William F. Buckley, Jr.  was arguably the most conspicuous intellectual lightning rod on critical political and intellectual issues for nearly three decades. The deeper you explore his life and the people with whom he conversed, debated and corresponded, the more you realize the remarkable reach of his enterprise.

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

Author's Note: This essay marks the conclusion of Crossing Swords: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Left.

This collection of articles, Crossing Swords: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Left, was conceived as a tribute to one of America's great public intellectuals. 

The essays have featured Buckley's exchanges with some of the top liberals and leftists of the past century, men with whom Buckley sparred, debated and — in an instance or two — feuded. By design, these essays have relied heavily on the writers' words, the goal being to give readers the pleasure of superior discourse Buckley and his opponents brought to bear as they engaged.

The series, also by design, for the most part avoided the much explored history of the conservative movement. As I tried to make clear in the introduction, Buckley's mobilization of the Right is a story that has been well told by a number of biographers, historians and memoirists. Yet, none of these treatments delved at length into his running debate with the Left on the critical issues that faced the United States in the second half of the 20^th century. Crossing Swords was an attempt to document this remarkable intellectual high wire act, not only by exploring in more depth Buckley's perspective, but by bringing into view the perspectives of his intellectual opponents.

It is my hope that this series achieved this end. There are, nevertheless, omissions that should be mentioned. To begin with, Buckley appeared on a number of talk shows hosted by prominent liberals. Some of these appearances are mentioned in these essays, but many are not. Would an exploration of his exchanges with Charlie Rose, Phil Donahue, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, Mike Wallace and David Susskind have proven worthwhile? Perhaps, but of necessity they had to be excluded because in many instances I did not have access to archival tape or transcripts.  Susskind did appear on Firing Line on one occasion, a tense discussion in which Susskind defended the "prevailing" liberal bias against conservatives in popular media culture. After arguing that most conservatives were bores, he paid this compliment to Buckley – that he was the most elegant anachronism in the nation.

While a loss in terms of entertainment value, I hope this absence will not detract seriously from the larger project. When appropriate, and where material was available, I did include parts of these discussions. For example, Susskind and Paar are mentioned at some length in the chapter on Vidal. Likewise, Buckley's exchanges with Rose, though more friendly than adversarial, helped shape some of the commentary on the evolution of Buckley's thought.

Another significant omission is Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the renowned liberal historian and political icon who was such a fixture in American political letters. This oversight, again, is the result mainly of my not having access to the substantive speeches they made when they debated one another. As far as I know, Buckley did not include in his collections the text of his debates with Schlesinger nor to my knowledge did Schlesinger document his exchanges with Buckley.

That they debated and feuded is well known and is easily gleaned from published correspondence and commentary, but this material, while interesting, is not substantive enough to sustain an extended treatment of their ideological differences or the manner in which they were presented to the public. Of course, one can make assumptions based on both men's well-known ideological and political loyalties, but I concluded that this approach would not till enough new ground to make a full-length chapter interesting.

A few observations are worth making, however. Schlesinger mentioned Buckley several times in his posthumously published diaries and it is apparent that the two men were not fond of one another. Schlesinger accused Buckley of intellectual dishonesty and even threatened to sue him when Buckley used a comment made by Schlesinger during one of their debates as a blurb on a published collection of columns, essays and correspondence.

As Buckley recounted the episode in The Jeweler's Eye, Schlesinger had, during one debate, made the comment: "Mr. Buckley has a facility for rhetoric which I envy, as well as a wit I seek clumsily and vainly to emulate." Buckley used the comments as a blurb on Rumbles Left and Right, his first collection of essays. Schlesinger was not amused, Buckley later recalled: "You would have thought it was the greatest swindle since the donation of Constantine."

Schlesinger, not known for being quick on his feet, first denied he ever made the statement and then had his lawyers contact Buckley demanding that the blurb be removed from the book, claiming use of the quote constituted a breach of Schlesinger's privacy.  Buckley found this too much. "A most interesting complaint, considering that Mr. Schlesinger's words had been uttered before an audience of 1,500 or so, before television and radio, and before members of the press and the wire services. For someone who wants what he says to be kept private . . . that's a strange way to go about it, wouldn't you say?"

When Buckley refused to remove the blurb, Schlesinger issued a statement in which he decried its use. He argued that it was uttered well before the publication of the book and that, in any case, it was intended as sarcasm. Buckley refused to back down, arguing that a writer's gifts do not, like a soufflé, collapse with the passing of a couple of years. Moreover, he told readers that Schlesinger had not meant to be sarcastic and that he would gladly refer the matter to an objective panel that could review the transcript or a recording of the comments.

Buckley was astonished at Schlesinger's lack of humor, and Schlesinger by Buckley's pluck. And the relationship certainly did not warm up. When Buckley's Firing Line team asked Schlesinger a few years later to appear on the show, Schlesinger, reportedly, refused on the ground that he did not want to increase Buckley's influence. This led to another entertaining exchange in which Buckley responded with a public letter to Schlesinger, which appeared in National Review. "I should have thought it would follow from your general convictions that a public exchange with me would diminish, rather than increase, my influence. And anyway, the general public aside, shouldn't you search out opportunities to expose yourself to my rhetoric and wit? How else will you fulfill your lifelong dream of emulating them?"

Schlesinger responded. "Dear Bill: I do not see the National Enquirer or National Review or whatever it is called; but I understand that you ran your silly letter of January 15 to me in your issue of February 10. I gather also that in neither this nor the succeeding issue did you run my reply of January 30, though it had obviously been in your hands in plenty of time. In a better world I might have hoped you would have had the elementary fairness, or guts, to provide equal time; but, alas, wrong again."

Buckley got testy in reply: "Now, suppose I had begun this letter, 'Dear Arthur, or Dear Barfer, or whatever you call yourself?' Would I do that? No; and not merely because it's childish, but because it isn't funny. The reason I did not publish your reply to my original letter is that I thought it embarrassingly feeble and it did not come to me with your permission to publish it."

Whereupon Buckley did publish the letter. A few more insults followed, with Schlesinger attacking NR for lacking wit and taste, thus the confusion with less respected publications, and Buckley replying that anyone who could confuse the two publications, well, would write the kind of history and political analysis Schlesinger did. No love was lost between the two men, one of them a stodgy academic, the other a young gadfly who enjoyed poking fun at arguably the most esteemed member of the liberal intellectual establishment.

In their later years, the two men patched over some of these differences and Schlesinger even acknowledged in later diary entries that he had come to like Buckley. They made one joint appearance on the Charlie Rose show, during which Buckley lamented Bill Clinton's endless ramblings in public and Schlesinger responded that he felt about Newt Gingrich the way Buckley felt about Clinton.

In a column written upon Schlesinger's death, Buckley, as he went about the business of trying to reconcile with past adversaries, summarized the man and his career:

I always regretted that we didn't become friends, because the thousands who succeeded in doing so found friendship with Arthur Schlesinger very rewarding. For one thing, to behold him – listen to him, observe him, read him – was to co-exist with a miracle of sorts . . . 

Schlesinger wrote serious studies, of the age not only of Jackson but also of Roosevelt and of Kennedy, for whom his enthusiasm was uncontainable. Arthur proceeded to write not one but three books on John F. Kennedy, whom he venerated. He lived with the risk entailed in following so uncritically the careers of his favorites. Professor Sidney Hook dismissed one of his Kennedy books as the work of a "court historian." Schlesinger minded the derogation not at all, so much did he cherish public controversy which cast him as maintaining the walls of the fortresses that protected his idols.

He was, I record regretfully, not very deft at close-up political infighting. I say this as the survivor of a half-dozen encounters designed, by Arthur, to kill, which failed. In one of them he hurled a sarcasm, saying of me, "He has a facility for rhetoric which I envy, as well as a wit which I seek clumsily and vainly to emulate." I thought that so amusing, I copied the words exactly on the jacket of my next book as though they were a great, generous compliment. If you see what I mean about Arthur's awkwardness in combat of this kind, he actually sued me and my publisher, drawing much attention to his careless use of sarcastic praise, and, of course, to my wit.

But we kept on bumping into each other with less than mortal exchanges, and I had to endure my wife's huge affection for him, which unhappily did not quite effect a personal rapprochement. He died in New York on February 27, after being struck by a heart attack at dinner in a restaurant, and I think back on the lunch we shared after the funeral of Murray Kempton, and of the sheer jolliness of the great and productive historian when he didn't feel that his gods were being profaned.

Murray Kempton, another great liberal icon, began as an opponent (see the Crossing Swords essay on Dwight Macdonald) but grew quite fond of Buckley despite their political disagreements. His collection of essays, Rebellions, Perversities and Main Events, is inscribed: "For William F. Buckley, genius at friendships, of the kind that passes all understanding. And for the whole army of those gone to be unforgotten and those still here to be thankful for."

Kempton nevertheless had assailed Buckley on several occasions. Not only did he write the scathing review of National Review recounted in the Macdonald essay, he also reviewed Buckley's book, Up from Liberalism, in Commentary, back when that magazine still traded under the liberal brand.

Kempton lamented as early as 1960, that Buckley, for all his gifts, generosity and seriousness, had chosen to package his political act for public consumption. He wrote: "I do not here think of those natural advantages with whose possession Buckley is most generally associated. One of these, his skill at debate, seems to me, when indulged, a serious disability, diverting him from the reality of human existence. I might equate it, as a personal danger, with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s talent for composing political speeches for his inferiors. In both cases, the exercise of a superficial skill results in contamination of private feeling by official rhetoric and a turning of public self into a caricature of private self." (Commentary, February 1960)

While Kempton credited Buckley with spearing some of liberalism's favorite superstitions, he nevertheless lamented that Buckley chose to participate in the reigning political culture which was cheapening public discourse by turning politics into a stage show that lacked any real compassion or understanding of human affairs.

Later Kempton wrote a review of Odyssey of a Friend, a collection of Whittaker Chambers letters to Buckley, in which he questioned Buckley's understanding of the great communist/anti-communist drama in which Chambers found himself a not inconsequential player. Kempton critiqued Chambers as a political and intellectual force, and concluded that he was a man prone to overstate his case and to dwell on his suffering. Buckley was naïve in his devotion to Chambers, Kempton suggested: "Buckley worshiped and did not listen; the real affection aside, the Chambers of his vision is a saint whose icon hangs in Church where his message is never read."

Kempton then concluded: "That Buckley did not understand him either is strongly suggested by Buckley's apparent deafness to any intrusion of common sense into the syllabus. Yet Chambers' most intense recollection of his time with the Hisses was of rest and domestic tranquility; and it must have been very like that with Buckley also. We are glad to find him happy here at the last even though it was the curious happiness of the man to find peace of soul and comfort of spirit in The Friend Who Does Not Understand." (RPME, p. 98)

Buckley celebrated Kempton on several occasions, but limited his criticism mainly to Kempton's complete ignorance of economics, a sure sign that his love of Kempton's literary style offset his concerns about their political differences. Thus did he begin a review of Kempton's work: "What would happen, one wonders, if the Devil should take the scales from Kempton's eyes, and let him see the world of economics? I say the Devil, because the Lord would not do so fiendish a thing. What a terrible end! His muse would dry up, and the pagan love song to humankind which he has been trilling for so many years would get all hung up under the discipline of keys, and measures, and clefs . . . Murray Kempton doesn't really understand economics."

What sealed their friendship was a shared love of language and those beautiful, orthodoxies that were summed up in Kempton's notes concerning his own funeral: "I should like my burial service to take place at the Church of St. Ignatius of Antioch and to follow closely as its record deems fit the Order of the Burial of the Dead prescribed by the 1559 Book of the Common Prayer, which can be found in my bookcase." Kempton added: "If there is to be music I should like it to be the Sanctus and Agnus Dei from the Byrd Three-Part Mass and the Purcell Funerary Verses, which will, to be sure, have been spoken elsewhere but deserve two hearings if anything in the language does."

Kempton, Buckley once wrote for TV Guide, had the habit of finding the one nugget of his opponent's argument that he found agreeable, and thus was not, actually, a compelling debater. He was, unquestionably, more adept with the pen than on stage. This did not lower him in Buckley's esteem. Buckley concluded one tribute to Kempton: "He was a great artist and a great friend."

Buckley and Christopher Hitchens, had they been of the same generation, surely would have been a fascinating pair to watch square off. Though Hitchens appeared on Firing Line on several occasions, these were not exactly intellectual duels. In one instance, Hitchens appeared once to comment on a devastating film about mass starvation in the Soviet Union. Hitchens, an anti-Stalinist of the Trotskyite variety, was not a hostile witness but a leftist prepared to acknowledge Stalin's crimes. So this appearance was not as combative as it might have been. Another episode featured Emmett Tyrell, who accused both Buckley and Hitchens of being extreme. Tyrell, note the irony, lost much of his eminence as a political commentator because of his own extreme obsession with all Clinton evils.

Hitchens and Buckley did come together a few years back to debate the 1960s on Peter Robinson's show, Uncommon Knowledge, parts of which were cited in this collection as part of the essay on Norman Mailer, but, again, it was a highly civil exchange, after which Hitchens reported his admiration for Buckley's striking acknowledgement that the Vietnam War might have been a mistake. Hitchens was reluctant to criticize Buckley, which seemed to be a measure of his respect for Buckley's contribution to language and discussion. During a show on CSPAN, Hitchens acknowledged this debt:

Mr. Buckley was incredibly good to me when he was running Firing Line, his flagship TV show. And would have me on quite often. I remember thinking with Firing Line unlike a lot of debate shows on TV, if you left that studio thinking, 'damn I wish I had made this point or made that point that way' it was your fault because no one was trying to hurry you up or shut you down or cut you off. It was very impressive. And I am very grateful to him for that style and for the style with which he mostly ran National Review. But I can't conceal that the fact that especially under his ownership NR was the worldview of the catholic right wing, not excluding General Franco and Joseph McCarthy. And I couldn't be further away from any interpretation of that kind. But . . . I don't go much for spy thrillers, but one or two of his Blackford Oakes novels amused me too.

Buckley was clearly interested in what Hitchens had to say, because I transcribed these comments for him when he expressed interest in seeing them in their entirety. Perhaps their most severe disagreements revolved around religion, though I have no knowledge that they ever confronted this matter directly. During the final Firing Line episode, a clip of Mother Teresa was shown and Buckley commented that she was saintly enough to forgive even such as Christopher Hitchens, a reference to Hitchens' hit job on the nun, The Missionary Position. Likewise, Buckley was disturbed when Hitchens went after Henry Kissinger, Buckley's close friend, accusing him of war crimes. In a column, Buckley wrote:

The latest expeditionary force against the enemy was initiated by Christopher Hitchens, a learned and resourceful moralist of exhibitionist inclinations who picks his enemies with brio and, a few years ago, undertook a book to the effect that Mother Teresa was a mountebank. The Kissinger offensive was done in Harper's magazine, and became a book. The call, no less, was to declare Henry Kissinger a war criminal and urge international courts to try him for, among other things, murder and kidnapping. That was a tall order of Hitchens, perhaps even outdoing the call to defrock Mother Teresa – but the anti-Kissinger reserves were there, anxious to serve.

Buckley concluded:

The historic view that will prevail is that he (Kissinger) was the most consistent and resourceful anti-Communist on the scene during a decade in which two presidents sought out his counsel, and the republic profited from it.

When Buckley died, Hitchens praised him generously and criticized with a caution unusual for one so typically aggressive in combat. There was in his tribute to Buckley a reverence for the man, however much a political throwback in Hitchens' view, because of his grace, style and intelligence.  Hitchens finished his essay thus:

His slightly affected distaste for modernity did not inhibit him from becoming an early star in the meretricious world of television. Having inaugurated his show in 1966, and eventually wondering how to wind it up, he closed it in 1999 thus giving it the magic lifetime (or so I suspect) of what the old hymn calls "three-and-thirty years." And he decided to go out in a blaze of tedium, with a debate on the campus of "Ole Miss" at Oxford, on the propriety or otherwise of taxing Internet commerce! I was honored to be invited and, as always, stayed up the night before to do my homework. William F. Buckley, Jr. was never solemn except or unless on purpose, and seldom if ever flippant where witty would do, and in saying this I hope I pay him the just tribute that is due to a serious man.

My personal nomination for the one great intellectual missing in Buckley's pantheon of opponents is Edward Said, one of the most influential intellectuals on the Left over the past thirty years. He transformed debate on college campuses about the Middle East and colonialism, and emerged as a leading post-modern leftist. He was also, like Buckley, a renaissance man — a concert level pianist, gifted in sports, articulate and passionate:  a debate between the two men would have been a great event. Alas, it never occurred. For whatever reason, Said never appeared on Firing Line and the two men never shared a public platform together. 

That is a shame. Said and Buckley were directly at odds on critical issues such as third world radicalism, ethnic and identity politics and even the Middle East, though Buckley, more so than most conservatives, was open-minded on the issues related to Palestinian rights. He once took George Will to task for being blindly pro-Israel, but he also made a point of distancing himself from people like Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran who would become alienated from the pro-Israel intellectual community.

I recall only one comment on Buckley by Said, a negative reference in Covering Islam because National Review publishing J.B. Kelly's anti-Arab commentary.

One thing is for certain – they would not have agreed on much beyond their love of classical music and things intellectual. One of NR's top editors, David Pryce-Jones, launched his career as a polemicist with a book, Closed Circle, that Said considered near racist in its stereotypical representation of Arab and Islamic culture.

When I wrote to Buckley to complain about NR endorsing a hit job on Said by Commentary magazine, in which it was claimed that Said exaggerated his Palestine connections, Buckley showed genuine interest in exploring the issue, but he was clearly more sympathetic to the Israeli side of the Middle East equation. It is no coincidence that he became a close friend in his final years with Norman Podhoretz, a staunch pro-Israel partisan. Still, that Buckley never dealt with Said in columns or in public appearances is an omission that any engaged student of history and politics cannot help but regret, particularly given Said's inordinate influence and his overwrought attacks on the United States during his final years as a public controversialist.

And then there is Malcolm Muggeridge, who deserves special mention not as a hostile guest but as an independent thinker who helped bring out some of Buckley's most penetrating discursive commentary. Buckley's great respect for Muggeridge is well known and is documented in On the Firing Line and Nearer My God, in his public discussions with Charlie Rose and in his own comments on Firing Line, on which Muggeridge appeared ten times.  

Buckley cherished Muggeridge's powerful spiritual presence and his great gift for articulating his faith in such a passionate and joyful way. But Muggeridge was hardly a doctrinaire conservative. If anything, he was, as he grew older, an evangelical Christian (albeit a Catholic convert) whose regret over his own licentiousness led him, on occasion, to overstate the dangers of the flesh. In one interview, Muggeridge claimed that the more austere lifestyle of Soviet Russia had led to the remarkable resurgence of Christian faith.

Buckley challenged Muggeridge, suggesting that most of us would prefer the occasional excesses of a free society to the unhealthy repression of those societies that sought to tame the appetites of its citizens through the imposition of totalitarian power. Muggeridge gave ground. He had come to both cherish but also surrender the material things that made human existence pleasurable. Buckley, hardly an aesthetic, never quite accepted Muggeridge's strict moralism, even as he embraced Muggeridge's view that the fall of the West morally could be traced to an obsessive concern with things material.

Likewise, one senses some disagreement over economics, though this is not easy to pin down. Buckley believed that free enterprise, whatever its material excesses, represented the best hope for happiness within the context of a spiritual life. Muggeridge was indifferent to such arguments. He swam against all the prevailing tides of modernity — liberalism, consumerism, materialism, sexual liberation, etc.  As a Christian writer in the tradition of C.S. Lewis and Chesterton, Muggeridge resisted political categorization. Though certainly conservative in important ways, he was as cynical of the Right as he was of the Left. Yet, he found in Buckley an independent and bright mind with whom conversation was raised to an art form. They became good friends and Buckley often said that Muggeridge was the most popular guest to ever appear on Firing Line.

If Muggeridge was the most popular guest, Harriet Pilpel was the most mysterious in one respect — Buckley had her on the show almost 20 times even though she had no independent political or intellectual stature beyond Firing Line itself. Why?

Buckley liked the lady and he perhaps overstated her abilities in his obituary tribute to her: "Mrs. Pilpel was a renowned lawyer and activist, and for all that she stressed unisex in respect of everything from bomber pilots to legislators, she could never have been mistaken for other than what she was, an intensely feminine woman of quite singular beauty. Although she was as sharp in debate as any Oxford Union killer, she managed a benevolent emanation that, I like to think after 20 years of carpet-bombing exchanges with her, genuinely reflected her character. She was a lovable woman and I loved her."

Buckley, nevertheless, could not countenance Mrs. Pilpel's support for abortion rights or the tributes paid to her at her 1991 funeral because of her advocacy of that position. "The trouble with abortion rights is abortion. It is not possible to distinguish between the two: If one defends the right to destroy the fetus, the destroyed fetus is the result of the exercise of that right."

On the general issue of women's rights, Buckley's traditional approach, while charming in its way, did not dissuade Mrs. Pilpel. In an exchange published in Vogue, August 1983, it must be said that Mrs. Pilpel might well have had the last word.

Buckley argued that "the man's world" was hardly worth the troubling of a woman's curiosity, and that a woman exercising power or authority or expertise faced pretty much the same situations as a man. He concluded that to argue that a "man's world" existed was to argue on behalf of a statistic, not reality.

Pilpel fired back: "It is not a remote statistic," she argued, that a woman earned 59 percent of a man for comparable work. Nor was it a remote statistic that by 2000 most of the people living in poverty would be women and children. "These are statements of fact that reflect serious injustice to women who work. Most of them work not because they want a career, or to express themselves, or to escape from boredom, but because their working is essential to the maintenance of their families . . . I feel certain that if Bill were to venture just a little further outside of his own world, he would know that; and knowing it would want to help, rather than play down, women's struggle for fairness and justice."

Strident advocate that she was as a lawyer and ACLU member, Mrs. Pilpel was hardly an icon of the Left, but rather a mostly friendly adversary with whom Buckley enjoyed sparring. His 1971 Firing Line debate with Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique, founder of the National Association for Women and the most famous of the feminists along with Gloria Steinem, was notable mostly because Buckley struggled to get a word in. 

Ms. Friedan summed up her attitudes early in the show thus: "If you're going to have real equality for women and participation by women in society, then there will be radical restructuring of the family! And even of architecture. And, finally, if you really confront the full implications of equality for women, there's going to be a new theology, a new politics and new art. But this is radical; this isn't reformism; this is radical change."

The debate than followed a familiar pattern – is housework work, what's wrong with traditional female roles, what about the rights of the fetus, etc. Buckley was most energetic on the issue of abortion, but generally he did not seem to exert a great deal of effort trying to dissuade the feminists. However patronizing, he seemed more amused than upset about the feminist agenda.

His debate with Germane Greer, whom Buckley called a formidable debater, went beyond women's liberation and touched on the advertising culture and what it was doing to culture in general.

Greer: There are so many questions involved. There is an advertisement on English television – I don't usually get too steamed up about advertisements as sexist. I regard them as universally depraving in their influence, but in this case the advertisement in question shows a man sitting with three women who are very harshly lit and have sort of greeny-yellow, frizzy hair and they are screaming at each other like a bunch of parrots, and it flashes back to his courtship when this woman next to him was a soft and lovely girl. And then it comes back and the thing, the motto – I can't think of the English word. I'm thinking in the wrong language. The motto is, "Some things haven't changed" or "some things are still the same," and it's his mug of stout that hasn't changed. His wife has changed for the irrevocably worse.

Now, I mean, I can see only one answer to that – which I find amazingly offensive – which is to show a lady, of relative handsomeness, sitting next to some boozy, blowsy, overblown pig of a man (laughter), drinking her dry sherry and thinking, "some things haven't changed" . . . 

Buckley: I am certainly under the impression, having watched a lot of advertising, that it's hardly misogynist in character. More often than not you see, you know, prettier girls on television commercials than you do on London streets, and under the circumstances . . . 

Greer: I don't see how that follows.

Buckley: I can't really see that . . .

Greer: Non sequitur, sir.

Buckley: Well, no, I can't see that the criticism of the advertising profession is a criticism that sustains that kind of criticism.

Greer: . . . I'm sure American advertising is the same. I'm sure it presents people with a very heightened and glossy image of a lifestyle which they don't, in fact, enjoy. I'm sure it has women going into raptures over a . . ..

Buckley: Tantalus taught us all that, right?

Greer: . . . chocolate chiffon pie and it assumes that you can attract a man by knowing how to make gravy out of a brown cube in a packet and that that will make your whole life coherent and sensible.

Buckley: Well, I think there's a lot of hyperbole in advertising, in political ideology, in life.

Greer: Hyperbole is just a nice way of saying distortion in this case.

Buckley:  Sure.

Greer: It sounds prettier, but it's really just the same.

Buckley:  But, can't you imagine people saying, at least as convincingly as you have just said, what you have said, that democratic politics is universally depraving?

Greer:  Plato said it, didn't he?

Buckley: Yes, correct. Well, Plato was not very pro-democratic.

Greer:  Well, the thing is that when you have ritual democracy, it's depraving.

Buckley: "Why speak of such acknowledged madness?" said Alcibiades.

Greer:  Oh, come, come . . . we certainly are flying high today. (Laughter).

* * *

For all the sparring, however, Buckley and Greer seemed to like each other. At one point Greer flirted with Buckley during a discussion about the relative pay they each received for interviewing with Playboy. "I might as well say that if you weren't such a good-looking fellow, you wouldn't be in the position that you're in today. You exploit it, too. You may not do it consciously.

Buckley: Well, now wait a minute…

Greer (to the audience): Don't you think he is a pretty man?

Buckley:  Well, I (laughter) – let's accept that as a hypothesis.

Greer:  I think interpersonal subjectivity proves it to be true – just as this studio is pale blue, you're a pretty man. (To the audience) Isn't that right?

Buckley: Now, you see, you're not getting automatic acquiescence.

Greer: I'm not getting any signs of anything at all. I'm wondering if you haven't given them fluoride.

* * *

Whittaker Chambers also deserves special mention here, if only because he had such an impact on Buckley early in his career. Buckley would defend Chambers for decades, publish his letters and write an eloquent tribute that still stands as one of his finest essays.

Interestingly, however, they were not ideological soulmates. In fact, they were direct opposites in a variety of critical ways. Chambers was deeply introspective, Buckley witty and funny to the point of being accused of being glib. Buckley was, by most accounts, a happy warrior on behalf of his causes, while Chambers' journeys through communism, brief homosexuality and anti-communism left him physically and mentally spent by the time he was sixty.

Chambers left the intellectual orbit of National Review and Buckley in part because he felt the magazine was disconnected from political reality. For example, Chambers believed Nixon a viable leader of the anti-communist cause and considered Joseph McCarthy a great threat. Buckley would come in Chambers' direction over time on McCarthy, but NR never completely accepted Chambers' support of Nixon.  When Chambers resigned from NR, he wrote Buckley a note expressing his feelings. To demonstrate how seriously he took the decision, he acknowledged that sending the letter had made him sick to his stomach.

Yet, they remained friends. Buckley intuitively appreciated Chambers' melancholy. Buckley was a sensitive, thoughtful person who could relate to people's spiritual and physical struggles.  And as his own energy began to wane and he began to appreciate the limits that life inevitably imposes on every man, great or not so great, Buckley would talk with Charlie Rose about Chambers and the wisdom of his counsel. Buckley, with his fine sense of history and drama, saw in Chambers a figure whose life was instructive if not wholly in sync with Buckley's own happier experiences as a popular gadfly and intellectual force.

Buckley clashed with the scientific Left as well, most notably Linus Pauling, the chemist and Nobel Laureate. Their disagreements in the early 1960s are detailed in Ted and Ben Goertzel's biography, Linus Pauling: A Life in Science and Politics.

Pauling had been singled out by NR because of his advocacy of leftist and Soviet causes as being sympathetic to communism. Pauling protested and eventually filed suit on the grounds that NR's claims would harm his reputation and endanger his livelihood. Buckley refused to budge. Other publishers "may have been too pusillanimous to fight back against what some will view as a brazen attempt at intimidation of the free press by one of the nation's leading fellow travelers" — not Buckley. (LP, p. 184)

Pauling continued to garner lucrative fees on the lecture circuit and in his academic career as a scientist. He could prove no material harm. Moreover, Judge Silverman, who reviewed the case, could find no evidence of malice on the part of National Review whose editors had no personal relationship with Pauling. The suit was dismissed. Were Buckley or Congressional investigators wrong to make such inflammatory accusations at one of the nation's most revered scientists?

Perhaps not.

". . . if one assumes the mind set of the committee members or National Review, one can see how they might have been confused. Pauling's views on many issues were strongly anti-American. He advocated friendship and reconciliation with the Soviet Union at a time when the Soviets were, in fact, an authoritarian dictatorship and threatening military power. Pauling's political views during this period were those of a New Left radical, very much in tune with the positions expressed by groups such as Students for a Democratic Society." (LP, p. 189)

This from friendly biographers, who conceded that Pauling's political thought was not on par with his scientific abilities. Still, the issue surfaced again in the mid 1970s, when the Boston Globe wrote a laudatory editorial on Pauling upon his receiving the Medal of Science from President Ford. The Globe suggested the honor would have been bestowed earlier but for enemies on the Right, and named Buckley as one of those who obstructed the deserved honor.

Buckley responded in his column and recounted Pauling's activities on behalf of the Soviet Union, including strident attacks on Presidents Truman and Kennedy. Buckley noted that a number of Senators, publications and pundits shared NR's views on the matter. He concluded: "If President Ford gives William Shockley one of those Science Medals, will the Globe write that this vindicates his genetic theses?" (A Hymnal, the Controversial Arts, pps.161-163)

Then there is the case of the celebrated writer on science, Martin Gardner, who entitled one of his books, From the Wandering Jew to William F. Buckley, Jr. Gardner, not unlike Ayn Rand, could not quite fathom how a man of Buckley's intelligence and sophistication could remain a believing Christian. In a review of Nearer My God, Gardner goes on at some length making the traditional scientific case against Buckley's religious convictions even as he confessed his admiration for Buckley, Chesterton and other writers of faith.

This was the one area where Buckley did not trifle. He took his faith seriously and resented Gardner's public attempt to debunk it. Gardner included Buckley's reply to the review in the book. "Gardner says that I have made 'little effort to think through the implications of [my] beliefs.' What can he mean by this? The implications of my beliefs can't go further than that some people go to heaven and some people go to hell. And if I have not thought through these implications – or the beliefs from which they derive – then neither has any Christian, layman or scholar or cleric, who recites the Nicean creed. If that is the case, that all Christians are insouciant about the meaning of their faith – the consequences are absolutely enormous." (Gardner, p. 346)

Buckley's point is simple. Faith is faith – it cannot be subjected to the sort of experimentation and empirical testing that is common in science, and consequently Gardner's expectation that it should failed to grasp the mystery of faith as practiced by believing religious adherents.

I might as well conclude by mentioning Victor S. Navasky, the publisher of The Nation magazine, who in his memoir, A Matter of Opinion, devotes several pages to Buckley's enterprise of launching and running National Review. (It is worth mentioning, too, that Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, wrote a nice tribute to Buckley in Newsweek upon his death even as she lamented his political views.)

Navasky, who was documenting the political and business history of The Nation, took some pleasure in observing that National Review, even under the leadership of the pro-free enterprise Buckley, has never managed to turn a profit.

As I write (the book appeared in 2005), for what it's worth, National Review's circulation is 154,800 and its deficit, according to Buckley's last funding appeal, was substantial. Even with a compassionate conservative in the White House, although the country did better than break even under his predecessor, conservative economists project a deficit in the hundreds of billions for years to come. (Navasky, p. 76)

Beyond trying to score a smug political point, Navasky conceded that The Nation always ran a deficit as well, this being the plight of opinion journals that do not have a large advertising base. His review of NR finances seems to be focused on making the essentially esoteric point that professional conservatives, who are faithful to free enterprise ideas, are bound by the same publishing dynamics as leftists who run opinion journals.

All of this simply underscores that Buckley was arguably the most conspicuous intellectual lightning rod on critical political and intellectual issues for nearly three decades. The deeper you explore his life and the people with whom he conversed, debated and corresponded, the more you realize the remarkable reach of his enterprise. He might not be remembered for a single book or tome in which he summed up the wisdom of the ages, but he wrote and spoke with eloquence, delivered a one liner like a gifted stand up comic, treated the vast majority of his opponents with grace and generosity; and in doing all of this, shaped public discourse in this nation for nearly a half century.

I must end with this moralistic sounding pronouncement. Bill Buckley not only was a great writer, political commentator and intellectual leader, he was also, as friend Andy Rooney put it, a good guy. This was – upon his death – observed almost unanimously across the political spectrum. From presidents to network anchors to interns at National Review, countless people recalled the small kindnesses and grand gestures of a great man who always seemed to bring joy to his work and play.

This explains why so many across the political spectrum found him a compelling human being and why the cause around which he rallied so many people, after years of toil, fun and debate, at last became ascendant.