William F. Buckley Jr. Old School
By JOSEPH RAGO
NEW YORK -- There is something out of time about lunching with William F. Buckley Jr. It goes beyond the inimitable WFB style: the mannered civility, the O.E.D. vocabulary, the jaunty patrician demeanor. It is also something more than mere age. "Well, I am one day older than I was yesterday," he says, with rather good cheer. Yet if there's anachronism to Mr. Buckley, it is also a sense of being present at a moment of creation.
For all his versatility as editor, essayist, critic, controversialist and bon vivant, Mr. Buckley is widely credited as the driving force behind the intellectual coalition that drew conservatism from the fringes of American life to its center, with such side-effects as the utter collapse of the Soviet empire. "There's nothing I hoped for that wasn't reasonably achieved," declares Mr. Buckley, who will turn 80 later this month. "Now, I'm going to have a cocktail," he announces, flashing his oblique grin. "Will you join me?"
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"My view is unorthodox," Mr. Buckley says of the violence roiling the French suburbs. "It seems to me that a very hard dose of market discipline would distract the attention of the young revolutionaries from their frolics, traditional and otherwise, and my sense is that if they had to worry about how to eat, and buy food, they would stop screwing around and face reality. If these people didn't wake up in the morning thinking about what cars to burn -- instead of work -- they might not be having these problems."
Here, with this talk of young men on the boil, we turn to the episode that made Mr. Buckley's name -- the publication, in 1951, of "God and Man at Yale." His argument, scrubbed down, was relatively simple: that the inner workings of Yale were increasingly hostile to conservative and religious perspectives. It was "the detraditionalization" of a great university. Yet his trim little volume scandalized the Yale administration and Bill Buckley, then 26, found himself subjected to calumnies from every sort of pen-and-inkubus. "A violent, twisted and ignorant young man," said McGeorge Bundy. And he was among the more charitable.
"The academic establishment simply agreed that it was a completely forgettable ideological hour, fit to be ignored completely," Mr. Buckley recalls. "They were overwhelmed by the fact that such thinking could happen, and they made fools of themselves -- I think." "God and Man," now regarded as a classic, is worth revisiting. Its most important consequence was that it "opened up thinking on several fronts . . . Not least being, people became more conscious of ideological balance, and therefore more sensitive to the overwhelming superiority of the formalisms of college life." All these years later, Mr. Buckley remains skeptical of our higher education. He concedes "a broadening of perspective," but notes that "the liberal orthodoxy is still pretty secure and it is unlikely that any event -- at least in my lifetime -- will dislodge it."
If there has been a signal project of Mr. Buckley's career, it is nicely captured in his reflection about opening up thought. That undertaking was most alive in his periodical, National Review, founded in 1955. This might seem incompatible in light of its famous animus: "It stands athwart History, yelling Stop . . ." But since the forces of history can no more be resisted than those of gravity, its capitalization -- as History -- is a touch that reminds us that Mr. Buckley meant it to represent the regnant liberalism which NR was specially designed to contest.
Mr. Buckley declares without hesitation that National Review was his greatest accomplishment. "I brokered it. So I'm very proud and grateful for that. I don't know if it's possible now to be aware of the number of people who contributed to National Review -- their opinions, their historical learning, their grace, their spirituality -- all that made for an extraordinary mix." At its finest, National Review seethed with controversy and creative energies, its pages largely given over to analyses of competing philosophies and politics, balanced by critical introspection. It was, says Mr. Buckley, "an open laboratory of unhampered thought."
Against this backdrop, it is difficult not to draw correspondences to the world in which we now find ourselves, and Mr. Buckley evinces a keen sense of disappointment with the fortunes of the movement his journal did so much to shape. The trouble (if it can be called that) is that conservatism is no longer sutured together by "the galvanizing thread that the Soviet Union provided. And for that reason I think conservatism has become a little bit slothful. It could be very decisive when the alternative was the apocalyptic reordering presented by the Soviet Union. . . But in the absence of those challenges, there were attenuations. Those attenuations at this point haven't been resolved very persuasively."
Does he believe the war on terror to be the same kind of "long twilight struggle" as the Cold War? "Well," he says, "it lacks the formal face. It's detached from national dimensions. As such, it legitimately inquires into two things. Number one: To what extent does this society elect to fight it? Because if it doesn't care that much about it then to hell with it. Number two: Is this society pliant enough to come up with a formula to defend itself that nevertheless acknowledges the ancient restrictions on ideas? If I'm correct, there hasn't been an act of terrorism in the U.S. for four years, and that bespeaks not the absence of will by terrorists to damage but a lack of resources. How much of that is owing to their own institutions or to a sense that resistance is here remains to be seen."
This last is a glancing way of referring to the U.S. enterprise in Iraq, which Mr. Buckley calls "anything but conservative." "Conservatism," he says, "except when it is expressed as pure idealism, takes into account reality, and the reality of the situation is that missions abroad to effect regime change in countries without a bill of rights or democratic tradition are terribly arduous. This isn't to say that the war is wrong, or that history will judge it to be wrong. But it is absolutely to say that conservatism implies a certain submission to reality; and this war has an unrealistic frank and is being conscripted by events."
Mr. Buckley is similarly skeptical of the presidency of George Bush, who, he says, was not elected "as a vessel of the conservative faith." He returns to a formulation he has used before: "Bush is conservative, but he is not a conservative." The distinction is not unimportant; it suggests a way of approaching the world with a conservative disposition but having devoted no particularly methodical thought to the subject -- perhaps a bit too in thrall to the formalisms of Republican discourse. "There's a certain" -- Mr. Buckley pauses mischievously -- "wholesomeness to the Republican Party."
Does he think the conservative movement will undergo the same kind of intellectual reinvigoration that National Review spurred in its early years? "I don't think there's any way to avoid it," he quickly interjects. "Mutatis mutandis. So one point on our side."
Mr. Buckley necessarily declines, however, to speculate on how that realignment will take shape. "I know people who have assured me about what will happen tomorrow, and they'll tell you animatedly about it. I don't have that gift. The happy aspect is that you're never surprised. On the other hand it denies you any claim to prophetic skills. But there's no alternative, and we're lucky there isn't."
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Mr. Buckley remains in contagiously high spirits, his world governed by his "cognate aversion to boredom." He continues to add to his extraordinary body of work -- largely on account of "the crowning imperative of the deadline." His great enthusiasms have led to thousands of individual pieces of published writing: close to 50 books, 18 of them novels, over 800 editorials for National Review, roughly 400 essays in other publications, more than 4,000 newspaper columns. He tells me his personal papers fill more than a hundred archival boxes in Yale's Sterling Memorial Library. All this, taken as a whole, is increasingly being recognized as one of the richest sustained contributions to American letters of the 20th century. Most of all, I think, he will be remembered for the promulgation of what he calls "a thoughtful conservatism."
And Mr. Buckley's work continues apace. He canceled his annual writing trip to Switzerland this year after he found he could not ski like he once used to -- that would have been "a violation of basic propositions." But he put a book together anyway, another novel. "I said to my gifted son, someone asked me, 'Well, what's it about?' Said I, rather pompously really: 'It can't be described.' Said he: 'Of course it can be described. Anything can be described.' Of course he was right." (I will leave its sinuous premises unsaid.)
"In any case," Mr. Buckley continues, "it's got some readable stuff in it. But I won't test you on that -- a year from now you can tell me what you think."
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Mr. Rago is an assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal.