William F. Buckley, Jr. Patron Saint of the Conservatives.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas

William Buckley

He could be a great thinker, but he's too busy running to the airport

No doubt William F. Buckley's friends will wonder why he allowed John Judis, a member of the staff of the socialist weekly In These Times, to have access to his papers and thus to become at least his quasi-official biographer. It may have been just vanity on Buckley's part (the urge to be the subject of a book is a powerful one), but, judging from the result, Buckley made a smart decision. This is a thorough, fair, insightful, and even affectionate book;(*) if it turns out to be the only Buckley biography, there's no need for anyone to feel short-changed.

Judis must have decided at the outset that he was going to refrain from making overt value judgements about Buckley's political views. He reports what Buckley thinks with a kind of eerie objectivity--you'd never know from this book what Judis's own opinions are. (If you already know that Judis is a man of the left, though, you can see that he takes pleasure in quoting Buckley, especially the McCarthyite young Buckley, taking non-respectable stands on issues like segregation, academic freedom, universal suffrage, and loyalty oaths--See, Judis seems to be saying to liberals and moderates who feel unthreatened by Reaganism, this is what conservatives really want.) To the extent that Judis has any evident bias, it's radical's preference for movement politics over the compromised center, and there he and Buckley are on common ground. Judis's great complaint about Buckley--that he hasn't lived up to his potential for political seriousness because he has become so involved in being a celebrity--is one born out of admiration for the fire Buckley used to have. If Judis thought Buckley were a pernicious influence on American life, presumably he would feel that the more Buckley books about his trans-Atlantic sailing trips, the better.

The reason that Buckley deserves all this attention, so much more than is usually accorded to people who write syndicated columns and run political magazines, is simple: he is the man who made conservatism--not electoral Republicanism, but conservatism as a system of ideas--respectable in post-World War II America. It is difficult to reconstruct today (thanks, in part, to the success of Buckley's career) how utterly discredited, how embarrassing, conservatism seemed in the early fifties. The thinking class had been almost entirely liberal for at least two generations, if not since the Gilded Age. The great conservative political causes of the preceding two decades--opposition to the New Deal and to American entry into World War II--seemed patently venal and wrong. There were certainly a lot of conservatives, but their public voices belonged to midwestern isolationists who might as well have been invented by liberal parodists (Senator Bourke Hickenlooper, Colonel Robert R. McCormick); southern segregationists; and Babbitt-like local automobile dealers drinking scotches at the country club. Whittaker Chambers, who now appears to have been the great conservative intellectual of the time, was a man who looked like a mental-hospital escapee and was best known for rooting around in a pumpkin patch in the middle of the night. Nobody was making a persuasive case for conservatism based on the national interest or higher morality.

When Buckley burst on the scene with the publication of God and Man at Yale in 1951, he seemed at first glance to be the epitome of conservative nonrespectability--a nut attacking one of the bulwark institutions of the Establishment...