Outside Looking In (19 page)

The real measure of Bill was the extent to which he overcame the prejudices he began with because of his family. His delightful mother was a southern belle from New Orleans whose grandfather had been a Confederate officer at Shiloh. She had the attitude toward blacks of her upbringing. One time, when we were sailing and stopped at Charleston, South Carolina, Bill took me to his father's winter home. When we arrived, we were greeted by a black retainer who had known Bill from his childhood—he called him “Master Billy.” It was not surprising that Bill and I would initially disagree about the civil rights movement. In a notorious 1957 editorial called “Why the South Must Prevail,” Bill defended segregation because whites were “the advanced race,” and “the claims of civilization superseded those of universal suffrage.”
⁴
We argued over this, and his biographer says that my views gradually had some effect: “Under the influence of conservative proponents of civil rights like Wills and the heated debate about civil rights taking place in the country, Buckley began to distinguish
National Review
's and the conservative positions from that of Southern racists.”
⁵

Another burden from Bill's early days was his father's anti-Semitism, a harder thing for him to conquer, since he honored his father so profoundly. A close friend of Bill's on the
Yale Daily News
was Tom Guinzberg, later the publisher of Viking Press. Guinzberg and Bill's sister Jane were on the verge of being engaged, and Bill's father said that Bill, using his friendship with Guinzberg, should prevent a Jew from joining the family. To his later regret, he intervened without telling his sister. For once, he was a match breaker rather than a matchmaker. I was with him the night he finally confessed to Jane what he had done behind her back. She said it did not matter—the marriage would not have worked. Bill said, “I wish I had known that earlier—I have been reproaching myself all these years.” Bill not only broke
National Review
away from right-wing journals that harbored anti-Semites. When he found that a book reviewer (Revilo Oliver) or one of his editors (M. Joseph Sobran) was writing anti-Semitic stuff in other venues, he banned those writers' further appearance in the magazine. Bill had become so sensitive to the problem that he wrote a book on the anti-Semitic tendencies of right-wingers like Sobran and Patrick Buchanan.
⁶

By the time of his death, even Bill's earlier critics admitted that he had done much to make conservatism respectable by purging it of racist and fanatical traits earlier embedded in the movement. He distanced his followers from the southern prejudices of George Wallace, the anti-Semitism of the Liberty Lobby, the fanaticism of the John Birch Society, the glorification of selfishness by Ayn Rand (famously excoriated in
National Review
by Whittaker Chambers), the paranoia and conspiratorialism of the neocons. In each of these cases, some right-wingers tried to cut off donations to
National Review
, but Bill stood his ground. In doing so, he elevated the discourse of American politics, making civil debate possible between responsible liberals and conservatives.

Bill was considered an elitist because he loved to use big words. This was a part of his playfulness. He liked to play games in general, and word games were especially appealing to him. He did it not from hauteur but from impishness. He used the big words for their own sake, even when he was not secure in their meaning. One of his most famous usages poisoned the general currency, especially among young conservatives trying to imitate him. They took “oxymoron” in the sense he gave it, though that was the opposite of its true meaning. He thought it was a fancier word for “contradiction” (a perfectly good word that needs no fancy dress), so young imitators would say that an intelligent liberal is an oxymoron. But the Greek word means something that is surprisingly
true
, a paradox, a “shrewd dumbness.”

Bill's love of exotic locutions came out when he asked me, one time, for the meaning of a word I had written, “subumbrous.” I said it meant cloaked in darkness. He protested that he could not find the word in any of his dictionaries. No wonder, I said; I made it up from the Latin
sub umbra
. He loved that—it continued the word games. But his lunge toward risky words was like his other ventures into risk. I wrote him once giving him five examples of Latin words he had used in the wrong cases. He did not yield easily. He said he used not the grammatically correct forms but the ones he thought would be most familiar to his audience. It was one of the few times I saw him resort to a populist argument.

Bill was not, and did not pretend to be, a real intellectual. He gave up the “big book” that his father and others were urging him to write. For years he tried to do a continuation of José Ortega y Gasset's
Revolt of the Masses
. This had been a sacred text for his father's guru, Albert Jay Nock. Bill took intellectual comrades like Hugh Kenner with him for his winter break in Switzerland, to help him get a grip on this ambitious project. But he told me he realized in time that this was not his métier. He was not a reflective thinker. He was a quick responder. He wrote rapidly because he was quickly bored. His gifts were facility, flash, and charm, not depth or prolonged wrestling with a problem. He made it his vocation to be the promoter, popularizer, and moderator of the conservative movement, defending it from liberal critics with wit and effrontery. In this he was entirely successful.

Bill needed people around him all the time. Frequently, when he told me he had to write a column, I would offer to withdraw from the boat cabin or hotel room or office where we were. He urged me not to, and as he typed (with great speed and accuracy) he would keep on talking off and on, reading a sentence to me, trying out a word, saying that something he was saying would annoy old So-and-So. When I appeared on his TV show to discuss a new book of mine, it was clear to me that he had not read the book—he was given notes on each author he interviewed. Once he asked me if I had read all of Adam Smith's
Wealth of Nations
. I said yes. “Haven't you?” He had not.
“Das Kapital
?” No, he had not read that through either. I suspect the same was true of capitalist classics he referred to—by Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm Röpke, and others. He could defend them with great panache. But he did not want to sit all by himself for a long time reading them. One of his teachers at Yale, the philosopher Paul Weiss, told me that Bill was very good at discussing books he had not read. His garage-office in Stamford was piled high with mounds of books, mostly sent to him, hundreds of them, in no order. That is not how a person who loves books keeps them.

Bill was heatedly attacked by Catholic liberals when he dismissed papal criticism of capitalism. He objected to John XXIII′s encyclical
Mater et Magistra
(the Church as “Mother and Teacher”) for its challenge to the free market. I joked that his attitude was “
Mater sí, Magistra no,
” playing on a slogan of the time,
“Cuba sí, Castro no
.” He printed the quip in the magazine and was attacked on the assumption that the saying was his own and he was rejecting the whole teaching role of the Church. He questioned me about Church teachings. He felt insecure because his Catholic education was so exiguous—it amounted to one year at a Jesuit prep school in England. I had been entirely educated in Catholic schools before entering graduate school at Yale, and he exaggerated what knowledge that had given me.

He wanted to know more about encyclicals. I told him I did not know much. I had read carefully the so-called social encyclicals—
Rerum Novarum
(1891) and
Quadragesimo Anno
(1931)—because Chesterton admired their praise of medieval guilds. He asked if I would bone up on the subject, and I agreed to. (Once again, he did not want to read all those boring encyclicals himself.) After I had done some research on the matter, he drove up from Stamford to New Haven to spend an afternoon discussing the subject. He had been challenged to a debate with an editor of
Commonweal,
William Clancy. Bill suggested that each side be defended by a two-man team—by Bill and me on one side, by Clancy and a partner of his choosing on the other. Clancy turned down the idea. Nonetheless, when it came time for the debate, to be held across the river from Manhattan in New Jersey, Bill asked me to go along with him for some last-minute preparation in the car. Once again, he was driving his own car. We had to grab a quick dinner before the event, so we stopped at a greasy spoon in New Jersey. When Bill asked for a bottle of red wine, it came out ice-cold, so he asked that it be run under hot water for a while, and we kept up our informal seminar on encyclicals.

Bill handled the debate with his customary forensic stylishness. But the Catholic attacks on him continued. They had become so voluminous at this point that our friend Neil McCaffrey made a collection of them, to be published with Neil's sulfurous comments on each item. Bill asked me to write an introduction to the collection, on the status of encyclicals. When Neil had the book ready, Bill asked me to come down from New Haven to his garage at Stamford. He found Neil's intemperate running commentary embarrassing. He wanted to cancel the project—unless I was willing to expand my introduction, incorporating some of the attacks into a calmer treatment of the matter. I said that I doubted Neil would be amenable to having his concept taken away from him. Bill said I should just leave that to him. Somehow, with his smooth persuasiveness, he took the project over without losing Neil's friendship, and I published
Politics and Catholic Freedom,
the first of my books on the papacy.

Bill lived and wrote and lectured—and played and socialized and exercised—at a furious pace. Partly this was because he bored so easily. But partly it was to make money. He was commonly thought of as a spoiled rich boy. But he had never had the kind of money people imagined. His wife did—she came from a far wealthier family than his. But he did not want to live on her inheritance. Bill's oilman father had drilled many a dry hole. Bill's biographer did the numbers, and concluded that the senior Buckley's money was exaggerated.
⁷
After the father's death, Bill's oldest brother, John, a heavy drinker, did not run the oil company with great skill.

Bill's own investments, especially in radio stations, rather set back than advanced his financial affairs—as always, he was too in love with risk. Bill made a good living, initially from his heavy lecture schedule, then from his widely syndicated newspaper column, then from his profitable series of spy novels. But he worked for much of his own money. I remember how delighted he was, in 1960, when for the first time he was paid a dollar a word for a magazine article (a good sum then). He did not, of course, have to work for a living. He could have lived on a lower scale than the one he maintained. But he wanted to support the swashbuckling yachts, the custom-made limousine, the ski lodge in Switzerland, and the great generosity of his gifts to others; and he did not want to do this on his wife's money. Thus he secretly acquired what some will consider his least plausible identity, that of a working stiff.

For a longer time than I now wish, Bill and I were estranged. For the first twelve years after we met, we were in almost constant contact. I sailed with him often (crewing for two of his international ocean races). We traveled together—in Ireland, to observe the Catholic-Protestant conflict, we went to an Ian Paisley sermon and a Bernadette Devlin rally. We attended two national political conventions. While working on his biography, I talked to him almost every day. We conferred on Catholic matters (especially during the Second Vatican Council). But the convulsions of the sixties and their aftermath tore many people apart, and they did that with us. He was a hard supporter of the Vietnam War, though I went to jail twice to protest it. I called his dear friend Henry Kissinger a war criminal (for approving the use of flechette bombs in cities). Though Bill had abondoned the southern view of black inferiority, he thought that Martin Luther King Jr. was hurting America in its struggle with Communism by criticizing its racism. Even my own friend at the magazine, Frank Meyer, tried to have my comments against Richard Nixon killed. My critical review of Whittaker Chambers's book of essays was spiked (I published it in
Modern Age
). The final break came when Bill refused to publish an essay in which I argued that there was no conservative rationale for our ruinous engagement in Vietnam. For the next thirty years communication between us was at first minimal, and then nonexistent.

When I moved out of my office at Northwestern, reducing my library to what would fit into my home, I gave a used-book store owner the pick of my volumes at the university. He went off with many titles that Bill had inscribed to me, and when some of Bill's irate fans found them in the store, they bought them and sent them back to him, calling me an ingrate for selling his gifts. When Bill's service in the CIA under Howard Hunt came to light during the Watergate scandal, I wrote a column about Bill's CIA connections. Perhaps he thought I was using confidential knowledge he had given me on the tapes I made for his biography; but I used nothing that was not public knowledge by then. He circulated my column to the
National Review
board of editors with his marginal notation, “I think we should smash him”—an item that his biographer found in his papers at Yale.
⁸
For a time the magazine ran a recurring feature, “The Wills Watch,” recording the latest liberal abomination I was guilty of. The principal Wills Watcher was M. Joseph Sobran. A man who later became an editor at the magazine, Rick Brookhiser, wrote: