Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography
by William F. Buckley Jr.
Regnery Publishing Inc., 2004,
592 pp., $43
A Matter of Opinion
by Victor S. Navasky
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005
464 pp., $38
While frequently as civil as a Bronx barroom, opinion journalism in the United States can also be as heady as a continental coffee house. This has been the case from the decisive influence of the Federalist Papers in the late-eighteenth century to the infectious presence of blogs in the early twenty-first. Within this bee-loud, brainy tradition, the biweekly National Review on the Right and The Nation, published weekly, on the Left have been particularly prominent. Through their regular rations of vigorous commentary, harsh critique, and unapologetic rabble-rousing, The Nation, founded in 1865 by E.L. Godkin, and National Review, founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley Jr., have done as much as two congenitally unprofitable, small-circulation magazines can to influence the course of modern American history. Which is to say, a lot.
For example, to the unbound dismay of Victor Navasky, long-time editor and publisher of The Nation, Ronald Reagan’s rise to power owed a significant debt to “National Review’s nourishing of the impossible, and I would add implausible if not insane, ideas of the radical right.” William F. Buckley concurs, after his own fashion: “We did as much as anybody with the exception of—Himself—to shepherd into the White House the man I am confident will emerge as the principal political figure of the second half of the twentieth century.”
Given his well-deserved status as an obnoxiously triumphant conservative icon, Buckley may disarm resistant readers with the prescient intelligence of five decades’ worth of cultural criticism on offer in Miles Gone By, his collection of autobiographical essays, if not win them over with his country-clubby style or arch prescriptions. Meanwhile, Navasky, a practised player in elite journalism, award-winning author, and member of America’s left-liberal brain trust, emerges in his intellectual memoir as a wry and admirably nonsectarian spokesman for the crucial task of magazines like The Nation and National Review to speak truth to power. This is especially needed of late, given two developments: the corporate consolidation of mainstream media and the gradual homogenization of two-party politics. Beyond each man’s pride in his magazine and passion for its causes, and leaving aside occasional portions of guttersnipe and self-congratulation, these books reveal that Buckley and Navasky share an abiding appreciation for the spirited free play of ideas. Their primary difference lies not in ideology but perspective. Navasky argues for opinion journalism’s importance to American public life, Buckley argues for his own. Each is unexpectedly persuasive.
William F. Buckley’s conservatism seems to have been preordained. Growing up in Connecticut comfort as one of ten offspring of a Texas oil magnate, he enjoyed a childhood furnished with a French nanny, three nurses, two maids, a cook, and a butler, not to mention equestrian, elocution, and music lessons. Of course, there was also the necessary touring of Europe, where, among other edifications, Buckley “saw Neville Chamberlain descend from the airplane that had flown him from Munich to announce that he had brought ‘peace in our time.’ ” Thus was born a life of high entitlement and a lifelong suspicion of weak-kneed optimism.
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