William F. Buckley Jr., widely considered the godfather of modern conservatism, defended Joseph McCarthy and his communist witch hunts. He praised the “restraint” of Alabama law enforcement officers who brutally assaulted civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. He was also a silver-tongued intellectual who abhorred boorish thinking and behavior and savored debates with the sharpest minds of his era.
Such a track record invites the question asked, implicitly and explicitly, in a new “American Masters” documentary: What would Buckley think of the current Republican kingpin, Donald Trump, and his followers? Would Buckley, who died in 2008, denounce the direction of the movement he helped start and disown a former (and perhaps future) American president who has expressed his admiration for a strongman Russian president? Or would he find a way to fold Trump and his supporters into his dreams of a conservative empire?
In “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley,” which premiered last week on PBS and is streaming on PBS.org, Buckley’s son, the novelist and former George H.W. Bush speechwriter Christopher Buckley, gives a cryptic assessment of what the senior Buckley would think of Trump: “He might just have said, ‘Demand a recount,’” a riff on William F. Buckley’s oft-repeated joke about what he would do if he won his 1965 New York mayoral bid. In a recent video interview, however, Christopher Buckley was more direct.
“I don’t equate Trumpism with conservatism,” he said. “I’m very glad my father and Ronald Reagan are not alive to see what’s happened to the G.O.P. and to the national discourse.”
Others, including some who appear in the film directed by Barak Goodman, say it’s not that straightforward.
“My own view is that Buckley would probably think about Trump more or less what he thought about McCarthy,” Beverly Gage, a history professor at Yale University and author of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning J. Edgar Hoover biography “G-Man,” said in a video interview. “He would see Trump as tremendously useful as a concentration of many of the themes and constituencies that Buckley stood for.”
“The Incomparable Mr. Buckley” tries to wrap its arms around the full Buckley — a challenging task for a subject both worshiped and reviled, and whose shadow loomed over American politics in the second half of the 20th century.
The son of an oil speculator who made his fortune in Mexico under the dictator Victoriano Huerta, Buckley was rigorously home-schooled before he went to Yale, where he fashioned himself into an anti-establishment conservative intellectual. His first book, “God and Man at Yale” (1951), took his alma mater to task for propagating atheistic liberal thought. His second book, “McCarthy and His Enemies” (1954, written with L. Brent Bozell Jr.), offered a defense of McCarthyism as a patriotic necessity. His profile kept rising as he founded National Review in 1955 and became a guiding light for burgeoning conservative groups like Young Americans for Freedom, founded in 1960 during a meeting at Buckley’s home.
Before Buckley, “there were a bunch of different ideas and different factions that were critics of liberalism, which was the dominant philosophy, a belief that government could solve problems,” said Goodman, whose previous documentary subjects include the Scottsboro Boys and the Oklahoma City bombing. “But there was never a figure that could galvanize these disparate factions into one movement.”
Not until Buckley, anyway.
“Not only did he have the charisma, talent, and energy to do it,” Goodman said, “he had the vision and he had the intellectual chops to be able to create something coherent out of this and then to excite people and to bring them into one tent.”
History doesn’t smile upon Buckley’s more extreme views. In a 1957 National Review editorial titled “Why the South Must Prevail,” he essentially argued in support of racial segregation, positing that Southern Black Americans had not earned the right to vote. (He was also known to argue that many white people hadn’t earned that right, either.) His views on race softened over the years, at least in public, but in 1965, eight years after that National Review essay, he was praising the patience of those police officers in Selma at a New York policemen’s communion breakfast. (Buckley, who was widely criticized for the remarks, claimed they had been misrepresented in news reports.) As is explained in the film, Buckley was a firm believer in the idea of a ruling “remnant,” a class of people like himself who he believed were naturally inclined to lead the less refined masses.
“Go back and look at Buckley’s civil rights record,” Gage said. “If you are a believer in human equality and in racial justice, it’s not a good record.”
Possessed of twinkling eyes, quick wit, and a wide, crooked smile, Buckley became the erudite symbol of his cause, especially once he launched his PBS debate series, “Firing Line,” in 1966. “He rendered palatable a set of authoritarian ideas that cultured people didn’t want to see themselves entertaining,” the historian and author Rick Perlstein, who appears in the film and has chronicled the conservative movement in books including “Before the Storm” and “Nixonland,” said in a video interview.
Some of the best recent works on Buckley have focused on his famous public debates. “The Fire Is Upon Us” (2019), by Nicholas Buccola (who also appears in the film), looks at Buckley’s 1965 debate with James Baldwin at the Cambridge Union Society in England, which is featured in “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley.” The topic: “The American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro.” Baldwin won the vote in a landslide, though Buckley would maintain that he won the debate. Then there is “Best of Enemies: Buckley vs. Vidal,” a 2015 documentary about the televised debates between Buckley and Gore Vidal, who were chosen by ABC to discuss their respective parties’ 1968 political conventions.
These debates, also covered in the new film, turned rancorous. Vidal, liberal, openly gay and as mischievous and quick on his feet as his opponent, arrived ready to poke the bear. As discussion turned to the showdown between protesters and the Chicago police at the Democratic National Convention, Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” and mocked his war record. Buckley, clearly rattled, responded by calling Vidal a “queer” and threatening to sock him. The moment remains raw, real, riveting television, with none of the bonhomie on display when Buckley squared off on “Firing Line” with, say, Norman Mailer, a staunch liberal who considered Buckley a friend.
It’s the rare public moment in which Buckley’s polished surface cracked.
“You saw the street brawler side of Buckley there,” Goodman said. “He didn’t do it on his TV show very much, but when you push the right buttons you see it.”
Some suggest Buckley’s status as the creator of modern conservatism is exaggerated. “I think that’s kind of self-congratulation,” Perlstein said. “If you look at the conservative manifesto that a bunch of Republican and Democrat members of Congress signed in the 1930s, it’s all there. But he marketed it. He made it something that could appear in The New York Times or on PBS.”
During his 1965 New York mayoral campaign, he also recognized the importance of the blue-collar conservative voting bloc that helped propel Richard Nixon to the presidency in 1968, though Buckley wasn’t much of a Nixon fan. He found his true conservative white knight in Ronald Reagan and worked tirelessly to get the former California governor elected to the White House. “If you influence things enough to bring about the election of your designated champion, I think you can claim a very large legacy,” Christopher Buckley said.
Does the younger Buckley think the film accurately captures his father?
“I think it was very fair, or as they say over at a certain network, fair and balanced,” he said. “It made me very proud of my old man.”
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