Saint William

Saint William? A canonization has occurred without prior beatification. A still living and breathing William F. Buckley Jr. has been elevated to sainthood. And by whom? Not by the pope and not by Buckley’s own flock, but by a man of the left. And why? Not because of Buckley’s continuing conservatism, but because he is no longer the same sort of conservative he was when he first began to make himself and his ideas known.

There is, you see, according to biographer Judis, more than one William F. Buckley. More specifically, a young “mahster” Buckley has “grown” during his nearly 40 years in the public eye. Or at least John Judis would have us believe as much. That Buckley youngster has stretched a bit, if not exactly filled out, in the years since he was Buckley Senior’s good boy, Yale’s bad boy, E. Howard Hunt’s fair-haired boy, and Jack Paar’s whipping boy. Does all this mean that William F. Buckley Jr. has ceased to be a conservative? No, but it does mean that he has become the sort of conservative Judis is able to tolerate, even admire.

Judis dwells at some length on the “reactionary” young Buckley, from the cradle through Yale. But the heart of his story is the post-CIA, post-God and Man at Yale Buckley who undertook the compromising and forbidding process of stitching together a conservative coalition from the “remnant” that was American conservatism in the 1950’s. It was Albert J. Nock who first had the idea. It was Nock’s great friend and benefactor, the senior Will Buckley, who considered himself to be a charter member of that coalition. And it would be William F. Buckley Jr. who would build upon that remnant within and without National Review.

As he has gotten older Buckley has learned that one can compromise to get a political victory without necessarily sacrificing one’s basic principles or destroying one’s peace of mind—or surrendering the twin beliefs of any good conservative. Growth or no growth, Bill Buckley has always been convinced that a perfect world is neither possible nor desirable, and a world fully politicized in the pursuit of perfection would be infinitely worse. Judis has detected flashes of doubt and even despair in both the private and public Buckley, but the broad portrait which emerges is one of a generally satisfied man at large in an all too satisfied country.

Judis would have us believe that some great transformation has taken place in the life of Bill Buckley. But has it? And if so, how did it happen? How did an always combative outsider transform himself into an often contented insider? How did a toothy aristocrat become the darling of the mass media? And how did an irresponsible radical make himself into a “responsible conservative”? Just who, if anyone, dragged William F. Buckley Jr. kicking and screaming, or, better, campling and inveighing, into the great gray world of the late 20th century? Judis points to Buckley himself, who has achieved his current level of respectability and understanding not by examining his life (Judis will gladly do that for him), but simply by living it. Of course, he has had his share of teachers.

It was Whittaker Chambers who taught Buckley the necessity of the “Beaconsfield position.” So named for Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Beaconsfield, it was based upon the conservative acceptance of the “needs and hopes of the masses”—i.e., the welfare state. At first Buckley rejected Chambers’ contention, as did Willi Schlamm, who was also present at the creation of National Review. It was Schlamm, the former communist, who joined with Buckley to make National Review into a bastion of anticommunism and free enterprise individualism. And it was Schlamm who objected strenuously to the notion that conservatives either had to face extinction or accommodate themselves to the “essentially socialist” desires of Chambers’ masses. Buckley, however, disagreed, and so began the departure of Schlamm and other likeminded conservatives from the masthead.

During his long tenure at National Review, James Burnham performed a similar service for his adopted movement and precocious pupil. If Chambers taught the grudging acceptance of the welfare state, then Burnham advised against grudge matches with the Soviet state. From the failed 1956 Hungarian uprising on, James Burnham, architect of liberation, became James Burnham, practitioner of containment. Again Buckley resisted following his mentor, but eventually he came down on the side of Burnhamite accommodation. In short, intellectual battles within National Review foreshadowed political baffles within the Reagan administration. And as those earlier battles were being waged, Buckley moved closer, ever closer, to a more pragmatic version of conservatism.

And battles there were. Battles over whether or not to canonize Senator McCarthy, endorse President Eisenhower, reject the John Birch Society, criticize Southern segregationists, endorse candidate Nixon, trumpet the candidacy of Goldwater, repudiate the Old Right, embrace the New Right, endorse candidate Nixon again, criticize President Nixon again and again, praise Henry Kissinger, support John Ashbrook, dump President Ford, oppose the Panama Canal treaties, and jump on the bandwagon of the leading Republican opponent of those treaties.

For Judis, the most significant upward step for Buckley was his decision to oppose the John Birch Society. With this move Buckley established himself as a member in good standing of the “responsible right.” No longer a radical intent upon demolishing the status quo, he was now a conservative with all of the rights and obligations thereof. No longer would his rallying cry be “no enemies to the right.” And no longer could he be denied acclaim, even celebrityhood. After all, no “Ike is a commie” shouter, no matter how clever he might be, could ever have found his way onto the Jack Paar Show.

According to Judis, Buckley was “inexorably drawn” to a career as a “popular journalist and political personality.” Never would he write a big book or win public office. His single effort to compose such a tract never got much beyond a title: Revolt from the Masses. And his lone foray into the electoral jungles ended with his expected loss to John Lindsay in a race for mayor of New York.

Patron saints seldom dirty their hands by campaigning for themselves or organizing campaigns for others. They may exhort their flock, but they are not much for actually marshaling the troops. Buckley has never shied away from his own “firing line,” but was kept on the sidelines by the Goldwater brain trust and remained apart from all three Reagan presidential drives. In between there was Nixon, whom Buckley came close to serving as an in-house conservative. According to Judis, Buckley gradually awakened to discover that the Nixon White House had cynically set out to cultivate him in order to establish greater credibility with the conservative movement.

Nevertheless, William F. Buckley Jr. has never been a skeptic on the scale of another Paar regular, Oscar Levant. Nor has he been a pessimist of Whittaker Chambers’s depth and variety. But he is not without a sense of tragedy when it comes to assessing the human condition, of fragility when it comes to pondering the state of the American experiment, and of limits when it comes to the possibility of repairing both.

A once obscure young editor who founded a once obscure magazine has become a permanent fixture among American celebrities, and on this last score Judis can be both infuriating and confusing. Without fear of self-contradiction, he accuses Buckley of disdain for the masses and of using the media, not to mention his own pen and tongue, to bring conservative ideas to the general public. Of course, it is possible to possess more than your share of arrogance and to pander to the masses at the same time. Just ask Gore Vidal. But no man who once insisted that he would rather be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the Harvard faculty can fairly be accused of elitism. And no man as diligent as Buckley has been about preaching to the unconverted can be charged with an ultimate lack of faith in the American Everyman.

Judis might be correct when he guesses that Buckley has become a caricature of himself—or at least a caricature of that demon we call celebrityhood. But I doubt that either is the case. Bill Buckley, young or not so young, surely seems to be someone who enjoys life too much to be a captive or caricature of anyone, even himself He also seems to be someone who understands that enjoying this life does not demand being captured by it, and who knows himself without having to examine his life. Consciences, after all, are to be examined; lives are to be lived.

Buckley was—and is—a conservative whose Catholicism has always affected his politics. He was—and is—a conservative for whom political and economic freedom are equally important and mutually reinforcing. He was—and is—a man who enjoys the trappings of wealth without flaunting that wealth or expending great intellectual energy in its defense. He was—and is—someone who believes that making money should not be the major purpose of anyone’s life, let alone a conservative’s life. He was—and is—an anticommunist and an enemy of anti-anticommunism. He was—and is—a thinker who understands the limits of politics and a doer who accepts the necessity of politics. And he was—and is—the sort of doer who would rather sail the globe than govern his country. It is also true that William F. Buckley Jr. was once—and may yet again be—a small piece of Albert J. Nock’s saving remnant.

[William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives, by John B. Judis; New York: Simon & Schuster]