All of this fed into his founding, in 1955, of National Review, which brashly announced itself as a magazine that “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or have much patience with those who so urge it.” Enjoying some 275,000 subscribers at its high point, National Review helped alchemize Barry Goldwater’s apocalyptic failure in 1964 into Ronald Reagan’s colossal victory in 1980 by hammering away at ideological opponents. Today, the magazine regularly takes on apostate conservatives, dim-witted lefties, mainstream mannequins, and those “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” in France, while editorializing in support of free institutions at home and abroad.
Beyond his self-described career as “a conservative controversialist,” Buckley has been a prolific print journalist, television host, spy-novel writer, and inveterate adventurer. Since his boyhood brush with Chamberlain, he has also maintained what he calls his private “link to the heavy machinery of history.” In a series of reflective essays and personal portraits, Buckley recounts befriending and recruiting the reclusive Whittaker Chambers to write for his fledgling magazine. He also dines with Jackie Kennedy and Princess Grace at David Niven’s chalet in the Swiss Alps, starts up a lifelong friendship with John Kenneth Galbraith at Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, squabbles with Ayn Rand and chats up Tom Wolfe on the New York society circuit (each of whom rivals Buckley in flashy self-regard), and lunches with two lions of twentieth-century journalism, the bbc’s Alistair Cooke and the New Yorker’s William Shawn. He plays go-between for Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon’s first collaboration, spends many happy hours with Ron and Nancy, takes a turn as a cia agent, and, he laments, has the misfortune of acquiring “more wine than I could drink.”
In one telling exchange, where a critic ventures that Buckley’s hyperkinetic column writing, rumoured to take ony twenty minutes per piece three times a week, allowed ” ‘too little time for serious contemplation of difficult subjects,’ ” Buckley counters that his conservative cosmopolitanism has prevented him from degenerating into the one-note dogmatist implied by the charge. When writing, Buckley draws on “huge reserves: of opinion, prejudice, priorities, presumptions, data, ironies, drama, histrionics. And these reserves you enhance during practically the entire course of the day, and it doesn’t matter all that much if a particular hour is not devoted to considering problems of foreign policy. You can spend an hour playing the piano and develop your capacity to think, even to create, and certainly to invest yourself with a feeling for priorities.”
Buckley ends this essay by noting that as an intellectual exercise, “I asked myself the other day, ‘Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?’ I couldn’t think of anyone. And I devoted to the exercise twenty minutes. Flat.” Beyond this egotistical showmanship, Buckley’s roving intellectual curiosity and broad cultural appreciations could be instructive to both his disciples on the Right and his antagonists on the Left as a means of avoiding terminal earnestness and tunnel vision—the war of ideas’ nonpartisan impairments. But given the pragmatic politicking, ideological raillery, and gyroscopic news cycle that prevail along the Potomac, Buckley’s well-read gentility renders him, at times, something of a colourful and cultured antiquity.
Two essays stand out from this collection, nonetheless, one for pure reading pleasure and the other for uncommonly relevant commentary. The first, “The Angel of Craig’s Point,” recounts Buckley’s thwarted attempt to dispose of his trash while passing through New Brunswick on a 1982 sailing trip and the cross-border media controversy that resulted from the mocking letter he sent to the editor of Saint John’s Telegraph Journal. The piece is a rollicking parable about the devolving relationship between event, perspective, and report that develops when a taste for scandal outpaces a respect for accuracy.
In a more serious turn, Buckley combines personal concern, literary panache, and critical questioning—the core features of opinion journalism—in “Why Don’t We Complain?,” which the author declares “my Hamlet, my Gettysburg Address, my Ninth Symphony.” Perhaps as poetic justice for such self-aggrandizement, this 1961 essay, re-read today, reveals ironic, unintended consequences of Buckley’s rhetoric of activist individualism.
“Why Don’t We Complain?” is a first-person survey of the sterilization of the human spirit by bureaucracy, business, technology, and two-party politics. Counting himself among the afflicted, Buckley notes how citizens no longer speak up for themselves, whether in response to a blurry movie projector or the usurpation of their rights by anonymous, monumental power. He worries that a people that had succumbed to the infantilizing ministrations of the state would be incapable of defending itself against a foreign threat. This is classic Cold War conservatism. In an ironic testament to Buckley’s intellectual victory, however, his rallying cry—“to make our voices heard” and “[claim] our rights”—is regularly employed to great success, forty years later, by abortion and gay rights advocates, not exactly his intended audience.
His further commentary on the imperilled landscape of modern democracy is even more arresting, in that it reads like the latest in progressive polemic. There is, he observes, an “increased sense of helplessness in an age of technology and centralized political and economic power.” But in decrying the stifling consolidations of power in America, Buckley was simply performing, to great effect, the first charge of opinion journalism, which is to be “a force of protest of the humane against the pressures of domineering institutions.”
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