Final Ascent
Given the melliflous, monotonous sonorities of William F. Buckley's later years (was any lion in winter this laidback?), it's difficult to recall the electric crackle that enveloped his appearances on TV and the debate stage during his early phenom years and beyond. He was the first to infuse punditry and opinion journalism with an ecclesiastical version of Method Acting. "Perhaps nowadays, young Buckley's rather special brand of polite impertinence would get lost among the all the coarser varieties--irreverence is a debased coin--but in the early fifties, Buckley carried, mutatis mutandis, some of the same postwar surprise value as a Marlon Brando or Jack Kerouac," Wilfrid Sheed observed in his review of John Judis' biography of Buckley (reprinted in the updated edition of Sheed's The Morning After.) Carrying his clipboard like a discus, Buckley slouched into the studio glare of the Jack Paar show or reposed on the set of David Susskind and uncoiled his cobra act, mesmerizing the audience and his antagonists with a battery of mannerisms, his eyes widening with a gleaming twinkle just before he went for the kill. He was a master of the tangential counterattack, to borrow a phrase from Manny Farber, not only removing the stuffing and mummy wrapping from modern conservatism but endowing it with a fizzy bonhomie that enabled him to entertain friendships with liberal foils such as John Kenneth Galbraith and others. Unlike a industrial-strength grievance collector such as Norman Podhoretz, Buckley didn't scrounge for opportunities to cast former friends and allies as enemies and infidels in order to play the role of injured party; he believed in the social emollients of courtesy, banter, and prompt drink refills during the intermission pauses between political jousting matches. His interrogation technique on Firing Line was a marvel of making a guest feel at ease before knocking him off his pedestal, his elaborate foreplay so stylized that it became a comic staple for impersonators ranging from David Frye to SCTV's Joe Flaherty, who didn't miss a trick conjuring Buckley's trademark deployment of fountain pen, flicking tongue, protruding rabbit teeth, sly grin, and reclining posture--his sitting in the interviewer's chair at such a steep incline that he nearly dropped out of camera frame.
Strictly as a writer, Buckley is unlikely to be remembered. He wrote too much, and he wrote by rote, producing hundreds of columns and editorial comments as if humming familiar tunes and authoring a series of spy novels intended more to keep boredom at bay than open up hidden doors in himself or release pent-up forces. Below the spiffy surface he declined to go. In 1971, The New Yorker caused a minor fuss by serializing Buckley's journals (later published in book form as Cruising Speed), an escorted tour through Buckley's social calendar whose chatty triviality and namedropping struck many as out of place in the magazine--a privileged slumming expedition. A decade later, The New Yorker serialized the sequel set of journals, Overdrive, which many thought might have been more aptly titled Autopilot. ("Tallulah Bankhead on Quaaludes" is how my friend Rhoda Koenig characterized Buckley's drawling rollout of vacuous superlatives in her mischievous review for Harper's.) As the magazine he founded, National Review, became more and more of a catapult platform for neoconservatism and a playpen for yahoos (gone were the intellectual sophistication and modernist forays by Hugh Kenner, D. Keith Mano, and Guy Davenport), he became a superannuated eminence, revered but irrelevant. His misgivings about the Iraq war fell snowflakes on a bunker mentality that now housed the likes of Michael Ledeen and Victor Davis Hanson.
Politically, his importance is large and enduring. As Spencer Ackerman correctly reckons at Washington Independent, "No William F. Buckley, no National Review; no National Review, no Goldwater movement; no Goldwater movement, no Ronald Reagan… and on and on. Naturally liberals will find much of Buckley’s legacy to be ultimately malign. But what was undeniably valuable was how he forced mid-century liberalism, so self-satisfied, to rethink many of its basic premises, grapple with inconvenient truths and harsh assessments, and emerge (in my opinion) stronger. What sort of ossification would have resulted had no one stood athwart history, yelling Stop?"
Standing athwart history yelling Stop! was the ringing phrase from National Review's mission statement. Yes, the modern conservative movement founded by National Review produced Goldwater, Reagan, the Gingrich revolution, and Bush II. But socially and culturally, it was impotent to stop the locomotive rush of history. It was on the ugly wrong side of the civil rights debate, as former senior editor Jeffrey Hart observes in his personal history of National Review, and the women's movement, gay liberation, the rise of the counterculture, and environmental consciousness have washed right over its paper-mache castle. National Review-style conservatism hasn't resulted in smaller, less obtrusive government, or a retrenchment from commitments abroad; it's degenerated into militaristic swagger and the Kabuki stomp of culture wars. To quote Ackerman again, "The decline of the right, and perhaps of America more generally, is summed up in the intellectual slouch from the heights of Buckley to the depths of Hewitt and Reynolds and Limbaugh and Coulter and Kristol and O’Reilly and Hannity and Bush," and John Cole, anticipating a bout of nausea coming on, cautions, "Watching the right-wing lunatics who destroyed conservatism wrapping themselves up in Buckley's cold, dead embrace over the next few weeks will be disgusting." Though it's already provided a dollop of comic relief.
February 27, 2008, 6:04 PM
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott
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