This is among the great revelations of Buckley: its subject’s endless willingness to lie. Over and over we watch Buckley slander, deceive, withhold information, and defend the falsity of others. He lies with glee and without compunction; he lies willfully and by omission. He stands athwart history, yelling the wildest possible bullshit.
Another of the book’s revelations has to do with dishonesty as well, namely the extent to which the Buckley family was engaged in the segregationist cause. While regarded as a scion of the Northeast, Bill spent much of his time in the family’s second home in Camden, S.C., at a restored plantation manor called “Kamschatka.” While the Buckleys were segregationists of the genteel variety—Tanenhaus notes how well the family’s black servants were treated—the book reveals that Buckley money funded a paper, The Camden News, which espoused the views of the local White Citizen’s Council. National Review’s editorial from 1957, written by Buckley and titled “Why the South Must Prevail,” is notorious and well-known. In it, Buckley wrote that the question:
is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.
This family connection sheds new light on the depths of Buckley’s commitment, and further explains why he would dismiss the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution as “inorganic accretions to the original document,” or compare the federalized National Guardsmen deployed to desegregate Little Rock’s schools to the Soviet tank commanders in Hungary and Poland. Tanenhaus reports that William Buckley Sr. assured his friend Strom Thurmond that Bill “is for segregation and backs it in every issue.”
It also helps explain how Buckley would approach his 1965 debate with James Baldwin at Cambridge University, and why he lost it. Buckley thought, and wrote, that Baldwin “celebrates his bitterness against the white community,” and prepared to debate an inferior opponent with a list of bitter complaints. Instead, when Baldwin takes upon his person the weight of centuries of injustice—his now famous assertion that “I picked the cotton, I carried it to the market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing. For nothing”—he becomes towering. Buckley, going as he so often did for personal slights, is the one made to seem small and petty.
Buckley would, of course, go on to lose another public debate in similarly ignoble fashion, this time against an opponent just as willing to lower himself. “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddam face and you’ll stay plastered,” may well be Buckley’s best-remembered quote. He shouted it at Gore Vidal, to Vidal’s obvious delight, during their second-to-last on-air debate as part of ABC’s coverage of the 1968 Democratic Convention. During the final debate, the two would be separated by a curtain. Tanenhaus is frank about the fact that Vidal was able to provoke this outburst because he had spent much of the previous exchanges insinuating that Buckley was gay. This suspicion had long haunted the lithe, effete, lavishly affected Buckley, and while Tanenhaus remains coy about the merits, it is refreshing at least for him to be as honest about what happened as Pat Buckley was when she complained to Murray Kempton that, following the debate, “two hundred million Americans think William F. Buckley is a screaming homosexual.”
Buckley as light on his feet, Buckley the quick-footed—there is intimation here but also truth. Not about Buckley’s sexuality, but about his essence: that the skills of a dancer are equally those of a fighter. Buckley liked to use a quote from Chambers that Tanenhaus also repeats: “To live is not to hold the lost redoubt. To live is to maneuver.” The style made the fighter; Buckley would lash out and then spin away from the blows that came in response. What is satisfying about seeing Buckley being thrown off balance by Vidal is not that it happened, but that it seemed to bother him for the rest of his life. {read}