Sam Tanenhaus: Bill Buckley's Effect on NY Politics
[Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, is writing a biography of William F. Buckley Jr.]
orty years after it was decided, the mayoral race of 1965 remains one of the most memorable elections in New York history. It was also one of the strangest, thanks in large part to the candidacy of William F. Buckley Jr. It was odd enough that Buckley, author, magazine editor, columnist, debater and gadfly - with no experience in practical politics - should have sought this most thankless of jobs. Odder still that his campaign style invited comparisons with Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, Noel Coward and Mort Sahl. But oddest of all was that he was taken seriously - seriously enough to confound opponents, observers and analysts and throw the election up for grabs. Although it wasn't clear at the time, Buckley's bid for office was an important chapter in one of the crucial events in modern political history, the transformation of the consensus politics of the peak cold-war years of the 1950's and early 60's, its agenda set by liberals, into the more polarized politics of our era, ruled by conservatives.
Today, when the right is synonymous with the Republican Party and the party itself synonymous with ideological unity and organizational punctilio, it is easy to forget that the ascendancy of "movement conservatism" came only after a brutal intraparty conflict, waged over the course of decades, in which (to borrow each faction's vocabulary for the other) "leftists" and "me too" Republican elders tried to fend off a mounting insurgency of "extremists" and "crackpots."
The most articulate voice of that insurgency was Bill Buckley, the founding editor (in 1955, at age 29) of National Review, the New Right's flagship journal of ideas, opinion and advocacy. With its mix of authoritarian anti-Communism, free-market libertarianism and staunch opposition to civil rights legislation, National Review sowed the ideological seeds that blossomed in the 1964 presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater, who had wrested the nomination from the G.O.P. establishment's standard-bearer, Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York. It was the movement's first great triumph, but it ended in disaster. Goldwater suffered one of the most lopsided defeats of all time, leaving Republicans more divided than ever. Moderates were convinced that the party's salvation lay in a move to the center, while conservatives believed Goldwater's defeat was merely a setback on the road to eventual victory. ...
... [T]he election was shaping up as a momentous event, fraught with national implications, and a serious candidate needed to offer solutions to what was being referred to routinely as New York City's "crisis": crime, racial tension, decrepit infrastructures and disheveled public spaces. In the previous 10 years, the city's annual budget had risen 128 percent. (It was approaching $4 billion.) Business and sales taxes had doubled; real estate taxes had jumped 75 percent. Even so, the Wagner administration was borrowing prodigally to cover a $92 million deficit from 1964 and a $256 million deficit for 1965. And New York had the highest unemployment rate of any metropolis in the nation, with some 250,000 people out of work.
The statistics translated into day-to-day dysfunctionality. Even the glittering island of Manhattan was unnaturally composed of a thin sliver of the rich, garrisoned in wealthy neighborhoods, and a massively enlarging population of the ghetto poor, with very little in between; a million middle-class New Yorkers bolted the city between 1955 and 1965, and the exodus was continuing. The year 1965 was the first in which the city's elementary schools had a greater proportion of blacks and Puerto Ricans, 50.8 percent, than whites. All races and classes had to cope with a rash of pathologies, from noise pollution and clogged streets to an alarming crime rate. In the first three months of 1965, "serious crime" on subways rose 41 percent. After one particularly brutal and senseless subway killing, in April, Wagner ordered night patrols on every train, with additional cops posted at each of the system's 480 stations, to combat the predations of "the mugger, the hoodlum and the young punk."
The paradox was that this urban nightmare was happening at a time of national prosperity. The G.N.P. grew 8 percent in 1965, and unemployment nationwide stood at 4.5 percent. In Washington, the good times produced a feeling of excitement. "The prestige of government, and government's confidence, not to say hubris, were at apogees," George F. Will would write 30 years later, "higher than at any time since 1945."
At the vortex of all this self-assurance was a new cadre of policy intellectuals, employed in the various hives of the executive branch, who were armed with the latest sociological and economic theories and prided themselves on their ability to solve long-range problems. They were the Great Society's "new priesthood," wrote Theodore White, licensed "to call down the heavy artillery of government, now, on the targets they alone can see moving in the distance."...
Read entire article at NYT Magazine
orty years after it was decided, the mayoral race of 1965 remains one of the most memorable elections in New York history. It was also one of the strangest, thanks in large part to the candidacy of William F. Buckley Jr. It was odd enough that Buckley, author, magazine editor, columnist, debater and gadfly - with no experience in practical politics - should have sought this most thankless of jobs. Odder still that his campaign style invited comparisons with Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, Noel Coward and Mort Sahl. But oddest of all was that he was taken seriously - seriously enough to confound opponents, observers and analysts and throw the election up for grabs. Although it wasn't clear at the time, Buckley's bid for office was an important chapter in one of the crucial events in modern political history, the transformation of the consensus politics of the peak cold-war years of the 1950's and early 60's, its agenda set by liberals, into the more polarized politics of our era, ruled by conservatives.
Today, when the right is synonymous with the Republican Party and the party itself synonymous with ideological unity and organizational punctilio, it is easy to forget that the ascendancy of "movement conservatism" came only after a brutal intraparty conflict, waged over the course of decades, in which (to borrow each faction's vocabulary for the other) "leftists" and "me too" Republican elders tried to fend off a mounting insurgency of "extremists" and "crackpots."
The most articulate voice of that insurgency was Bill Buckley, the founding editor (in 1955, at age 29) of National Review, the New Right's flagship journal of ideas, opinion and advocacy. With its mix of authoritarian anti-Communism, free-market libertarianism and staunch opposition to civil rights legislation, National Review sowed the ideological seeds that blossomed in the 1964 presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater, who had wrested the nomination from the G.O.P. establishment's standard-bearer, Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York. It was the movement's first great triumph, but it ended in disaster. Goldwater suffered one of the most lopsided defeats of all time, leaving Republicans more divided than ever. Moderates were convinced that the party's salvation lay in a move to the center, while conservatives believed Goldwater's defeat was merely a setback on the road to eventual victory. ...
... [T]he election was shaping up as a momentous event, fraught with national implications, and a serious candidate needed to offer solutions to what was being referred to routinely as New York City's "crisis": crime, racial tension, decrepit infrastructures and disheveled public spaces. In the previous 10 years, the city's annual budget had risen 128 percent. (It was approaching $4 billion.) Business and sales taxes had doubled; real estate taxes had jumped 75 percent. Even so, the Wagner administration was borrowing prodigally to cover a $92 million deficit from 1964 and a $256 million deficit for 1965. And New York had the highest unemployment rate of any metropolis in the nation, with some 250,000 people out of work.
The statistics translated into day-to-day dysfunctionality. Even the glittering island of Manhattan was unnaturally composed of a thin sliver of the rich, garrisoned in wealthy neighborhoods, and a massively enlarging population of the ghetto poor, with very little in between; a million middle-class New Yorkers bolted the city between 1955 and 1965, and the exodus was continuing. The year 1965 was the first in which the city's elementary schools had a greater proportion of blacks and Puerto Ricans, 50.8 percent, than whites. All races and classes had to cope with a rash of pathologies, from noise pollution and clogged streets to an alarming crime rate. In the first three months of 1965, "serious crime" on subways rose 41 percent. After one particularly brutal and senseless subway killing, in April, Wagner ordered night patrols on every train, with additional cops posted at each of the system's 480 stations, to combat the predations of "the mugger, the hoodlum and the young punk."
The paradox was that this urban nightmare was happening at a time of national prosperity. The G.N.P. grew 8 percent in 1965, and unemployment nationwide stood at 4.5 percent. In Washington, the good times produced a feeling of excitement. "The prestige of government, and government's confidence, not to say hubris, were at apogees," George F. Will would write 30 years later, "higher than at any time since 1945."
At the vortex of all this self-assurance was a new cadre of policy intellectuals, employed in the various hives of the executive branch, who were armed with the latest sociological and economic theories and prided themselves on their ability to solve long-range problems. They were the Great Society's "new priesthood," wrote Theodore White, licensed "to call down the heavy artillery of government, now, on the targets they alone can see moving in the distance."...