James Rosen has executed a smart idea that never occurred to William F. Buckley Jr.: He has assembled a collection of some of the best obituaries Buckley penned in more than a half-century as commentator, political activist, and public intellectual. Buckley aficionados, general readers, and the uninitiated are in for a treat.
As Rosen notes, Buckley was a master of “that elusive art form the eulogy.” He spent considerable time, over several decades, writing his tributes to the recently departed, and once estimated that he wrote about 500 of them. Rosen was able to find half. (Given the energy and thought he invested, Buckley may well have believed that he had turned out twice as many as he had.) Ambitious readers can scope out the rest by going to the Hillsdale College website, which has all of Buckley’s columns online, or to National Review‘s website and archives. Both are well worth a visit.
In his essays on the famous and less than famous, Buckley recorded the impact they had on their world—or on their erudite eulogizer. In assessing those he greatly admired, he was careful to consider their flaws; among those whose contributions he deemed primarily negative, he sought to discern those qualities that made them appealing to their followers. Rosen assembles the 50-odd gems here into six groupings: presidents (Eisenhower through Reagan, minus Ford); family; arts and letters (Truman Capote, John Lennon, Johnny Carson, among many others); generals, spies, and statesmen (Churchill, Goldwater, and a handful of CIA operatives); friends (including Whittaker Chambers, Allard Lowenstein, and two unrelated Galbraiths); and nemeses (Ayn Rand, Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and others).
As a collection, the essays convey the wide range of Buckley’s interests and the breadth and depth of his many friendships and what he called “active acquaintanceships.” And in his introductions to each piece, Rosen does more than provide context for what follows: He reveals a deep familiarity with the subjects and conveys an appreciation of Buckley’s particular take.
My attention returned several times to Rosen’s last section (“Nemeses”), in which Buckley’s special grace and generosity toward ideological adversaries is on display. Alger Hiss, for example, the Soviet agent who had risen to high rank in the State Department, had an admirable quality that should not be overlooked: He had, at one time, won the devotion of Whittaker Chambers, who brought to light not only his own betrayal of his country but also that of his collaborator, Hiss. And his tribute to John V. Lindsay, the charismatic liberal Republican congressman whose ambitions Buckley sought to thwart in his own quixotic campaign for mayor of New York, is a tip of the hat from one seasoned performer to another: Lindsay, Buckley states as fact, “always, or nearly always gave theatrical satisfaction” to his audiences. Buckley could also be brutally frank: Nelson Rockefeller, whose brand of northeastern Republicanism he helped relegate to the “ash heap” of history, died once he had nothing left to animate him, his hopes of becoming president having been dashed on three separate occasions.
Editors wrestle with what to omit as well as what to include, but I wish Rosen had squeezed in just one more treasure: Buckley’s 1972 tribute to Harry Truman. Buckley’s views on the former president changed considerably in the quarter-century in which he wrote about him. As chairman of the Yale Daily News in the late 1940s, Buckley wrote that historians would record that “the greatest economic crisis the U.S. ever sustained was when Mr. Truman’s haberdashery business failed.” In 1958, Buckley declared Truman to be the “nation’s most conspicuous vulgarian.”
In less than a decade, however, Buckley was referring to Truman’s presidency as a “happy memory.” Why the abrupt shift? By the late 1960s and early ’70s, the anti-anti-Communists (better known as the New Left) had become ascendant in the history departments of many of our most distinguished universities. The revisionism they practiced proclaimed that it was not Stalin but Truman, the man who had resisted Soviet aggression, who was responsible for the onset of the Cold War. “Harry Truman made many grievous mistakes,” Buckley wrote, “but it is not his mistakes that are singled out for criticism, but his triumphs.”
Alvin S. Felzenberg is the author of the forthcoming A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr.
