In the 1960s and 70s, William F. Buckley, Jr. squared off against James Baldwin and his view of American society as hopelesly irredeemable.  According to Buckley, the idea of "Freedom Now" was an invitation to frustration, and true empowerment could not be achieved through political gestures or symbolism alone.

Part I: Introduction to Crossing Swords
Part II: James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement
Part III: Dwight Macdonald and Journalism as Style over Substance
Part IV: Gore Vidal: Politics as Personality
Part V: Michael Harrington and the War on Poverty
Part VI: Norman Mailer and the Culture Wars
Part VII: Noam Chomsky and the New Left
Part VIII: John Kenneth Galbraith and Free Enterprise
Part IX: The Environmental Movement
Part X: Buckley in Perspective

It is an accident of history, I suppose, that two great visionary men emerged in the 1950s with such different worldviews as William F. Buckley, Jr. and Martin Luther King, Jr.
 
Close to the same age, King being a bit younger, both men changed the way the world viewed the critical issues around which they sought to mobilize the public – Buckley around conservative values and anti-communism, King around the long-denied rights owed black American citizens. Interestingly, both sought to liberate oppressed peoples, though it must be acknowledged that while white America had left blacks for too long in the backwaters of American society, communism left entire populations to perish under totalitarian systems that failed as miserably as any in human history.
 
Buckley, born of a wealthy family and educated at Yale, breathed rarified air, while King was raised in the South and studied theology and religion at Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania and finally at Boston University. Yet, it was James Baldwin, a strong civil rights advocate and a literary and intellectual lightning rod, who actually carried on an ongoing debate with Buckley. He was a person of uncommon literary ability and he burst upon the American scene with such works as Go Tell It on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, Another Country and The Fire Next Time.
 
The core of the debate between Buckley and civil rights proponents, for which King and Baldwin were critical voices, is interesting for several reasons. First, it occurred in the tense 1960s, during which time Buckley himself achieved stardom as political thinker and personality. It was a critical moment in U.S. history as King marshaled the forces of morality, galvanized the events of the 1950s and early 1960s, and helped push Congress and the Johnson Administration to pass landmark civil rights legislation.
 
Retrospectively, Buckley's critics will argue that he was terribly out of touch with the times. I would suggest that he was quite aware of the passions at work in American society; it was his concern about where those passions would drive civil society that explain his position on the civil rights movement, which he would later acknowledge he got only partly right.
 
To begin with, unlike Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi and King, Buckley objected to civil disobedience, seeing it as an instrument of lawlessness. Only when religious freedom was threatened did Buckley believe such resistance legitimate. This reflected his conviction that freedom of religion was the one issue about which compromise was not possible.
 
His opposition to activism outside the law led Buckley and the editors of National Review to oppose King's tactics and the rush to achieve his end, for which they have been excoriated ever since. Buckley himself would proclaim this editorial stance a mistake and would later support a national holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr.
 
Nevertheless, the caricatures of his position need to be analyzed. First, no reputable biographer of Buckley's life has concluded he was a racist. On the contrary, he was sympathetic to the plight of black Americans and agreed with much of the discontent expressed by leading spokesmen, including Baldwin, who as an intellectual and artistic force had a great impact on the tone of the debate. (In the summer of 1963, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy would complain after meeting with Baldwin and other civil rights activists that they were unnecessarily hostile and confrontational).
 
But before getting into the discussion of Buckley and the civil rights movement, it is worth recounting briefly the history that led to the confrontations of the 1950s and 1960s. It is not widely remembered today that in the 1880s and 1890s great progress was being made in the South on civil rights for former slaves. Black Americans in the South used the same facilities as whites, frequented the same restaurants and held public office. Many white southern leaders were prepared to support the political empowerment of blacks, including the white governor in Mississippi who was a progressive political force.
 
Had this process continued – had it won the day – there would have been no need for a civil rights movement: no legacy of Jim Crow, no race riots, no divisions tearing at the fabric of American society for several generations. Black Americans would have been assimilated into mainstream American society. Alas, reactionary forces mobilized when federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877. Lynchings, Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan all materialized as white supremacists reacted to the progress made by African-Americans. When reactionary forces prevailed and the nation abandoned its efforts to bring blacks into the mainstream, America experienced one of its greatest political and human tragedies.
 
Into this history marched Martin Luther King, Jr. He was courageous, charismatic, well-educated and shrewd. He won the civil rights struggle for two reasons: his cause was just, and he understood strategically and tactically how to achieve his goals. King chose his enemies and his words wisely.

In Bull Connor he got his poster boy for unenlightened racist leadership. In his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963), he laid out his own manifesto of civil rights. He buttressed his case using the very weapons of his opponents. They argued for the tradition of the South; King countered with the traditions of Christianity; they argued for state's rights, but King countered with the human rights underscored in the Declaration of Independence; opponents accused him of extremism, but the nation witnessed peaceful civil rights marchers being attacked with fire hoses and vicious dogs. In short, King appealed to Constitutional law and peaceful protest. Indeed, King even warned his followers that the law required that they be jailed – and he accepted this as the price of illuminating the injustices African-Americans had been forced to shoulder for generations.
 
But, alas, things fall apart, and the center does not hold, as Yeats wrote. By the mid-1960s, radicals with far-reaching agendas beyond civil rights began to hijack the civil rights movement. Economic empowerment required more than legislation passed in Washington, D.C., and people were impatient. Black power and even separation became the rallying cries of disillusioned radicals who still felt the sting of discrimination and who became the pawns of leftists whose agenda went well beyond giving blacks their rightful place as full citizens in American life.
 
These folks were not interested in correcting the system; they sought to overthrow it. Their enemy was not Bull Connor, but capitalism, free enterprise and the institutions that had made America — its racial policies notwithstanding — one of the greatest and most generous nations on earth. They pushed the Democratic Party and the civil rights movement so far to the left that both began to lose touch with King's original mission and the dream he articulated so ably. There were even fears throughout the 1960s that communists with their own agendas were manipulating King and infiltrating the civil rights power structure.

As all of this unfolded, Buckley was creating National Review and trying to mobilize intellectual and political forces against the tyranny represented by the Soviet Union and worldwide communism. He also worried that King's efforts to provoke confrontation, even on behalf of a good cause, would unleash forces of violence and instability impossible to control. Anyone who knows the history of the 1960s would have to conclude that Buckley, while wrong at times in tone, was not wholly incorrect in his conclusions.
 
The larger issue, of course, is whether the civil right movement could have succeeded without civil disobedience. There is no denying that King launched a brilliant strategy of controlled provocation that shamed the nation and mobilized the federal government on behalf of blacks who were being denied their rights as citizens. Would a gradualist approach have achieved the same results, but perhaps more slowly? Buckley himself was uncertain, which is why he eventually conceded that King was right and he wrong about the thrust of the civil rights movement. 
 
To add a layer of political complexity to the equation, in 1956 southern Democrats issued the Southern Manifesto. Though the document appealed to state's rights, local empowerment and individual choice – values Buckley mostly embraced — it represented the nadir of modern southern politics. For whereas Buckley and National Review were honestly guided by Constitutional concerns with regard to the civil rights movement and accompanying legislation, few would deny that the Manifesto was motivated by raw racial politics of the most base kind.  The manifesto was issued as a response to Brown vs. the Board of Education, the decision in which our highest court ruled that separate but equal – the law of the land since Plessy vs. Ferguson – was inherently unconstitutional.
 
The Brown decision, whatever its judicial merits, spelled doom for segregation polices. Strom Thurmond and his followers thumbed their noses at the federal government and the Supreme Court – and in doing so they sought to hijack the ideas of state's rights and individual choice that many Republicans and conservatives championed. President Eisenhower sent troops to force desegregation in Little Rock. Several southern states responded with massive resistance.

During all of this two major realignments occurred. First, the same Democratic Party that had historically opposed civil rights had under Lyndon Johnson's leadership become its champion. And conservatives and Republicans, who had long been relatively receptive to black empowerment, suddenly found themselves identified with the status quo, even though most Republicans cooperated with the Johnson administration in supporting the Civil Rights Act. Politically, it was something of a draw. Republicans got southern support that helped propel Nixon and Reagan, not to mention both Bushes, into the White House. Democrats, however, can now count on the black vote almost as assuredly as they can the law of gravity.
 
It is against this backdrop that Buckley had his famous debate with James Baldwin at Cambridge University in 1965. All of these tensions, combined with the Vietnam War and the radical left agenda being pushed by Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman and others, were propelling the United States toward ongoing domestic violence. Baldwin himself had condemned the United States forcefully as an evil system and had aligned himself sympathetically with black separatists – Black Muslims who felt revolution or total separation were the only ways to achieve equality or justice.
 
The debate between Buckley and Baldwin had all the earmarks of a great intellectual celebrity event. The two men were almost the same age when they squared off in Cambridge. Buckley, of course, had founded National Review and published God and Man at Yale, McCarthy and His Enemies, Up from Liberalism and a collection of essays, Rumbles Left and Right. Baldwin had won great literary acclaim for his novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain, and his book, The Fire Next Time, in which he denounced Christian civilization and glorified black power. His eloquence and reputation were increasingly celebrated. To appreciate Baldwin's standing with many liberals, consider this interview introduction in 1963 by Kenneth Clark, a professor of psychology at City College in New York.

Probably one of the most articulate, passionate and clear communicators to the American conscience is my guest, James Baldwin. James Baldwin's name is known throughout America for saying so passionately and so clearly and with such grace and style what every Negro has long known and has long felt.
– Conversations with James Baldwin, p. 38.

When Baldwin stood at the podium in Cambridge in February 1965, before a packed house, the tides of history were running in his direction. A liberal administration had only recently won a landslide victory against Buckley's chosen candidate, Barry Goldwater, and the cultural and sexual revolutions were underway. The question before the Cambridge Union Society was this: "The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro."
 
Baldwin's remarks cannot have been unexpected. In an eloquent and moving presentation, he listed the litany of crimes perpetrated on blacks by white society and he appealed to the idealism of the young audience.
 
"In the case of the American Negro," he argued, "from the moment you are born every stick and stone, every face, is white. Since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose you are, too. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6 or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians and, although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you."
 
Baldwin continued in this vein, using the tone of disappointment and despair to move his audience rather than the anger so evident in his writings.

It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and identity has not, in its whole system of reality, evolved any place for you.

. . . 

It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of it population is beneath them. Until the moment comes when we, the Americans, are able to accept the fact that my ancestors are both black and white, that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity, that we need each other, that I am not a ward of America, I am not an object of missionary charity, I am one of the people who built the country – until this moment comes there is scarcely any hope for the American dream. If the people are denied participation in it, by their very presence they will wreck it. And if that happens it is a very grave moment for the West.
– New York Times, March 7, 1965.

Buckley's response was conciliatory. It could even be said that he agreed with many of Baldwin's comments. His argument was not against the goals, but the means. He was not trying to deny the rights of black Americans, but he was trying to avert the kind of social unrest that might jeopardize the very system that, in his view, would deliver hope and prosperity to black Americans. Buckley feared, not without reason, that the aggressive push for civil rights would lead to confrontation, instability, violence and tragedy, and in the process derail the natural evolution of sensibilities that, over time, would strip away the vestiges of racism.
 
Now, in this respect, he was too idealistic. While Buckley kept company with men and women of good will, even as a product of southern parents he did not seem to wholly appreciate the depth of hatred that mobilized those who encouraged massive resistance against federal commands that schools desegregate and blacks be allowed to openly participate in normal social life.
 
Buckley was trying to make a point, however valid, that might have seemed overstated to those faced with hundreds of years of violence and racism – don't endanger the very system that will deliver you to freedom. The system that creates jobs, that fosters education, that insists on responsibility and accountability – this is a system that people of all races and backgrounds must embrace if they are going to live positive, responsible lives. He also believed that the intrusion of federal power into these issues compromised the capacity of local government to navigate their own parameters, in their own traditions, within a workable framework.
 
The flaws of America were not unique to America, he argued, and he reminded his audience pointedly that far more people had died as a result of hostile British/Irish relations than at the hands of racists in the United States. In this formulation, Buckley was not wholly convincing. After all, the violence endured by blacks was not limited to the Jim Crow or Reconstruction eras in American history. The slave trade and the practice of slavery for over 300 years led to the deaths of uncountable tens of thousands of Africans and African-Americans. However, Buckley tried to put the issue in historical context. As he himself would observe, human nature can be difficult. You will not tame the appetite for violence or hatred by destroying the very systems created to contain and control those appetites.

You cannot go to any university in the United States in which practically every other problem of public policy is not pre-empted by the primary concern for the Negro. I challenge you to name me another civilization in the history of the world in which the problems of the minority, which had been showing considerable material and political advancement, are as much a subject of concern as in the United States.

He added:

Americans are not willing, as a result of Mr. Baldwin's aspirations, to say that the whole American proposition was an unfortunate experiment. They are not willing to say that because we have not accelerated Negro progress faster, we are going to desert the constitutional system, the idea of the rule of law, the idea of individual rights of the American citizen, that we are going to burn all the Bibles, burn our books, that we want to reject the our entire Judaeo-Christian civilization because of the continued persistence of the kind of evil that has been so eloquently described by Mr. Baldwin.

Buckley went on: "There is no instant cure for the race problem in America. Anyone who tells you that there is a quick solution is a charlatan and ultimately a boring man – a boring man because he is then speaking in the kind of abstractions which do not relate to human experience."
 
And then Buckley set up the great debate that still rages today: how would blacks best integrate themselves into American society as they wait for the American system to accommodate them? He referenced the fact that the number of black doctors in America has remained stagnant over the previous three generations, referring to the now famous book, Beyond the Melting Pot by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moniyhan.
 
And here Buckley begins to win the broader debate, not because he was right about the civil rights movement, but because he understood intuitively that the movement underway was only the first step toward full African-American empowerment. That empowerment would not be assisted by treating the law cavalierly, by walking away from traditional responsibilities or even by agitating endlessly for the vote, political power being – in his view – only a partial means to an end. (And let us say that Buckley while eccentric in his notion that people should be reasonably educated to vote, was not directing this concern against African-Americans – it was an elitist, republican concern, not a racist one.)
 
Even so, Buckley knew the day would not be his.

Baldwin was considered, among intellectuals, to be the prophet, standing before even Martin Luther King, Jr. His position was far more radical than King's. To begin with he was a professed atheist, unlike the Baptist minister who led the political fight in America. And then there was a brooding moroseness in Baldwin's position that was darkly attractive to young Englishmen with large appetites to deplore the United States.
– On the Firing Line, pgs. 52-53.

When the vote was returned, Buckley got smashed. As the New York Times reported, Baldwin carried the day 544 to 164. (Interestingly, Baldwin would sue the Times for publishing the debate without permission. He contacted Buckley and asked him to join in the suit, but Buckley declined after obtaining a guarantee from the Times that it would not happen again.)
 
Despite losing the debate rather handily, Buckley was not deterred. Throughout the 1960s, he would continue to argue that both Baldwin and King had gotten it wrong. In fact, Baldwin himself would argue that King's movement had run out of steam, as early as 1963. When Baldwin and Buckley continued their jousting on David Susskind's Open Air show, Baldwin would complain about Buckley's response to his position. Buckley wrote in a column about this issue.

When Mr. Baldwin says that the lot of the Negroes could not be worse, one necessarily reacts in either of two ways. He is correct – things couldn't be worse. Or he is engaging in hyperbole; in which case one must ask whether it is useful to the cause of a proper equality to engage in such hyperbole. I conclude, as regards the former, that things could very easily be worse for the Negroes than they are now. Worse, for instance, if the overwhelming majority of the opinion leaders of this country cared not at all about the plight of the Negroes, which manifestly is not the case.
– As reprinted in On the Firing Line, pages 54-55.

Likewise, in another column, Buckley would revisit his arguments with Baldwin but direct them at Martin Luther King.

The realization has dawned that all those legislative enactments calculated to produce equality before the law were not enough to reify the heavenly kingdom. Indeed and perversely, it sometimes seemed as if the greater the effort to integrate, to dispense welfare, the less that was accomplished.
– The Jeweler's Eye, page 118.

Clearly, at this time (1967), Buckley was increasingly concerned about the agitation taking place on America's streets. Riots had erupted across the country – in places like Watts and Harlem, not to mention on college campuses. This might explain the less generous tone in the column, which concluded by suggesting that those who took to the streets to provoke confrontation would be "zestfully repressed," and "quite properly, in the name of social justice."
 
Though Buckley to my knowledge never repudiated this particular comment, it is one he might have regretted, not because of the point he is making, but because of the way it was made – in a tone that failed to appreciate the frustrations of blacks still trying to be accepted in greater American society as equal economic and political participants. But Buckley did not oppose lawful resistance on the part of blacks. For example, he supported blacks boycotting businesses that discriminated against them. Moreover, one need only watch his Firing Line interviews with the segregationists George Wallace and Leander Perez to appreciate that Buckley was as repulsed by the white supremacists as he was by their opponents who were committed to violence or confrontation on America's streets.
 
In 1970, Robert Scheer conducted an interview with Buckley that appeared in Playboy magazine in which he asked about the civil rights movement. He first pushed Buckley to endorse it. Buckley suggested that the first great leap forward for blacks occurred with the emancipation of the slaves. The next step, he argued, was to value blacks based on individual achievement, not racial or identity politics. Did Buckley then conclude that the civil rights movement had retarded black emancipation? Buckley parsed his answer carefully.

The very idea of "Freedom Now" was an invitation to frustration.  Now means something or it means nothing. When months and then years went by and the kind of dream that Martin Luther King spoke about in 1963 in Washington didn't come true, a totally predictable frustration set in. It is one thing to engage in great ventures in amelioration; it is another to engage in great ventures in utopianism.

Then followed an exchange that demonstrated Buckley's skill at critiquing unchallenged assumptions that have solidified into dogma.
 
Playboy: Couldn't it be argued that the career of Martin Luther King – even if it didn't create freedom – inspired a sense of dignity in the masses of black people.
 
Buckley: It could. It could also be argued that the dignity was already there. What Dr. King inspired was more nearly self-assertion, which sometimes is and sometimes isn't the same as dignity.
 
Playboy: Your belief that black Americans had dignity before the appearance of King strikes us as less important than the fact that million of blacks themselves didn't think so.
 
Buckley: Look. There was anti-black discrimination pre-King. There is anti-black discrimination post-King. If dignity is something that comes to you only after you have succeeded in putting an end to discrimination, then the blacks didn't have it then and don't have it now. If dignity is something that comes to you by transcending discrimination, then I say they had it then even as they have it now.
 
A critic might suggest that Buckley was trying to pacify the passions of blacks and liberals struggling to overturn an evil system; I would suggest that Buckley was engaged in an attempt to manage expectations. The frustrations that had exploded on America's streets might well alienate the black community and lock them in a perpetual state of anger and demoralization which, in turn, would result in cycles of self-destruction. Buckley is not blaming the victim – but he is asking the victim to focus on more than the immediate gratification of expressing anger in the face of injustices.
 
Buckley failed to comprehend at this point that the civil rights movement would move the barometer with respect to white society's tolerance of racism. By forcing reactionary forces to expose their own bigotry, King and even Baldwin helped America face its own entrenched biases more squarely and honestly. One can debate at what cost, and how much faster. And there is no question that the violence and discontent of the 1960s created a backlash that mobilized the "silent majority" to rally around Nixon and law and order Republicans. Conversely, ultimately it could be argued that King tempered what could have been much worse violence given the seething anger evident throughout the black community. 
 
From Baldwin's perspective, Buckley was simply out of touch with black reality. A sympathetic biographer, W. J. Weatherby, in his book Artist on Fire, suggested that Baldwin was impatient with Buckley's attempts at fine distinctions. When Black Power radicals began to challenge moderates such as King and Roy Wilkins, "Buckley wrote that the cataract of contempt for America had been foreshadowed by James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time. Baldwin dismissed this as 'CIA rhetoric'" — (apparently a reference to Buckley's brief employment with the CIA in Mexico as a young man) – "and described Buckley as a 'right-wing James Bond who doesn't know anything about American black life. He is merely a witness for affluent conservative white America.'" (Artist on Fire, p. 313).
 
Yet, Buckley's interest in finding a humane middle ground between white reactionaries and black militants seems sincere. He interviewed on Firing Line Floyd McKissick, Eldridge Cleaver, Jesse Jackson and other civil rights leaders of various perspectives. He wrote once that one did not have to live on the streets of Harlem to appreciate the challenges of black America, he simply had to read Claude Brown's book, Manchild in a Promised Land. His own sensitivity to the issues in play had to have been affected by the agitation he experienced on his own staff at National Review. Garry Wills, in his book, Confessions of a Conservative, would cite the civil rights issue as one of the critical reasons he broke with Buckley and the magazine, and for many years this departure troubled Buckley.
 
And of course Buckley could not, with all his articulate appeals for patience and calm, reduce the temperature of the 1960s even among the intellectual and literary class, as was obviously clear from the tone of Baldwin's passionate tract, The Fire Next Time. Blacks had run out of patience, Baldwin argued, and he cited World War II and the demeaning experiences of serving with racist whites as part of the reason. And so more and more young blacks raised in a Christian nation were embracing a new, radical vision.

God is black. All black men belong to Islam; they have chosen. And Islam shall rule the world. The dream, the sentiment is old; only the color is new. And it is this dream, this sweet possibility, that thousands of oppressed black men and women in this country now carry away with them after the Muslim minister has spoken, through the dark, noisome ghetto streets, into the hovels where so many have perished. The white God has not delivered them; perhaps the black God will.

At it turns out, neither the white nor black "God" would deliver on the promises so many sought to have fulfilled. Malcolm X would be gunned down by Black Muslims. Black Panthers would unleash murder on the streets of America and white police would respond in kind with violence and contempt. In Memphis, Martin Luther King, there to help settle a garbage strike, would be shot down and killed – and riots erupted across the land, driving many to truly fear that America was about to break.

In the midst of all this mayhem and fear, Buckley, it seems to me, was prescient about the challenges African-Americans would face if anger and alienation became culturally entrenched. Violence and protest, whatever the motivation, could not educate people or give them the skills to thrive in a competitive world. The cottage industry of protest and confrontation would not – ultimately — prove a path to true empowerment.
 
Perhaps Buckley's most eloquent plea on behalf of his own country with respect to racial issues that rocked the nation throughout the 1960s was his speech, "Did You Kill Martin Luther King?" The speech was delivered on April 19, 1968, in what must have been a highly charged atmosphere at a Washington, D.C. gathering of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. It had been barely two weeks since King was gunned down. The nation was still reeling.
 
Buckley tried to reason through emotions of the tragedy. He resisted the notion that the murder of King, by a lone gunman, justified Julian Bond, for example, pronouncing the American dream dead. The day after King was killed, Buckley and Bond had debated at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Bond was beside himself, Buckley told the editors. America had forfeited all claims – "Any pretensions that we have to justice. And that we have to the rule of law. Any that we have to equality, compassion, mutual esteem, love. The audience cheered him. The young audience sought to atone for the crime against Martin Luther King – once again for reasons both pathological and sublime . . ."
 
Buckley continued:

I asked the audience of six thousand people at Vanderbilt University whether they were representative of America.  Were there rich men in the audience? Poor men? Old, young? Southerners, Easterners, Midwesterners. Catholics, Protestants, Jews? College graduates, high-school drop-outs? Yes; yes; yes; yes . . . All right then, raise your hands, those of you who consider yourselves implicated in the assassination of Martin Luther King . . . Me, I say this: that more significant by far than the ghastly murders of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, acts committed by isolatable and isolated men – more significant by far is the spontaneous, universal grief of a community which in fact considers itself aggrieved. That is the salient datum in America: not that we bred the aberrant assassins of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, but that we bred the most widely shared and the most intensely felt sense of grief: such grief over the loss of Mr. Kennedy and Mr. King as is felt over the loss of one's own sons.
– Let Us Talk of Many Things, p. 122.

Buckley is fighting for the best America, not the America that resisted civil rights, but the America that condemned violence and murder; not the America that spawned the rare assassin, but the America that reacted with collective grief to the crimes in question (unlike in the Soviet Union, where millions simply disappeared without any concern into the Gulags). Emotion and anger are understandable, Buckley was saying, but they are not the soil from which long-term growth and advancement can sprout.
 
Still, in the heat of all the issues and occurrences that were ongoing, National Review and Buckley uttered regrettable words, most notably these comments, which appeared in the magazine after the murder of four children in the Birmingham bombing in 1963.

Let us gently say the fiend who set off the bomb does not have the sympathy of the white population in the South; in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur – of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro. And let it be said that the convulsions that go on, and are bound to continue, have resulted from revolutionary assaults on the status quo, and a contempt for the law, which are traceable to the Supreme Court's manifest contempt for the settled traditions of Constitutional practice. Certainly it now appears that Birmingham's Negroes will never be content so long as the white population is free to be free.

Unquestionably, NR was putting the emphasis in the wrong place – on the concerns of whites rather than the suffering of blacks long reduced to second class citizenship. It is clear as well that in the heat of the moment, NR resorted – without evidence – to the sort of paranoid conspiracy all too common in America today (9/11, Katrina, OJ, etc.) But to interpret this commentary as racist in the George Wallace sense of that term is a stretch. Sam Tanenhaus, who is working on a Buckley biography, has reported that Buckley cried when he heard about the murders of the children.
 
Nor is it clear that Baldwin, for all his eloquence, ever effectively countered Buckley's argument that to articulate the suffering of blacks was not the same as mapping a constructive course out of that suffering to full self-empowerment. While King and those who supported him gave birth to the child of black independence, the next generations of liberal leadership have not proven as adept at nurturing that child to full health and maturity.
 
Can anyone look at the state of black America today and at America generally and argue that Buckley was wrong on this count? With millions of children born out of wedlock, with millions of blacks locked in poverty in cities run by African-Americans, with entire generations of black men being imprisoned or murdered in gang- or drug-related violence, it would be hard indeed to argue that the civil rights movement, as it evolved after King, has been successful in mitigating the critical issues that Buckley raised in his exchanges with Baldwin and other leading liberal lights. Precisely because he did not feel the pain that Baldwin rightly addressed, Buckley could see past that pain to the larger issues that would haunt American blacks if civil rights and personal empowerment were not properly framed.
 
Today, we might well be on the verge of having our first African-American president. Blacks hold power in many major American cities. They are successful in entertainment, business and sports.  Many of the most popular icons in our nation are people of color – Tiger Woods, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey. Yet, in cities across this nation, it has been the abandonment of individual responsibility that has left generations of people poor, ignorant and self-destructive. That these problems also impact white Americans only underscores the truth of what Buckley and later Moynihan, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Cosby, and many others would contend: there is no easy road to empowerment, but it begins with functional families and personal accountability. It is not a sexy message, but it is nevertheless true.
 
Thus, what happened to the civil rights movement is a tragedy on two fronts. First, white racists drove many blacks toward violence and separation. Then, white liberals, by nursing the pathologies of alienation and conspiracy helped trap millions of blacks in dependency.  The National Urban League's State of Black America report is long on racial disparities, but short on innovative solutions for addressing them. Even as black leadership has emerged in virtually every major city in the nation, the black community struggles to overcome the sense of alienation fostered, in my view, by the very people who claim to help them.  Consequently, we see many in the black community celebrate the exoneration of O. J. Simpson, as if he were a hero; we witness charlatans emerging as "legitimate" voices of black concerns; we see respectable and talented blacks like Clarence Thomas, Condileezza Rice and Colin Powell denigrated for standing apart from victim politics; we hear baseless charges of conspiracy tossed around as recklessly as NR made its inflammatory charge in the early 1960s.

All the while, the Democratic Party has flamed these attitudes because its own political fortunes are entwined with keeping blacks in a state of dependency. Even in cities that are governed by Democrats and blacks, failures in education, government and emergency response are somehow laid at the feet of a white power structure. Meanwhile, young blacks are exposed relentlessly to the Hip Hop culture of violence, sex and drugs – a culture that nurses grievances and glorifies destructive behaviors that cripple an already vulnerable black underclass. I would be so bold as to paraphrase Ms. Clinton's notorious statement a while back: it is not conservatives and Republicans who are the new plantation owners, but rather entertainment and political elites who make their fortunes capitalizing on people's despair and hopelessness, much of it manufactured for political or economic gain. Their messages are harmful, demoralizing and largely false, but they work in pockets of African-American culture where young people are brainwashed with the same relentless efficiency as Muslim children in the Middle East.
 
Has the political landscape changed enough to allow Republicans to aggressively seek out African-American votes without alienating white voters who, while not overtly racist, might consider political efforts directed at blacks as a form of pandering? Will Senator Obama's riveting campaign, for all its upside, further delay a message that needs to be delivered, unless Obama himself is willing to deliver it? After all, not even a black president can wave a magic wand and transform the dysfunctional cultures that have led to so much suffering for segments of our nation. 
 
That Bill Buckley foresaw much of this two generations ago underscores how perceptive he was about these critical issues. Certainly, he evoked controversy and got things wrong, but he was surely right to suggest that true empowerment could not be achieved through political gestures or symbolism alone. His skepticism about the civil rights movement may have been overstated, but his rejection of Baldwin's uncompromising view of American society as irredeemable was not; for this belief, increasingly and obviously untrue, invites self-fulfilling defeat and leads to alienation and despair for millions of African-Americans, young and old, who deserve to breathe the rich oxygen of hope only a free society can offer.