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Buckley and His Heirs
 No
matter how I may disapprove of his version of conservatism, part of
me will always love Bill Buckley.
Funny? I’ll say. Once we
were discussing a hostile, badly written
biography  of
him, and he quipped, “You know you’re in the hands of a
truly boring writer when you’re reading about yourself,
and you find your mind wandering.”
It’s no great secret that
Bill and his confreres, his lovely sister Priscilla and his friend Jeffrey Hart,
are disappointed in the young fry, sometimes called the
“mini-cons,” to whom his magazine, National
Review, has been entrusted. The current issue features a cover
article called “The ‘To Hell with Them’ Hawks.”
What are “to hell with
them” hawks? The author is so proud of this phrase — his very
own coinage! — that he quotes it in almost every paragraph, as if it
were the most telling label since radical chic. He’s the kind of
writer who says “prior to” instead of “before,” and
“replicates” instead of “repeats.” The mind
wanders ...
“To hell with them”
hawks are those conservatives you might expect to support the Iraq war,
but who are now going wobbly — having second thoughts about it.
Obviously this means guys like Bill Buckley, who is in fact criticized —
by name! — in an editorial in the same issue for saying the war is an
American “defeat.”
It would sound harsh to say Bill
deserves successors like the mini-cons, but he has undeniably brought them
on himself. When he retired from his magazine a few years ago, he turned his
throne over to these young ’uns, instead of (say) his own gifted son
Christopher. Now, like King Lear, “fourscore and upwards,”
he’s discovering he made a mistake.
![[Breaker quote for
Buckley and His Heirs: He deserved better.]](2006breakers/060323.gif) Maybe Chris didn’t want the job. He’d already made a
career as a bestselling satirical novelist, an independent talent, and he may
have preferred to make his own mark, even if that meant letting the
succession fall to young right-wingers with none of the Buckley wit. You can
hardly blame them all for not being Buckleys.
Bill always winced at the imitators
he attracted. He never wanted to be the stereotyped
“right-winger.” He once wrote that though he was philosophically
conservative, “temperamentally, I am not of the breed.” George
W. Bush, you might say, belongs to a breed Bill is not of.
Many of his friends were liberals,
and he was a skilled (and justly famed) debater who always tried to grasp and
answer his opponent’s point. He had such disarming humor and charm
that his opponent, very often, became his friend. Those who expected to
meet a snob met instead a playful man of ready affections and irrepressible
kindness, not to mention personal magnetism.
Bill found a purely “right-
wing” atmosphere as stifling as a liberal one, and some of his best
friends were brilliant maverick conservatives like his mentors James
Burnham and the uproarious Willmoore Kendall, both original thinkers who
deserve to be better remembered than they are. He kept his mind fresh with
such delights as sailing, skiing, oil painting, and playing Bach on the
harpsichord.
Despite his reputation as an
intellectual, Bill spent little time in the study pondering ideas. Later in life he
wrote spy novels instead of the weightier tomes I’d once hoped for.
(He was immensely proud when he and his son made the bestseller list the
same week.) Though intellectuals flocked to him, he preferred to live his own
life on the move. “There is more true simplicity in the man who eats
caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape nuts on principle,”
Chesterton observed, and he might have been writing about a free spirit like
Bill Buckley.
Bill ate both, so to speak, but
doing his duty as a conservative leader was the grape nuts side of his life. He
became somewhat intoxicated by celebrity and, at the same time, averse to
taking risks that might let down the team. Some think he chose as his heirs
at National Review men who would not outshine him. But there
was never any danger of that! He was the one and only. After him, nearly
anyone would seem disappointing. Burnhams and Kendalls are in short supply
nowadays.
For half a century National
Review was fueled by Bill Buckley’s outsize personality. Now
he can open the magazine he created and find himself derided as a “to
hell with them” hawk. He deserved better than this. Like Lear, Bill is
“a man more sinned against than sinning.”
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 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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