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Bill Buckley’s Sad Farewell
 Over
more than half a century, William F. Buckley
Jr. has gone from enfant  terrible
to éminence
grise of the American conservative movement. He first made his mark
with God and Man at Yale (1951), a small book arguing that
his alma mater was promoting left-wing views that would disturb most of
its alumni; at the time, in the heat of the McCarthy era, that seemed
controversial. It was only natural that his second book should be a defense
of Joe McCarthy himself.
In 1955, before he was 30, he
founded National Review, which soon became the
country’s foremost conservative magazine. Now 78, he has finally
relinquished control of the magazine, which is barely recognizable as the
one he launched those many moons ago.
National Review
was chronically short on money, but, at the beginning, long on writing
talent. Its contributors included such brainy and stylish intellectuals as
James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, Russell Kirk, Willmoore Kendall, and
Richard Weaver. They were not only anti-Communist; they were
anti-liberal and, more specifically, anti-Eisenhower, believing that the
Republican Party had abandoned the solid principles of Robert Taft.
The star of the show was
Buckley himself, who had earned a reputation as a brilliantly witty
debater at Yale. One liberal called him “the most dangerous
undergraduate Yale has seen in years.” Dangerous! Tweaking liberal
noses in those days could get you called a fascist and Nazi by the folks
who accused McCarthy of hysterical smears.
Buckley and his magazine made
the most of such ironies. They pretty much invented fun-loving
conservatism, ploddingly imitated today by Rush Limbaugh. As the country
moved leftward in the Sixties, Buckley became the first conservative
celebrity, so familiar that comedians got big laughs imitating his haughty
demeanor. Nobody else was on hand to nail liberals at every turn.
Today it’s hard to
remember how controversial, and exciting, Buckley was in those days. His
assimilation to the ranks of the respectable was completed in 1980, when
a National Review subscriber, recently deceased, was
elected president of the United States. I was on the magazine’s
staff at the time, and I remember Bill’s delight in sharing jokes
with his pal Ron.
![[Breaker quote:
NATIONAL REVIEW, then and now]](2004breakers/040629.gif) Everyone at the magazine loved Bill. His charm was real. Despite
his lofty public persona, he was warm, hilarious, and infinitely
considerate and generous. A fat book could be written about his quiet good
deeds, if anyone could trace them all; he performed them unostentatiously,
with tact and delicacy.
Unfortunately, Bill tended to
mistake his personal success and Reagan’s political victories for
the final triumph of conservatism. He forgave Reagan’s
compromises and made some of his own. He didn’t seem to notice
that during the Reagan years, the Federal Government continued to grow at
a rate that would have horrified Robert Taft. He was nearly as indulgent to
the first President Bush, another Yale man, as he had been to Reagan.
In recent years, National
Review has become remote from the thing it was in 1955. Buckley
has turned it over to young neoconservatives with little conception of its
original standards, who have supported the new Bush administration, and
especially the Iraq war, with fanatical zeal, without regard to any
philosophy that can be called conservative.
Buckley seems to realize this. In
announcing his retirement to the New York Times, he
admitted that the growth of the Federal Government under the current
President Bush “bothers me enormously.” As for the war
itself, he added, “With the benefit of minute hindsight, Saddam
Hussein wasn’t the kind of extra-territorial menace that was
assumed by the administration one year ago. If I knew then what I know
now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the
war.”
So there spake the founder of
National Review. I’ve often wondered if he had qualms
about his callow, warmongering successors; I guess I have the answer
now.
Sad to reflect that the magazine
has forsaken not only its founding purpose — to “stand
athwart history yelling ‘Stop’” — but its
founding philosophy of severely limited government. That philosophy was
hard enough to reconcile with the Cold War; it’s impossible to
square with endless imperialist wars.
It’s some meager
consolation that Bill Buckley acknowledges, however implicitly, the
distance between the magazine he created and the one from which he has
now taken his leave.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2004 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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