The Infernal Triangle: An Implausible Mr. Buckley

It’s a funny thing, this sideline of mine as a talking head in history documentaries. The work can be incredibly fulfilling. (Like when, explaining how a majority of Americans said the students shot dead at Kent State had it coming, often with lusty relish, I almost cried.) It can be fun, especially when the person in line to sit for the cameras after you is Henry Rollins, or the guy whose arrest set off the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.

But it is also hard work, preparing, sitting still while they set up the shot—that can take as long as an hour—then racking your brain to boil down your points to elegant sound bites, in the hopes you might win more screen time. So it’s frustrating when the thing finally comes out and … well, it kind of sucks.

I had to wait 30 months after my interview for the American Masters documentary The Incomparable Mr. Buckley before it came out last Friday. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy some of what I saw; Newsday called it “highly watchable,” and it is. (Hell, watching the man navigate a steep slope of moguls on skinny, stiff 1970s skis was almost worth the time alone.) My frustration is that this exact same program could have come out in 1996—well before the movement Buckley is said to have founded ended up producing Donald Trump. Many dedicated historians have done serious work during the Trump era uncovering facts that have radically revised the scholarly understanding of William F. Buckley and his work. That new scholarship suggests that Trump’s rise was not a reversal of what Buckley was up to, but in many ways, its apotheosis. This, the producers determinedly contrived to ignore.

I SAT IN PRODUCER/DIRECTOR BARAK GOODMAN’S INTERVIEW CHAIR in a sumptuous apartment in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, stocked with gorgeous African traditional art, on a rainy fall day in 2021. I remember the details clearly, because it was a notably pleasant experience. I led Goodman through the emerging scholarly consensus in short, punchy sound bites, as I have trained myself to do. He seemed to take it all in with respect and an open mind. An exhausting but gratifying day, even if it ended up being too rainy to go fishing afterward in Lincoln Park’s South Lagoon.

The story I told echoed what I set down both in a 2017 New York Times Magazine essay, and in a piece I co-authored in the spring of 2021 in The New Republic with historian Edward H. Miller, biographer of John Birch Society founder Robert Welch. The old consensus, as I wrote in that 2017 piece, was that, pre-Buckley, “conservatives had become a scattered and obscure remnant, vanquished by the New Deal and the apparent reality that, as the critic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950, liberalism was ‘not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.’” And then came National Review, founded in 1955 with the aim of articulating, as Buckley put it, “a position on world affairs which a conservative candidate can adhere to without fear of intellectual embarrassment or political surrealism.” There, he and his cohort “fused the diverse schools of conservative thinking—traditionalist philosophers, militant anti-Communists, libertarian economists—into a coherent ideology, one that eventually came to dominate American politics.” Then, Buckley purged the lunatic conspiracists of the John Birch Society and the antisemites, which was what finally made conservatism ready for its mainstream success.

After establishing that standard interpretation, I guided Goodman point by point through what we now understand about how misleading it is.

Buckley, a former CIA operative, was sedulously playing a double game. Historian Joseph Fronczak—in no less than the field’s journal of record, The Journal of American History—has documented the complicated story of Buckley’s long relationship with one of his biggest early influences, the American fascist Merwin K. Hart. Hart’s influence on Buckley is acknowledged in the documentary, as if a youthful misadventure—but not that Buckley explicitly named him as the kind of figure whose name would be kept out of his new magazine, the better to spare the politicians he hoped to influence any fear of intellectual embarrassment.

Then there are all those conspiracy-spouting Birchers Buckley supposedly “purged.” Historian Matthew Dallek has shown it to be a myth. Princeton’s David Austin Walsh argues the Buckleyites and Birchers are more accurately understood as part of a “popular front.” John Huntington calls the far right—not Buckley—the movement’s “vanguard.” After all, it was the Birchers who pioneered the use of cultural wedge issues like abortion as recruitment tools; no modern conservatism without that. And according to the work of Jeff Roche, it was Birch-style conspiracists who built and grew the modern Republican Party in the crucial state of Texas, a pattern I’ve noticed in other states as well.

“Without William Buckley,” a talking head in the PBS documentary tells us early on, “conservatism, as we understand it, would never have happened.” But if he had actually accomplished what the show says he did—purged its fringe, made conservatism respectable—conservatism as we would have understood it would not have happened, either.

THE SHOW ENDS WITH IMAGES OF DONALD TRUMP SPEWING HATRED and January 6th rioters throwing metal barriers at cops. This, we are to understand, is the direct antithesis of what Buckley had wrought: the reason, really, he is a figure worth paying particular attention to now in the first place. Goodman had to ignore great draughts of evidence to get there.

In my interview, I pointed him to this evidence. Another talking head told me he spent some of his own two hours in the chair doing so as well.

There’s a whole article in Politico by a Buckley hagiographer claiming Buckley supposedly “changed his mind” about the fitness of Black people for democracy. But only in the United States, it turned out. In “‘Will the Jungle Take Over?’ National Review and the Defense of Western Civilization in the Era of Civil Rights and African Decolonization,” a scholar named Jesse Curtis cited Buckley’s writing that Africans were “savages” who would be ready for self-government “when they stopped eating each other.” My co-writer Miller, the scholar of the John Birch Society, avows he never witnessed racism like that even in Robert Welch’s private papers.

Regarding his National Review confreres, according to a tidbit leaked to Spy magazine for the 1989 article “The Boys Who Would Be Buckley,” his close friend and colleague Jeffrey Hart (I sat two seats down from him at one of Buckley’s fortnightly “stag dinners”) once said at an editorial meeting, “Under a real government, Bishop Tutu”—Desmond Tutu, the Anglican priest who helped lead South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement—“would be a cake of soap.”

Historian and journalist Jeet Heer demonstrated as far back as 2015 how National Review habitually minimized the Holocaust. And any claim that Buckley forswore antisemitism was surely put to bed back in 2007 by what biographer Sam Tanenhaus learned in an interview with an unapologetic George Will, the magazine’s longtime Washington correspondent: He and Buckley agreed that a Jew could not be allowed to replace him as editor. (At the time, rumors were that Jews David Frum and David Brooks were under consideration. Sorry, Davids!)

It’s interesting how much evidence contrary to the producers’ own interpretations is right there on the screen, in their own program. Buckley is quoted at a gathering of New York City police about the thwarted 1965 voting rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama: “All of America saw the police charge at the demonstrators and the blood on the bridge. They did not see the restraint on the part of the officers and the sincere negotiations to cool the tempers.” This is disinformation on an Alex Jones level, though PBS viewers would have no way of knowing that: The fiction just hangs there without correction, like a Donald Trump interview on Fox.

We do learn that the enthusiastic response from the cops helped inspire Buckley to run for mayor of New York City. But not, say, about Buckley’s campaign proposal for a “pilot program of relocating chronic welfare cases outside the city limits.” Drug addicts, too. A Buckley position paper suggested they would be sent to “great and humane rehabilitation centers.” Critics said it sounded more like concentration camps for the poor. It also sounds like a recent idea of Donald Trump’s.

Who, it is true, said it with a lot less style and a far worse vocabulary.

DURING WATERGATE, IT CAME OUT FOR THE FIRST TIME THAT BUCKLEY had been a CIA operative in Mexico, with Watergate burglar Howard Hunt as his handler. Here, we learn that Hunt would call Buckley and unburden himself of the details of the crime, like a penitent before a priest. Thus did Buckley hear the proof, before practically anyone else, that the president of the United States was, indisputably, a criminal.

Sam Tanenhaus, who is completing a Buckley biography, speaks next: “Bill Buckley saw the Republicans had to cut themselves loose from Nixon. But somebody has to go first.” It happened that Bill Buckley had a brother who was a senator; “Buckley pulled Jim aside and said, ‘Nixon has got to resign. And you are the one who has to go out publicly and say it.’”

Cut to Sen. James Buckley behind a podium: “There is one way and one way only by which the country can be pulled out of the Watergate swamp … That act is Richard Nixon’s own voluntary resignation as President of the United States.”

Tanenhaus: “There was a colder, calculating side to Buckley … Here, he saw Nixon was bad news. They were going down. And he prided himself on not being simply a loyalist. He could say to his brother, ‘Now, Nixon’s done.’ And he was.”

I don’t know what Tanenhaus said next in his interview. That’s the thing about these exercises: You’re at the director’s mercy. I hope he went on to conclude what seems to me the obvious moral: that however Buckley himself saw it, this was no courageous act of public-spirited independence. That would have been telling the public what he knew, and letting justice take its course. Leaking to his senator brother instead, giving him the chance to appear a brave prophet in the eyes of history—loyalty to the family—was downright swampy.

But the producers seem to believe this tidbit establishes Buckley as ineluctably noble—given that it introduces a series of scenes illustrating his most impressive and charming qualities.

Here he is practicing Bach on his harpsichord (“Bill’s musicality really came out in his writing … He wanted things to be in balance.”). Thrashing out columns with superhuman speed. Launching a sideline as spy novelist. Skiing, sailing, consummating the romance of the century with high-born Pat Buckley.

(Which is followed, creepily but without comment, by Chris Buckley giggling at the recollection of mom, the only woman voyaging on the Buckley family yacht, on her knees scrubbing the toilets. The show seems to find something charming in this.)

Next comes some outright balderdash.

Reagan rises, Communism falls. A conservative talking head recalls asking, “Where do we go from here?” Another characterizes what came next as “what we now call ‘the culture wars.’” Newt Gingrich sweeps onstage, scourging Democrats like a frothing Maoist during the Cultural Revolution; Rush Limbaugh rants about feminazis. Buckley is depicted retiring from National Review, then his weekly PBS program Firing Line, appearing old and frail. This is the show’s way of suggesting William F. Buckley’s supposedly more admirable brand of conservatism has been swept aside. Viewers are to forget his avowals that John Lewis on Edmund Pettus Bridge must have had it coming, that Africans were cannibals best kept colonized.

No, our era’s is supposedly an entirely novel sort of conservatism, driven by a new sort of media—here depicted as developments Buckley had nothing to do with.

Clichés are recited: “There were 24/7 news channels, and then there’s social media, and that places a premium on clicks and on attention and on grabbing it. And some of the best ways to do that is anger and vituperation.” No place for the urbane, British-accented Buckley amid all of that.

Watch a typical Firing Line episode. They’re all on YouTube. Buckley is utterly angry and vituperative. I defy you to find a single moment when he displays an ounce of genuine curiosity toward one of his liberal guests. They’re there to be ambushed. Conservative guests were coddled. It was a template for partisan shout-fests, not an antithesis—even if it was gussied up in orotund sentences and five-dollar words.

The kind of anti-liberal hate we now hear every day was ushered into the public sphere by the way Buckley rendered it palatable to the kind of people who watch, and produce shows for, PBS. At the same time, taking Buckley’s part of conservatism and depicting it as conservatism’s origin—another myth scholars have debunked—just serves to make it harder to understand how the actual movement, especially those parts that would want nothing to do with PBS, came about.

I remember pressing this especially hard on that rainy day in 2021. I argued why it was wrong to treat Buckley’s little magazine, with its circulation in the tens of thousands, as symbol and substance of the conservative movement, instead of, say, the magazine of the biological racist and flagrantly conspiracist Willis Carto, The Spotlight, which reached a circulation high in 1981 of 315,000. (Timothy McVeigh was a fan.)

I now see how artfully the authors of The Incomparable Mr. Buckley have set themselves up to be protected from such criticism. The technique is that old familiar moral evasion of elite media discourse: “balance.” Voices flattering Buckley and voices (mildly) scourging him almost feel equalized down to the milligram.

Then, at the last possible instant, a biased thumb presses down on the scale. It belongs to our hero’s son Christopher, who, over scenes of the worst violence of January 6th, reflects on the question of what his father, who died in 2008, would have thought about Donald Trump. He uses the same quip as his father, when asked in 1965 what he would do if he found out he had just been elected mayor: “He might just have said, ‘Demand a recount!’”

Clever quips were always how William F. Buckley distracted from the ugliness of what he was trying to accomplish.

A recent book by journalist Jacob Heilbrunn cuts through that conclusion. America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance With Foreign Dictators makes the simple point that if you really want to understand what kinds of societies American conservatives want, look to the regimes they most admired abroad. In Buckley’s case, these included that of the theocratic general who overthrew Mexican democracy, whom Buckley’s father joined a counterrevolution to seek to restore, and fascist Spain. Regarding the former, we learn only that William Buckley Sr. “got caught up in a lot of revolutionary movements in Latin America, and I think that instilled in him a distaste for disorder and a fear of revolt.” The latter, The Incomparable Mr. Buckley passes over in silence.

But not the actual Mr. Buckley: not at all.

“General Franco is an authentic national hero,” he wrote in 1957. National Review’s longtime foreign affairs guru James Burnham eulogized him in 1976 as “our century’s most successful ruler.” Buckley assigned one of his brothers—not the senator—to pen one of the magazine’s two fulsome obituaries. He called Franco “a Spaniard out of the heroic annals of the nation, a giant. He will be truly mourned by Spain because with all his heart and might and soul, he loved his country, and in the vast context of Spanish history, did well by it.”

Say it plain: These were regimes where setting loose violent mobs for political ends was a normal political practice.

Why do American elites seem to so desperately need this narrative of a respectable right wing that Trump and January 6th have usurped? In the case of the Public Broadcasting Service, maybe because it turns their own complicity aside. They’ve invested a great deal in promoting this interpretation: When I did a newspaper interview about the show, not one but two publicists sat in. Publicists were also surely involved in curating the chat accompanying the show on YouTube—crafted, it certainly seems, with young and impressionable viewers in mind. One prompt: “You can read about how Buckley’s upper-class lifestyle was a formative aesthetic for conservative influencers.” It links to a nifty visual essay on preppy fashion.

And what might be the consequences of all of this? I recently gave a lecture to college students. I asked their professor how much they could be expected to know about the history of conservatism. “Put it this way,” she replied, “they probably haven’t heard of William F. Buckley.” Well, if they flipped on the telly last Friday, or Google this show in the decades to come, what they will learn is that everything would have turned out just ducky if only he could have stuck around, and that maybe, just maybe, our monstrous political era could be repaired, if only conservatism could become great again—with lots more boat shoes and crewneck sweaters, for a start.

Extra! Extra! Got Infernally Triangular questions you’d like to see answered in a future column? Send them to infernaltriangle@prospect.org.