Jeet Heer Praises William F. Buckley's Capacity to Learn

Jeet Heer:

: I do have to say though that the passing of William F. Buckley, whose death has just been announced, makes me feel wistful and at a loss. Like countless other readers, I read Buckley not for his ideas but for his voice, that languid self-assured upper-crust tone that was saved from being offensively twee by a certain tart wit and generous capacity to engage with other points of view....

I want to focus in on a few key themes in his life.

Race and his capacity for change. Conservatives are supposed to be defenders of the status quo but Buckley had a life-long capacity to change, adapt and learn. This can be seen most clearly on the issue of race. Like many Americans of his generation, Buckley was raised to be a bigot. His siblings once burned a cross in front of a Jewish resort. In the 1950s, Buckley and the circle of writers at National Review around him were unabashedly racist, often publishing whole-hearted defenses of Jim Crow segregation. This is evident in an 1957 editorial defending the Southern states from challenges to Jim Crow: "The central question that emerges... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes - the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists." (National Review, August 27, 1957).

Despite this dismal stance, Buckley did in fact change and renounce racism by the mid-1960s, in part because his horror at the terrorist tactics used by white supremacists to fight the civil rights movement, in part because of the moral witness of friends like Garry Wills who confronted Buckley with the immorality of his politics.... There are a host of other issues on which Buckley moderated his politics. In the 1980s, he said that if he were a black South African he would probably support the ANC, a statement that shocked fellow conservatives. This independence of mind continued to the end of his life. Not too long ago, he admitted that the Iraq war was a ghastly mistake, again annoying his intellectual fellow travelers. He was learning until his last days....

Buckley was a literary man at heart, which can best be seen in his skill at discovering young writers. To read the book review section of the old National Review is to come across an amazing range of stylists who had either been discovered by Buckley or nurtured by his friendship: Arlene Croce, Garry Wills, Joan Didion, Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, John Leonard, D. Keith Mano. As Buckley became disengaged from National Review, the magazine lost its taste for strong, distinctive prose....

Buckley will be widely and enormously missed. Rest in peace.

Comments

[jimbo]

If Buckley and his ilk couldn't get easy moral questions like racial segregation right, why should anyone have listened to their opinions about anything else?

[Bloix]

I believe that Buckley moderated his views on race over the decades. How could he have failed to do so? The things he published in the 50's couldn't be said in polite company by the 70's. What I have never seen is any expression of contrition for his contribution to oppression and human misery. If he did ever acknowledge that he was wrong and that his errors had consequences, perhaps someone could post a link.

[Monte Davis]

Maybe because not all questions -- not even all moral questions -- can be sensibly aligned on an "easy --- hard" axis...?

Nah, couldn't be. That would imply the world isn't optimized to make jimbo very, very right.

[sm]

He seems to have been a very slow learner.

[tedb]

Nice try, Monte, but your glib strawman retort to Jimbo is not half as clever as you think it is. Conservatives like Buckley claimed to possess keen insight into the proper moral order of the nation. Two hundred years earlier the Declaration of Independence declared "that all men are created equal." One hundred years earlier Abraham Lincoln referenced those same six words in the first sentence of the Gettysburg Address. Nevertheless, in the 1950's Buckley and his cohort felt comfortable betraying this moral heritage by claiming that the white race should "prevail." Most people would say this is an easy call on moral grounds, and, since Buckley blew it, he should not be trusted on more complicated judgments.
On the other hand I suppose you would choose the guy who can't balance his checkbook to calculate a trajectory for your billion dollar satellite because it is so very difficult to determine if the one task is harder than the other.
Of course, that's how the Bush administration has approached personnel issues, thus giving us a judge of Arabian stallions to run FEMA.

[david]

Arlene Croce, Garry Wills, Joan Didion, Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, John Leonard, D. Keith Mano.

Certainly an impressive list.

[Brian]

Well, admitting the Iraq war was a ghastly mistake does qualify as learning, I guess, but it's hardly evidence of perspicacity.

[Kate G.]

got to agree with sm on this one--he was a mad slow learner. And of course Brian is also correct--realizing after the fact that the Iraq war was a mistake makes him quite a bit less stupid and vile than the rest of his party and his president, but is "hardly evidence of perspicacity." I also love, love, love the bizarre passive tense in the quoted article in which Buckley's and his family's active racism is somehow lowered to the level of culturally normative. *Even in the forties and fifties* the *burning of a cross* on the lawn of a Jewish Hotel would have been seen as pretty far outside the mainstream of acceptable behavior. Also, a quite bizarre choice of iconography given its association with the quite *anti catholic* KKK.

Kate G.

Kate G.

[rea]

It's a measure of the degeneracy of contemporary conservativism that Buckley looks like a relatively decent, sensible person in hindsight, compared to thsoe who followed him.

[Roger Bigod]

I come to praise Mr. Buckley for his kind-hearted acceptance of individuals who supported political Marxism in the 1930's and later decided that they had made a mistake. We should certainly extend him the same forgiveness. Given a few more decades, he might even have changed his mind about Marshall.

[harold]

These articles strike me as spin. In 1955 Buckley was 29 and the National Review didn't give up on anti-Semitism until the early 60s., after the wide publicity given to the Eichmann trial (when he was in his mid-thirties) and then only when it became impolitic to continue to demand that Jews let bygones be bygones in the interests of anti-Communism.

Did Buckley ever explain or acknowledge his change of heart?

It is chilling to think that people like Buckley had an influence on US policy.

[Maynard Handley]

"Like countless other readers, I read Buckley not for his ideas but for his voice"

I assume this means his figurative, not his literal voice. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, and all that, and perhaps it's not fair to attach someone on a physical characteristic they can't much change (though Buckley seemed to have no problem on this score when the physical characteristic was skin color). But, god the man's voice was grating. That slurred droning gave me an insight into visceral hatred of the "upper classes" of certain englishmen.

[ABP]

What a great guy Buckley was.

"Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals."

1986 in the gray lady.

[Roger Bigod]

IIRC, the tatoo on the buttocks was to feature a quote from Dante. He seemed pleased with his witty command of the classics.

[CN]

R.I.P., which in this instance stands for "Roast In Perdition".

[David Webb]

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