Noemie Emery on All of Bill's sons: Private lives in the public letters
By: Noemie Emery
Examiner Columnist
July 23, 2009
They don't make people like William F. Buckley any more, and perhaps never did.
He was one of those people who is a phenomenon, a conservative with the effect of an Oscar Wilde dandy, an opinion journalist who palled around with the (liberal) swells of Park Avenue, a political activist and policy wonk who played the harpsichord, sailed yachts across oceans, and repaired to Gstaad in the winter, where he skied, socialized with David Niven, and wrote novels about a spy as dashing as he was, who in the first book of the series, sleeps with England"s (fictional) queen.
Among his peers (assuming he had them) he was a peacock plunked down in a cluster of pigeons, to other editors as Jackie O is to other First Ladies, one of a group of worthy and well-meaning people, but with a whole other measure of awesomeness.
In 1999, he won an award as a "living legend," a phrase that applies to a few in a century. Later, magazines would run ads urging people to "drink like Buckley," by ordering wines endorsed by the master. According to his son, Buckley refused to spend more than $9 per bottle, but the idea of anyone buying wine to be like the editor of a small but prestigious political journal tends to stun if not stagger the mind.
All this caused complications for his heirs and his children, who were not in all ways the same thing. Christopher, the son of his marriage to Pat Taylor Buckley (for whom the term "drama queen" was likely invented), got the writing gene, along with the genes for panache, wit, and style, but not the ones for religion or politics: his urge was less to preach to the world than to tweak it a little, which made him the right man to be a satirical writer, but the wrong one to lead a crusade.
This left Bill to look for his heirs among strangers, the precocious young people from middle-class backgrounds, whom he sought out and hired en masse. There were David Brooks and Garry Wills, whom Bill hired in college; there was Richard Brookhiser, in high school, in a small upstate hamlet, whom Bill published when Rick was 15. Bill was Rick's ideal, his mentor, and his fast track on the journey to power and influence; Rick was Bill's idea of himself, only younger, a man he could shape and mold to his measure, the one in whose hands his legacy, and his magazine, would be safe.
Rick wrote for Bill while he was at Yale, interned at National Review in the summer, and joined the magazine when he left college. A year later, Bill took Rick to lunch and to his surprise told him he had decided that Rick should become his successor, and inherit the magazine, its stock, and all that went with it when Bill should retire. Bill was in his fifties, 12 years away from this date of departure. Rick, 30 years younger, was just 23.
Chris meanwhile had built his career not in, but alongside Bill's shadow, apart from the mold of the enfant terrible, that described Bill"s disciples, and Bill. Children of large personalities often rebel, or try, and fail, to follow their elders, but Chris had devised his own way of coping: he was not the new Bill (as Rick tried to be), and he was not the un-Bill, but he had become instead Bill with a difference, Bill in a new and a different translation, Bill with a twist.
He was wry, not impassioned; detached, not ideological; he was not an activist, but instead wrote of the follies, social and otherwise, that activists of all callings commit. He wrote, as did Bill, but in the few forms that Bill hadn't mastered. He wrote of Washington, but of its mores, not its politics. He edited a magazine, but it was Forbes FYI, a lifestyle journal.
Rick wrote for Chris, and Chris wrote for National Review on occasion, but theirs was not exactly a melding of temperaments: "Chris and I had overlapped two years at Yale...though I had not known him there, working for Bill did not make me know him any better," Brookhiser wrote in his memoir, adding that Chris did not live a National Review-like existence, and made a conscious decision to do so. He understood that this led to his own elevation. "Chris's decision to go his own way may have added a shade of urgency to Bill"s efforts to find a successor," he said.
Gee, do you think so? But there was yet a new twist to the story. Nine years after Bill made his promise, Rick got a letter rescinding the offer. Bill found Rick brilliant, but lacking executive talents; he was a great writer, but no longer the man to succeed him. He was no longer the heir.
Chris says in his book that his parents were "difficult," but it was Rick who would bear the full brunt of the father-son drama: "My first reaction, and my second, third, and fourth," as he tells us, "was the howl of pain." His projected life plan was rerouted completely: he had gone from being at the magazine"s heart to being a semi-outsider, connected to it by a bi-weekly column and a minimum office requirement of four hours weekly, but otherwise freed (and required) to find other outlets, and to write the long, more intense, books and pieces that Bill was now sure he could do.
Rick was less sure, but he expanded his repertoire, and in time hit on the line of historic biographies that was to establish his new reputation. He ended like Chris, but from the other direction, neither the new Bill or the non-Bill, but Bill with a difference, touching Bill's world but not wholly of it, writing of politics, but from an angle, writing his books as his own brand and franchise, the kind of books Bill never did.
Bill found his third "son" in the late 1990"s, when he passed his magazine on to Rich Lowry, then 29, (and from another middle class family), 13 years younger than Rick was, and 43 years younger than Bill.
Coming in at the tail end of Bill's fame, his relations with him were less fraught than those of the others; like Bill, (and like Rick) he was an enfante, (though not as terrible), unlike Rick and Chris he is an in-the-day politician; like the other three, he writes books. With this, the quest for an heir appeared settled, or at least, divided in three. None of the three owned all the inheritance, but each held a sizeable chunk of the franchise. None is a legend, and none can move wine, but then, they don't have to. Bill seemed quite proud of his talented "children." Now and then, as Brookhiser tells us, Bill addressed Lowry as "Chris."
Relations between Chris, Rick and Rich seemed somewhat uneasy, as in the manner of many mixed families; Rich and Rick being the products of Bill"s marriage to politics, while Chris is the son of his marriage to Pat.
The split came when Chris endorsed Barack Obama, proving that as a political brain he is an exceptional satirist, and being widely perceived as an Oedipal moment, a slap at his dead (and his more famous) father, and at the magazine and the movement that had been Bill"s other love.
The real reason, however, may be something else. At some point, Chris noted, he began to keep track of who called and did not when his father expired. Calls came from Al Gore and John Kerry, and from George McGovern, who had himself dug out of snowdrifts to come to the funeral, but there was nary a peep from the soon-to-be-head of his party.
"McCain's lack of any gesture at all did, I confess, smart a bit," Chris admitted. Months later, citing reasons of "temperament," Chris endorsed McCain"s rival. Had McCain only bothered to say he was sorry, the Great Betrayal might never have been.
Examiner columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of "Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families."
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