckley absorbed this philosophy in childhood and never abandoned it, though he added a new layer during the Cold War, with the emergence of an enemy even more dangerous than the U.S. government: global communism. Defeating it— or them— became his guiding mission. That epic battle required a big military (including a costly nuclear program), and interventions across the world (including in Vietnam) as well as closer to our shores (Castro's Cuba, Allende's Chile). Closer still, and nearly as menacing, were 'socialistic' elements inside America's own political, cultural, and intellectual establishment. Put all these ideas together, and you have the ideology of the modern right through the end of the 20th century, which simultaneously opposed the encroachments of government (especially when it sought to raise up the 'undeserving' at the expense of talented 'individualists,' as Nock and his disciples called themselves) even as it urged that same government to wage the Cold War on every front. This ideology, sometimes called 'fusionism,' was spelled out in the pages of National Review and eventually was adopted by the GOP, whose leaders saw the utility of presenting themselves to voters as more than pastel 'me too' Republicans (later called Republicans in Name Only—RINOS), and instead as counterrevolutionaries determined to 'roll back' statism at home and abroad. It worked brilliantly in strategic and tactical terms, especially when the liberal Cold War consensus began to come apart in the 1960s as anti–Vietnam War protests and the civil-rights movement synchronously grew. Buckley and others argued that the increased radicalism of the left was the stepchild of a permissive, wayward consensus politics that lacked clear, coherent principles. The masses were now in control, and the only solution was to rise up against them. Buckley was not a serious political thinker, but he was a gifted enactor of political ideas as a writer, debater, and—in one pivotal chapter in the life of both him and the conservative movement—candidate for mayor of New York in 1965. Murphy: Since you brought it up: I remember the mayoral campaign vividly. Buckley was funny, and he turned conservative politics from resolutely angry into something that could be fun. Do you think the mayoral race changed the conservative movement? Or him? Or both? Tanenhaus: When he was asked what he'd do if he won, he said: 'Demand a recount.' It was a line he'd worked out in advance. His aide de camp, a young Yale grad named Neal Freeman, pleaded with him not to use it, since it would feed suspicions that Buckley wasn't taking the campaign seriously. But one of the points Buckley wanted to make was that people were taking politics too seriously. He seldom talked about politics. He once told me he did it only when he was paid, and when he was paid, it was a lot—$11,000 per episode of Firing Line as of 1971. In 1967, Time put him on the cover—a big deal in those days. (Just ask Donald Trump.) The headline was in fact 'Conservatism Can Be Fun.' Ta-Nehisi Coates: When James Baldwin met Bill Buckley Why did anyone care about fun? For one thing, because fun was in short supply in the politics of that time. In the span of five years, three of our greatest figures—Jack and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King—were assassinated. We worry about violent uprisings in our moment. In the 1960s, they happened almost continually. New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Newark all became war zones. And here was Bill Buckley suggesting there might be another way: Ideological adversaries could talk to one another, use language as a weapon but also as an instrument of persuasion. In the course of that singular New York mayoral campaign, which one friend likened to Andy Warhol–quality performance art, Buckley articulated his ideology with remarkable flair in a city that was being undone by crime, delinquency, and out-of-control municipal spending. He summoned all the strains of conservative belief and remade the GOP into the party we knew until 2016 The luckiest turn for Buckley and New York voters during the mayoral election was a newspaper strike in the fall of 1965. This made TV the main news medium. Each of the local news stations invited the three candidates—the Conservative Party candidate, Buckley; the Republican, John Lindsay; and the Democrat, Abe Beame—into the studio for debates. They were a revelation. Here was something no one had ever witnessed before—a first-class mind and university wit talking about issues like crime in the streets and welfare rolls. Columnists like Murray Kempton and Pete Hamill were enthralled. It wasn't just the debates. Twenty years ago I wrote an anniversary story on the 1965 campaign for The New York Times Magazine. One of the items that turned up in my research was an audiotape of a luncheon speech Buckley gave to the Overseas Press Club in October 1965. At the time, Buckley was 39. I have never heard anyone command an audience the way he does on that tape—the jokes, the erudite wit, the phrasing and polish, the mellifluous voice, the charm. It was the mayoral campaign that persuaded Buckley—and WOR, a local New York TV network—to broadcast a regular weekly debate program beginning in the spring of 1966: Firing Line. Richard Nixon's speechwriter Ray Price—who had known and been awed by Buckley at Yale in the late 1940s—told me that Firing Line was Bill's single greatest contribution to the conservative movement and to American politics. For the first time, he brought his argument into the living rooms of Upper West Side liberals and their equivalents across the land, and many were entertained and also persuaded—not every time or in all cases, but just enough to keep listening. Liberals found themselves thinking, I don't agree with him but he's smarter than I am, and maybe I should hear him out. Getting people to listen, to drop their defenses and let you inside their minds, is the all-important first step in winning the argument. With the mayoral campaign and Firing Line, Buckley became good company. At the same time, the mayoral race was caught up with race in the other sense—that is, racial conflict. It was the great issue in the 1965 campaign, as it was in so much of American politics in those years, and in subsequent years too. One of the things that became clear as I explored the life and times of Bill Buckley was that issues involving race made the conservative movement—that is, brought it into the mainstream. Anti-communism was a strong cause, but it was shared by many. Murray Kempton, Buckley's favorite columnist—in those days, just about everyone's favorite columnist—once pointed out that differences between the patrician Averill Harriman and the rogue Joe McCarthy were differences of taste, by which he meant Harriman's anti-communism was genteel while McCarthy's was vulgar. Matthew Yglesias: William F. Buckley, RIP In May 1954, at the same moment McCarthy was coming apart during the Army-McCarthy hearings—seen by as many as 20 million people in the infant days of television—the Supreme Court issued the Brown decision outlawing segregated schools. This instantly created new allegiances and new enmities—first in the '50s, when the Dixiecrats found allies among northern Republicans, and then in the '60s and '70s, when the civil-rights movement moved north, and the new 'backlash politics' arose in big cities where the conflicts were different and ethnic groups clashed over schools, jobs, and housing. The same argument that landed with a thud in Buckley's debate at Cambridge University with James Baldwin—Black Americans were actually doing pretty well, and whites should stop apologizing—excited audiences a month or two later when Buckley made it in Manhattan. Murphy: The high-water mark of Buckley's political influence may have been the election of Ronald Reagan. Would that be fair to say? What was the Buckley-Reagan relationship like?—that's the first question. And the second is related: The GOP itself is changing by the time Reagan assumes office—the conservatism, if that's the word, it espouses more and more is not an intellectual conservatism but a populist emotion. How did Buckley think about what was happening? Tanenhaus: Yes, most would agree that in 1980, with the election of Reagan—'my favorite president,' as Buckley called him—his ideology and the movement reached their peak. It was a personal triumph for Bill, because he had been Reagan's tutor, going all the way back to 1961, when he had gone to Los Angeles to speak to conservatives and Reagan—then a TV actor and nascent right-wing activist—had been his introducer. Today, after so many transformations and with the passage of time, few grasp how fringe a figure Reagan seemed to many, even after he was twice elected governor of California [in 1966 and 1970] and proved himself to be a responsible and sensible administrator. The fringe reputation grew out of his association with the John Birch Society, a major force in California politics despite the wacky assertions of Robert Welch, its leader—most notoriously that President Eisenhower was a Soviet agent. Buckley and company didn't know what to do about Welch. At first they prescribed an early version of 'don't take him literally, take him seriously,' but once Welch became an embarrassment, Buckley huddled with Goldwater and some others. All agreed that Bill, the super-clever counterpuncher, would take apart Welch's mad theories, which he did at length in the pages of National Review in 1962, outraging many subscribers—one of many episodes that prompted Buckley's famous retort, 'Cancel your own goddam subscription.' Reagan was one of those enlisted to second the attack on Welch—and both the movement and Reagan were saved. But Buckley wanted to bring 'Ronnie' along slowly. In 1968, riding high on his landslide first victory in California, Reagan was the presidential favorite of many on the right—including the campus legions who were members of the Young Americans for Freedom (one of Buckley's many suboperations). Buckley said no. Reagan wasn't ready. It was Nixon's turn. He came to regret this—first when Nixon went to China, undermining his own long history of anti-communism, the one important conservative credential Nixon had; and later, amid the catastrophe of Watergate, set in motion by Buckley's own good friend and former boss, E. Howard Hunt. Hunt was Buckley's handler when Bill was briefly a 'deep cover' CIA officer in Mexico City in 1951. He quit after eight months, having found his assignments 'tedious'—always the death-knell word for him. Besides, far more stimulating work awaited him back in the U.S.: promoting the surprise best seller God and Man at Yale. From the July/August 2009 Issue: Daredevil But, as you suggest, Buckley's relationship with Reagan was complicated, in part because Reagan was more complicated than many realized. I myself didn't realize it until I dug into the facts of Buckley's friendship with him. These were two large figures with, shall we say, healthy egos. A colleague of Reagan's once said Reagan felt superior to everyone in any room of politicians he was in because he had the confidence of one who came from nowhere but had a successful career in Hollywood in its golden age, the 1930s and '40s. That took discipline, skill, talent. Reagan, as the nation and world eventually learned, was a master script reader and deliverer. Gore Vidal once said that Reagan was a far better actor than he was given credit for, and acting is an art. And his speaking voice was probably the best of any American politician's, then or since. Well, Buckley was pretty good in the speaking and script department too, and in fact wrote his own scripts (including the 1,500 introductions he wrote to Firing Line episodes), and he discovered—or, rather, had the reality thrust upon him—that at a certain point, Reagan decided his tutelage under Bill Buckley was complete, and it was Reagan's turn to take over. This happened in the days following his epic landslide victory in 1980. Thrilled and excited, National Review 's editors declared themselves the true victors and brashly announced, 'We have a nation to run.' That sealed it. Reagan decided not to attend the magazine's big 25th-anniversary bash at the Plaza Hotel, in New York, held in December 1980—a snub that caused Buckley acute embarrassment and haunted him all his remaining days. In fact, he was still steamed about toward the end of his life, when he was working on his final book, The Reagan I Knew, which was published posthumously in 2009. The last time I saw Buckley, at his home in Stamford in February 2008, three weeks before he died, the two people he talked about were Reagan and Henry Kissinger, who had become his closest friend—a friendship that dated back to 1954 but grew in the Nixon years and after. In 1980–81, Buckley pleaded with Reagan to bring Kissinger into his Cabinet, but Reagan wouldn't do it because Henry was so deeply disliked on the right—blamed for détente with the Soviet Union and for the China opening. Buckley himself opposed both gambits but liked and admired Kissinger anyway, in part because of his exceptional intellect. Nevertheless, he felt better about it all when, long afterward, Kissinger told him, on one of his last visits to Stamford shortly before Buckley died, that both heretical moves had originated with Nixon, who in addition to being a criminal was one of the most talented geostrategic chess players ever to occupy the White House. Reagan was very good at that too. Buckley and others were appalled when Reagan reached a truce with Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan had gotten out in front of them all. One of the lessons of modern politics, reinforced for me while working on this book, is that the role of intellectuals, while important, is actually different from what we—and they —may suppose. Buckley and his allies liked to think of themselves as preceptors and teachers—even visionaries and prophets—ushering in the grand ideas. Mere vote-hustling presidents were the vehicles or instruments of those ideas. In truth the relationship is generally the opposite. The charismatic leader clears the way and the 'verbalists,' in the term used by one of Buckley's mentors, James Burnham, fall behind in the important but subsidiary roles of cheerleaders and publicists. This was the message the supposed simpleton Ronnie Reagan coolly delivered to the über-sophisticate Bill Buckley by deciding to skip the banquet at the Plaza. Emma Green: In the age of Trump, no wonder Republicans miss William F. Buckley This led to another painful irony. Once Reagan entered the White House, he didn't need Bill Buckley. Nixon had needed him, to keep the right wing in line. But Reagan came directly out of the right wing. Bill Buckley was a social ornament—especially to the ladder-climbing Nancy Reagan—but otherwise not especially useful. The journalist the Reagans cultivated was Buckley's protégé George F. Will, the king of Washington columnists. Fortunately, Buckley had so big and full a life in New York, and had so many interests and friendships of his own there, that he didn't need Reagan either. Murphy: Reagan aside, what did Buckley think about the direction his party was going in? Tanenhaus: Populism is a fraught subject for the whole of conservative-movement history. Lindbergh wasn't precisely a populist, but he also was not an officeholder or office seeker. But Joe McCarthy was, and he remains the most important figure in Buckley's crucial formative years. Buckley took up his cause early and defended him 'til the end of his life, though he made vague stabs at saying that maybe 'Joe' had been more trouble than he was worth. In fact, Buckley was well aware that the movement needed crowd-pleasing candidates. How else to win office? The ideas and arguments—the philosophy—could be adjusted and contoured (and readjusted and recontoured) to suit each new movement tribune. After Reagan left office, and the Cold War was won, Buckley found himself a reluctant promoter of the movement's new causes, the 'culture wars,' which in the '70s included disputes about 'forced' school busing and abortion and, in the '80s, revolved around the AIDS epidemic. The booming voices belonged to Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh. Buckley liked them all, in particular Limbaugh. When I attended one of National Review 's big events in the early 2000s, Rush was the host and man of honor. Many were surprised. They shouldn't have been. He was a rabble-rouser, but then so had been McCarthy. I'm asked time and again what would Buckley have made of Donald Trump. My answer is, first, that backward-looking prophecy is the bane of poor historians. It's impossible to read the present into the thinking of a person who lived in an earlier time. Buckley died in 2008, at age 82. He came from a different world than our own but also helped bring our world into being, particularly the world of American conservatives. Many Buckley admirers and acolytes are now Trumpists. Is this a betrayal of Buckley and his legacy, or is it a fulfillment? There are arguments to be made on both sides. I decided not to discuss or quote Buckley's one extended commentary on Donald Trump, a penetratingly dismissive assessment written in 2000 (and published in, of all venues, Cigar Aficionado), when Trump was toying with running for president on the Reform Party ticket invented by Ross Perot. Why did I omit this? Because it was written long before Trump emerged as a force in the Republican Party. Many who agreed with Buckley's dismissive words back then have since changed their minds. The editors of National Review vehemently opposed Trump in January 2016 but no longer do so. Would Buckley have undergone a similar revolution in his thinking? I can't say, and neither can anyone else. Murphy: You've spent 25 years working on this book. You've had access to Buckley's papers. You've interviewed his friends and members of his family. You knew Buckley, and spoke with him often and at length. A life fuller than his is hard to imagine, and like anyone's, it had its complexities. As a person—as I understand it, and as he emerges in your book—he elicited great loyalty and affection, and returned it. What were the qualities that accounted for this? Tanenhaus: Like most journalists who've been kicking around for a long time, I've been in the company of many prominent people. But of them all, not one (with the exception of the great Linda Ronstadt, when I got to interview her some years ago) was so natural and enjoyable company as Bill Buckley. As Garry Wills said, he was 'just exciting to be with.' One reason was that the distinctions that so often place barriers between the great and the ordinary simply melted away, with no effort on his part. This may seem strange, since Buckley's speech and manner struck so many as affected or even pretentious. Nothing could be further from the truth. An interviewer asked him once about his ornate vocabulary and diction. Bill replied, 'I talk to my dog the same way.' (That was Rowley, his adored Cavalier King Charles spaniel). Ross Douthat: Cruisin' with the Right When I first met Buckley, in 1990, he was at or near the peak of his fame. He was a best-selling author, TV star, and Manhattan socialite. He was the acknowledged leader of one of the great political movements in American history and had just seen the single great mission in his life, the defeat of global communism, achieved under American statesmen he had anointed. I was nobody, a 34-year-old barely published freelance journalist. Yet Bill Buckley treated me as his equal in every way, with no hint of pretense or condescension. He had a quality not just of courtesy but of deference I'd not encountered before or since. This is related to something else—his utter lack of pettiness. His mortal enemy was Gore Vidal, yet I never heard Buckley speak ill of him. One of Buckley's protégés, the writer Michael Lind, told me that the only time he heard Buckley mention Vidal was to praise his brilliance as a writer. Some of this was good manners. My wife and I were recently in Sharon, Connecticut, and spoke with many there who knew several generations of Buckleys. Not once did any Buckley they knew disparage or criticize anyone in personal terms. In Bill's case this carried over into all his dealings. Courtesy was also rooted in his faith. When Bill was growing up in Sharon, every Catholic member of the household—that is, servants and groomsmen—went to church together on Sundays. They piled together into the family Buicks and drove to the modest Catholic church, St. Bernard. Murphy: Why did you write this biography? You've been at work on it, off and on, for a quarter of a century. Tanenhaus: Books, as you know, seem to choose authors rather than the other way around. But I can tell you the precise moment when it occurred to me to write about Bill Buckley, if not exactly why. It was in 1992. I was midway through my biography of Whittaker Chambers, and I had just read Garry Wills's wonderful little book Confessions of a Conservative, which included a tantalizing reference to a lunch with Chambers when Garry was at National Review in 1957. Wills was my idol then—as he still is—and I wrote asking if I could speak with him. This was pre-internet and pre-email. Letters were really letters signed and posted in the mail. After some weeks had passed, it seemed clear that Wills was not going to reply. I mentioned my frustration to Buckley. Not long after, the phone rang. It was Bill Buckley, and I remember his exact words. 'I hadn't spoken to Garry Wills in 20 years'—because of an epic falling-out during the Vietnam and civil-rights era—'but I just got off the phone with him and he's waiting for your call.' And he was. I made the call, and Garry Wills told me about his meeting with Chambers. I've turned that little episode over in my mind many times in the past more than 30 years, and each time I'm struck by something different: his extravagant kindness to me, the delight he plainly took in letting me know the extent of his interest in the book I was writing, the excuse he was perhaps looking for to resume a connection whose loss troubled him. But when I think about it now, what I think of is the enjoyment it afforded Buckley too in solving my problem—the pleasure he found or created in such moments, and there were thousands like them. It is the pleasure of the artist, pleasure allied with an odd detachment. It is of a piece with the feel for comedy—his love of conversation as continual repartee and his embrace of the political life as more than the grim clash of zealotries but instead an adventure and expression of personality. The greatest work of secular religious writing is Dante's La Divina Commedia —comic because the hero reaches paradise. And Buckley, the Catholic who never knew a moment of doubt, was sure the same deliverance awaited him. From the December 1951 Issue: The changes at Yale Buckley was born in 1925, the same year a writer he admired and identified with, his fellow Irish Catholic romantic F. Scott Fitzgerald, published The Great Gatsby. Both Bill Buckley and Jay Gatsby turn 100 this year. The two epigraphs in my book come from Marcel Proust and John Keats. I was sorely tempted to add a third, from Gatsby: If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away … it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. To be in Bill Buckley's company was to feel this and also to feel—to know—that hope really is a gift, not a delusion, though Buckley knew a great deal about delusion too.
New York Times
a day ago
- Business
- New York Times
The Cerebral, Bach-Loving Patrician Who Wrote Trump's Playbook
In a memorable exchange during a Republican primary debate in January 2016, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas needled the upstart candidate Donald Trump, saying he was not a true conservative and adding, 'Not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan.' Mr. Trump was ready with a retort. 'Conservatives actually do come out of Manhattan,' he replied, 'including William F. Buckley.' It was obvious why Mr. Trump would invoke William F. Buckley Jr. — the author, columnist, magazine editor, TV debater and political candidate who died at 82 in 2008 (and who did work for decades in Manhattan). Mr. Buckley was the leading intellectual architect of the modern conservative movement — indeed, he personified it for more than 50 years. But by what reasoning could Mr. Trump rightfully claim a connection with him? Outwardly, Mr. Buckley, with his patrician manner, salon wit and gold-plated vocabulary, his passion for Bach and connoisseur's taste for fine writing, could not have been less like Mr. Trump. And in policy terms, Mr. Trump's love of tariffs, defense of entitlement programs and isolationist tendencies were at odds with Mr. Buckley's fondness for the free market, skepticism of big government and support for a muscular foreign policy. In fact, in the winter of 2016, the editors of National Review, the venerable political journal Mr. Buckley founded in 1955, devoted an entire issue to making the case against Mr. Trump. They invited conservatives 'across the spectrum' to argue that he was a 'philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the G.O.P. in favor of a free-floating populism with strongman overtones.' Since then, the ranks of anti- or 'never' Trump conservatives have thinned almost to extinction, in the pages of National Review and elsewhere. Mr. Trump controls the Republican Party top to bottom and commands the loyalty of its policy minds as well as the thriving right-wing media ecosphere. His vision, it seems, has prevailed. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Washington Post
25-05-2025
- Automotive
- Washington Post
The Indianapolis 500 can run just fine without a tax break
Dominic Pino is the Thomas L. Rhodes Journalism Fellow at National Review Institute and host of the American Institute for Economic Research podcast 'Econception.' In most circumstances, 'it's the month of May' is an anodyne statement about the time of year. For fans of auto racing, however, it's one of the most exciting sentences you can hear. The 'month of May' refers to the weeks of preparation for the Indianapolis 500, which always takes place the Sunday before Memorial Day. Drivers combine to run thousands of practice laps throughout May and compete in a regular season race on the infield road course before multiple stages of qualifying, with a pole speed of around 230 mph. Congress moves a lot slower than that, but the Indianapolis 500 has put tax policy on the minds of some lawmakers. The Indianapolis Star reported that Sen. Todd Young (R-Indiana) is pushing a bill with Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Virginia) called the Motorsports Fairness and Permanency Act, which would provide a tax break for investments in motorsports facilities. I'm the biggest fan there is when it comes to racing, but Congress should let this bill crash and burn. Politicians have a habit of channeling their constituents' fandom into taxpayer-funded goodies — just look at the current talks over a new football stadium in D.C. The bipartisanship of motorsports favors extends beyond Young and Warner's bill. North Carolina, under Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, used money from Joe Biden's American Rescue Plan Act to help refurbish North Wilkesboro Speedway. A law supposedly about covid recovery was used to fund improvements to a track that had been vacant since 1996, for the use of NASCAR, which has plenty of money of its own. Some reasons to oppose this latest racing bill are specific to the sport. Most racetracks are small operations that don't generate extraordinary amounts of economic activity, and the large tracks that do host premier racing series only create significant economic impact one or two weekends per year. Eleven out of 12 months are not 'the month of May,' and aside from one weekend hosting NASCAR, Indianapolis Motor Speedway is little more than a museum, gift shop and landmark for most of the year. It's an enchanting place to race fans like me (a photo of the Yard of Bricks at the finish line that I took on a tour of the track is my phone background), but federal taxpayers shouldn't be asked to give special privileges to our interests. In an administration where personal connections matter a lot in policymaking, it's also hard to ignore that the speedway's owner, Roger Penske, is a billionaire friend of Donald Trump. But the larger reason to oppose the bill is in the title itself: A bill with 'fairness' in the name should not give a special tax preference to motorsports facilities. Instead, Congress should help businesses around the country with some related tweaks that benefit them all. The co-sponsors of this latest bill do have a point on policy. It's not a story about racing, though, but about Congress taking a smart, pro-growth tax idea, trying to do it on the cheap, and opening itself up to these kinds of industry-specific shenanigans in the process. The Motorsports Fairness and Permanency Act concerns depreciation schedules under the tax code, meaning the pace at which businesses can write off their investment costs over time. Many of the investments that motorsports facilities make have long depreciation schedules that could stretch out over 29 years. Beginning in 2004, Congress made a temporary carveout for motorsports facilities that reduced that to seven years. This is good for racetracks because it allows them to write off their investments faster. Congress has extended that provision since then. But what's good for motorsports is also good for everyone else. So in 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act made the shortened period of seven years largely irrelevant by allowing businesses to write off 100 percent of the cost of many investments immediately, including many of those made by motorsports facilities. The problem is that doing this reduces federal revenue, and Senate Republicans agreed at the outset of their 2017 tax negotiations to only increase deficits by so much. So to ease passage of the bill, this new 'bonus depreciation' began to phase out in 2023. The percentage of an investment expense that is allowed to be deducted immediately has declined by 20 points per year, so it currently sits at 40 percent and will be gone entirely by 2027. Which brings us to our current proposal from Young and Warner. If Congress wants to encourage businesses to make capital investments, they have an opportunity to do it right now in the One Big Beautiful Bill Trump is trying to get across the finish line. As of now, they only want to extend bonus depreciation through 2029, setting up yet another cliff. It may take shuffling around some priorities, but a permanent and fair code beats a line of rent-seeking industries trying to sneak their own side deals through every year.
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Perspective: The renaissance that American universities need
Years ago, as a young academic, I found myself seated in an antebellum inn in Oxford, Mississippi. A fire crackled quietly in the hearth, and across from me sat William F. Buckley Jr. — founder of National Review, author of 'God and Man at Yale,' and one of the great minds of our time. As we spoke at length about the decay of higher education, Buckley lamented that Yale had abandoned its soul. 'They've kept the Latin,' he said with a wry smile, 'but they've lost the light.' He was, of course, speaking of Yale's motto: Lux et Veritas — Light and Truth. I would add this: Yale's seal doesn't only include Latin. It also bears Hebrew script—Urim and Thummim— symbols drawn from biblical tradition, meaning 'lights and perfections.' When a university abandons Lux et Veritas, it doesn't just lose tradition. It forfeits transcendence. Buckley told me that universities were drifting not only from faith, but from intellectual seriousness, from moral purpose, from the courage to say some things are true and others are not. That night shaped me. It reminded me that ideas are not abstractions — they are anchors. And liberty requires more than license. It requires character. This is one reason that, earlier this year, I sponsored a bill that seeks to restore civic education to our universities. This was not a nostalgic gesture, but a necessary course correction. Why? Because I spent years in the classroom, and I've seen what's been lost. Students arrive equipped with slogans, not substance; credentials, but not conviction. They can quote grievance, but not Lincoln. They can deconstruct, but they cannot defend. One critic asked me, 'Why fix something when you can reinvent a whole other concept?' Here's why: Because what's broken is not just policy — it's purpose. And sometimes, reinvention is the most responsible form of repair. My bill, SB334, doesn't dictate doctrine. It doesn't ban ideas. It revives balance, it renews foundations, and it reminds us all that our republic cannot endure if it forgets its roots. And yet, for daring to suggest that students should engage with the Constitution, The Federalist Papers, and the great thinkers of our tradition — from Augustine to Du Bois — I have been accused of censorship, of cowardice, of control. When I wrote earlier this year that Americans are sick of the 'neo-Marxist, nihilistic narcissism of the hard left,' it wasn't a rhetorical flourish. It was a cultural diagnosis — a warning drawn not from ideology, but from experience. Neo-Marxism has infiltrated too many corners of the academy — not as one voice among many, but as a dominating lens through which all of history, literature, and society must be interpreted. It teaches that everything is about power — race, gender, class —forever locked in a binary of oppressor and oppressed. Nihilism soon follows, replacing wonder with suspicion, and turning the quest for truth into a campaign of endless deconstruction. If nothing is true, then everything is permissible — and everything is politicized. Narcissism completes the triangle, elevating personal identity above shared reality, feelings above facts, grievance above gratitude. It replaces moral formation with moral performance —and turns education into a pageant of self-righteousness. This is not education. This is theater, not thought. True education derives from virtue, and from liberty rooted in reason. It prizes self-rule, not mob rule. It knows that happiness is found not in the hedonism of the moment, but in a life anchored to virtue, ordered liberty, and moral purpose. 'Pleasure,' said Epicurus, 'is rather sober reasoning… banishing those beliefs that lead to the tumult of the soul.' Justice Anthony Kennedy reminded us that to the Founders, 'Happiness meant that feeling of self-worth and dignity you acquire by contributing to your community and to its civic life.' And then there is Alexis de Tocqueville, who saw far ahead— into our very moment: 'Tyranny in democratic republics does not proceed in the same way, however. It ignores the body and goes straight for the soul… You will remain among men, but you will forfeit your rights to humanity… Go in peace, I will not take your life, but the life I leave you with is worse than death.' That is the tyranny that awaits when liberty is divorced from moral clarity, when freedom is severed from formation, when truth is replaced by technocracy and virtue by virtual applause. Not long ago, I sat down with sculptor Sabin Howard, whose work on the National World War I Memorial has been called nothing short of a modern marvel. His bronzes don't just commemorate; they communicate. They teach. They remind us that art, at its best, does not flatter our vanities but elevates our virtues. Howard and I spoke about something bigger than a statue —something deeper than nostalgia. We spoke about the need for a renaissance— not just of art, but of ideas. A revival of beauty, meaning and moral imagination. A return to excellence. He told me about his next great vision: The Grand Liberty Arch, a monumental sculpture installation coming to Salt Lake City — a tribute to freedom, courage, sacrifice, and the enduring American spirit. Not just metal and stone, but a declaration in form: Liberty still lives here. It is up to all of us to ensure that this remains true. John D. Johnson is a Utah state senator and professor emeritus at Utah State University. This essay was adapted from a speech he delivered at the 2025 commencement ceremonies for Mount Liberty College.
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Perspective: The renaissance that American universities need
Years ago, as a young academic, I found myself seated in an antebellum inn in Oxford, Mississippi. A fire crackled quietly in the hearth, and across from me sat William F. Buckley Jr. — founder of National Review, author of 'God and Man at Yale,' and one of the great minds of our time. As we spoke at length about the decay of higher education, Buckley lamented that Yale had abandoned its soul. 'They've kept the Latin,' he said with a wry smile, 'but they've lost the light.' He was, of course, speaking of Yale's motto: Lux et Veritas — Light and Truth. I would add this: Yale's seal doesn't only include Latin. It also bears Hebrew script—Urim and Thummim— symbols drawn from biblical tradition, meaning 'lights and perfections.' When a university abandons Lux et Veritas, it doesn't just lose tradition. It forfeits transcendence. Buckley told me that universities were drifting not only from faith, but from intellectual seriousness, from moral purpose, from the courage to say some things are true and others are not. That night shaped me. It reminded me that ideas are not abstractions — they are anchors. And liberty requires more than license. It requires character. This is one reason that, earlier this year, I sponsored a bill that seeks to restore civic education to our universities. This was not a nostalgic gesture, but a necessary course correction. Why? Because I spent years in the classroom, and I've seen what's been lost. Students arrive equipped with slogans, not substance; credentials, but not conviction. They can quote grievance, but not Lincoln. They can deconstruct, but they cannot defend. One critic asked me, 'Why fix something when you can reinvent a whole other concept?' Here's why: Because what's broken is not just policy — it's purpose. And sometimes, reinvention is the most responsible form of repair. My bill, SB334, doesn't dictate doctrine. It doesn't ban ideas. It revives balance, it renews foundations, and it reminds us all that our republic cannot endure if it forgets its roots. And yet, for daring to suggest that students should engage with the Constitution, The Federalist Papers, and the great thinkers of our tradition — from Augustine to Du Bois — I have been accused of censorship, of cowardice, of control. When I wrote earlier this year that Americans are sick of the 'neo-Marxist, nihilistic narcissism of the hard left,' it wasn't a rhetorical flourish. It was a cultural diagnosis — a warning drawn not from ideology, but from experience. Neo-Marxism has infiltrated too many corners of the academy — not as one voice among many, but as a dominating lens through which all of history, literature, and society must be interpreted. It teaches that everything is about power — race, gender, class —forever locked in a binary of oppressor and oppressed. Nihilism soon follows, replacing wonder with suspicion, and turning the quest for truth into a campaign of endless deconstruction. If nothing is true, then everything is permissible — and everything is politicized. Narcissism completes the triangle, elevating personal identity above shared reality, feelings above facts, grievance above gratitude. It replaces moral formation with moral performance —and turns education into a pageant of self-righteousness. This is not education. This is theater, not thought. True education derives from virtue, and from liberty rooted in reason. It prizes self-rule, not mob rule. It knows that happiness is found not in the hedonism of the moment, but in a life anchored to virtue, ordered liberty, and moral purpose. 'Pleasure,' said Epicurus, 'is rather sober reasoning… banishing those beliefs that lead to the tumult of the soul.' Justice Anthony Kennedy reminded us that to the Founders, 'Happiness meant that feeling of self-worth and dignity you acquire by contributing to your community and to its civic life.' And then there is Alexis de Tocqueville, who saw far ahead— into our very moment: 'Tyranny in democratic republics does not proceed in the same way, however. It ignores the body and goes straight for the soul… You will remain among men, but you will forfeit your rights to humanity… Go in peace, I will not take your life, but the life I leave you with is worse than death.' That is the tyranny that awaits when liberty is divorced from moral clarity, when freedom is severed from formation, when truth is replaced by technocracy and virtue by virtual applause. Not long ago, I sat down with sculptor Sabin Howard, whose work on the National World War I Memorial has been called nothing short of a modern marvel. His bronzes don't just commemorate; they communicate. They teach. They remind us that art, at its best, does not flatter our vanities but elevates our virtues. Howard and I spoke about something bigger than a statue —something deeper than nostalgia. We spoke about the need for a renaissance— not just of art, but of ideas. A revival of beauty, meaning and moral imagination. A return to excellence. He told me about his next great vision: The Grand Liberty Arch, a monumental sculpture installation coming to Salt Lake City — a tribute to freedom, courage, sacrifice, and the enduring American spirit. Not just metal and stone, but a declaration in form: Liberty still lives here. It is up to all of us to ensure that this remains true. John D. Johnson is a Utah state senator and professor emeritus at Utah State University. This essay was adapted from a speech he delivered at the 2025 commencement ceremonies for Mount Liberty College.
