Sailing to Posterity

In fact, Mr. Buckley’s “retirement” has something of the quality of Frank Sinatra’s farewell tours. It is a work in progress. He stepped down as editor of National Review several years ago, and gave up his PBS talk show, Firing Line, after three decades. He has withdrawn from the lecture circuit, and in a recent piece in The Atlantic Monthly, announced the termination of his sailing career (the subject of many books) as well as the end of piano and harpsichord playing.

“The fingers get rusty, the dividends are more laboriously achieved, the memory is shakier,” he writes. “One can putter on–or quit.”

As for journalism, Buckley allowed that “concerns about my own mortality” prompted him to divest himself of National Review, which, like all magazines of its type, depends on philanthropy as well as sales revenue. But he will keep on writing. He intends to continue his twice-weekly newspaper column, as well as a favorite NR feature, “Notes and Asides,” in which he exchanges erudite banter with readers. Several new books are anticipated. For a man of his age, this is more than impressive.

I should say, at this juncture, that while I have a high regard for William F. Buckley, and great admiration for his achievements, I was never one of his wholehearted devotees. Nor was I a part of the NR fraternity. As an undergraduate, I was not a member of Young Americans for Freedom–quite the opposite, in fact–and, unlike Hillary Clinton, recoiled from Barry Goldwater in his day. I much prefer Dwight D. Eisenhower to Robert A. Taft. I thought that Buckley was spread too thin to be a stylish writer; and I must confess that National Review was sometimes a little too preoccupied with Roman Catholicism and New York politics to sustain my interest.

Yet there is no denying Buckley’s influence in his time. No doubt, part of this is due to his status as a character: The toothy smile, bug eyes, sharpened wit, rumpled suits, button-down shirts and indecipherable mandarin accent became part of the cultural, even the pop cultural, landscape after the late 1950s. His 1965 campaign for mayor of New York remains a landmark in political theater. He was an entertaining guest on television programs, an indefatigable debater on campuses, and a cheerful companion to writers, artists, musicians, acolytes, theologians, selected statesmen and open-minded antagonists on the left.

This is especially admirable when you consider the task he undertook, at age 30, when he began National Review, then and for some years thereafter the only right-wing organ of repute in the country. Ike may have resided in the White House, but the Democrats controlled the other levers of political power, at nearly all levels, and conservatism was a ragged assortment of has-beens and would-bes.

The year before NR was founded, Lionel Trilling, the Columbia literary critic and cultural historian, wrote (with some accuracy) that “in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.” Conservative impulses, he explained, “do not express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

To some degree, this remains the liberal view of American conservatism: People like Buckley, and the thinkers, publications and institutions that have grown up in his wake, are too casually dismissed as political “extremists” or accused of devaluing the life of the mind. The truth, of course, is almost exactly the opposite. Fifty years after NR was founded, it is conservatism, not liberalism, that is the dominant intellectual tradition in American life, and it is the Left that is reduced to “irritable mental gestures” in response to conservative ideas.

This is, of course, a vast simplification of the history of ideas, in our country, in our time. There are many elements of midcentury liberalism that remain embedded in our thinking, and the modern conservative “movement,” which Buckley helped found and animate, is a house with many mansions. Buckley himself, along with National Review, has evolved in innumerable ways. But there is no escaping that the place described by Lionel Trilling–the world he inhabited, and for which he could imagine no plausible alternative in 1954–no longer exists.

Would this have happened without William F. Buckley Jr., his little magazine, his enterprising genius and boundless energy, and his band of ex-Trotskyites, priest-crusaders, Southern Agrarians, Cold Warriors and ink-stained émigrés?

Good question.

Philip Terzian is literary editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. This editorial originally appeared in the July 4, 2004, edition of the Providence Journal.