William F. Buckley Jr., the godfather of conservatism, in person and on the phone
In 1995 I met Buckley when he came to Pittsburgh. In late 2007, three months before he died, I interviewed him about the modern conservative revolution he started in the 1950s.
Bill Buckley in person, 1995
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
September 19, 1995
When you go to interview the Godfather of Conservatism, you better take your tape recorder.
A poli-sci degree and a good dictionary wouldn't hurt, either, because William F. Buckley Jr. -- the conservative author, columnist, speaker and owner/operator/founder of the influential political think magazine National Review -- still knows how to throw those 10-dollar words around like nobody else.
Words like "epistemological" and "dispositive" and "synecdoche" still pepper his conversation, naturally, the way "likes" and "ums" fall from the mouths of the rest of us.
Buckley was in Pittsburgh last night to speak to a sold-out crowd of 1,700 at the Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland, where he was the opening attraction for the 1995 Three Rivers Lecture Series.
But at 3:30 yesterday afternoon Buckley was Downtown, ensconced in his room at the Pittsburgh Doubletree Hotel.
Greeting his interrogator at his doorway, Buckley, thick-chested and robust at 69, looked nothing like the imperious right-wing intellectual he has played for decades on his PBS talk show ''Firing Line." But that voice, those words, that haughty, halting, rhythmic speech pattern ... .
Gracious, pleasant, friendly, downright charming -- Buckley insisted on taking his visitor's raincoat and hanging it in the closet.
Like the preppy beached sailboater he is, he was rumpled, wrinkled and looking maximum casual in cuffless Docker's-like cotton pants, brown Gore-Tex hiking shoes and a pale pink button-down shirt with a WFB monogram.
In his hotel room he had already deployed the superweapon of the modern traveling celebrity intellectual -- the laptop computer (with built-in printer). It was warmed up and ready for the syndicated newspaper column he had to bang out before he showed up at The Carnegie.
Buckley, a guy who regularly eats dinner with past and future presidents, had been invited by The Carnegie to speak, broadly, about the subject of writing. More narrowly, he was promoting his new book, "Brothers No More," his 11th work of fiction to go along with his political books like "Up From Liberalism" and "In Search of Anti-Semitism."
In "Brothers" he created a fictitious and cowardly grandson of FDR. That earned him a thrashing in The New York Times Book Review for writing an ''anti-FDR screed," he said, adding that the charge is without merit. It has been reviewed more favorably in the Washington Post, Baltimore Sun and the Washington Times.
"Brothers" is his first novel that has nothing to do with spies, the CIA and the Cold War, subjects that he and John Le Carre both know no longer sell books. But the tireless anti-communist and Hall of Fame Cold War Warrior doesn't miss the Commie Menace.
"Strategically, it was a useful ideological and literary target," he explains, adding that "nobody cheered louder than I did when it was defeated."
When Buckley launched National Review in 1955, conservatives were even rarer than communists are today.
For years, he was our token media conservative. Meanwhile, his magazine attracted the conservative/libertarian intellectual remnant in America, keeping their ideas alive, nurturing and growing them and, as Ronald Reagan himself once pronounced, ultimately making the Reagan-Gingrich Revolution possible.
Saving conservatism from the New Deal, however, is easier to explain than Buckley's definition of what conservatism is.
"Conservatism is a paradigm of essences toward which the phenomenology of the world is in continuing approximation," he says, quoting from long-dead but revered writer Richard Weaver.
The Godfather laughs devilishly, but then explains what all that philosophical argot means -- sort of.
"There's a lot of thought given there. It is a paradigm. It is Platonic in the sense that it has ideals, goals. The phenomenology of the world, which is Aristotelian, attempts to reach that paradigm but never does. It's in continuing approximation."
Gotcha, Bill. Something about the Real Newt not being the Ideal Newt, right?
"It's a mouthful," admitted Buckley, stretched leisurely on the couch.
''But it's not a laugh. In practical matters, conservatism is always defined in terms of the perspective. In the Soviet Union, we talked about how the conservatives in Moscow wanted to bring about more Stalinism."
The definition of liberalism has the same problem -- it's always changing.
''We all know what liberalism used to mean," Buckley said, speaking mostly of himself. "Woodrow Wilson -- this is in 1891 -- said, 'Liberalism is the history of man's efforts to restrain the growth of government,' ha, ha, ha."
The day-to-day definition of a conservative has come a long way since Buckley was an economics major at Yale in the late 1940s. Then, he says, "a conservative was a cigar-smoking capitalist who tried to prevent people from making a decent living."
Now, thanks to him and his ideological grandchildren, conservatives have taken over America and liberals are running for the hills. "It's going to be a while before they (conservatives) take the academy back," he says. "They're the last fortresses of the left-liberal orthodoxy."
Otherwise, he thinks the big battle of ideas has been won. Communism and socialism are dead, he says, showing his libertarian streak, but "what infected the Soviet system is still very much around -- the impulse to order other people's lives and the impulse to socialize activity."
Is he comfortable with the current state of conservatism, which is often criticized for a streak of meanspiritedness? "I'm comfortable with the paradigm of essences, not with the phenomenology," he says, laughing again.
Gotcha, Bill.
Who do you think will be the next President in 1996?
"That's a bad question to ask me. I never answer it for one reason -- I have no feel for these things. Almost nothing that happens ever surprises me.
"If for a half an hour you were to tell me Rick Santorum is going to be the next nominee, I'd probably walk out of here saying he's going to be the next nominee."
Then who do you think should be the next president? "Phil Gramm. He comes closer to my paradigm of essences."
What about Colin Powell?
"Frankly, I think it's become a bore. We all know, we all applaud, we all love what he has accomplished. But we're talking about, 'Do we want him as president of the United States?' "
"Other than these feeble formulae he comes up with, 'I'm in favor of affirmative action but I'm not in favor of quotas' ... It becomes kind of tedious. I'm going to wait until he says something interesting."
What about President Clinton?
"I think he's a brilliant politician, and that he has no interesting ideas on any subject. The only time he's interesting is when he's making a political maneuver."
Bill Buckley on the phone, 2007
William F. Buckley Jr., the leading political and cultural symbol of American conservatism for almost 50 years, died Feb. 27, 2008 at age 82 at his home in Stamford, Conn. He had been ill with emphysema.
Buckley, who I spoke with by telephone on Nov. 14, 2007, is universally credited with godfathering the ideological revolution that carried Ronald Reagan into the White House in 1980.
Author, lecturer, debater and host of "Firing Line" on PBS from 1966 to 1999, Buckley founded National Review magazine in 1955 and turned it into the country's leading conservative journal of opinion.
In this ‘Firing Line’ episode his guests are two very young future political stars who obviously don’t like each other, then-lefty Christopher Hitchens and conservative R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., the brash editor of American Spectator magazine. It was strange watching this 1984 program because in the next 20 years I would meet all three men. I spent a day with Tyrrell in LA and wrote this as a freelancer for the LA Times.
Buckley retired as National Review’s active editor in 1990. But his syndicated newspaper column, "On the Right," which he began in 1962, continued to appear twice a week. He also wrote 10 novels featuring CIA agent Blackford Oakes.
Despite his poor health, during our 15 minute talk about the state of conservatism, the 1991 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient was erudite, gracious and cheerful.
Q: What's become of the conservative revolution that you fathered 50-some years ago?
A: Well, all revolutions have to either keep moving or else be consolidated. Ours is a little bit of each. I think that there is less appetite now, or patience, for revolutionary dogmas of the kind that all Europe and America faced right after the world war. That is an aspect of a revolution that has been consummated. It doesn't mean that it mightn't reawaken but, in fact, it has not yet. So we can say that's what happened to that revolution -- we won.
Q: Do you feel today that that revolution peaked with Ronald Reagan?
A: Yes, I think it did. Viewed as a straight political trajectory, that, in my judgment, would be correct: It peaked in 1980.
Q: Can you give us a concise definition of conservatism?
A: Conservatism aims to maintain in working order the loyalties of the community to perceived truths and also to those truths which in their judgment have earned universal recognition.
Now this leaves room, of course, for deposition, and there is deposition -- the Civil War being the most monstrous account. But it also urges a kind of loyalty that breeds a devotion to those ideals sufficient to surmount the current crisis.
When the Soviet Union challenged America and our set of loyalties, it did so at gunpoint. It became necessary at a certain point to show them our clenched fist and advise them that we were not going to deal lightly with our primal commitment to preserve those loyalties.
That's the most general definition of conservatism.
Q: In American politics, in the day-to-day political struggle, what is conservatism? How does it manifest itself?
A: I think it manifests itself at different levels. It is more provoked by Soviet challenges than it is by challenges in trivial quarters by local school teachers. People always continue to ask themselves are they furthering the cause of conservatism by accepting this quarrel or that quarrel and inevitably we reach a situation --- especially because of the politicization of our culture --- in which it's impossible absolutely to say whether John Jones by voting Democratic is manifestly entitled to the gratitude of conservatives rather than if he had voted Republican. So there is that diffusion and the difficulty in concentrating in a few words all the ideals involved.
Much depends, of course, on the emphasis that is placed on them, so that all of that must be kept in mind. I thought it was awfully well done by Russell Kirk in his book 'What is Conservatism?,' which I thoroughly recommend.
Q: Is Russell Kirk spinning in his grave at what passes for conservatism today?
A: I don't know what you have referenced to. There's a lot of fanciful ideologizing which he would not approve of but I don't think of him as spinning in the grave as a result of particular irritations.
Q: Which politician best exemplifies conservatism in America today?
A: Well, I don't know more about that than you do. All I can say is that the people who write for National Review, year in, year out, in my judgment, are conservatives leading a useful and creative life. To mention them individually wouldn't do anything other than to distract from the search you are undertaking.
Q: Book publisher Henry Regnery once said, 'Conservatism is not a fixed and immutable body of dogma, and conservatives inherit from Burke a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the times.'
A: I agree with the last part of what you just said, but I've forgotten what the first part was.
Q: That 'conservatism is not a fixed and immutable body of dogma' --
A: I agree, I agree. It is not.
Q: Yet it does have certain tenets that can't be thrown overboard. Is that true?
A: Yeah. It is difficult to imagine a regnant conservatism which authorized random mercy killing. Or for that matter, the taking of life lightly. But there are permutations there.
Some conservatives are against capital punishment; others are not. But I think both would agree that conservatism would frown on a flippant attitude toward life which allowed capital punishment to proceed at other than a grave level of investigation.
Q: When you look at the current state of conservatism, do you see the sun rising or the sun setting?
A: We've accomplished an enormous amount historically in the last 50 years. We emerged from the Second World War gravely threatened at many levels; threatened by a kind of an attitudinal socialism, which I think we have fought through successfully; and of course by huge, direct political talent -- and a lot of tributary talent, as in Europe and so on and so forth -- over these (threats) we have prevailed.
There is no Soviet threat. There is no tidal demand for a change in government of a kind that would ignore human rights and private property rights. A lot of problems continue -- education primary among them, the allocation of resources.
But the fact of the matter is that what we have accomplished is signal, important and enduring and under those circumstances, conservatives can legitimately take some pride in what has happened.
Q: Is there any single biggest or single worst mistake that conservatives have committed in the last 20 years that you really, really wish had not happened?
A: That's an interesting question. Let me, if I may, proceed with a question and take one step at a higher level of political discourse.
Anything that seeks to propound the theory of equality other than in the eyes of God is, in my judgment, unnatural. So that any emphasis that's put on equality that defies a general intelligence makes a mistake on the altar of that equality which is injurious.
If you say, 'Give me an example of where that happened,' you would turn to such matters as required graduation in the high schools based on one's commitment to equality; that would be a mistake. There's such a variety of those, it's hard to single one out as the principal offender.
Q: The prefix 'neo' being placed in front of the word 'conservative' has given conservatism quite a different spin. Many old-time or traditional conservatives are not too happy with the idea that the United States is trying to spread democracy around the world a la Woodrow Wilson, as is going on in Iraq. Is that something conservatives can be blamed for or is that something that is not conservative in nature?
A: I think it's the latter. Conservatives can be blamed to the extent that they are thought of having acquiesced in that definition of their goal in a free society. But it has been by no means unanimous in the belief that conservatism consists in that kind of evangelistic extreme.
There are people whom I enormously admire, as perhaps you do, who take a pretty Wilsonian view about the responsibility of states like ours vis-a-vis states that simply reject learning that we consider to be primary, that's true.
But I don't think that the existence of the neoconservative movement has the effect of vitiating legitimate conservatism -- or even of putting such pressure on traditional conservatives as to feel that they are missing a great historical tide.
Some people that I very much respect, like (Weekly Standard editor) Bill Kristol, disagree with me on that, but there we are.
Q: You've said that President Bush is not a true conservative --- if that's a fair repeating of what you said -- primarily because of intervention in Iraq and his extravagant domestic spending.
A: I have distinguished in the past between somebody who 'is conservative' and somebody who is 'a conservative.'
By somebody who is 'a conservative,' I'm referring to people like Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman, the totality of whose respect for those ideals is such as to say they are guided by them.
But if you say of someone, 'Well, he's 'conservative,' ' by no means could it be said that he is guided by conservative lodestars. That would include President Eisenhower and President Bush.
In the matter of the incumbent Bush, the challenge is very keen because of the central role that Iraq is playing. It's a challenge not only in that we are being asked to turn toward neoconservatism in our foreign policy but also in that the acid test is coming in an area of the world in which we haven't, in my judgment, devised an arresting and persuasive stance.
We don't really know whether Islam is a consolidated challenge to Western Christianity and, as such, we haven't, in my judgment, come up with the persuasive weaponry with which to press our own field and deny theirs.
Q: Has conservatism made a bargain with the state or with government power that it should not have made over the last 50 years? Has conservatism forgotten the message of Albert J. Nock's seminal book, 'Our Enemy, the State'?
A: The answer is, 'Yes, it has.' Accommodations have been made, the consequences of which we have yet to pay for.
Albert J. Nock, although he could express himself fanatically on these subjects, would certainly have pronounced these as major, major mistakes. So, the answer to your question is, indeed those excesses have been engaged in and they affect the probity of the conservative faith.
Q: You know who Ron Paul is -- the congressman. He's derided and discounted by many conservatives and his fellow Republicans as a kook. Yet his strong stands in favor of limited constitutional government, lower taxes, more personal freedoms and nonintervention overseas make him in many ways sound like a conservative of old -- a Robert Taft, or a Coolidge kind of conservative in some ways.
A: I agree, yeah.
Q: Is he getting a bum rap?
A: I think that people who cast themselves as presidential contenders are almost universally derided on the grounds that they don't have manifest orthodox qualifications.
In the case of Ron Paul, he doesn't have a broad enough or huge following and under the circumstances he becomes rather a quaint ideological aspirant than someone who is realistically seeking for power.
Q: You've always had a visible libertarian streak --
A: Yes.
Q: -- whether it goes back to your admiration of Nock or your opposition to the war on drugs. Yet you and libertarians have always been feuding. Is there a simple way to summarize the most important argument between you and libertarians?
A: I suppose the most important argument is the dogmatic character of libertarian conservatism.
I once wrote an essay on the subject in which I said that if I were at sea on my boat and saw a light flashing I would not worry deeply whether the financing of that light had been done by the private or public sector. This became a kind of playful debate with the (University of) Chicago (economists). By and large it has to do with the tenacity with which some libertarians tend to hold on to their basic (principles).
Q: Is conservatism compatible with a welfare-warfare state that consumes so much of our national wealth and controls so much of our daily lives?
A: It's incompatible with a state that overdoes it. If the demands on the state required a devotion and a preoccupation with it to the point of standing in the way of people's devising their own preferences and their own order of preferences, then you could say it was a mortal enemy.
Well, because he was a good conservative but not a libertarian, he'd be all over the block and have his lovers and haters. Sadly, he'd probably be a hawk on Ukraine. But he'd be blasting Biden and his foreign and domestic policies, especially, I hope, about how the war on covid was unnecessarily tyrannical and stupid. He'd be against the insanity of transgender surgeries, the whole woke movement, the hysteria about climate change, the hatred of fossil fuels ( think his father was an oil man). He was a big fan of the CIA, so it'd be tough for him to be anti-surveillance state, pro-Snowden, pro-Channing or the new whistleblower kid whose name I don't yet know how to spell. He'd certainly be appalled by the size of the fed government but he'd probably say our military should have more money. On crime and racism, I can't say. He was once a great influence on me and my beliefs, but then his magazine lead me to Hayek, Mises and the libertarians.
Interesting piece. Curious as to how Buckley would be viewed today if he were still alive.