"Buckley luxuriates in his amenities a bit too much and one hears in his prose the happy sigh of a man sinking into a hot bath. So his enemies try to dismiss him as Marie Antoinette in a pimpmobile. They portray him as, among other things, a terrible, terminal snob.
To make the accusation is to misunderstand both WFBJR and the nature of snobbery. Buckley is an expansive character who is almost indiscriminately democratic in the range of his friends and interests. He glows with intimidating self-assurance. The true snob sometimes has an air of pugnacious, overbearing self-satisfaction, but it is usually mere front.
The snob is frequently a grand porch with no mansion attached, a Potemkin affair. The essence of snobbery is not real self-assurance but its opposite, a deep apprehension that the jungles of vulgarity are too close, that they will creep up and reclaim the soul and drag it back down into its native squalor, back to the Velveeta and the double-knits.”
– Lance Morrow
In Buckley’s case – back to “Bill” momentarily; it just doesn’t feel right writing “Buckley” over and over – the attraction is what it usually is for me: the writing. Clear and wonderful sentences that just happen to elucidate a perspective, politically and culturally, I find appealing. Moreover, he has damn good taste; I’ve learned a lot just from reading or listening to the people he brings up admiringly, both left and right.
This is not to say I always agree with him or that the appeal is in the agreement. We part hard on some things, culturally and generationally, and he's a bit too Catholic for me. (I grew up a non-churchgoing Protestant in a town filled with French Catholics. Which I mention only to put my comment in perspective; I've no insider baseball when it comes to the Mother Church.) A brilliant resource for the last five decades of political life in the twentieth century, for left, right, up, down, and indifferent. What a reviewer wrote of Overdrive goes for Bill's work in general: “rambling, idiosyncratic, amused, cranky, occasionally flamboyant – (his) observations and recollections are most enjoyable testaments to a vital life.” Hear, hear.
I’ve written on the Blackford Oakes books and the sailing and peripherals but wanted to devote one post to the collections of his columns, etc. Let's look at them all-too-briefly in chronological order of publication.
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| (1963) |
In 1951 Buckley published God and Man at Yale, and in 1955 founded National Review. These are selected works from that period through 1963.
A great deal of the appeal of these collections is the recreation of political and cultural atmosphere of the media of the years surveyed. Primarily its magazine and television media – the two mediums through which Bill moved. There are a great many people and events discussed here that are no longer household names. I’m generally pretty up on these things – not because I’m something special but because I immerse myself in a lot of old media, primarily – weirdly, I know – old radio news of the 40s through the 70s. That said I really strained to make certain connections; things made more sense when I started looking up anyone I didn't recognize.
Reading this (and this is not unique to it; any collection, of any era, often demonstrates the same) reminds me that news cycles change, that we forget history and then live it again. Even, maybe especially, the closer eras to our own. National Review was founded in a climate of hostility to establishment positions – be they the kind represented by Eisenhower (a Republican and ostensibly “right wing”) or Jack Paar and Gore Vidal.
Speaking of both, they get a lot of ink spilled here. There's also the entirety of Bill’s opening remarks in a debate with Norman Mailer on the meaning of the right-wing (the definition of which then as is now a source of much contention). There’s also a nice piece on sailing and life on the Panic and racing. The Panic was Bill’s boat that sank in a hurricane while tied to the dock, the loss of which precipitated getting … Suzy Wong? I can’t believe I forgot the order, not because this is either vital or conventional info, simply because I’ve been reading so much of Bill’s stuff lately. I could (and should) look it up.
(OTR sounds of footsteps and closing doors, to and fro.)
Answer, indeed it was:
"(After the Panic sank) I now had the insurance money. I very quickly bought, sight unseen, a forty-foot Sparkman & Stephens yawl of illustrious design from its four owners in Miami. The owners were sailors who had served together in the Army in Japan and, aged twenty to twenty-two, had dreamed of owning a sailboat and taking it around the world. They could put together only enough money to buy the bare boat and engine from the American boat company in Hong Kong. It was all teak—teakwood was cheap in that part of the world. They flew there joyfully upon their discharge, men with varied skills learned as civilians and in the Army. They sanded and painted the hull, mounted the rigging, installed the plumbing and electrical systems, and finished the deck. Two months later the boat was ready, and they set out, westward, for Miami, arriving eighteen months later, flat broke and happy. They calculated that they had spent $l.75 per person per day. That updates to about six dollars. I paid them $30,000 for the Suzy Wong, and sailed her for sixteen years, some weekdays, most summer weekends, here and there cruising on blue water, running two races to Bermuda and one to Halifax, very contented until I found the Cyrano, a sixty-foot schooner with an eighteen-foot bowsprit—a big upgrade, though bought for the same $30,000 I realized on selling the Suzy."
Favorites: “Will Formosa Liberate the USA?” and “Outside Politics”
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| (1968) |
Re: “A Book of Irresistible Political Reflections” This and the title itself (referring to a question a reviewer asked him once) are just jokes, of course. One would hope the back cover would make it plain, but it doesn't always work like that.
Given the year of publication, you’d be forgiven for assuming this to be a collection of tumultuous events, but most of the things we think of 60s stuff happens in the next collection. This one contains eulogies to his father (WFBSR - 1881 to 1958. 1881! Bill’s Dad was in his thirties when World War One broke out and in his forties when Bill (sixth of tent children) was born. No wonder Bill, Sr. sent all the kids packing to boarding school by the time he was in his fifties.) Evelyn Waugh, Herbert Hoover (on the strength of this one, I picked up (title), his sister Maureen (died of a cerebral hemorrhage age 31), and Aloise Buckley Heath (Bill's older sister and frequent contributor of its early years.)
Edgar Smith, Ruben Carter, Beatles, Malcolm X, MLK, Playboy, Gays – he sounds, well, like a dude born in the 1920s. Most of the time he’s spot-on about a lot of stuff, but there are occasions (most of the aforementioned) where I feel the distance in our ages. I trust that would go double for most of my friends, but unhinged RWNJ-ism this is not. Such things are generally exaggerated or misrepresented where they are not clearly contextualized or self-evident.
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| (1970) |
Upping the ante, now, with that subtitle!
This was the first of Bill's I ever read. Looking through it now reminds me of those first few months of my son’s life. We had the bassinet by the couch and I’d sit there with him while my wife showered and then push it all into the bedroom (“The Owen Express”). Good times. I talk as if Bill was there with me. He wasn’t – thankfully, as that would be supernatural and creepy.
This is a fantastic collection. There's the famous Gore Vidal piece for starters. All the topics (Sirhan Sirhan, RFK, Frank Sinatra, Six Day War, riots, Gore Vidal, campus unrest, Black Panthers, all the uncomfortable highways and byways of Civil Rights in the Sixties, LBJ, Apollo missions, the Apollo Theater, Apollo the god, Rhodesia, Biafra, all of it. I wish there was a book like Byron Farwell's Great War in Africa, just for the Cold War, especially covering those countries that took (or continue to take) the communist road of liberation. As James Michener once said of communism/ post-colonialism in the Far East: "It's nationalism first and communism second, but the first so quickly becomes the second that it's hard to differentiate between the two."
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| (1972) |
The book is dedicated to Van and Bootsie's daughter Julie Helene, who died tragically young (1965 to 1972.) ‘Elle est venue, elle a souri, elle partie.’ (She came, she smiled, she left.)
There are some sagas that stretch over all the books. Two of them are the prison sentences and appeals and overturns (and reincarcerations) of Ruben Carter and Edgar Smith. Ruben Carter you may have heard of, but Edgar Smith has dropped out of conventional circulation. For some reason the Edgar Smith one seems to get pushed to the top of results a lot.
(Three more you’ll always hear about and from: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Patrick Moynihan, and Kenneth Galbraith. The latter is Van’s father so they have that kind of relationship as well as two independent challengers in the intellectual arena of the twentieth century. Pat Moynihan, in addition to being a fellow Millbrook alum, was the guy who unseated Bill’s brother as the junior senator from New York. (Hilary Clinton succeeded him.) Despite being a lifelong Democrat, he had the good manners (and sense) to write Bill in the 90s and tell him he was right about everything he predicted about the social welfare programs of the 60s. This endears me to him. Moynihan was always an interesting presence on the cable news of my own political-awakening years, and (like Kissinger and so many others) Bill’s affection for him endears him to me all the more. As his constant pranking and getting one over on Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. does as well.
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| This will always makes me laugh. Seeing that Mailer quote reminds me; they were buddies, too. Nice tribute here. |
This is the book where you’ll find all the good 60s stuff. Some amazingly clear-eyed views on Vietnam, 60s radicalism, and William Kuntsler. His review of Jerry Rubin’s Do It! Is hilarious. Views from Switzerland, Rome, and Antarctica, also his Playboy interview. (Likewise, his on-again / off-again relationship with Hugh Hefner and Playboy evolves over the books as well.) There is also the indispensable piece on Nixon’s visit to China. (Bill was there, after all.)
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| (1975) |
We return to China with Nixon (also indispensable.) Speaking of Nixon, why no Watergate? It’s explained in the intro: not only was Bill an impartial party (as Howard Hunt's old friend and the executor of his estate), he had advance knowledge of it. Advance of the conventional media, that is, not of the crime itself. He had to play dumb for a good six or seven months until the media began catching up on things. This is not to say he had a scoop that he sat on or anything, only that he came to the knowledge through his then-clandestine employment with the CIA. He was no longer with the company after the 50s, but he was sworn to secrecy, until such things became public knowledge later in the 70s.
For all of these reasons, I’d love to hear Bill’s thoughts on Ted Shackley or on James Michener’s Legacy. (I’m sure he’d have agreed with me on both.) Sheesh: why didn’t Michener ever go on Firing Line? That's annoying.
All great stuff here as well. You can’t swing a cat in the 70s without hitting something interesting. He reflects on certain repetitive patterns themselves in our political process (the scientific prediction of landslide victories by professional pundit classes in elections that go the other way, the remarks and warnings after said victory – the Shlesinger/ Galbraith Entrail-Reading Service.) Everything he discusses is true of subsequent political elections, as well. Also here, some fantastic essays on Vietnam (“What is Morality”), an African sojourn getting saved by the Coast Guard, and (I believe) the first “Cancel Your Own Goddamn Subscription.”
Also meant to get a picture of that but no luck. Someone wrote into National Review in an insulting manner and ended with the conventional “Cancel my subscription.” Bill responded curtly with the above, later a title of other published Notes and Asides of Bill’s. (All worth reading – Bill was a funny bastard, especially when provoked.)
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| (1978) |
This is the book in the aftermath of brother Jim Buckley’s election loss to Moynihan. While we’re here, I have Jim's If Men Were Angels and look forward to reading it. It’s not in this collection, but there’s a funny angry-letter-to-the-editor that Jim forwards to Bill with the note “I believe you want to speak to my brother, who is the actual publisher of National Review.” To which Bill responds that his brother is a prankster and HE is the actual senator, and it’s just a game they play with the world.)
The People and characters portion of this is astonishingly good, as are the commentaries on (more!) unfolding events in Africa (from Rhodesia to Egypt) more on Edgar Smith and Ruben Carter, the Selling of Your Own Books (an excellent glimpse into the realities of 70s publishing), a sobering piece on Pol Pot, Election '76, and Bicentennial thoughts.
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| (1985) |
If there was a peak, it’s probably here, with a charter subscriber in the White House and a board member as ambassador to France.
This volume contains the indispensable “Human Rights and Foreign Policy” (illustrating something still very much in effect today, and beyond the UN/ Soviet Union, re: the UN’s charter to reform members’ less-than-jake policies, i.e. the rise of manipulating the human rights dimension as an aspect of foreign policy.” Contrasted to the USA, or any democratic government, always on the defensive, learning only a new Realpolitik, “an inchoate disjunction between the power to affirm and the power to dispose.” (Also that a “crisis” as in “crisis management” means “anything that might cause serious discomfort to the Soviet Union.”)
Speaking of human rights, Bill refers to Jonestown as the supreme rebuke of our civilization, a sort of hold-my-beer to the Mansons. (Elsewhere he refers to China's Cultural Revolution as the Jonestown of Maoism - both of these insights are fantastic.)
Also included: a panel he did with the producers of Deep Throat and others causes him to reflect on an insightful passage from Hilliard Belloc. “We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him. In the long stretches of peace we are not afraid, We are tickled his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there is no smile.”
Some wonderful and moving requiems, those starting to rack those up, an unfortunate side effect of moving into one’s sixth decade of life. His mother (Aloise Steiner Buckley – 1985), David Niven, John Lennon.
“I have always assumed that I had things to say that were worth listening to. To claim otherwise, given the life I lead, would be to engage in imposture on a very grand scale. But I have incurable stylistic and intellectual mannerisms I wouldn’t want others to imitate – assuming the inconceivable, namely that anyone would be tempted to do so. I am attracted to varieties of anomalous thought which, expressed by more prudent men, would be taken as contumacious.”
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| (1993) |
Interesting to see Bill describe himself as a libertarian journalist. It’s not untrue, just not how he is often characterized.
Another superb collection that covers (pretty much) the Bush years, which means reading it for me is like revisiting the SNL Weekend Updates of my high school years. There’s good stuff on Leonard Bernstein, a visit to Cambodia, diving in a submersible to the Titanic, the dangers of memorializing evil men (Idi Amin), some (unfortunately prescient) remarks on what the Biden/Clarence Thomas Supreme Court back and forth might portend for the future, as well as the “disturbing willingness of normal people to incorporate into their own vocabulary the distorted terminology of the Soviet Union.”
There’s an essay on Columbus which I assumed would reproduce a lot of stuff from Windfall. It didn’t, though – this is a great quality in a writer, to be able to expound on topics without reproducing the same lecture/ range of impressions.
He speaks often of his speeches – as I imagine he should.
They are, after all, like little books he wrote, as well. I have not made my way through these, although the one reproduced in Cruising Speed is great.
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And that’s all she wrote on that. This isn’t the extent of Bill’s non-fiction or anything, just the collected columns et al. Let’s say you were looking for one to pick up; which one would I recommend? This would depend on several things.
If you have ever argued about the differences between Adlai Stevenson and Harry S. Truman, maybe Rumbles Left and Right is for you. If the 60s and 70s are more your thing, maybe Execution Eve or Inveighing We Will Go. If the events and personalities of the Reagan/Bush era is more your jam, either of the last two.
Or get any/ all of it - you can't go wrong.
As for Bill, to paraphrase Dr. Westphall, there was a time, inconceivable as it seems, when he did not exist. Corporeally, that time has come again. But in libraries and on bookshelves and on YouTube and in the hearts of all who knew him – or that come to know him through his writing – it feels like he’s still around a little while longer. Luckily! We need him. But need him or not, we can still enjoy him.
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| (1925 – 2008) |
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