William Francis Buckley Jr. (November 24, 1925 – February 27, 2008) was an American writer, journalist, and broadcaster, and perhaps the single most influential figure in American conservatism. Starting his career as an upstart right-wing idealist, his first book God and Man at Yale criticized the unspoken orientation towards secularism and liberalism amongst the faculty in his alma mater.note The overwhelmingly negative response the book received ironically inspired Buckley to launch a crusade against what he perceived was an unchallenged liberal consensus in post-New Deal America. To that end, he founded National Review, a weekly political magazine whose stated purpose was to "stand athwart history, yelling Stop." The magazine was foundational to what would become a full-blown conservative movement, unifying the American right-wing into a coherent force by forging an alliance between traditionalists, anti-communists and libertarians, as well as firmly excluding right-wing extremists and "right-wing materialists" (read: Randian Objectivism).
Buckley is most famous for his public affairs television show Firing Line, which ran for a whopping 33 years. While ultimately designed to promote his ideas, the series often featured incredibly sophisticated conversations between Buckley and his political opponents or allies, with Buckley interviewing the guest and both being cross examined by a panel formed from the audience. The show was distinguished from others of its kind from its (usually) unfailingly polite and civil atmosphere and high-brow nature, combined with Buckley's distinctive mannerisms and barbed wit. The show boasted an illustrious catalogue of guests to discuss various topics surrounding then-current events. Here and elsewhere, Buckley proved himself a masterful debater, impressing even his ideological opponents.
Though most of the books Buckley published were just collections of his essays and writings from National Review, he was also an avid novelist, specializing in Spy Fiction with his Blackford Oakes series. He also wrote two autobiographies and a fictionalized account of the rise of the American right-wing.
Buckley famously feuded with author Gore Vidal, whom he despised on principle. The two first met when invited by ABC to commentate on the 1968 political conventions, which the network did because they knew the two bitter rivals would boost ratings.note The debates brought the worst out of both men, who spent more time trading increasingly unsubtle insults than actually commentating on politics, described by the "moderator" as "generating more heat than light." The exchanges quickly deteriorated, culminating in Buckley, provoked by Vidal calling him a "crypto-Nazi" responded by calling him a "queer" and threatening to "sock [Vidal] in [his] goddamn face" on live TV. Buckley considered being cajoled into using a hateful slur and stooping to personal insults the absolute lowest point in his career, going so far as to pen an apology to the man he hated so much. Their feud, however, continued unabated immediately after, trading published barbs and libel lawsuits for the rest of their respective lives.
Buckley died in his Stamford, Conneticut home in 2008 of a heart attack.
His work provides examples of:
- Author Avatar: Blackford Oakes, the protagonist of Buckley's spy novels, is pretty clearly a highly fictionalized version of himself. His exploits are a reference to Buckley's own past as a deep-cover agent for the CIA and, just like Buckley, is a WWII veteran, Yale graduate, passionate sailor and horseman, and avid reader of National Review.
- Berserk Button: Buckley absolutely despised being called a fascist or a Nazi, or any association of conservatism with those ideologies. Exchanges on his show would become noticeably more tense if this occurred or was even hinted at, and Gore Vidal pressing it caused him to completely lose his cool. This might have been a response to dubious political choices early in his career (see Old Shame below).
- Black-and-Gray Morality: In his Blackford Oakes novels, Communists are the ultimate evil, and their abettors are, at best, misguided Wide-Eyed Idealists. The heroes are heroes by virtue of being in opposition to the Communists, but are firmly entrenched on the I Did What I Had to Do end of heroism.
- Career-Building Blunder: The Vidal incident happened pretty early on in Buckley's career and very well could have torpedoed it. Instead, the marked contrast between the manufactured controversy of the ABC special and his measured, erudite demeanor on Firing Line helped cultivate Buckley's high-brow reputation.
- Character Tics: On Firing Line, Buckley had a tendency to recline in his chair, raise his pen to his ear, and dart his tongue out. He would also frequently blink rapidly when asking a question.
- Christianity is Catholic: Played with. Buckley wrote a lot about Christianity, but was always very careful to define the religion in broadly ecumenical terms. However, owing in part to a sheltered background, Buckley often had some trouble adequately distinguishing the differences between his Catholicism and Protestantism, which sometimes came through in his writings.
- The protagonist of his novel Getting It Right is Woodroe Raynor, a Mormon. Despite this, he's almost indistinguishable from a Catholic in his beliefs and practices, except for not drinking alcohol and going on a mission when he was a teenager. He even makes a reference to St. Francis in one of the letters he writes to his girlfriend.
- Discussed in the Firing Line episode featuring Billy Graham. Buckley openly wonders if Graham's idiosyncratic approach to the religion can cross denominational lines. True to form, Graham cheerfully affirms this, and notes that Catholic students at his university crusades are often his most eager patrons.
- Colbert Bump: The attention he gave to Ronald Reagan both on Firing Line and in National Review are credited in large part to Reagan's eventual prominence in national politics and his successful run at the presidency. He may have also been responsible for Ron Paul's elevation from being a hopeless fringe candidate to an actual presence in national politics.
- Dirty Communists: As you can probably tell, Buckley hated Communism with a passion — describing it as "satanic" — and advocated for its destruction (as opposed to containment). He notably disowned Richard Nixon over the latter normalizing relations with China and the Soviet Union, as well as withdrawing from Vietnam.
- Everyone Has Standards:
- His modus operandi with National Review was to make it clear who could and could not rightly call themselves "conservatives." Notably, Buckley excluded the rabidly anti-communist John Birch Society, whom he thought were wackos who gave genuine anticommunists a bad name. This also excluded Ayn Rand, whose militant atheism offended him, and white supremacists (eventually).
- Even early on in his career, Antisemitism made him uncomfortable, such that he quit his job at The American Mercury when they started peddling anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. And even in the days where he was defending Jim Crow, he hated the Ku Klux Klan and thought that arch-segregationist George Wallace was a nut.
- Even as far back as the sixties, Buckley was also very vocal in his criticism of the war on drugs, believing it did far more harm than good and just ruined the lives of young people for minor mistakes and made it harder for addicts to get help as well as just being a waste of resources.
- Friendly Enemy: George McGovern (a liberal Democratic politician who represented South Dakota in both houses of Congress) was Buckley's political antithesis and Buckley always gave him hell when he was on the show and Mc Govern happily gave back as good as he got. However, off the record, the two were very close friends, with Buckley describing him as his "best friend" and "the nicest guy I've ever met." He was also feuded in writing and debate with liberal economist John K. Galbraith, but nevertheless considered the man a close personal friend, even planning annual ski trips together. Buckley was also close with Democratic activist Allard K Lowenstein, even supporting his Congressional run and speaking at his funeral.
- Gentleman Snarker: Buckley's chivalrous, patrician demeanor did little to temper his acerbic sense of humor. Even the people he liked got a barb or two thrown at them.
- Long-Runners: Firing Line was one of the longest-running TV shows ever when it went of the air, having been on for 33 years and aired over 1500 episodes. This also makes it the longest-running show with a single host.
- My Greatest Failure: The incident with Vidal haunted Buckley for the rest of his life. So much so that when he saw the clip during a retrospective of his life, some 50 years later, he had a minor Freak Out and chewed out his producer for not having the footage destroyed.
- Buckley was also guilt stricken about his efforts to get Edgar Smith, a death row inmate who convinced Buckley of his innocence, released, only for Smith to not only attempt to murder another woman but admit he had been guilty of his first murder all along. Friends claim he never fully recovered from the guilt and sense of betrayal.
- Old Shame: As a young man, Buckley was staunchly racist, anti-Semitic, and isolationist. For its first few years, National Review's editorial stance was white supremacist and strongly supportive of Jim Crow. As a teenager, he was involved with the non-interventionist America First Committee, which tended to harbor anti-Semites, and whose spokesperson — Charles Lindbergh — was a Nazi sympathizer.note These things deeply embarrassed Buckley later in life, which was why he tried so hard to write what he regarded as right-wing extremists out the conservative movement, and may have been why he was so sensitive about being accused of Nazism later in life.
- Phony Veteran: The infamous Vidal debate has him accused of being this when he cites being "infantry in the last war" as evidence of his loyalty in response to being called a "crypto-Nazi." Buckley was a lieutenant in the US Army during WWII, but was stationed stateside for the entirety of his service.
- Political Correctness Is Evil: He critiqued feminists on Firing Line for this, insisting that their attempts to make English gender-neutral was an unmusical abuse of the language. At least one — Germaine Greer — agreed with him on that front at least. During one of his televised debates on feminism, however, he found himself using "PC" terms (e.g. insistently using the term "spokesperson") without thinking about it.
- Pompous Political Pundit: Buckley himself made every attempt to avert this, but several major network political commentators are consciously patterned off the Buckley-Vidal debates, i.e. for the purpose of generating controversy rather than insightful analysis. Many conservative political commentators (who shall remain nameless) have imitated Buckley's pugilistic debate style but, lacking Buckley's tact and erudition, have become this instead.
- Pretender Diss:
- Despite the heavily pro-capitalist stance of her works, National Review famously pilloried Ayn Rand as an imposter, scathingly equating her worldview with that of Marxism.
Whitaker Chambers: Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left first surprisingly resemble, then, in action, tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purpose, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing.- Suffered this at the hands of his co-brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell Jr., who had founded Triumph, an explicitly religious (read: Catholic) offshoot of National Review. The two had a very public falling out over Buckley's supposed lack of fidelity to the Catholic faith except where politically convenient, culminating in Bozell all but calling him a hypocrite in print. This permanently ended their friendship.
- Pun-Based Title:
- "Firing Line" is in part a reference to how the show is meant to put ideas "in the line of fire" so to speak, but is also meant to recall a "Fire Line", an artificial break meant to slow or halt the advance of a wildfire.
- His last novel Getting it Right is a highly fictionalized account of the rise of the modern (circa the late 1990s) American right wing. It's centered around two conservative "heretics" (a member of the John Birch Society and an Objectivist) who are eventually brought around to the "right" (as in correct) way of thinking about conservatism in Buckley's view.
- Renaissance Man: He was a talented writer, journalist, and debater, and a triple major at Yale in political science, economics, and history. He was also a very skilled harpsichordist and a passionate sailor, skier, hiker, horseback rider, and hunter.
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: One of the most famous examples in pop culture. Buckley never used one word when he could use ten, at least four of which would probably send the average person to a dictionary.
- Sophisticated as Hell: Absolutely loved interrupting an elegantly constructed sentence with a well-timed swearword. His famous tirade against Gore Vidal was an unintentional and far less comedic example.
- Stop Being Stereotypical: National Review was in part a response to Buckley's frustration that there was no such thing as a "conservative intellectual" in America at the time, academia being dominated by liberals and leftists, and the most prominent right-wing figures being crackpots who Buckley scathingly described as "knuckle-dragging neanderthals."
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Buckley was a virulent critic of the liturgical changes brought about by the Catholic Church's Second Vatican Council, going so far as to call it "an aesthetic ordeal". He editorialized about it frequently, even in other publications, and dedicated an episode of Firing Line to discussing the question.
- Worthy Opponent: He and George McGovern considered each other this. McGovern was the most frequent participant against Buckley in the debate episodes of Firing Line, always opposite Buckley. Buckley also seems to have regarded Robert F. Kennedy this way, and later remarked that one of his greatest career regrets was never being able to get him on the show.
