The rich, populist Republican radical who paved the way for Trump
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Summary
Sam Tannenhausenhaus, former writer and book editor for the New York Times and author of Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America, talks about William F. Buckley and his impact on American politics.
Transcript
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Once upon a time, William F. Buckley was a household name. He ran a successful magazine. He
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was on Firing Line, a popular PBS TV show. He was sought out for his views on anything and everything.
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Today? Well, it's been quite a while since he passed on in 2008. His magazine National Review
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isn't as influential as it once was, but Buckley is still a fascinating figure. Hello and welcome
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to the Full Comment Podcast. My name is Brian Lilly, your host, and today I'll look at a
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recently released biography of William F. Buckley. It's called Buckley, The Life and the Revolution
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That Changed America, because at its heart, Buckley was a revolutionary and someone who started a
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movement that continues to change politics in America and, by extension, Canada through to today.
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I had a chance to sit down and speak with Sam Tannenhaus, former writer and book editor for
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the New York Times. He's written extensively elsewhere and is the author of several books,
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including a biography of Whitaker Chambers. Here's our conversation.
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So, Sam, you've written a very big book. It's over 900 pages about William F. Buckley,
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and while he is a very familiar name for me, someone whose writings I read vociferously as I was
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altering my political mindset, a lot of people are just sitting there saying,
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who is William F. Buckley today? He used to be very popular. He was one of the most popular guys
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going at the center of the zeitgeist. Who's William F. Buckley in a nutshell, and why did you have to
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write a biography of him? In a nutshell, Brian, he was the architect of the modern conservative
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movement in the U.S. And that's not to say he wasn't a president like Reagan or even a nominee
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like Barry Goldwater or Mitt Romney or name them. But he was a writer. He was a television
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personality. He was the moderator of the first really great TV debate program in the U.S.
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And I'll meet all sorts of, no offense to anybody, slightly older people who will remember that.
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His show firing line extremely well. And I urge listeners, just go on YouTube and type in a name,
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type in Muhammad Ali or Groucho Marx and William F. Buckley, and you'll see him. And he was born in
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1925, died in 2008 at the age of 82, which means in November, his centennial will be celebrated. I think
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that will bring some more attention to him, but you never know with, what do they call it now,
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the attention economy, whether that's really going to happen. But he was an author. He was a debater.
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He was a columnist, a television personality, and, Brian, an impresario, an organizer. He brought all
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sorts of people together in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, right, those mid-century decades, to take a marginal
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movement in the U.S. of conservatism, of ideological conservatism, take over the Republican Party and
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then dominate our politics. With the result, some would say, we are seeing right now.
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We'll get into how it relates to right now in a little bit, but people forget, or maybe not old
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enough to have known this, but the Republican Party used to be rather middle-of-the-road,
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some would say liberal, very much Northeastern establishment. And then Bill Buckley came along.
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He was responsible in part for Barry Goldwater as the presidential nominee in 64, for Richard Nixon
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in 68. I won't give him any credit for Ford unless you want to give it to him. But Ronald Reagan,
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he had a big part in Ronald Reagan's ascendancy. You know, Reagan was, you know, big by 80 anyway,
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but... Buckley was a mentor to Reagan in a way. He wasn't so much for Goldwater as one of the
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discoveries I've made. But Buckley, through his magazine National Review, which was founded in 1955
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when Buckley was 29, first a weekly and then in the elegant old phrase of fortnightly, maybe you still
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say that in Canada. You all speak better than we do here in the U.S., which means it came out every
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two weeks. That became the flagship publication for conservatism in the United States. You've made
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a really important point, Brian, which is that we have to separate out, though it seems inconceivable
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today, but going back in time, the conservative ideological movement from the Republican Party.
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And the Republican Party is closer to what you've described. It was a kind of moderate, middle of the
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road, the party of businessmen, because that's what they mainly were. And the Democrats were the party
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of the New Deal, of social reform, social justice. And the Republicans were the rump party. They were just
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out of power. From Buckley's childhood in 1928 until the election of Richard Nixon in 1968,
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no true blue conservative was elected president of the United States. There were a couple of
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moderate figures. Dwight Eisenhower, the great general of World War II, was a moderate Republican,
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but not ideological conservatives. So what Buckley and Company did was to choose a couple of very big
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issues and put them front and center. And the most important was militant anti-communism,
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starting at the beginning of the Cold War and in the late 1940s.
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What was it that drove his anti-communism? Because I know you talk about his relationship with
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Joe McCarthy, McCarthyism. He wasn't really into McCarthyism, but he also didn't, you know,
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throw McCarthy under the bus the way so many people did.
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Yeah. A lot of it had to do with religion. Brian Buckley was a really devout Catholic.
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So let me do a little bit on his background, because it's what sets him apart from so many
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others. So I mentioned he was born in 1925. He was the sixth of 10 children in a quite wealthy family
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that grew up on a big estate in Connecticut, near the border of Massachusetts, just to the north,
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and Dutchess County, New York, to the west. I mentioned that because when Buckley's father,
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who was a self-made oil millionaire, was launching his crusade against the Bolshevik,
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Franklin D. Roosevelt, as he saw him, that was their neighbor. Roosevelt was living 30 miles away,
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and they would see him at the horse show, you know. So it's very much a kind of inside the
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establishment attack on the establishment. And that's what was new. That's what made it sound
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different. You always had people out there in the heartlands who didn't like the political
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establishment. But Buckley went to Yale University, was the star of his class, the editor of the
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newspaper. His family had all this money that had been 47 acres. They had another mansion in South
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Carolina with black help. I have a lot on that in the book, some of the discoveries I made.
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So it made him a kind of insider declaring war on the elite. Not so different from what we're seeing
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today in our politics. When I first remember seeing William F. Buckley, when I was first reading him,
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you would think that this guy came from central casting for the Northeastern Anglican aristocracy,
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that, you know, he'd been a blue blood for his whole time. And instead, his ancestors came from
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Ireland. They went to Hamilton, Ontario, my hometown, then went to Texas and made a bucket load of money
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that helped Buckley throughout his career. It was a very different background than you would expect
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for someone like him. Yeah. What was interesting, I found, Brian, there's a funny theme that runs through
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the discussion of politics in the 1960s with the rise of the very charismatic Jack Kennedy,
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John F. Kennedy, who was elected in 1960, is people began to notice what seemed to be parallels
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between the Kennedy family and the Buckley family. They're Irish. They're Catholic. They're really
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rich. They're very good looking. All the boys go to the Ivy League, Harvard or Yale. And there are a lot
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of daughters who have many children. And it feels like these two clans. But Buckley was always very
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snobbish about the Kennedys. And he'd say, well, they're kind of, you know, lace curtain Irish.
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We never paid any attention to Ireland, he told me. Everything for us was Mexico, where his father
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had made his fortune from growing up in South Texas and then migrating there. And the South,
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there were very much Southerners, the American South. Buckley's mother came from a German-Swiss
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family in New Orleans. What that meant, this is really important, Brian, is that not only were both
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his parents devout Catholics, they came from places where Catholicism dominated. So they did not have
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the inferiority complex. A lot of, say, Irish immigrants did in the U.S., right? No Irish need
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apply. That was not an issue, as I think it was for quite a while in Ontario and Toronto, particularly.
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Hey, I've read my Morley Callahan, you know. And there was this, you know, there was a very,
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there's a wasp, kind of very Protestant elite, and the Catholics are excluded from that. Well,
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that was true in the U.S. too, except the Buckley's origins were in these really, really Catholic
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places. We should mention, by the way, that Buckley's socialite wife, Pat, came from Vancouver.
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Now, people should know that. She came from our super rich, far richer than the Buckley's,
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family in Vancouver, the Taylors. And there are people in Canada who will remember the names,
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A.C. Taylor. That was her father, and her brother was also called A.C. Taylor. Hugely
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successful financiers in Canada. So there's a whole Canada, North America thing going through here,
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too. Also, you know, as you're going through some of the names there, it's remarkable to me how many of
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the people who were at the center of shaping conservatism in the United States over the last
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bunch of decades have been Catholic, like Buckley or the people behind First Things and, you know,
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all of that. It's been an incredible influence, but it's not seen as that way. Would Buckley,
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you know, someone who used National Review, used his show firing line, to put forward conservative
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ideas, to make them mainstream, to the point where Ronald Reagan is elected in a landslide,
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would he recognize the conservative movement that he sees today? Or, you know, would you even say that
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what is around Donald Trump and MAGA, which is something very different, would he recognize
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any of that or see that as the antithesis of what he was building?
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He would see some of it, I think. What the economic policies will set aside. Now, Buckley was
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an old-style, laissez-faire, Reagan-type, what's now called neoliberal. Free trade, no barriers,
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everybody gets as rich as we can. And here's where he'd agree with Trump, the lowest possible tax rate
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on the wealthy, right? Which Reagan did. Reagan first reduced the taxes. Trump is doing it even more.
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And there's another place where he'd agree with Trump, I believe. No one can say these things
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with certainty, right? Matt Buckley died in 2008, and we can't possibly predict what he would say now.
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But what he might recognize is the culture war aspect. Buckley's first book, which put him on the
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map and made him quite famous at the tender age of 25, was an attack on his own, his alma mater,
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Yale University, called God and Man at Yale. And I know just from some chatting you and I have done,
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you're aware there's a lot that's been written about in my book as it's come out in the U.S.
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And whenever the discussion turns to Buckley's 50 books, they talk about only one of them,
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his very first one, God and Man at Yale, because it's an attack on the Ivy League
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or the ivory tower from within. What did Buckley advocate? Fire left-wing professors and alumni and
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donors should stop giving money to the university. Pretty much what's going on now. That's the
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culture war. Yeah. With Columbia and other schools. Columbia, Harvard, and others. University of
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Virginia just fired its president. And the idea there is that a small cadre, we use the old
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communist term, it's not a Buckley's first mentors, we're ex-communists, right? You have a small group
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of elites who have kind of hijacked these great institutions and are espousing ideologies that
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then convert or seduce the sons in Buckley's day. Women were not admitted to these universities. That
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didn't happen until 20 years later in the late 1960s. The sons of, as he says, Christian and God-fearing
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businessmen are being turned into atheistic socialists. That's his argument. And the argument
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is outlandish and extreme, although quite cleverly and brilliantly stated. But here's where he scored
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his big points, Brian. And I think it's where it's happening again today. What he got was not so much
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that there were terrible things going on. Most people would say, well, sure, you're going to have
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economists who think the New Deal kind of worked in the 30s. Why should they not teach students that?
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Or with the rise of the natural sciences, we don't accept the Bible as revealed truth. What's the surprise
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there? Well, what Buckley knew was that what was going on in the classroom, the things I've just
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described, was something the administrators of those universities were actually kind of shielding the donors
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and alumni from. They still assumed Yale in 1950 was the university it had been in 1900, you know, in a kind
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of a Victorian institution, which in itself had not changed all that much from its founding 200 years
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earlier. So Buckley's saying we've entered modernity, modernity is dangerous, and worse, the people who run
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the institutions won't own up to it. So now we flash forward to what's going on when people in
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Congress, U.S. House of Representatives, attack the presidents of universities, put them in the
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right, put them on, you know, they interrogate them, they put them on display, they ask them these
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questions, well, what are you doing about anti-Semitism? Is it true faculty have signed these
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petitions? Is it true that Jewish students feel intimidated and the university professors don't know
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what to say because either they're not really paying attention or they're going to be taken someplace
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they don't want to go to? So Buckley's phrase for that was unacknowledged orthodoxy. If you've got a
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new philosophy that you're teaching the students, just come out and say it. But they weren't saying
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it. And that's where the points got scored. So he would recognize the outrage over the anti-Semitism
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on campus and the culture wars around that. I know that you write about the, you kind of wrote
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the playbook, as you said, by telling the donors not to go on. Was he an establishment conservative
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He started out as a radical. He called himself a radical conservative. And you know, it's a funny
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phrase because people say, well, how can you be a conservative who wants to preserve things
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and look at yourself a radical? And the answer to that, which took me a while to find, that's why
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these books take a long time, is that if you think the enemy has taken over, well, the only way you're
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going to get rid of them is through the root and branch pulling it up. So you become the champion of
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conservative values in his estimation. I'm not saying, by the way, that I agree with any of it.
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My job as the storyteller is just to guide you through it. So if you have that view, you're going
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to say, well, they've really come after us. They have really attacked our ideals, our values. We have
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to fight back. We have to be aggressive in turn. We can't meekly go along with it. And that's where the
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more traditional Republican Party didn't seem to be meeting the challenge because they would say,
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well, we're conservatives. And as long as there's not rioting in the streets, we're going to make the
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adjustments we need to make and we'll be OK. Buckley says, no, you can't do that, that you're giving up
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more than you realize and you've got to get it back or it's never going to come back. So he had this
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kind of enthusiasm and this zeal, you know, for converting people and bringing them along to the
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cause, finding all the different platforms, whether it's the debate stage, whether it's television,
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whether it's books, whether it's columns, whether it's the magazine he publishes, all these things
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he's doing at once to build this movement in opposition. And let me add one thing to that.
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You mentioned McCarthyism before, Brian. Buckley's second book, also controversial,
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was a defense of Joseph McCarthy called McCarthy and His Enemies. He wrote it with his
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best friend at Yale who became his brother-in-law, Brent Bozell. Well, if you read that book,
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which I've done very closely, there's not a whole lot about McCarthy in it, as you were kind of
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suggesting, but there's a lot about his enemies. A lot of it's about the bad guys. And who are the
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enemies? They're in media and they're in academia, just as we hear today.
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I saw, I heard a clip where he was talking about, about that book and about McCarthy. And he said,
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yeah, as bad as McCarthy was, his enemies were worse.
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That's it. Yeah. That was always the line. Yeah.
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To use a term that you used in both your essay and your book, the death of conservatism,
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You were writing about, you know, the death of the conservative movement after
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George W. Bush was done, after John McCain had lost to Barack Obama. And you talked about
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a divide within the movement. And you said that there were these revanchists who don't trust
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government. Kind of sounds to me like Bill Buckley started as a revanchist. He didn't trust the
00:20:27.820
establishment and wanted to pull it out, you know, by the route.
00:20:32.100
Yeah, he did. He did. And here's the interesting thing is, and again, you know, draw the current
00:20:39.840
parallels. And thank you, by the way, for bringing up that book of mine, which had kind of been
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forgotten and made fun of in part because of the title. Although now I see, particularly on the right,
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I was surprised to see this, it's being discussed again because conservatives are trying to figure
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out where Trump fits in. And in this very moment, right, we're talking at the midst of this crazy
00:21:05.200
Jeffrey Epstein crisis or controversy or scandal or hilarity, however you view it. Now you have the
00:21:13.480
paradox of the outsiders becoming the establishment. What do you do? What do you do when your guy who's
00:21:20.820
been railing against the Justice Department in the U.S. for concealing all this evidence now runs the
00:21:27.540
Justice Department and tells you they're not going to release the documents, right? Then you get to
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this place Bill Buckley did where he's on the outside all these years. And then, OMG, his 2T,
00:21:39.100
Ronald Reagan, is one of the most popular presidents in U.S. history. Not only that, Reagan kind of starts
00:21:45.720
acting like more, you can't see air quotes, more normal kind of president. He wants to scale back
00:21:53.000
the Cold War. He actually reaches a kind of truce for the Soviet Union. They finish it off. He doesn't
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really eliminate all the social programs, the big spending programs they say is going to eliminate.
00:22:03.860
None of that's really happening. And he doesn't really denounce his enemies that much. And you're
00:22:09.140
thinking, well, how did that happen? Well, it happened because he was a responsible leader once he came
00:22:14.080
into office. And now we're actually seeing some repudiation of that, maybe. This may be the first
00:22:22.080
time, although there will be different interpretations of this, where we may actually see an insurgent
00:22:30.380
in the White House. And that's why he's getting caught out, because he's supposed to, his followers,
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some of them, expect him to follow through on this stuff that suddenly isn't getting followed through
00:22:41.060
on so much. Yeah. And they're quite loud. Just to, while you're mentioning or alluding to Donald
00:22:49.820
Trump, both men have a connection, Buckley and Trump, at least through one person, Roy Cohen,
00:22:59.760
who was Trump's mentor, was a great friend of William F. Buckley.
00:23:03.400
You know, you've picked up on that. There's one mention, as you said, it's a very long book.
00:23:11.240
Although I want listeners to understand, it's meant to be fun to read. And many who've read it have
00:23:18.300
said so. You know, it moves quickly, Buckley in a very busy, active life. He did all kinds of crazy
00:23:24.980
stuff. Frankly, incredible things, as one reviewer said. So Trump is mentioned in just one place.
00:23:32.560
And that is when he and Bill Buckley were character witnesses for Roy Cohn, when Cohn was threatened
00:23:42.800
with disbarment and was disbarred near the end of his life. So you say, well, why would Buckley have
00:23:49.520
such affection for Roy Cohn? Well, Cohn had been the chief assistant to Joe McCarthy. Buckley had known
00:23:59.000
him from that period in the 1950s. And Buckley was a really loyal guy. He was loyal to his CIA friend,
00:24:06.860
E. Howard Hunt, right through the Watergate crisis. Buckley's covering up for him and withholding
00:24:14.260
information that he knew about the Watergate break-in, which was a huge scandal. It makes
00:24:19.060
Jeffrey Epstein's scandal look pretty small. And Buckley was very loyal. So he was loyal to Roy Cohn.
00:24:25.080
What surprised me, Brian, is when Buckley testified before the judicial panel that was weighing
00:24:33.420
Cohn's many egregious, grievous acts as a lawyer, Buckley said, I can't imagine how Roy Cohn would
00:24:43.080
ever do anything untoward when Buckley knew that Cohn had done it to his own friends.
00:24:48.760
He promised them money that he didn't give them, or he'd write bad checks, this kind of thing. And
00:24:55.220
Buckley knew it. But he went before this panel and pretended he didn't know it.
00:25:00.360
But his friends were legion. And he was not someone who, you know, we've talked about him so far as this,
00:25:08.900
you know, father of the modern conservative movement in America. But politics, and he founded
00:25:15.020
National Review, which is still a great publication in my eyes. But he, he was about more than politics,
00:25:22.340
and his friendships transcended political lines.
00:25:26.320
That's one of the fun things about him is all who his friends were. Well, the publisher,
00:25:30.900
longtime publisher of Nash Revere, William Rusher, Bill Rusher said, Buckley was a good writer,
00:25:36.660
as you know, you've read a lot of his stuff. And he really admired good prose whenever he read it.
00:25:42.420
And he knew when people wrote better than he did. And then he really esteemed them. His favorite
00:25:46.340
writer was Norman Mailer, who was, you know, the novelist and journalist who was very much on the
00:25:50.740
left. And he and Buckley were great friends. Well, Bill Rusher said at one point, the publisher of
00:25:57.620
Nash Review, he said, it's a good thing the Communist Manifesto wasn't better written,
00:26:03.860
You know, he just liked good writing that much.
00:26:06.520
Yes. He liked good writing that much. And he liked the people who could do it. So he'd invite
00:26:11.160
them over to his house. He had these beautiful homes, one of them in Stamford, Connecticut,
00:26:17.340
right on the Long Island Sound. That was his weekend home. He had this beautiful, elegant apartment
00:26:22.220
in Manhattan that he and his wife, Pat. Pat was a great socialite and a great donor to AIDS research
00:26:33.260
and protection of gay men in the 1980s. In fact, she kind of overtook her husband as a moral force
00:26:40.960
in that period, very highly respected and esteemed philanthropist. But it was very philanthropic too,
00:26:47.880
by the way. But so they have these beautiful homes and their winter retreat in Gstaat, Switzerland,
00:26:55.060
where you would see Princess Grace Kelly and the film star David Niven. I mean, it's almost comical
00:27:01.480
what this life was like. And that really mattered more to Buckley in the end, I think, than the
00:27:07.720
politics did. He was really good at politics. He told me, but he hated talking about it. So when I
00:27:13.160
went to see him, I was working on this book, and I got to know him because he was a gatekeeper for a
00:27:17.960
previous biography I'd written of one of his heroes, the ex-communist witness, Whitaker Chambers.
00:27:24.000
And Buckley said, I only talk about politics when I'm paid to do it. And he was paid a lot to do it.
00:27:33.140
Otherwise, it was, oh, did you see what was in The New Yorker this past week? Did you see that story
00:27:37.440
by John Updike? Isn't he good? Isn't that great? Or what about this gossip about what's going on in
00:27:43.020
the boardroom at The New York Times? He was very much inside that media world. You know, the media
00:27:49.140
elite that's consistently denounced today, those were Buckley's friends. You know, he got together
00:27:55.180
with them all the time. And he took them on his boat. He was a big sailor. At one point, he owned
00:28:01.360
two big sailing boats at once, and he really couldn't afford either one. He was always in
00:28:06.540
the verge of bankruptcy. So I have a lot on that, too, because I found it all interesting how he led
00:28:12.320
this huge and busy, active life. He just never slowed down. One of the key items, documents I had,
00:28:22.240
which no one else had ever seen, is his personal diary from about 30 years, from 1968 to the year 2000.
00:28:30.800
And it's just a list of his appointments each week, what he's doing every single day,
00:28:38.580
kept by one of his two secretaries. And you just can't believe it. It's like a Monty Python routine.
00:28:44.960
How many people are coming in? Henry Kissinger over here and Joan Didion over there. And oh,
00:28:49.440
we have to meet with the president. And it's just the United States.
00:28:56.260
Oh, so much name dropping. If you read his memoirs, I have a feeling you've read them.
00:29:00.500
Cruising Speed and Overdrive. The names just fall in these huge cascading bunches.
00:29:07.100
They're his friends. They're his friends. And we have to say, somebody who cultivated friendship.
00:29:14.460
I don't know how many of your listeners remember the name Alistair Cook, who's a great Manchester
00:29:22.200
Guardian journalist who came to the United States kind of before Christopher Hitchens. He was doing
00:29:28.660
the Christopher Hitchens thing. Came to the United States and wrote very brilliantly about what was
00:29:34.000
going on in American politics and culture for what was then called the Manchester Guardian. And now
00:29:39.840
we call it the Guardian. And he was also on public television. And he introduced every week something
00:29:47.300
that in the US we called Masterpiece Theater, which were BBC costume dramas. And he did this in the 1970s
00:29:53.860
and Buckley got to know him pretty well. And he said to me, he said, I have lunch with Alistair Cook
00:30:01.700
every three months. It's just put into his calendar. And you think you have lunch with somebody every
00:30:06.980
three months. Why would you do that? Well, I put to you, I wish I could do it. And I put it to your
00:30:12.520
listeners. Imagine if you saw someone for an hour and a half, once every three months, over the course
00:30:20.780
of, say, 10 years. You would think of that person as a true friend, as somebody really new, because
00:30:30.520
you're making a point of seeing them. When I was starting out at this department, I was nobody from
00:30:36.220
nowhere. Now I'm an older nobody from nowhere. But then I was a younger nobody from nowhere. And I was
00:30:41.760
working on this biography of Whitaker Chambers. And Buckley would call me out of the blue. How are
00:30:46.520
you doing? Can I help you with anything? He would initiate it. And at that point, now we're talking
00:30:52.460
about the early 1990s, when Buckley was still on television, and his protege Reagan had just been
00:30:58.760
elected president. And Buckley's good friend from Yale, George H.W. Bush, is the next president. That's
00:31:05.460
the world Buckley's living in. If you stood in Fry's to work at the New York Times, who was a writer
00:31:11.240
reporter and editor there, if you stood in front of the New York Times, you should tell
00:31:14.960
my colleagues, and a lot of famous people walked by, a lot of famous writers, I mentioned
00:31:21.000
Norman Mailer, if he walked by, how many people would recognize him on the street? I'm guessing
00:31:25.940
maybe two out of 10. Or if Joan Didion, the famous Joan Didion walked by, maybe three out
00:31:31.620
of 10. If Bill Buckley walked by, everybody would recognize him. That's how famous he was.
00:31:36.280
Because it was on television every week. It was on for 30 years.
00:31:39.940
And it was a good-sized audience watching Firing Line.
00:31:43.620
It was in many, it was PBS, public television. So the numbers were never huge, but it's in 100
00:31:50.680
markets, as we now say. And it's, you can't see the air quotes again, it's the right people watching
00:31:57.400
it. That is to say, it's the people who read, the people who really are engaged in politics.
00:32:03.160
We need to take a quick break to pay the bills, but more with Sam Tannenhaus and his book on
00:32:10.040
This is Tristan Hopper, the host of Canada Did What?, where we unpack the biggest, weirdest,
00:32:15.120
and wildest political moments in Canadian history you thought you knew, and tell you what really
00:32:19.940
happened. Stick around at the end of the episode to hear a sample of one of our favorite episodes.
00:32:25.540
If you don't want to stick around, make sure you subscribe to Canada Did What?, everywhere
00:32:30.300
you get podcasts. Let me ask you about his, the way he was able to change and adapt. You
00:32:37.460
mentioned earlier that his family came out of the South, that he would spend a good part
00:32:42.920
of the summers when he was growing up in South Carolina. That informed his views on race.
00:32:50.840
And at the beginning, he was in favor of segregation. He was not by the end. Talk to me a bit about that
00:33:01.280
and the famous Muhammad Ali interview on Firing Line.
00:33:07.120
Yeah. One of the great things about Buckley was his ability to adapt. And it's interesting because
00:33:13.560
it's not a matter of splitting the difference, right? Like, we talk a lot, we look back at that
00:33:21.280
era, 1950s and 60s in the U.S., and we say, well, that was the peak period of consensus politics,
00:33:28.120
right? That's when you have this great civil rights legislation that much of the country supports.
00:33:34.940
The anti-communism, for better and worse, the country supports. It gets us into Vietnam,
00:33:39.600
which kind of, you know, to somebody my age was a single great calamity in U.S. history. It tore
00:33:47.200
the country apart. Well, Buckley had very firm views, but he could also see when he was losing.
00:33:54.980
And if it wasn't going to win, he liked to win. You know, as a kid, he was very competitive. He runs
00:34:03.260
the newspaper at Yale because he out-competes everybody for it. When he was a young horseman,
00:34:08.920
you know, an equestrian, he competed at Madison Square Garden in the National Horse Show because
00:34:15.540
he won the local competition. He was a brilliant student when he was very young and then became
00:34:20.480
less interested in it, but he liked to win. And if his side wasn't going to win, then he was going to
00:34:26.220
find some other thing to do. And after a while, because also, this was so important and we've touched
00:34:33.440
on it, because his own range of experience kept getting bigger and bigger, he would meet people
00:34:39.960
who defied his presumptions about them. And that's a great thing when you can do that. So you mentioned
00:34:45.680
Muhammad Ali and race. Well, we start with Buckley, as you say, in the 1950s, one of the big finds I made
00:34:52.540
in the research, probably the most important discovery I made, was not something Bill Buckley gave me,
00:34:57.740
for something he actually hid from me, which is important when you're doing biography for all you
00:35:02.880
researchers out there. And it wasn't in his huge archive at Yale. It was in another little archive
00:35:08.540
in South Carolina where his family had a home. And I'd picked up one little reference in National Review
00:35:14.260
to the town where the Buckley family spent its winters in Camden, South Carolina. Something had
00:35:20.280
happened there. I think, well, what's that about? So my wife and I go down to Camden, South Carolina,
00:35:24.620
I'm going to go into the archive. And what did we find? That there was a pro-segregation newspaper
00:35:30.040
that Buckley family had sponsored. And I can tell you-
00:35:33.620
Was that him or was it his father or was it all of them?
00:35:37.520
His parents owned it. So they paid for the staff, they paid for the equipment. His older sister,
00:35:45.240
Priscilla Buckley, who was one of the best text line editors of her time, as we say,
00:35:52.460
this is somebody who edited copy by Joan Didion and Gary Wills and writers of that caliber,
00:35:59.540
was for a time the editor of that newspaper, edited it out of her office in New York.
00:36:05.020
And nobody knew about it. In the South, they did. You could see references to the Buckley family
00:36:11.300
newspaper, the Camden News in the Southern press. But this goes back long ago to mid-1950s,
00:36:18.240
where mass communications had not reached the saturation point it has today. So Buckley could
00:36:24.560
kind of keep that secret and did keep it secret for a really long time. He himself was not involved
00:36:29.940
in it. But there were causes that National Review, having to do with things like voting rights,
00:36:36.760
keeping Black Americans from voting, that were identical to the positions being advanced in the
00:36:42.940
Camden News. So Buckley is, and I was just amazed when I'm working on the book, and I typed the phrase
00:36:50.060
Northern segregationist, and I think, have I ever seen that phrase before? Because it just makes a
00:36:56.600
little sense. But here you have these very erudite, thoughtful conservatives in the North, where there
00:37:03.600
was not legalized segregation, actually siding with the South, as they called it, by which they meant
00:37:09.480
the power structure in the White South. Well, what happens? Buckley ran for mayor. There's one
00:37:16.240
campaign, a hilarious kind of wonderful campaign he waged in 1965 to become the mayor of New York City
00:37:24.320
to try to save the Republican Party after the calamitous defeat in the federal national election
00:37:30.360
of their candidate, the rights candidate, Barry Goldwater. And the movement looks finished.
00:37:35.600
There's been a huge landslide victory for the Democrats and Lyndon Johnson. And the party,
00:37:41.080
the Republican Party, taken over by the conservative movement, looks as if it's going to become a fringe
00:37:48.060
party, totally out of power. So Buckley runs for mayor of New York to try to revive it. It turns out to be
00:37:54.000
this very charming and beguiling and persuasive candidate, especially on television, where he's just
00:38:03.180
instantly the charisma on television just transforms him, his celebrity and the movement. Well, what
00:38:12.320
happens when he's running for office, he starts meeting more black people who aren't like the
00:38:17.040
ones who just work for his family in their two estates in Connecticut and South Carolina. They're
00:38:21.780
actually middle-class professionals. And suddenly he realizes they don't sound the way he expects them
00:38:27.780
to. Then he starts firing line and he thinks, OK, I've got to talk to these people. So it's kind of
00:38:32.900
interesting for Americans now or anybody now who wants to know about black militancy in the late
00:38:39.340
60s, which has become a big theme, the Black Panthers and such. I'm actually working on some of that
00:38:45.100
now myself. They were all on firing line. Buckley invites them in. Go ahead, Huey Newton, the minister of
00:38:51.760
defense for the Black Panther Party, who poses with a machine gun. Go ahead and tell me what you
00:38:56.960
believe. And he brings Muhammad Ali on. Why does he like Ali? Because Ali's got moral courage. He's
00:39:02.520
giving up his heavyweight crown because he doesn't want to fight in the Vietnam War. So Buckley invites
00:39:08.520
him on. And at this point, 1967, 1968, I know this. I was a kid then. And I would read the New York
00:39:15.880
Times. And its esteemed sports writer refused to call Ali Muhammad Ali. So, well, you know,
00:39:23.940
that's just some radical name. He's really Cassius Clay. And he insisted in the newspaper, that's what
00:39:29.480
he would call him. Buckley has him on his program. And the first thing he says is, well, we're going
00:39:34.860
to call you Muhammad Ali. And if you change your mind tomorrow and decide you're Cassius Clay, then
00:39:40.180
we'll call you Cassius Clay. In other words, you get to decide who you are, right? Well, we add another
00:39:47.100
piece to this, which was a fascinating and devastating debate. Buckley had had with James Baldwin, the great
00:39:54.080
writer in Cambridge. And Baldwin just dismantled Buckley. And explain who Baldwin was and why this
00:40:02.880
mattered to Buckley. Baldwin had become, in the mid-1960s, probably the most famous Black author
00:40:12.720
in the world, certainly in the United States, through his fiction, which was quite admirable,
00:40:19.500
but really through a little polemic called The Fire Next Time, which is a very small book. It's just
00:40:25.640
barely 100 pages. It's really two essays he wrote, one of them published in The New Yorker.
00:40:30.480
And Baldwin says, basically, Black people don't take it anymore. It's the beginning of what we
00:40:37.660
think of as the Black Power Movement. Buckley, the Southerner, is horrified by this. And he really
00:40:43.260
wants to take Baldwin on. And so Cambridge University invites them to debate. In England, Baldwin was doing
00:40:51.060
a promotional tour for his novel, a very good novel, called Another Country. He's touring Europe.
00:40:56.160
It's coming out there. Buckley's on a skiing vacation in Switzerland. They invite them for
00:41:03.560
a BBC televised debate. You can see it on YouTube, listeners. Go on, you'll see it. You'll see Buckley
00:41:09.300
and Baldwin. And Buckley comes across as this kind of snarling white supremacist, which he wasn't
00:41:18.140
really, but that's what it sounds like. And Baldwin stands up with all the skills of the former
00:41:25.280
boyhood preacher he had been in Pentecostal churches in Harlem and delivers this kind of
00:41:32.520
glorious, impassioned autobiography of Black people in America. And Buckley is fighting against it at the
00:41:43.240
very moment, February 1965, when Black citizens in the Deep South are being brutalized by the police
00:41:53.560
because they're trying to exercise their constitutional right to vote.
00:42:00.560
So in all your research, I mean, you said that Buckley hid the paper from you and you met with
00:42:09.740
Buckley many times about this book. After your Chambers book, you met with him many times to talk about
00:42:15.800
this book. But do you get the sense from all your research that he was a racist? Was it just the
00:42:27.760
way that he was brought up? And then, you know, whatever your answer is, tell me how he gets from
00:42:32.360
there to having Jesse Jackson on firing line and really helping that guy start his public figure
00:42:39.760
career. I'm glad you brought that up because he loved Jesse Jackson. He met him on a tour.
00:42:44.760
Buckley, and I'm so glad that you're a good interviewer because you know how to ask the
00:42:49.040
questions, is after he had had Muhammad Ali on his program. And by the way, when Ali is on firing
00:42:54.500
line, it's worth watching because he and Buckley then have a debate about Malcolm X and the Nation of
00:42:59.280
Islam. And it's fascinating. Buckley takes Malcolm X's side because Muhammad Ali was part of the group
00:43:05.160
that forced him out. It's fascinating. But at any rate, what happened is he met them. Buckley,
00:43:10.080
although he was an intellectual, was not a huge reader. He read very slowly. I sympathize with
00:43:16.960
that. I'm a slow reader. But he's a great listener. He was a pretty good musician. He really wanted to
00:43:23.080
be a concert pianist. He wasn't anywhere near good enough to do that. But he was a great music
00:43:28.460
appreciator. And there's a kind of musical quality to his speech and writing if you listen closely. He loved
00:43:33.640
music. So when he met a good talker, he was all ears. And he went on a tour. He was invited more
00:43:40.220
power to the National Urban League, points, props to them. They were a civil rights organization
00:43:46.860
that invited journalists in 1969, right after Richard Nixon had been elected, a period of great
00:43:54.640
civil unrest in the U.S., to tour what was then called the inner city ghetto in eight cities across
00:44:02.680
the country. And Buckley was invited and he went along. First thing, he went. He wanted to meet.
00:44:10.180
They said to him, you're not going to eat in fancy restaurants. You're going to stay in the homes
00:44:14.440
of ordinary citizens in the inner city and you're going to meet community leaders. And Buckley was
00:44:20.460
just astounded. Who are these people? They're so smart. They're so educated. They've taught themselves
00:44:26.840
all these things, right? And today, again, it can sound condescending. But I talked to a guy who was
00:44:33.620
on that tour with Buckley and he was impressed. He said, what's he doing there? He was there. He
00:44:39.100
wanted to hear what people had to say. And when they went to Chicago, he met the very young
00:44:44.440
and charismatic organizer, Jesse Jackson, who was then in his late 20s, mid to late 20s. Buckley's
00:44:52.160
knocked out by him. He says, oh, you've got to come to New York. You have to meet my colleagues
00:44:55.680
at National Review. Like his famous elder at the magazine, James Burnham, the political theorist,
00:45:02.460
who is far more of a racist, by the way, than Bill Buckley. And then Buckley puts him on firing
00:45:07.300
line and you can see it. You can see Jackson and his dashiki, you know, during this debate.
00:45:12.680
And then it's just because he was interested. He was curious. He would say to you, so who are you?
00:45:19.320
What do you believe? He didn't care what your background was, whether you were rich or poor.
00:45:23.300
He wanted to know what you thought, where you stood. And Jackson, he realizes, is saying something
00:45:28.120
he hasn't heard before. And the phrase used back then was black capitalism. Jackson is saying,
00:45:36.620
help us. Help us with, give us some money and we will put that money to use. Yeah, we can't generate
00:45:43.300
ourselves. We just don't have the wherewithal. But if you give us some money, we'll make something
00:45:50.280
happen with it. And Buckley thinks, you know what? That might work. He's for that. In fact,
00:45:55.840
Nixon was for that. So Buckley starts listening and then he thinks, oh man, that stuff I was saying
00:46:02.680
about how black people can't vote. He said, that's pretty bad. So he writes an article in Life magazine
00:46:09.000
and then he does an interview with Playboy magazine. It will surprise people. Playboy was a very
00:46:14.600
distinguished sort of magazine. Oh, you wanted to be the celebrity Playboy interview. Yeah,
00:46:19.540
he was the, more than once. And Bill Buckley in 1970 says, I'll tell you what we need. We need a
00:46:26.620
black president in this country in 1980. And he died six months, 2008, before Barack Obama got the
00:46:34.740
nomination. What would he have made of Barack Obama? To me, that's a very interesting question
00:46:39.860
because Barack Obama is a really good writer, really good talker, all the things Buckley liked.
00:46:45.200
He has that kind of poise and charisma that's very interesting to Buckley. And Buckley's only
00:46:51.540
biological child, his son, Christopher Buckley, very accomplished and well-known novelist and humor
00:46:58.740
writer in the US, voted for Barack Obama in 2008. Yeah, some controversy around that.
00:47:03.740
Some controversy got driven out of National Review because of that. So it's very, very interesting
00:47:09.340
when you do Buckley and race. So you look at it and you think, okay, this is how people change.
00:47:15.080
And if you are diehard ideologue, you say, oh, well, you just like Buckley because his views on race
00:47:23.060
became softer and more accommodating. And so I think, well, what's wrong with that exactly?
00:47:29.020
You know, he's taking the measure of the real world he's living in. You know, he came out of
00:47:35.560
a place, not just his childhood, Brian, but the intellectual world that created him, these very
00:47:41.800
impassioned ex-communists who in some ways remain Bolsheviks at heart, like Whitaker Chambers was
00:47:49.000
one of them. They still see the world in apocalyptic terms. Buckley's not really that apocalyptic.
00:47:53.980
He sees it more in strategic terms. And the strategy says, strategic thinking says,
00:48:01.140
well, maybe we can pull some of those people over to our side. Remember, Ronald Reagan was
00:48:04.860
very pro-immigration, right? He would say, well, they're Democrats now, but once they start making
00:48:09.480
money, they'll all turn into Republicans, which kind of turned out to be true. If you look at some
00:48:16.840
I was in, I was in Arizona just before the election last year. Um, yeah, it's a, yeah.
00:48:24.420
I mean, who's with them? It's surprising who's with them on a lot of the, you know, the
00:48:28.320
Latino men voted for, for Donald Trump in big numbers, black men too, and much bigger numbers
00:48:33.580
than we've seen in a long time because they feel they're a part rightly or wrongly of whatever
00:48:39.400
world they think he's creating. You know, there's an aspirational, uh, aspect to all of this politics
00:48:45.660
that I think we sometimes forget. And, um, Buckley's got that. Buckley was much more better acquainted
00:48:53.680
with the middle class and the working class than people realized because, uh, because he'd grown up
00:49:02.020
in the Catholic church. And even though his own family had this almost kind of Spanish
00:49:07.860
counter-Reformation style, high church Catholicism, they still went to the local church. And I've seen
00:49:15.240
that church in the town of Sharon, Connecticut, where he was raised. The beautiful old churches are
00:49:20.940
the Episcopal and the Congregational Church, you know, um, and, uh, that, that's Connecticut. It's,
00:49:27.740
it's a Protestant state. But you have to go around the corner to kind of a side street to see the
00:49:33.880
very modest little brick church where the Catholics worship. And that's where the Buckley's went,
00:49:39.440
alongside whom? The groomsmen who were working in the stables, the mechanics who were fixing people's
00:49:45.840
cars, the gardeners and the lawn workers, people who used to work in the factories when they still had
00:49:52.280
them in Connecticut. That's who Buckley knows in some way are his actual constituency. That was not
00:50:00.000
easy for him to reconcile himself to, by the way. He didn't like the idea that, that his politics had
00:50:05.700
this populist aspect, but he was shrewd enough to understand that it did, um, that that's where the
00:50:13.000
votes were coming from. He kind of, he never really reconciled himself to it, but he was smart enough to
00:50:20.420
see that's how it worked. What was then called the backlash politics and in his era was really where
00:50:27.240
the Republican party was, was finding its support. Well, Sam, I could keep talking to you for hours,
00:50:33.240
I think. Um, but I do encourage people to read the book because you, um, you brought out all sides of
00:50:41.080
William Buckley and, you know, he, he seemed like a larger than life character and that's, uh, you know,
00:50:46.180
from my far off perch and that's what you've presented here. So thank you very much for the
00:50:51.200
book. I appreciate it. Oh, it was so much fun talking to you, Brian. Full comment is a post-media
00:50:55.660
podcast. My name's Brian Lilly, your host. This episode was produced by Andre Proulx, theme music
00:51:00.320
by Bryce Hall. Kevin Libin is the executive producer. Please remember to hit subscribe, whether
00:51:06.040
you're on Apple, Spotify, wherever you're listening, hit the subscribe button. Help us out by leaving a
00:51:11.560
review, telling your friends about us until next time. I'm Brian Lilly. Thanks for listening.
00:51:21.040
Here's that clip from Canada did what I promised you.
00:51:27.820
So, um, although, although abortion was sort of accessible, it really wasn't.
00:51:35.700
But then 1988 rolls around. And what's the law on abortion then? Suddenly, there wasn't one.
00:51:43.340
Literally no restrictions existed in 1988. Abortion went from heavily restricted to completely
00:51:49.700
unrestricted almost overnight. There was no referendum on this. There wasn't even an act of parliament.
00:51:56.740
This whole thing is due to a somewhat surprised decision out of the Supreme Court of Canada.
00:52:01.400
And it came about in large part because of one man, a Canadian doctor who had been relentless about
00:52:07.580
running illegal abortion clinics since the 1960s and was determined to overturn the laws prohibiting
00:52:13.140
the practice. Along the way, he endured multiple arrests, constant raids, a jail term, a firebombing
00:52:19.600
of his clinic, an attack by a fanatic wielding garden shears, the approbation of virtually his entire
00:52:24.940
profession. And frequent death threats. If you want to hear the rest of the story, make sure you
00:52:32.880
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