Sam Tanenhaus: How Bill Buckley turned against his own movement
Although he remains the most eminent conservative in the United States, his face and voice recognized by millions, William F. Buckley Jr. has all but retired from public life. At the apex of his influence, when Richard Nixon and, later, Ronald Reagan occupied the White House, Buckley received flattering notes on presidential letterhead and importuning phone calls from Cabinet members worried about their standing in the conservative movement. Since those heady times, Buckley has, piece by piece, dismantled the formidable apparatus through which he tirelessly promulgated conservative doctrine over the course of half a century. In 1998, he ended his frenetic schedule of public speeches (some 70 a year over the course of 40 years, he once estimated). In 1999, he taped the last segment of "Firing Line," the debate program begun in 1966 that invented TV punditry. And, in 2004, he relinquished his controlling stock ownership of National Review, the magazine he founded in 1955 and had continued to direct from behind the scenes even after yielding his place atop the masthead in 1988.
Buckley made these serial "divestitures" contentedly, even cheerfully. It left more time for other pursuits--writing novels, weekend sailing (he sold his 36-foot sloop, Patito, but sometimes traverses the Long Island Sound with its new owner, Roger Kimball, who co-edits The New Criterion), and music (he still plays Bach on the piano in his study and invites friends to his rambling weekend home in Stamford, Connecticut, to hear professional recitals on the harpsichord in his music room). In truth, Buckley has never been a wholeheartedly political creature and doesn't quite approve of politicians--not even his favorites. Of his disciples Barry Goldwater and Reagan, Buckley emphasizes, "They came to me." He once told me he discusses politics only when someone's paying him to do it.
Still, Buckley, now 81, likes to have his say and, for this reason, has held onto one outlet for regular political commentary: his syndicated column, "On the Right," which he has been writing since 1962. At its peak, the column ran in 300 dailies. Today, Buckley's most dedicated readers are the friends who receive e-mailed versions in advance, though even they, in some cases, may read him less avidly than before or wait to catch up with the selected columns reprinted in the back pages of National Review.
Or so it was, until George W. Bush invaded Iraq. The war that has unhinged so many has curiously revitalized Buckley, not as the administration's most eloquent defender but as perhaps its most forceful in-house critic. Untethered to the Bush team--the only insider he knew was Donald Rumsfeld, whom Buckley suggested should consider resigning following the Abu Ghraib scandal--he is also detached from its outer ring of ideologues and flacks. He is, instead, a party of one, who thinks and writes with newfound freedom. While others, left and right, have staked out positions and then fortified them, week after week, Buckley has been thinking his way through events as they have unfolded, looking for new angles of approach, new ways of understanding, drawing on his matchless knowledge of modern conservatism and on his 50-year immersion in the American political scene. It is one of those late-period efflorescences that major figures sometimes enjoy--and, in Buckley's case, it is marked by an unexpected austerity. Like Wallace Stevens's snow man, he has developed a "mind of winter" and, as he scans the bleak vista of the Iraq disaster, "beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." And it has been instructive to observe....
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Sam Tanenhaus interview about Bill Buckley (TNR)
From the interview:
Buckley's often thought of as the intellectual godfather of modern conservatism. And you sort of laid out in your piece the ways in which he has come oppose the war. It's also interesting the way in which most of the conservative movement which he is considered the godfather of supports the war, and many of them still support the war. How do you think it is that he's gone off on one track and the movement which he sort of helped create has gone off on the other track? Is there something about the movement that is different than him? What do you think of the distinction?
Well some of it has to do with the position Buckley now occupies in American cultural, intellectual, and political life in general, and also within the conservative movement. Buckley has a long career of loyalty, even fealty, to the conservative cause, which has often been the conservative, Republican cause. But now he does not have that attachment, to the party, to the Bush administration in particular, and to the people surrounding it, so he looks at it with more detachment. Whereas I think much of the conservative movement--including a fair number of contributors and editors at National Review, the publication Buckley formed in 1955--are still closely allied with the Republican Party and the Bush administration. So for them, any alternative is worse, the most important thing is for Bush to succeed, for the policy to succeed, for the movement to succeed. The irony is that the Iraq expedition, or adventure as Buckley sometimes calls it, has actually undermined the movement. That has weakened it politically and as a kind of cultural force. So Buckley, viewing all of this with detachment, sees the danger, the real peril--and in the piece I say he is very clear about this being the Republican version of Vietnam. Buckley was on the scene watching closely when the Vietnam war unraveled. When the liberal consensus that dominated politics then unraveled, he was the leader of the movement that led conservatism into the center, and now he sees the opposite happening. And because he has no particular allegiance to anyone in office or in power now he can say this more directly than others do. Now I think another facet of this is the rise of neoconservatism, and there's an irony there as well, there wasn't room in my story to get into this, but it was really Buckley who, among the classic or"old right" as it's called, welcomed the neoconservatives into the camp back in the 1970s when neoconservatives were breaking away from the Democratic Party. So he has a kind of affection for them, he realizes the were useful allies, but now he sees that they've become so besotted with certain ideology that it's damaging the movement itself, and again from his lonely perch, he's surveying all this and he sees the dangers.