Review: William F. Buckley Was Not a Good Man

Robin Averbeck

“Be a friend

to your friend

and also to his friend,

but never be a friend,

to the enemy

of your friend.”

- Havamal 43, The Poetic Edda[1]

Imagine you are handed a book and are asked to read the first few pages of the prologue. You’re introduced to the early morning routines of what becomes clear is an old man. Judging by the fact that he has servants ready to respond to his every need at two in the morning, he is a very wealthy old man. But he’s wistful about the past, and also ready to die. Still, he decides to sit down to do what he has always done — write. Indeed, he has written so much in his lifetime that he has produced over 40 books and thousands of newspaper columns. At this point you wonder, ‘what exactly am I reading?’

The opening sketch for a biopic?

The study of an eighteenth-century aristocrat?

Another biography about Winston Churchill?

None of the above it turns out. This is how Kevin M. Schultz’s book about William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer, Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties, begins. Schultz opens with this scene of Buckley on the doorstep of death and does his best to slather on as much gravitas as possible. Soon, we find that we’re getting two for the price of one, for this book is actually about a pair of wistful, old men – William F. Buckley, widely regarded as one of the most important public intellectuals of the New Right, and Norman Mailer, the counter-culture-inspiring postwar novelist that wrote such classics as The Naked and the Dead and Armies of the Night.

But guess what?

Despite coming from seemingly opposite ends of the political spectrum, these two giants from the Greatest Generation were friends! Even “genuine friends”![2]

If it’s not immediately obvious to you why this biographical detail merits an entire book focused on it, Schultz quickly fills you in. Over the course of their lives, the two “citizen intellectuals” had “debated in huge venues; drunk together in intimate night spots; exchanged dozens of private letters; socialized together at the most memorable parties of the era; traded books, articles, and laughs,” he explains. At this point, you would be forgiven for hoping that what you’re really reading is the prologue to a brilliant piece of alternative history fanfiction, where Buckley and Mailer end one of their heady nights discussing the nature of man by drunkenly stumbling on Buckley’s schooner and, under the lights of New York City, finally making sweet, forbidden love.

But alas, no. Schultz’s focus is rather more mainstream than that, for what bound the seeming opposites together “most vitally of all” was their “shared love of America.”[3]

So, let’s step back for a moment. Even though this Buckley fellow sounds like he had a very sexy lifestyle, who was he, exactly? What did he do? William F. Buckley is best known for founding what was, for decades, the premiere journal of conservative commentary, The National Review. He also helped found Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative student organization that acted as a kind of doppelganger to SDS. Buckley would even dip into electoral politics, running for mayor of New York City and, while never expecting to win, nonetheless discovering the potential of tapping into the wellspring of voters who would later come to be known as the Reagan Democrats.

And what kind of politics did Buckley promote? As it turns out, on almost every major policy issue of the postwar period, Buckley pushed for the most reprehensible and disastrous position. He first made a splash by publishing God and Man at Yale, where he attacked secularism in the university and pushed for abolishing standards of academic freedom to ensure that the prophets of communism and socialism could be purged from institutions of learning. When the Civil Rights Movement began gaining ground in the 1950s, Buckley used the pages of The National Review to argue against democracy in the South, promoting the then relatively new re-packaging of racism by arguing that black people simply were not culturally advanced enough to be trusted with the vote. He would stick to this position throughout the 1960s, declining to even slightly reconsider his stance on civil rights until the last years of his life.[4] When it came to Vietnam, Buckley was the most belligerent of hawks, characterizing any criticism of America’s intervention with the failure to take the side of freedom. One could go on, but we’ll settle for the headlines of a lifetime of bad takes.

None of this would be of much consequence, however, if Buckley had never managed to make a dent on the nation’s politics. But that Buckley did have an incredible impact on postwar politics seems to be agreed to by all, both liberal and conservative. In The New York Times obituary for Buckley, Nicholas Lemann is quoted discussing his impact on the Reagan administration:

Nicholas Lemann observed in Washington Monthly in 1988 that during the Reagan administration “the 5,000 middle-level officials, journalists and policy intellectuals that it takes to run a government” were “deeply influenced by Buckley’s example.” He suggested that neither moderate Washington insiders nor “Ed Meese-style provincial conservatives” could have pulled off the Reagan tax cut and other policy transformations.

Speaking of the true believers, Mr. Lemann continued, “Some of these people had been personally groomed by Buckley, and most of the rest saw him as a role model.”[5]

William F. Buckley was, for decades, anywhere and everywhere politics was debated or shaped— in the newspapers, on the lecture circuit, on television. He was so influential that some have even claimed that without Buckley, Reagan would have never seen the presidency.[6]

At this point, this much should be clear: William F. Buckley was one of the most influential builders and proponents of what would come to be called the New Right. This political movement successfully took over national politics with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and went on to wreak incalculable harm on people in the United States and around the globe. The destruction of the working class, mass incarceration, the erosion of the welfare state into a punitive system of workfare, and the pursuit of two ruinous wars in the Middle East – all of these developments, while not solely the projects of the New Right, were spearheaded by their politicians, pundits, and foot soldiers. It is not my purpose here to review the horrors of the last half century, especially as we are dealing with scholars and historians who certainly already know all this. Yet I do feel compelled to highlight only the most obvious consequence: millions of people have suffered and died because of these political projects.

Does it not seem reasonable, then, to expect that anyone so integral to their execution to be gazed upon as an agent of horror and tragedy?

The answer, apparently, is no. Because Buckley, it turns out, enjoys yet another distinction: as The New York Times put it, “he was often described as liberals’ favorite conservative.”[7] The documentary record seems to bear this out. As we’ve seen, Schultz wrote a book based on his well-known capacity to be friends with political rivals. But liberals have also written essays about how Buckley should be regarded as a model for public political debate. And after Trump’s 2016 victory, several liberal journalists held Buckley up as an example of what the GOP used to be like, and how far they’ve fallen from those heights of civilized discourse that supposedly banished the less appealing fringes of the conservative movement from a serious role in the party. Considering what we know about how central Buckley was to the disaster of postwar American politics, this should strike us as strange. What is going on here?

Let’s try to explore this question by looking at two examples of the “Buckley Was Alright” genre. First, we’ll pick back up where we left off, with Shultz’s book on the friendship between Buckley and Norman Mailer.

This is a bizarre book.

From the start, it’s not clear what Schultz intends to do, or why he thinks the relationship between the two men merits several hundred pages. That the two men were important to the politics and culture of the postwar decades is indisputable – but in that case, why not write a book about one or the other? Clearly, Shultz thinks we have something to learn from the intersection between their two lives and perspectives. And he’s not entirely wrong – but the lessons one could derive from the story probably aren’t those that he had in mind.

For starters, much of the content serves as a powerful reminder of how toxic celebrity culture is to politics. Mailer and Buckley were public intellectuals at a time when that status meant you might impact public debate, and that power also offered membership in an exclusive clique of writers, artists, pundits, and journalists. The prestige and fame attached to membership in this set of cultural elites conjured a sometimes off-putting, sometimes downright offensive feedback loop of self-regard. The most nauseating example of this dynamic in Schultz’s book is the fifteen or so pages spent on discussing the masked, black-and-white ball thrown by Truman Capote in the fall of 1966. Intended as a thinly disguised celebration of his own critically acclaimed book on the quadruple Clutter family murders, Capote invited anybody and everybody in the literary and political power circles of New York City. And when they all got together, things that happen at parties with a lot of egos throwing their weight around happened. People had a good time, got drunk, and got into awkward confrontations. There is no point in going into more detail than that because honestly, it is not interesting or important.

But Schultz apparently thinks it is, as he spends a good amount of time going into detail of who-said-what-to-whom and what the fallout was. But all I knew is that afterwards I felt like I needed to shower, so palpable was the sensation of being soaked in the self-absorption of people so easily distracted by their own privilege and prestige that they didn’t mind rubbing shoulders with war criminals and racists. 

We do learn other things from this book. I learned, for example, that Norman Mailer once stabbed his wife in a drunken rage and then told the people who tried to assist her to “let the bitch die.”[8] That was an interesting detail to ponder in an age where domestic violence and sexism aren’t so easily excused by a wave of the hand and a “well yes, but his novels are brilliant” refrain.

I also learned that Mailer and Buckley so enjoyed each other’s company that they once planned to go on a sailing trip together (others would also be present), which alas, Mailer in the end couldn’t make.[9] Mailer acknowledged to his fans that Buckley’s public persona involved hurling “unspeakably churlish invective,” but personally he was “the best fellow you ever met offstage.”[10] And in fact, in some ways the two men’s politics converged, with both feeling concerned and confused with the forms of political engagement the younger generations were pioneering. So, by the end of the book, what we do get is a portrait of a friendship rooted in white male solidarity. What we don’t get is any clear argument as to why we should care.

For that, we can turn to Rick Perlstein. In 1997, Perlstein was working on Before the Storm, his first in a series of three books that feverishly chart the rise of the New Right through Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. Not surprisingly, Buckley was an ideal person to interview, and he agreed. After Buckley’s death in 2008, Perlstein contributed to the postmortem commentary on the man by composing a short essay in remembrance of Buckley, titled “Why William F. Buckley Was My Role Model.”[11]

What immediately becomes clear is how surprised Perlstein was at the openness of the right-wing legend. As he writes, “I sat with him for a good half hour in National Review's offices on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, and he answered every damned question I asked, in searching detail, and then answered a few I hadn't even asked.” Buckley followed up with personal letters and flattering public commentary on Perlstein’s work. Of course, Buckley didn’t agree with Perlstein’s views – how could he, having spent his entire life trying to defeat them – but this clearly didn’t matter to Perlstein. Rather, he was awed that the Great Man deigned to engage with him at all. When Buckley expressed regret at not reading Perlstein’s book earlier, Perlstein was wowed. “What a deeply sensitive, humane thing to say to a 31-year-old first-time author: an apology for not affording him his immediate attention.” It’s a pity that this sensitive, humane man didn’t extend these qualities to the victims of the AIDS epidemic when he quipped that “everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm to prevent common needle use, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of homosexuals.”[12] It would have been nice, as well, if he had displayed some of this thoughtfulness to James Baldwin when he debated him at Yale in 1965, but instead he opened his rebuttal by accusing Baldwin of affecting an English accent.[13] But Perlstein did not hold these contributions of Buckley to our public discourse against him – because what mattered is how nice Buckley was to him. Buckley became his friend, and, as Perlstein explained, “He was friends with those he fought. He fought with friends. These are the highest civic ideals to which an American patriot can aspire.”[14]

So finally, we’ve arrived at a substantive argument. Politics, according to this view, should be conducted in a sphere disconnected from the consequences of what we advocate there. Believe that the American military should have been willing to annihilate every last North Vietnamese communist left alive in order to win that war? Or that dissenting scholars should be denied their academic freedom? Or that the “white community” should control the South because “it is the advanced race”?[15] None of that should come back on you as long as you are nice to the fellows who write books and think otherwise. (Indeed, the word “nice” makes an appearance in Perlstein’s essay four times.)

This is American patriotism; political debate without any accountability for the real-world results of the ideas or policies we advocate.

As we’ve seen, this conception of patriotism also makes an appearance in Schultz’s book, who highlights the “deep love” both men felt for the country.[16] In the Epilogue, although he avoids being so blunt about it as Perlstein, he again hints at this idea. Schultz emphasizes first, the huge impact both Buckley and Mailer had on American political culture, and second, how much they clearly respected each other. Both arguments are undeniably true, but Schultz – perhaps wisely – never explicitly lays out why we should be impressed by either. The conclusion, rather, is left implicit: wow!, look at these two giants of American Ideas, having it out on stage but still digging each other behind the scenes. If they could do it, perhaps we could; perhaps we’re not that different after all.[17]

A comforting thought in the age of Trump, but also a harder one to sell. And interestingly, both appeared before 2016, when Trump’s triumph threw millions of liberals into an existential crisis and such platitudes about civil debate could still be swallowed by most without a hiccup. And to be fair, there are indications that Perlstein might not write quite so glowing a reflection of Buckley today. He has been critical of post-Trump attempts to cast Buckley as some kind of moderate Republican who protected the party from the fringe before Trump single-handedly undid all his good work.[18] Nonetheless, the fantasy of the Habermasian public sphere continues to entrance the majority of the liberal commentariat like a mirage in the middle of the desert.

Some may accuse this review of engaging in purity politics – or cancel culture, if you prefer. Any deviation from a hard left-wing perspective, according to this view, is met with intolerant disdain. A product of self-absorption and ideological blinkers, cancel culture makes a sport out of who is the most woke, and protects the spoils of the victors by shaming, insulting, and ostracizing anyone who disagrees. Certainly, these dynamics can be a problem. But let’s stop and remember who we are talking about here. This is William F. Buckley we are considering; not your boomer uncle who makes sexist jokes at the dinner table or clearly prefers Phil Michelson over Tiger Woods for reasons other than their relative skills in golfing. While such people may make us uncomfortable, they cannot, in and of themselves, do much harm, nor should they necessarily be held to the high standard of accountability for what they say as a commentator who positions themselves as an authority on political questions.

But when it comes to public figures and, what’s more, public figures who actively make their living from politics in one form or another, not only is scrutiny and criticism called for, but social accountability. But if we segregate our political from our personal assessments of powerful people, this becomes impossible, and we create an incredibly shallow political culture which denies any connection between our public commitments and their consequences to flesh and bone human beings. Politics becomes framed as a game, and two pundits or politicians shouting at each other on the court of a cable news show can simply shake hands after the cameras are off. Liberals like to think they are exempt from this toxicity because they advocate for polite, “reasoned” discourse; but this is a difference in style, not substance. It does not matter whether political debate resembles a wrestling match or a golf tournament – if when the contest is over, all antagonism ceases, those who continue to struggle under the rule of the victor can rightly conclude that no one was ever fighting for them in the first place. When there are no serious social consequences for the individuals who create the conditions of oppression and suffering – when civility is constantly prioritized over solidarity – those actively engaged in making life miserable for millions can continue to do so without a second thought. And this is disastrous; because politics is not, in fact, a game. It is a matter of life and death. 

Insisting that our assessments of political actors must or can include dynamics on the personal level obscures this reality by equating subjective experience with the broader public good. This comes across clearly in Perlstein’s piece – the most relevant fact about Buckley’s character, it seems, is how willing he was to shoot the shit with the ideological enemy. But to further illustrate this point, I offer a confession: I, too, have been charmed by William F. Buckley. As a college student, my politics were quite different from what they are now, and I also had not yet learned how to be skeptical of charisma. So even as I transitioned into liberalism, I couldn’t help but like the guy. Even now I can still access these instinctual responses – I understand why people find him compelling. But I’ve also learned to distinguish between my own engagement with people or ideas and their broader impact on the world. And because I’ve come to believe that solidarity has to be able to wield social power if it ever hopes to wield political power, I do my best to align my public actions and utterances with what would do the most to help build that solidarity.

So it doesn’t much matter if someone can’t help but love William F. Buckley, or Tucker Carlson, or Jonathan Peterson for whatever reason – as long as they keep that to themselves. But openly making claims about their goodness or arguing that they are model citizens or asserting that because they are a good friend, or father, or whatever, they therefore should be regarded as “decent” – that is actively harmful.[19] It enables a political culture where people can advocate for and enact racist, classist, and sexist policies and then be embraced by the powerful and well-to-do, granting them the authority and ability to continue to do more of the same. Hence Henry Kissinger, one of the most heinous war criminals of the twentieth century, being embraced by Hilary Clinton and dozens more. Hence Dick Cheney, a chief engineer of two disastrous wars and advocate for the imperial presidency suddenly being made into a good guy simply because he finds the way Trump tries to seize power to be distasteful.[20] And hence George W. Bush, once the embodiment of everything liberals are supposedly opposed to, being elevated as a loveable model of responsible conservatism.

Buried in the liberal approach to people who, politically, can only be described as villains, is an assumption about how politics works. Once again the Habermasian dream of the public sphere will be conjured to justify their inclusion in polite discourse by arguing that politics is the art of persuasion – or, as Perlstein puts it in his eulogy for Buckley, “the game of politics is to win over American institutions to our way of seeing things.”[21] Politics, according to this rarefied scheme, is therefore first and foremost a debate – or even just a “conversation.” It takes place in the Realm of Reason, in the mystical Marketplace of Ideas, and to engage with your opponents in a manner that takes into consideration how their arguments impacted actual people is to drag the whole enterprise into the mud. To respond to this fantasy with a reality-based approach that understands that politics is also a social activity – where cultural pressure must be applied to reward and punish those engaged in promoting good or evil – is unacceptable to the liberal mind. You might as well be arguing for Stalinist thought control or the subjugation of the self to the immortal and infallible will of The Party.

Liberals defend this slippery slope logic by insisting that all that is needed to defeat bad ideas are, well, good ones. Schultz again furnishes us with an example of this reasoning when he devotes an entire chapter of his book to the famous 1965 debate between William F. Buckley and James Baldwin. Interestingly, Schultz does not hold back in his assessment of Buckley’s performance – his arguments are rightly described as “vile” and “little more than disguised racism.”[22] And the students at Cambridge agreed, as the audience voted Baldwin the victor by a count of 544 to 164. Schultz goes on to discuss how Buckley completely failed to grasp why his animosity to the civil rights movement was so horrid, only slightly modifying his views on the necessity of federal intervention to end segregation by 2004.[23]

But what is left out of this story is how, from the vantage point of the long-durée, Buckley very much did win the debate. Have a majority of Americans (or Britons, for that matter), to this day, really accepted the truth of Baldwin’s claim that “the Southern oligarchy which has still today so very much power in Washington, and therefore some power in the world was created by my labor and my sweat and the violation of my women and the murder of my children”?[24] Indeed, at the moment of the debate the civil rights movement had in many regards hit its peak, and after the landmark legislation of 1964 and 1965, started to be blocked by the same obstinate refusal of white Americans to actually address entrenched social inequality that it still faces today. I am reminded of Jon Stewart’s observation that had he actually “destroyed” the arguments of so many right-wing pundits and politicians, as many a social media headline claimed, the political landscape would look very fucking different.[25] Interestingly, Salon, which ran an excerpt of Schultz’s chapter on the Baldwin-Buckley debate, engages in this exact indulgence, running it with the subtitle: “Remembering the night William F. Buckley took his genteel racism to Cambridge – and left destroyed by James Baldwin.”[26] Would that it were so. 

All of which is not to argue that public debate is useless or that a campaign of egg-throwing will solve all of our political deadlock (although honestly, it’s not a bad idea). Debate is important, and the truth is powerful. But on its own, it is certainly not enough; political discourse always unfolds in a social matrix of power where truth will be toothless without the bite of at least some sort of substantial repercussions for assisting in the spread of lies. Yet the very existence of Schultz’s book and Perlstein’s insistence that we should be friendly with our enemies seems to deny this reality or, at least expresses a deep desire to carry on with political and historical thinking as if it wasn’t the case. But as should be clear from the number of bodies lying about – those of people denied housing, health care, and basic human dignity – contemporary politics simply isn’t that bloodless. This is why it does not matter how generous, kind, or genial William F. Buckley was. No man that contributes to a body count that high can ever be considered decent without empowering those who would follow in his footsteps.

[1] Jackson Crawford, Editor, The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2015), 25.

[2] Kevin M. Schultz, Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015), 6.

[3] Schultz, Buckley and Mailer, 6.

[4] Schultz, Buckley and Mailer, 136.

[5] Douglas Martin, “William F. Buckley is Dead at 82,” The New York Times, Feb 27, 2008. Accessed: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/business/media/27cnd-buckley.html

[6] “Commentator William F. Buckley Dies at 82,” National Public Radio, Feb 27, 2008. Accessed: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=68344288. Granted, this was his son speaking but, it’s perfectly believable that the sentiment was wide spread.

[7] Martin, William F. Buckley is Dead at 82.”

[8] Schultz, Buckley and Mailer, 14-15. He actually stabbed her twice, and then kicked her, and she nearly died.

[9] Schultz, Buckley and Mailer, 255-257.

[10] Schultz, Buckley and Mailer, 60.

[11] Perlstein, “Why William F. Buckley Was My Role Model,” History News Network (originally ourfuture.org), Feb 27, 2008. Accessed: http://hnn.us/article/47815

[12] Martin, “William F. Buckley is Dead at 82.”

[13] Schultz, Buckley and Mailer, 126.

[14] Perlstein, “Why William F. Buckley Was My Role Model.”

[15] Quoted in Joseph Crespino, Strom Thurmond’s America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 10. Crespino also discussed how Buckley Jr.’s father was a close friend of Thurmond, and sent him a copy of The National Review and noted that Jr. “is for segregation and backs it in every issue.”

[16] Schultz, Buckley and Mailer,  4.

[17] Schutlz, Buckley and Mailer, 329 – 332.

[18] Rick Perlstein and Edward H. Miller, “The John Birch Society Never Left,” The New Republic, March 8, 2021. Accessed: https://newrepublic.com/article/161603/john-birch-society-qanon-trump. Rick Perlstein, “I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong,” The New York Times Magazine, April 11, 2017. Accessed: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/magazine/i-thought-i-understood-the-american-right-trump-proved-me-wrong.html

[19] Perlstein, “Why William F. Buckley Was My Role Model.”

[20] (IE, the “unitary executive”) – see Martin Lederman commenting on PBS’s Cheney’s Law, 2007. Accessed: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/cheney/themes/believers.html

[21] Perlstein, “Why William F. Buckley Was My Role Model.”

[22] Kevin M. Schultz, “William F. Buckley and National Review’s vile race stance: Everything you need to know about conservatives and civil rights,” Salon, June 7, 2015. Accessed: https://www.salon.com/2015/06/07/william_f_buckley_and_national_reviews_vile_race_stance_everything_you_need_to_know_about_conservatives_and_civil_rights/. This article was excerpted from the book.

[23] Schultz, Buckley and Mailer, 136.

[24] Schultz, Buckley and Mailer, 125.

[25] Hilary Lewis, “Jon Stewart Talks Media’s Role in Election Outcome, How to Combat Spread of Fake News,” The Hollywood Reporter, December 2, 2016. Accessed: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/jon-stewart-why-daily-show-didnt-determine-election-trump-fake-news-cnn-fox-at-ny-times-talk-95-952367/

[26] Kevin M. Schultz, “William F. Buckley and National Review’s vile race stance: Everything you need to know about conservatives and civil rights,” Salon, June 7, 2015.