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Atlantic
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
When William F. Buckley Jr. Met James Baldwin
In February 1965, three months after Barry Goldwater had been trounced by Lyndon B. Johnson in the presidential election, one of the Republican candidate's most forceful advocates, William F. Buckley Jr., had an important event on his calendar. Taking a break from his annual ski vacation in Switzerland with his wife, Pat, he made his way to England for a debate at the Cambridge Union with one of the most celebrated writers alive, the novelist, memoirist, critic, and essayist James Baldwin. Buckley had been paying attention to Baldwin. He had read and admired his novel Another Country, which subtly explored complex gay and racial themes. But he disliked Baldwin's journalism and his profuse commentary on race. Baldwin, he had written, 'celebrates his bitterness against the white community mostly in journals of the far political left,' which suggested complicity—or was it cowardice?—on the part of guilt-ridden white editors. Baldwin's presence in England was itself an event. He was there to promote the paperback edition of Another Country and to discuss a screenplay with a filmmaker. He also made himself available to journalists and students. And there was the debate with Buckley at the Cambridge Union—a debate on the subject of race in America. Baldwin's numerous venues were not, as it happened, limited to those of the left. His arguments, moreover, were original and unorthodox, and at times even paralleled Buckley's own. Baldwin, too, was skeptical of liberal programs and the meliorist principles they rested on. When he observed that the 'mountain of sociological investigations, committee reports, and plans for recreational centers have failed to change the face of Harlem,' a conservative could agree. The difference came in the conclusions Baldwin drew. The true lessons of race in America, he argued, began in what had been revealed about its white population. 'The interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man,' he wrote as early as 1953; 'it has created a new white man, too.' This was a year before the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing segregation in public schools, and two years before the Montgomery bus boycott. Yet Baldwin understood that the white monopoly on racial discourse was already weakening. What that new white man seemed unable to understand, much less accept, was that 'this world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.' It would never be so, because 'white power has been broken,' Baldwin had said in a debate with Malcolm X in 1961. 'And this means, among other things, that it is no longer possible for an Englishman to describe an African and make the African believe it. It's no longer possible for a white man in this country to tell a Negro who he is, and make the Negro believe this.' In the 1964 election, Johnson, the incumbent, had tagged Goldwater as an extremist, and had coasted to one of the most overwhelming victories in history, winning 44 states and the District of Columbia. And the extremist charge had a sound basis. Goldwater had been one of only six Republicans to vote against the landmark Civil Rights Act when the Senate passed it in June 1964. At the GOP's nominating convention in San Francisco a month later, a desperate attempt by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller to add an anti-extremism plank to the party platform had been thunderously rejected. Five of the six states that Goldwater won in November—all but his own Arizona—were in the Deep South. The journalist Robert Novak observed that Goldwater and his allies had completed their makeover of the GOP into 'the White Man's Party.' Buckley was the right's undisputed intellectual leader, who as a speaker, a columnist, and an author made his case with remarkable fluency and wit. And a primary shaper of that new party was Bill Buckley. In the pages of National Review, the political fortnightly he had founded in 1955 and still edited, he and his colleagues continued to support segregation in the South, a decade after the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown. In his writing, he referred to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the civil-rights movement as lawbreakers and agitators. Buckley had become, at age 39, the right's undisputed intellectual leader, who as a speaker, a columnist, and an author made his case with remarkable fluency and wit. Goldwater 'has near him at least one man who can think,' the novelist and Syracuse University professor George P. Elliott had warned. Commenting on an address Buckley had given to a college audience, Elliott judged him 'an all-or-none theocratic zealot of the most dangerous kind,' partly because 'his criticism of the faults of the liberal rulers of the nation was incisive and accurate; his forensic power and control were by far the greatest I have heard in an American speaker.' Now, as Republican strategists struggled to move forward, Buckley's forensic talents were among the few assets they could count on. For years, Buckley had wanted to debate Baldwin. He was all the more eager to do so after the publication of Baldwin's polemic The Fire Next Time, in 1963. With this small, powerful book, Baldwin became a different writer: no longer a witness to racial injustice but a prophet of racial reckoning. Most of the book had been first published as a long article in The New Yorker in November 1962, and Buckley had read it during his preparation for a two-week visit to South Africa and Mozambique as a guest of their respective governments. Buckley was especially impressed by South Africa's prime minister, Hendrik Verwoerd, the principal creator of apartheid in 1948. To Buckley, apartheid—literally racial 'separatehood' in Afrikaans—was more than defensible. It was a kind of ideal system in a caste-divided society, what Jim Crow might have become if only its architects had been more systematic in their thinking and had embraced the concept of fully developed separate nations, Black and white. Despite Verwoerd's valiant efforts, Buckley reported in National Review, South Africa was beset with peril. The threat came from the 'beady eyes of the Communist propaganda machine,' which was cynically stirring the embers of 'black racism.' In Buckley's view, this left Verwoerd only one sensible option: cracking down on dissidents. For 'in such an eutectic situation it is necessary to maintain very firm control. Relentless vigilance' and 'relentless order' were required 'because the eudaemonic era has not yet come to Africa.' Eutectic, eudaemonic : Buckley had a weakness for arcane words, which he deployed as weapons. The more fragile his argument, the more syllables he used: 'preemptive obfuscations,' as one of his protégés, the novelist and critic John Leonard, called them. But in this instance, the tongue twisters could not obscure raw facts; 70 percent of South Africa's population was Black, and eventually that majority would assert itself and challenge white dominance—just what was happening in the American South. Baldwin also had things to say about South Africa and Verwoerd. The Fire Next Time included a bold assertion about the origins of radical evil over the past two millennia. 'Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves,' Baldwin wrote. White Christians have also forgotten several elementary historical details. They have forgotten that the religion that is now identified with their virtue and their power—'God is on our side,' says Dr. Verwoerd—came out of a rocky piece of ground in what is now known as the Middle East before color was invented, and that in order for the Christian church to be established, Christ had to be put to death, by Rome, and that the real architect of the Christian church was not the disreputable, sun-baked Hebrew who gave it his name but the mercilessly fanatical and self-righteous St. Paul. Baldwin did not pause to analyze. He did not allow the emotion to cool. He saw in Paul a zealous convert and proselytizer, and he also saw the intolerance, extremism, prejudice, and persecution that would come in the name of faith. The Christian world, he wrote, 'has revealed itself as morally bankrupt and politically unstable.' With the Church's long history of anti-Semitism in the background, he stated bluntly: 'The fact of the Third Reich alone makes obsolete forever any question of Christian superiority.' The Holocaust—the most radical instance of modern evil—was thus not truly surprising to him and other Black Americans. Just as Christians had monstrously mistreated Jews, so 'white men in America do not behave toward black men the way they behave toward each other. When a white man faces a black man, especially if the black man is helpless, terrible things are revealed.' Buckley had been affronted by the line Baldwin drew from Saint Paul to the gas chambers. But he was also well aware that Baldwin was steeped in Church history and teaching, and knew scripture far better than Buckley himself. The stepson of a Pentecostal minister, Baldwin had been a teenage preacher before abandoning what his book called 'the church racket'—the phrase all but calculated to stir the wellspring of Buckley rage. Nothing defined Buckley so fully as his Catholicism. He had been raised in the Church and as a teenager had talked of joining the priesthood. As recently as 1961, he had told an admirer, 'If I am ever persuaded that my attachment to conservatism gets in the way of my attachment to the Catholic Church, I shall promptly forsake the former.' At the same time, Buckley knew how deft Baldwin's glancing reference to Verwoerd had been. During the Second World War, Verwoerd had been enthusiastic in his support for Nazi Germany, and openly anti-Semitic. But Buckley was, among many other things, a first-rate editor. He recognized that Baldwin had written a major statement and must be met on his own ground. One National Review contributor had the intellectual and literary gifts to do it, a young critic whom Buckley esteemed above all others—Garry Wills. In 1958, when Wills had applied to Harvard's Ph.D. program in classics after a summer working at NR, Buckley had written a recommendation saying, 'There simply is no doubt in my mind that twenty-five years hence he will be conceded one of the nation's top critics and literary craftsmen.' (Wills had gone instead to Yale, which offered a better fellowship.) He was now teaching at Johns Hopkins and writing prolifically for NR. He could handle almost any subject—history, literature, philosophy, politics, religion. Better still, he had spent six years preparing for the priesthood, as a Jesuit, before being released from his vows so he could enjoy a secular life of marriage and family and pursue a literary career. Up to now, Wills had written very little on race, but what he had written was less ideological than most other NR commentary on the subject. Wills made no defense of segregation and was dismissive (like Buckley) of white racists who argued for their own biological superiority. From the July 2002 issue: The loyal Catholic What Buckley did not know was how formative race had been for Wills. He had grown up in the Midwest, but his family came from the South and were typical white southerners of the time. Once, 'on a family visit to Louisville,' Wills later recalled, 'my grandmother took me to Sunday Mass and a Black priest came out from the sacristy. My grandmother snatched me by the hand and hauled me outside. When I asked her why, she—who would never go without Mass on Sunday—said she could not stand to see a 'nigger' at the altar. I observed that she had Black women help her bake loaves of bread for sale in her kitchen, but she answered: 'A nigger does not deserve the dignity of the priesthood.' ' At Wills's Jesuit seminary near St. Louis, his training included orderly service in a hospital. Most of the patients were Black. He and other seminarians ' gave the men their baths, rubbed cream on to prevent bedsores, and washed the bodies of those who died.' Wills's best friend in the seminary was Black and 'told me of the obstacles the order had put in the way of his joining—he was bluntly told that Southerners in the novitiate would resent his presence.' This resistance was one reason, Wills believed, that meeting 'the demands (even legitimate demands) of some' to outlaw segregation might 'bend the permanent structure of our society permanently out of shape' and 'sacrifice the peace of all of us.' To that extent, Wills could sympathize with white southerners. But they must also respond humanely. This was the test being failed time and again. The permanent structure of society was Baldwin's theme too, only he was making the opposite case: The structure itself was rotten and awaited the match that would set it ablaze. Here Wills was ready to meet Baldwin. Unlike Buckley, who read just enough of books he disliked to collect ammunition for disparaging them, Wills brought Jesuitical thoroughness and precision to his reading. He read not only The Fire Next Time, but just about everything else Baldwin had published, and he was overwhelmed by its artistry and power. Wills had agonized over the assignment, he told Buckley in the winter of 1963. 'But after tearing up many attempts at the thing, I send this off immediately, before I decide to tear it up.' He still was afraid he had not risen to the task, because refuting Baldwin required 'new arguments for civilization'—and, Wills confessed, 'I don't know any.' There were only the old arguments, and under the pressure of Baldwin's impassioned language, they seemed to wilt. 'There is virtuosity, even a dark gaiety in his anger,' Wills wrote in his article. Baldwin, he went on, had an 'uncanny way of writing to a background music that somehow gets transmitted along with the words.' And his account of America's racial history was accurate. 'We have been cruel to the Negro,' Wills wrote. 'We have, more than we know; more than we want to know.' But Baldwin did not limit his attack to white America alone. He condemned the system of belief from which the entirety of Western civilization arose. 'He does not attack us for not living up to our ideals, for lapsing, for sinning, for being bad Christians,' Wills went on. 'He says we do not have any ideals: we do not believe in any of the things our religion, our civilization, our country stand for. It is all an elaborate lie whose sole and original function is to fortify privilege.' Baldwin's sweeping denunciation ignored the saving virtues of the Western tradition—its humanism, its ideas of justice and human dignity, its embrace of charity as a defining principle—the same ideals that informed his own writing. Yet reviewers seemed uninterested in pointing out this rather obvious omission. Why? This was the question Wills's essay asked and tried to answer. What looked like sympathy for Baldwin, he concluded, was in reality a condescending refusal to take him seriously—arrant hypocrisy that Baldwin himself exposed by 'attacking all our so-called beliefs, then standing back and observing that no one defends them. In fact, everyone rushes to defend him.' Instead, Wills wrote, somebody should take Baldwin's charges seriously enough to ask, not whether they are moving, or beautiful, or important, or sincerely meant—they are obviously all these, and there has been enough repetition of the obvious—but whether they are true. In depicting white evil in absolute terms, Wills believed, Baldwin foreclosed the possibility of redemption—this despite an evident history of moral growth and improvement. Wills acknowledged the discomfort of defending the existence and importance of ideals so brutally violated by the race to which one belonged, but insisted on its necessity. 'We must have the courage to defend the ideals we have, perhaps, not lived up to, but only known to be true. It takes a special courage to bear witness in this way; to be wrong, yet defend what was right; to be what one is, yet continue to fight for what one should have been; to oppose a better man than oneself in the service of a better creed than his.' From the July/August 2009 issue: Garry Wills on the daredevil Willam F. Buckley Nothing like this had ever been published in National Review. Even as Wills disagreed with Baldwin, he ceded him high authority as an artist and praised in exalted terms what the magazine's chief political theorist, James Burnham, in his book Suicide of the West, was soon to call 'the abusive writings of a disoriented Negro homosexual.' Another respected NR elder—its books editor Frank Meyer, Wills's mentor at the magazine—pleaded with Buckley not to publish the essay. But Buckley was captivated. What Wills had written was quite possibly National Review 's 'finest hour,' he later said. Overruling Meyer, Buckley edited the essay himself; printed it at eight full pages under the title Wills had chosen, 'What Color Is God?'; and made it the cover story. It appeared in May 1963 just after the historic civil-rights protest in Birmingham, Alabama. Americans watched televised footage of firefighters as they aimed fire hoses at children who were then slammed to the pavement, the pressure of the hoses turned so high, The New York Times reported, that the spray 'skinned bark off trees.' At the time, Buckley also efficiently drew on Wills's argument in his own writing about Baldwin. One column restated the argument so closely that it 'suggests some interesting reflections on your conception of editing and/or plagiarism,' Wills protested. But Buckley also honed Wills's nuanced words into the sharp blade of accusation. The Fire Next Time, Buckley wrote, was a violently racist tract—'A Call to Lynch the White God.' None of this deterred Baldwin from agreeing to debate Buckley in early 1965. 'It will be a tough one,' Buckley wrote to a friend. And he had made it no easier by taunting Baldwin in a column only weeks beforehand, calling him the 'Number-1 America-hater.' Buckley had no idea what to expect from the audience he would face at the Cambridge Union. For a recent debate on the Labour Party's 'hypocritical attitude on immigration,' one Labour member of Parliament after another declined to come. The union had held the event anyway, and 200 demonstrators had marched through campus, many carrying banners and placards saying the Conservative speaker was a racist. Forty police officers had been brought in to protect him. American civil-rights leaders, by contrast, had been warmly received in England. In December, when King, en route to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, had stopped over in London to give a sermon at St. Paul's Cathedral—' the first non-Anglican ever allowed in the pulpit ' there, according to King's biographer Taylor Branch—some 4,000 people had turned out to hear him, more than the great church could seat. Cambridge Union debates were held in the evening, preceded by a dinner, with the student leaders as hosts and the invited guests seated on either side of the union's president. Not this time. Baldwin had instead requested to be seated as far as possible from Buckley. He wanted no pre-debate pleasantries. Buckley respected this. He also disliked forced geniality with strong adversaries; it made going after them harder. Baldwin's words were as much sermon as argument. The audience was stunned into silence. Hardly anyone stirred. When Baldwin finished, after almost half an hour, the ovation lasted a full minute. The union hall that night—Thursday, February 18—was filled to capacity and beyond. 'By eight o'clock, the hall was so jam-packed with students that officials had to set up crash barriers,' the political scientist Nicholas Buccola writes in his 2019 account of the debate, The Fire Is Upon Us. All the benches were taken, and many students sat on the floor. Buckley and Baldwin had to pick their way past them as they were led to the long table at the front of the room. Buckley had two British companions with him—his close friend, the journalist and historian Alistair Horne, and the film star James Mason, who sat high above in the gallery. Baldwin's small entourage sat there too. Hundreds more viewers gathered in nearby rooms with TV screens, making the total audience about 1,000. The BBC had sent a crew for a broadcast. 'I don't think I've ever seen the union so well attended,' said the Tory MP Norman St. John-Stevas, who was there as the station's commentator. To a home audience that had never heard of William F. Buckley, St. John-Stevas explained that he was 'very well known as a conservative in the United States,' smiling as he added, 'I must stress, a conservative in the American sense'—closer, in British terms, to a Manchester-school classical liberal—and 'one of the early supporters of Senator Goldwater.' The topic of the debate called to mind an especially provocative sentence in The Fire Next Time : 'The Negroes of this country may never be able to rise to power,' Baldwin had written, 'but they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and ring down the curtain on the American dream.' The motion put up for debate was this: 'The American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.' The phrase American dream was one that Buckley seldom, if ever, used except ironically, but he would now be forced to defend it. Baldwin began by saying that, in terms of the Black experience, American dream was an all but meaningless expression. 'Let me put it this way,' he said in what became the most famous words spoken that evening: From a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports, and the railroads of the country—the economy, especially of the southern states, could not conceivably be what it has become if they had not had, and do not still have, indeed and for so long, for many generations, cheap labor. I am stating very seriously, and this is not an overstatement, that I picked the cotton, and I carried it to the market, and I built the railroads under someone else's whip for nothing, for nothing. The custom at Cambridge Union debates was for audience members to address questions to the speaker, even interrupting to demand a reply. But Baldwin's words were as much sermon as argument—'a highly refined version of soapbox speech,' one of Baldwin's biographers later wrote—even as his description of the capitalist uses of slavery was grounded in historical fact. In 1965, structural racism was a new idea, certainly for this audience, which had been stunned into silence. Hardly anyone stirred. When Baldwin finished, after almost half an hour, the ovation lasted a full minute. 'The whole of the union standing and applauding this magnificent speech of James Baldwin,' St. John-Stevas excitedly told the BBC audience. 'Never seen this happen before.' All the while, Buckley had been sitting by, writing notes on his yellow pad, thinking, as he later recalled, 'Boy, tonight is a lost cause.' For years to come, he would maintain that the debate had contrasted his exercise in high logic with Baldwin's emotionalism. But many present that day thought otherwise. Baldwin had been careful not to say a word about Buckley, not even to utter his name. He had stood at the podium and spoken as if in a kind of reverie. But Buckley, when his turn came, 'stalked the center debating table like a panther,' The New York Times reported. 'He began in a low monotone, almost a snarl.' From the April 1968 issue: What makes Bill Buckley run And the snarling words were distinctly ad hominem, a direct attack on Baldwin himself and the hypocrisy of his admirers. Baldwin's writings constituted a bitter catalog of American sins, yet no one challenged him. Instead he was 'treated from coast to coast in the United States with a kind of unctuous servitude, which, in point of fact, goes beyond anything that was ever expected from the most servile Negro creature by a southern family.' Baldwin's indictment of America was so sweeping, Buckley continued, that it deserved to be met head-on, which meant granting him no special favors. Baldwin could not be engaged squarely in debate unless one is prepared to deal with him as a white man. Unless one is prepared to say to him, 'The fact that your skin is black is utterly irrelevant to the arguments that you raise.' The fact that you sit here, as is your rhetorical device, and lay the entire weight of the Negro ordeal on your own shoulders is irrelevant to the argument that we are here to discuss. But it was Buckley who seemed disconnected from the larger context. Wills was soon to denounce (in his new column in the National Catholic Reporter) 'the savage policemen of Mississippi and Alabama' who had been brutalizing people seeking only their constitutional right to vote. Buckley simply reverted to the two-year-old argument from 'What Color Is God?,' which he repeated almost verbatim. 'The gravamen of Mr. Baldwin's charges against America,' Buckley said, is 'not so much that our civilization has failed him and his people, that our ideals are insufficient, but that we have no ideals.' Baldwin had written this in The Fire Next Time and asserted it again in the union, only 'he didn't, in writing that book, speak with the British accents that he used exclusively tonight.' Up to that moment, Baldwin had been almost impassive as Buckley spoke. The BBC camera now captured his look of angry surprise. There was nothing 'British' in Baldwin's accents. He was a practiced and polished speaker, who had gone before many audiences and spoken exactly as he had on this occasion, in elevated tones steeped, like his prose, in the vocabulary and cadences of the King James Bible. Buckley had insinuated that it was a kind of minstrel performance worked up for this British audience. Murmurs of disapproval and loud hissing rose in the hall. Buckley, always attentive to his audiences and their responses, realized he had erred. He tried to recover. He took this debate seriously. He took all debates seriously, often writing out his major statement in advance. Tonight, as always, he had a case to make. He rightly pointed to the logical error, the 'soritic' leap, by which Baldwin connected the 'fanatic' teachings of Paul to the genocide at Dachau. He accurately remarked that other countries had histories of persecution no better than America's. But other realities seemed lost on him. When he acknowledged 'those psychic humiliations which I join Mr. Baldwin in believing are the worst aspects of discrimination,' he cited an incident in The Fire Next Time, when the 13-year-old Baldwin had been walking along Fifth Avenue on his way to the public library, and a policeman had said, 'Why don't you niggers stay uptown where you belong?' But Buckley said nothing about Baldwin's recollection of having been accosted at age 10 by two white police officers, who 'amused themselves with me by frisking me, making comic (and terrifying) speculations concerning my ancestry and probable sexual prowess, and for good measure, leaving me flat on my back in one of Harlem's empty lots.' Flat on his back. This wasn't merely psychic humiliation; it was physical intimidation and threat. 'I have been carried into precinct basements often enough,' Baldwin wrote, and I have seen and heard and endured the secrets of desperate white men and women, which they knew were safe with me, because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true. Those secrets were the secrets of violence committed with impunity. Even now, Buckley seemed unable to grasp this reality of America's racial history—very much alive in the winter of 1965. On the same day that Buckley and Baldwin met in debate, voting-rights demonstrators who'd assembled peacefully in a downtown square in Marion, Alabama, had been sadistically beaten by state troopers. The victims included a Black minister whose skull had been cracked as he knelt in prayer. The police had also attacked an 82-year-old man and his 50-year-old daughter. Both had been hospitalized. When a third member of the family had leaped at the officer beating his mother, the officer had shot him in the stomach. (He died eight days later.) These were the facts putting the promise of the American dream to the test. When the debate ballots were counted, the motion carried 544 to 164, a lopsided defeat for Buckley. 'Baldwin worsted Bill,' Buckley's friend Alistair Horne recalled in 2013. 'He was electric, so wonderfully articulate, and—this is what I think shook Bill—so highly entertaining.' This last would have stung most of all. Buckley had been not just outdebated but outperformed. Soon after, Buckley opened The New York Times and saw almost the entire transcript of the debate printed without permission in the newspaper's magazine. The two combatants now found common cause. Baldwin's lawyer let Buckley know so both could lodge a protest. Playboy had reportedly offered Baldwin as much as $10,000 to publish his remarks. Eventually he and Buckley received token payments of $400 each. The Times article appeared in print on March 7, the day of the voting-rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Bloody Sunday. The Cambridge fiasco might have permanently damaged Buckley's reputation—except there was a second debate with Baldwin, under very different conditions. It happened in New York in late May 1965 on Open End, a talk show moderated by the TV personality and producer David Susskind. The subject was police brutality in big cities. In the South, the violence was plain for all to see—the beatings and killings of people seeking the right to vote. But in the North, the issue was more complex, especially in places such as New York, where rising crime was inextricably bound up with the emergence of white 'backlash politics.' Open End 's format was more favorable to Buckley than the formal Cambridge proceedings had been. The three men were seated and went back and forth for nearly two hours. One columnist described Buckley this time as 'cool, detached, confident,' and in command as he warned that the talented Baldwin was also 'destructive and sullen,' and on a course that would ultimately harm Black people. 'The best fight in town,' the columnist wrote. Less than two weeks later, Buckley called a press conference and confirmed the rumor that had been building for weeks: The 'one man who can think' in the conservative movement declared himself a candidate for mayor of New York City. Buckley lost the election, but it made him a household name—and fed an ambition to reach a broader audience and become a facilitator of discussion rather than a mere combatant. He launched his own TV debate program, Firing Line, in 1966; the guests eventually included the Black Panthers Eldridge Cleaver and Huey P. Newton. 'Amazingly, a PBS public affairs program designed to convert Americans to conservatism,' the media historian Heather Hendershot later wrote, was broadcasting 'some of the most comprehensive representations of Black Power' of that era. National Review had praised Malcolm X's doctrine of self-reliance, and Buckley's own enthusiasm for 'black capitalism' was one reason the National Urban League invited him to join a group of other journalists it sent on a tour of eight cities in 1969. Buckley was impressed by the leaders he met, in particular by a young Chicago organizer, Jesse Jackson. The next year Buckley, who came to see The Fire Next Time as a 'spectacular essay,' wrote an article for Look magazine titled, ' Why We Need a Black President in 1980.' He knew that it would happen eventually and almost lived to see it. Buckley died at age 82 on February 27, 2008, three months before Barack Obama clinched the Democratic nomination.
Telegraph
15-02-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
The real Daniel Levy: What it is like to work for Tottenham chairman
Daniel Levy has a favourite story about himself. It is from a parents' evening when he was 16 and the headteacher told his mother and father that he should leave school as he was not academic enough. 'The next day I said to myself 'I'm not going to be beaten',' Levy says. 'From that moment onward I got As in my exams and I went to university. I'm a fighter.' It is a tale that Levy recalls to Tanguy Ndombele in the Amazon Prime All or Nothing: Tottenham Hotspur series, as the pair talk about the (disastrous) record signing's struggles at the club. And, tellingly, it is a tale Levy also recounted when he spoke at the Cambridge Union, returning to the university where he gained a first-class degree in Economics and Land Economy. 'I had to fight to get to where I am today and everyone said I wouldn't make it,' Levy told the students. It is even a description that those who know Levy use today. 'A lot of people don't know the real Daniel Levy,' someone who has worked with him for many years told Telegraph Sport. 'He looks very tough, very tight, very difficult to deal with and, yes, he's not easy to deal with. But he's a good guy. He's a fighter. Very, very clever and he built this by himself. Joe Lewis invested at the start but since then he has not put money into the club. Daniel has done it all.' 'This' is the modern-day Tottenham Hotspur that Levy has presided over with their state-of-the-art training ground, its wonderful, futuristic stadium and a club that are now valued at £2.6 billion by Forbes. It was worth £80 million when he took over. But, also, do not forget its underperforming football team, sky-high season-ticket prices and unhappy fanbase. Thinking 'too big' In fact there are those who believe Levy has thought 'too big' with his off-field ambitions to the detriment of what it is ultimately all about: the football. He maintains those ambitions are to help fund the club although he is also the highest-paid executive in the Premier League (£6.58 million a year in the last accounts) and is ranked 303rd on the Sunday Times Rich List with a net worth of £450 million. The latest plan is to build a 30-storey hotel with 180 rooms and 49 apartments adjacent to the stadium, which is due to open before Euro 2028. Joe Lewis is, of course, the English billionaire tax exile. He was the ultimate owner of ENIC and, therefore, Tottenham, who were acquired by the investment company in 2001 but since 2022 it has been in the hands of the Lewis Family Trust, which retains his name although he is no longer part of it. Lewis, or the trust, was never prepared to inject cash into the club after that initial outlay. Levy's goal, therefore, was always for it to be self-sustaining. Given his longevity – he celebrates the 24th anniversary of his appointment next month, making him by far the Premier League's longest-serving chairman – and the infrastructure he has built without risking Spurs' financial security, Levy should be hugely popular and celebrated. Instead he will face more furious protests about his chairmanship after Sunday's home game against Manchester United with fans urged to take part in a sit-in. Last weekend, during the FA Cup defeat away to Aston Villa, the frustrated Spurs supporters maligned the chairman's name throughout, both in a chant celebrating Dejan Kulusevski and the simple 'We want Levy out'. Ahead of the game against Leicester City last month a banner was unfurled which read: '24 years, 16 managers, one trophy. Time for change'. The involvement with Lewis stems from Levy's business background, running ENIC. Levy, who has been managing director since 1995, even refers to him as 'Mr Lewis'. Despite the apparent portrayal of himself as fighting against the odds, Levy's is hardly a story of hardship and battling his way up. He went to state school but there was already a successful family business, begun by his grandfather, Abraham, who opened a hat shop in Stratford, east London, which Levy's father Barry diversified into men's clothes including the Mr Byrite brand, later the retail chain Blue Inc. Still the outsider Even so, Levy's words about himself reveal an attitude that has influenced him throughout his career. For good and bad. It explains, in particular, why he never wants to lose face when it comes to transfer deals and why he has acted as something of an outsider despite how long he has been a fixture in the Premier League. 'There are chips on his shoulder that come from somewhere,' says a former business associate who admires Levy's drive and acumen but is less enamoured with his man-management and personality, describing how he runs Spurs 'like an investment bank' with targets and KPIs – Key Performance Indicators – to be met. Former staff complain that even if they reached these targets they were left feeling it was not enough. Man-management, they say, is certainly not a strength of Levy's. Interestingly 'not good enough' is another theme that resonates with him personally. Five years ago Levy granted a rare interview to the Cambridge student newspaper Varsity in which he admitted he feared that he had failed his university finals, despite 'working every hour in the last few months' because – tellingly – he thought 'I just wasn't good enough'. When he went to check which degree classification he had he started reading the list from the bottom, where students failed or were awarded thirds. Boasting about a thick skin Being a fighter. Proving people wrong. Not losing face. Winning the deal. Coming out on top. Earning respect – and money – while claiming he does not care what people think of him. Boasting, apparently, about having a thick skin. All this matters to Levy and helps to explain his way of operating and his motivation. And so Telegraph Sport has spoken to a number of people who know the 63-year-old – from former employees, business associates, club executives and agents – all on the basis of anonymity to try to build a picture of what he is like. And there is that word, above all, that is used to describe Levy. By those who like him and also by those who are not so warm towards him. 'He is a fighter,' says another long-time associate who has known Levy for many years and who cites the transfer of Harry Kane to Bayern Munich as not just his best deal but one that sums up the way he operates and why he always tries to do what he believes is in Spurs' interests. However unpopular it makes him. 'A lot of the decisions he makes are not popular but he is genuinely trying to do the best for the football club,' one source maintains. The perspective from Kane's camp on what happened is very different. It is very similar, in fact, to that of Luka Modric who, like Kane, believed he had a 'gentleman's agreement' with Levy that he could leave. The mistake both made was not to have anything in writing. And, so, when Modric tried to quit for Chelsea for £22 million – in 2011 – and gave an interview to Telegraph Sport asking to go, Levy put out a forthright statement on the club website just a few hours later killing his chances. The Croatian was eventually sold to Real Madrid the following year for £33 million but has not forgotten what happened. And when it came to signing his replacement, João Moutinho, that deal fell apart because of Levy's 11th-hour haggling over £500,000 on a £26 million transfer which infuriated the then manager André Villas-Boas. Similarly Kane believed that, in a meeting, Levy had accepted he could leave if Spurs finished outside the top four or failed to win a trophy. He wanted to join Manchester City in 2021. Levy refused, selling him to Bayern Munich two years later for £100 million – which was also the base of City's offer. For Spurs and Levy it was a great piece of business as Kane, at 30, had just 12 months left on his contract. 'Near impossible to deal with' This is where opinions on Levy diverge dramatically. 'He's very hard, to near-impossible to deal with. I'd never try to buy or sell a player to Tottenham,' says one club chairman who also adds that, as a person, he likes Levy, describing him as shy but polite and, one on one, 'quite good company' with a sharp sense of humour even if you have to lead any conversation with him. Levy has even been known to perform karaoke, once persuaded to do so during a trip to Moscow for a Europa League tie by Spurs' former executive director Darren Eales. Levy sang Sir Elton John's Crocodile Rock. Levy is not anti-social but he can be hard work in a social environment. He appears at his most comfortable firing off emails or WhatsApp messages and he is relentless in doing so, often with bold demands attached. Such as when he wanted to sign Wilfried Zaha in 2016 and tried to low-ball Crystal Palace by getting them to take Ryan Mason… whom he valued at £2 million more. But Levy is not a great public-facing communicator which, sources say, is partly why fans fail to connect with him. When Levy walks into a room he can appear relatively anonymous and unassuming, which is fine. But is it what you want from a leader? Another criticism is that he has not always surrounded himself with people who make up for his weaknesses. Instead they tend to compound them. A former highly placed employee is more withering about this: 'If he had been a better football administrator – or employed one and let him get on with the job – then Spurs would be top four. Sometimes it feels like a property company with a football club attached rather than a football club with property.' This is hotly disputed by others who know him, and the accusation offends Levy, who was a Spurs season ticket-holder and is a genuine fan of the club. He gave a presentation to all of Spurs' 750 staff in which he put up a picture with lots of trophies on it and has admitted to feeling 'sick' that Arsenal have had more success. Levy, with just the 2008 League Cup, has vowed he will never leave Spurs without winning something else and Telegraph Sport has been told he has turned down at least three serious takeover approaches in recent years from substantial figures who decided to buy another Premier League club instead. Levy has claimed to have refused bids from the Far East, Middle East and United States but continues to seek minority investment, recently holding talks with financier Amanda Staveley, who brokered the Saudi Arabian-led purchase of Newcastle United. The Qataris retain an interest in Spurs. Levy's supporters insist he has one overall aim: to bring success on the pitch. 'He cares only about the football and that is the truth and when it comes to football he is better than everybody,' one declares although he agrees with the view of the chairman we spoke to: some clubs do not want to deal with Levy. 'It's very simple. Always he tries to get more and pay less. It is that simple. Sometimes it's a crazy number and people look at him like they don't understand where it came from,' he says. 'Some clubs are totally afraid to deal with him because they know he comes again and again and again trying to get what he wants.' There are myriad stories of outrageous demands and near-misses when it comes to buying and selling players – from Eden Hazard and Luis Suárez to more recently Luis Díaz and Conor Gallagher, which some ascribe to Levy's hard bargaining. He never blinks and he will bombard people with emails and messages trying to get the deal done. Levy has even had to step away and delegate at the last minute – as with Gareth Bale's £85.5 million world-record sale to Real Madrid – because it got too tense, while there are those who believe his aggressive attitude towards deals is influenced by the fact that he made most of his money in the property boom. 'So do you think you're more painful to deal with than a hip replacement?' asked a student during the Q&A at Cambridge, citing a quote from Sir Alex Ferguson relating to the Dimitar Berbatov deadline-day transfer in 2008. 'Maybe,' Levy said, with a smile, although it should also be noted that he and Ferguson remain friends. Even so there are those who say following the Berbatov transfer and, later, after allowing Kyle Walker to join City, Levy vowed never again to sell to the Manchester clubs. It is partly why City were turned down in their attempt to sign Kane and United never really tried to recruit him, despite being desperate to do so on several occasions and knowing he would have joined them. What is not in dispute is Levy's workaholic nature. He barely sleeps. 'Nothing moves at the club without him. He is working 18 hours a day and the only thing in the world for him is Tottenham,' says one associate. The stories are legendary of his obsessive nature: from logging on to the stadium TV webcam through his iPad at 6am every day to watch the progress of the new ground when it was being built and zooming in on anything he was unhappy with, to choosing the tiling for the concourses and going through the wine lists in hospitality. In fact, some at Spurs talk fondly about the period when the stadium was being built and how it distracted Levy and the board away from the actual football. That allowed the then manager Mauricio Pochettino, academy manager John McDermott – now the FA's technical director – and Paul Mitchell, who was head of recruitment and is now Newcastle's sporting director, to get on with it. Pochettino was undoubtedly the manager Levy had the best relationship with – the one he invested in the most, personally – and the Argentine brought the most success, including reaching the Champions League final in 2019. Famously, in his autobiography, the former captain Hugo Lloris chided Levy for handing the players luxury watches from IWC Schaffhausen – Spurs' 'official timing partner' – engraved with the word 'finalist'. Levy's motivation? Lloris's criticism was harsh as apparently lucrative contracts kicked in with Nike and shirt sponsors AIA for reaching the final, and not necessarily winning it, and he wanted to reward the players for that achievement. Instead it reinforced the perception that he was a 'numbers man' more concerned with the finance than the football. That is strongly disputed by those who point out that Levy then employed Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte, against his usual 'project manager' approach, expressly and expensively to win. That did not work either. Tellingly, and despite the team's struggles, he has stuck with Ange Postecoglou – for now – because he likes him as well as being sympathetic to the factors that have contributed to such a difficult season. Maybe, also, he sees a fellow fighter or, once again, he wants to do things his way.
