One really misses something about William F. Buckley Jr. to not grasp that this man was a fighter. Not everyone blessed with logic lacks spirit.
Monday marks the centenary of William F. Buckley Jr.’s birth.
Those misled by recent mischaracterizations of the National Review co-founder might imagine a French fop’s harpsichord or Gavin MacCleod’s Love Boat captain’s cap as the perfect birthday present. Brass knuckles fit just as well.
In finding hundreds of Buckley’s letters and memos in a warehouse during research for The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, and reading thousands more in Yale’s Sterling Library and other archives, the aspect of his personality that surprised most pertained to his capacity to morph into Bill “the Brawler” Buckley when the situation called for it.
Yes, Buckley spoke in a transatlantic accent of sorts and deployed “eristic,” “lapidary,” and other $2 words one encounters, if at all, on the SAT. But the gentleman could become a tough guy. And given his patrician demeanor, his roughness necessarily grabbed its recipients by the lapels in a way that the aggression of those who rely on it as their default mode simply cannot.
This side of Buckley came out, tellingly, not with employees or servants but when dealing with some of the most formidable men of the 20th Century when they came after underlings or abused his generosity.
Roy Cohn, reputationally Buckley’s opposite, received the Brawler Bill treatment when he invoked his donor status to object to NR literary editor Frank Meyer dismissing Harry and Bonaro Overstreet’s What We Must Know About Communism as the work of dilettantes (Meyer had been a party leader in the U.S. and U.K.) and his utilization of the controversial Joan Didion beau Noel Parmentel as a book reviewer.
Cohn accused Buckley of “lowering National Review’s standards” and discrediting the magazine’s financial backers.
Dubbing it a “vulgarity” that Cohn emphasized his financial gift in a letter on editorial decision-making, Buckley dressed down the Manhattan power lawyer in a letter kept at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives. He bluntly explained that “the day is long distant when the financial contributions of yourself and your friends—however much I appreciate their symbolic significance—will earn you the right to treat me as your piper. Your contribution of one hundred dollars two years ago no more entitles you to a veto power over articles that appear in National Review than do the tens of thousands of dollars contributed by several other supporters give them a governing voice.”
The words and tone out-Roy Cohned Roy Cohn.
The same day, Buckley called attention to the “disturbing letter” to Cohn’s hero, columnist George Sokolsky. “God damn it,” he wrote the columnist and ABC commentator, “Roy has got to be told by somebody what kind of a thing you do, and what kind of thing you don’t say, to a friend and coadjutor, which I understand myself as being with respect to Roy.”
Buckley and Cohn remained friends for the remainder of the latter’s life with boundaries, essential to any relationship, firmly established early by the magazine editor. When New York disbarred Cohn in his final months, Buckley, along with Donald Trump and others, testified on his behalf as character witnesses.
In 1961, Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek used the occasion of an anonymous National Review writer’s joking insinuation that UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, found dead in the wreckage of a plane with an ace of spades in his collar, cheated at cards to demand that the magazine end his gratis subscription.
Buckley confronted rather than apologized in a what’s-your-problem letter.
“As I think back on your coolness toward our enterprise (I have not, in the six years that the magazine has been published, had from you a single letter commending a single article, editorial, or book review),” he wrote Hayek, “it occurs to me that you must be harboring some grudges against me or the magazine which for now, for your own reasons, seek occasion for externalizing. What is your long-term complaint?”
Unlike the sharp-elbowed words used with Cohn, the testy Buckley-Hayek exchange did not precede a long friendship. Buckley contributed to 1976’s Essays on Hayek and hosted the Austrian economist on Firing Line the following year. But save for a memorial piece upon the 1973 death of his mentor, Ludwig von Mises, Hayek never wrote for Buckley’s magazine after that 1961 quarrel. As Modern Age editor David Collier then counseled his peer at National Review, “while professorial people may have large brains when it comes to matters of the intellect, in questions of relations with other humans that same brain seems to shrink to the size of a pea.”
Buckley’s mentor, Willmoore Kendall, damaged their friendship by a million cuts. And then Buckley in one swipe slashed him to the core to end their relationship.
The brilliant, but mercurial, Kendall taught Buckley at Yale and most importantly Buckley helped guide Kendall into the Catholic Church. The older man, a force at early National Review, increasingly alienated himself from the magazine starting in the late 1950s. He moved far away from Manhattan to Madrid in 1959, and when he returned to the United States, he enthusiastically accepted, to the Yale graduate’s dismay, a buyout from Buckley’s alma mater. The connection further frayed each time Kendall dramatically announced a resignation from the magazine, only for colleagues to dissuade him from such a rash course. After he saw himself demoted from senior editor to contributor Kendall confessed that he felt toward National Review the way one might feel toward an old girlfriend upon learning that she had become a call girl.
It proved a last straw for Kendall’s heretofore tolerant friend.
“I have never had the power to prevent you from being a fool,” Buckley began his response. After that opening, little in the way of honey sweetened the bitter dish served.
It may tempt some to conflate this go-hard-in-the-paint Buckley with the one who committed technical fouls on ABC in 1968 with Gore Vidal. The disqualifying difference involved self-control. With ruthless trial lawyer Cohn, future Nobel Memorial Prize-winner Hayek, and troubled genius Kendall—three formidable, and even intimidating, men—Buckley exhibited complete command of his words. In response to gutter-dweller Vidal, Buckley stooped to his taunter’s level. And, as a result, he muddied himself. Fifty-seven years later, people still seize on that made-for-TV moment partly because it showed an aspect of the genteel multimedia personality that we rarely saw.
And what a national audience saw was a Bill Buckley who had gone native in his time and place, 1968 at the tumultuous Democratic National Convention in Chicago. That threat of violence, use of profanity, aggressive body language, and invocation of Vidal’s sexuality struck as profoundly uncharacteristic because it was. But in its assertiveness and even pugnaciousness, the outburst meshed well with the Buckley occasionally glimpsed in his tens of thousands of extant letters.
Bill Buckley exuded wit, culture, charm, generosity, and scores of other attributes. In taking on liberals at Yale, defending Senator Joseph McCarthy to the intelligentsia with his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell in McCarthy and His Enemies, and defying the Republican Party by refusing to give National Review’s endorsement to Richard Nixon in 1960 and running for mayor of New York City as a third-party candidate in 1965, he also displayed courage and inner-directedness. And in his tangles with Cohn, Kendall, Hayek, and so many others, he showed forcefulness, directness, and toughness.
Both Right and Left today include so many blind to that Buckley. The larger-than-life character has yielded to caricature that resembles a cross between George Plimpton in Good Will Hunting and SpongeBob SquarePants’s Squidward. This proves convenient both to populists seeking to distinguish manly MAGA from the milquetoast conservatism that preceded and to leftists seeking to undercut one of the right’s heroes by portraying him as a poseur.
“The old Republican party wanted a vanguard like Buckley with smart Ivy League guys writing for the National Review and going to cocktail parties,” Steve Bannon told The Guardian in 2024. This year, a biography of Buckley by Sam Tanenhaus at times plays up the stereotype of Buckley as an effete.
Surely, Buckley knew the difference between a salad and a dinner fork. And he did not periodically conscript others into fisticuffs as his contemporary Norman Mailer, who embarked on a copycat third-party bid for mayor of New York four years after Buckley’s quixotic campaign, did.
But one really misses something about William F. Buckley Jr. to not grasp that this man was a fighter. Not everyone blessed with logos lacks thumos.
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The featured image is a photograph of William F. Buckley during an interview with Joan Baez, 9 Sep 1979. This file is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Yours seems a wonderful, if belated, eulogy to the ‘great man’ Buckley Jr., Daniel. Thanks.
Thank you for this article, Daniel. Buckley was gracious yet a great debater. I was quite young when he interviewed David Suskind. Buckley has just returned from Vietnam and they were discussing the pros and cons. Suskind flippantly said (I’m probably paraphrasing here), “You go over to Vietnam, come back and think you’re an expert on the matter”! Buckley, without missing a beat said, “You said that, not me”! Brilliant comeback that I use quite often!
Perhaps the most courageous thing he did was to get beyond his background and remove his generation’s version of the alt-right from the conservative movement. It is unfortunate that many in the movement are welcoming them back, something the Left – which has largely been taken over by its equivalent – was long condemned for. This rejection of anti-semitism is a break from old Europe, and a prime example of American Exceptionalism.
Also worth noting is the less-than-warm relationship between Buckley and Ayn Rand, who once told Buckley that he was too intelligent to believe in God. In 1957, National Review published a review of “Atlas Shrugged” by Whitaker Chambers, who was far from impressed with the book. His review suggested that behind every page, one could detect a voice saying, “To the gas chambers, go.” After that, Rand refused to attend any function at which Buckley was present.
Though I did not see it on television, I remember hearing fellow students talk about Buckley’s encounter with Vidal in 1968. Decades later, I was able to watch it on Youtube.
The episode illustrates it is possible simultaneously to (1) lose a point of argument under formal debate rules, and yet (2) win the hearts of an audience by your spirit.
All my friends thought Buckley bested Vidal. The only thing better would have been if he had ended the debate right then by following through & actually “plastering” Vidal with his fist. It would have been well worth any subsequent fines or legal damages.