Open to Debate

How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line

Heather Hendershot

• Publisher: Broadside e-books
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062430472
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A unique and compelling portrait of William F. Buckley as the champion of conservative ideas in an age of liberal dominance, taking on the smartest adversaries he could find while singlehandedly reinventing the role of public intellectual in the network television era.

When Firing Line premiered on American television in 1966, just two years after Barry Goldwater's devastating defeat, liberalism was ascendant. Though the left seemed to have decisively won the hearts and minds of the electorate, the show's creator and host, William F. Buckley—relishing his role as a public contrarian—made the case for conservative ideas, believing that his side would ultimately win because its arguments were better. As the founder of the right's flagship journal, National Review, Buckley spoke to likeminded readers. With Firing Line, he reached beyond conservative enclaves, engaging millions of Americans across the political spectrum.

Each week on Firing Line, Buckley and his guests—the cream of America's intellectual class, such as Tom Wolfe, Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, Henry Kissinger, and Milton Friedman—debated the urgent issues of the day, bringing politics, culture, and economics into American living rooms as never before. Buckley himself was an exemplary host; he never appealed to emotion and prejudice; he engaged his guests with a unique and entertaining combination of principle, wit, fact, a truly fearsome vocabulary, and genuine affection for his adversaries.

Drawing on archival material, interviews, and transcripts, Open to Debate provides a richly detailed portrait of this widely respected ideological warrior, showing him in action as never before. Much more than just the story of a television show, Hendershot's book provides a history of American public intellectual life from the 1960s through the 1980s—one of the most contentious eras in our history—and shows how Buckley led the way in drawing America to conservatism during those years.

CHAPTER ONE

FORGING A NEW IMAGE FOR THE RIGHT

Goldwater, Extremism, and Stylish Conservatism

Bill’s contribution is making conservatism not only respectable but stylish. That was the meaning of the mayoral campaign. That was the meaning of Firing Line. That was the meaning of National Review and its political triumph with Reagan. Other people could have made it respectable. Nobody else could have made it stylish. When Bill ran for mayor, the establishment’s idea of political style was John Lindsay. And Bill made John Lindsay look tired intellectually.

—NEAL FREEMAN, ASSISTANT MANAGER OF BUCKLEY MAYORAL CAMPAIGN AND EARLY FIRING LINE PRODUCER¹

He is fresh and everyone else is tired.

—CAMPAIGN SLOGAN FOR NEW YORK CITY MAYORAL CANDIDATE JOHN LINDSAY, 1965

When Firing Line premiered in 1966, Goldwater’s defeat still loomed large, apparently confirming the eternal triumph of American liberalism. Conservatism had a practical problem that the movement strategists would have to address: how could conservative Republican candidates get elected? This was a long-term conundrum. But conservatism also had an image problem that could, with patience and persistence, be addressed and solved more immediately. In the popular imagination of the mid-1960s, American conservatives were largely identified with the conspiracy theorists of the John Birch Society (JBS), violent groups like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), and a variety of nutty broadcast operations run by anticommunists like H. L. Hunt and fundamentalists such as Billy James Hargis and Carl McIntire.² To most people at the time, the idea of an intellectual or urbane conservative would have seemed pretty far-fetched. Buckley would take the bull by the horns on both Firing Line and in the pages of National Review to demonstrate the legitimate status of conservatism. He would push the extremists out, argue that Goldwater could not be categorized in that camp, and, by example, show that conservatism could be not only upright but also stylish.

As Hugh Kenner summarized, “Bill was responsible for rejecting the John Birch Society and the other kooks. . . . [W]ithout him, there probably would be no respectable conservative movement in this country.”³ What is left unsaid here is that Buckley began as a Birch Society supporter. Like Barry Goldwater, he maintained for some time that many Birchers held legitimate conservative notions; it was only their fearless leader, Robert Welch, who had gone off the deep end, diving into a conspiratorial morass, even calling President Eisenhower a “dedicated conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” National Review wryly countered that Ike was not a communist; he was a golfer.

Rejecting Welch meant losing National Review subscribers, which was no small thing, as National Review was persistently in the red, like all journals of opinion. But Buckley bit the bullet and officially rejected Welch in the pages of his magazine. A bit later, Buckley realized that he had not gone far enough. The JBS rank and file was not merely held captive by Welch’s personality—perhaps a far-fetched notion to anyone who had ever heard Welch deliver one of his decidedly unscintillating lectures on the dangers of communism; Birchers were in and of themselves of a die-hard and disreputable conspiratorial bent. Buckley’s rather commonsensical insight was that such extremists had to be cut loose for the conservative movement to move forward. Firing Line would become a useful, high-profile platform for his efforts to create distance from the extremists.

An episode that aptly illustrated the challenge of shifting the conservative image away from extremism was “The Decline of Anti-Communism” (1967) with guest Fred C. Schwarz. Schwarz was the man behind the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade; he traveled across the United States hosting daylong anticommunist “schools,” published a newsletter, and authored the bestselling You Can Trust the Communists (to Be Communists) in 1960. He even pioneered conservative folk singing with his discovery of Janet Greene, the “anti-Baez.” (Inexplicably, her tunes “Fascist Threat,” “Commie Lies,” and “Comrades Lament” never hit the big time.) This was a man who ate, drank, and slept anticommunism. He was bespectacled and tidy, with an Australian accent, always in dark suit and tie, his short hair slicked back.

Buckley never had any of the out-and-out anticommunist nuts on his show—people like Hargis, McIntire, or Hunt—and he was at pains to demonstrate that Schwarz did not fit in that camp of political operatives. Introducing him, Buckley emphasized that “Dr. Schwarz has never made it easy for his critics. He has not, for instance, uttered any memorable inanity—not that Eisenhower is a Communist, or that Communism is a Jewish plot, or that the United Nations was conceived by the Third Internationale.”

That Schwarz was not anti-Semitic or conspiratorial was enough for Buckley to place him in the nonextremist camp. Yet Schwarz’s own self-presentation made it difficult to cling to the notion that he was a regular Joe, just an ardent, God-fearing anticommunist. Schwarz had made a close study of Marxist-Leninist doctrine. So close, in fact, that it was at several points rather difficult for Buckley to have a genuine exchange with him. Buckley wonders how changes in the economy of the Soviet Union might change the communist situation, for example.

BUCKLEY: It might just be possible for people to argue plausibly that a strong economy in the Soviet Union is one which necessarily would augment the power of the people vis-à-vis the power of its leaders and cause them to be a more considerable restraining influence than they are in situations in which they are in perpetual penury.

SCHWARZ: You know why I discount that argument, Bill. . . . This argument, that the changes within the Soviet Union in which the people become more economically well-to-do and that they get certain basic advantages will moderate communism and change it, reminded me of the Marxist argument in The Communist Manifesto that capitalism was creating its own grave diggers. Now we are reversing it and saying that communism is creating its own grave diggers: in order to industrialize, they have had to educate their people, they have to give them certain economic advantages, that freedom is an appetite—

BUCKLEY: But might that not be true? That is to say, as I understand it, at least this is my own position, that the greatest friend of conservatism is realism. The reason I am a conservative is because I understand it to be realistic. Now, if the greatest enemy, therefore, of fantasy is circumstance, then don’t we have a lot to gain by trying to put the Soviet Union in situations where it finds out how jejune and misleading its own axioms are?

SCHWARZ: I doubt if it’s true, Bill. It was certainly not true for Marx—the argument that capitalism was creating its own gravediggers. . . .

Buckley is looking for nuances and trying to tease out hypotheticals. Granted, it seemed unlikely that the Soviet Union would realize its axioms were jejune, but what if? Schwarz can only go back to The Communist Manifesto again and again, like a hack Pravda journalist.

Interestingly, Buckley does not seem frustrated that he keeps hitting this brick wall. He’s convinced that Schwarz is a respectable anticommunist, and Schwarz’s performance more or less confirms this, but there is at the very least, if not a nuttiness, a, shall we say, limited quality to his articulation of the dangers of communism. He even argues that his work is simply “Christian and anticommunist” but categorically could not be labeled “conservative.” Buckley pushes back that there is a “natural correspondence” between anticommunism and conservatism, but Schwarz will not budge: he is not part of the conservative movement. Buckley finally says, not unkindly, “I’m aware that that has been your rubric, and I won’t embarrass you by probing it.” Schwarz laughs, and they move on.

Schwarz could not satisfactorily talk through the ways that communism had changed since the Russian Revolution, consider the nuances of the hostility between Russia and China, or ponder how differences between Stalin and later Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin affected the global communist movement. He had a plethora of facts and figures at his fingertips, but, like a broken record, it all came back to the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of unilateral communist conquest. He was a friendly, perpetually smiling man who projected exactly the opposite image of anticommunism as that projected by Senator McCarthy, and to that extent he was a good Firing Line guest for demonstrating that the right need not be alarming.

Buckley also had Schwarz on the show specifically as part of his ongoing effort to debunk Danger on the Right, a book in which Schwarz featured prominently. The 1964 exposé was written by Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein under the aegis of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, and its objective was to expose the “radical right” and the somewhat less dangerous “extreme conservatives.” Forster and Epstein identified Schwarz with the former camp, Buckley with the latter. The book described Schwarz as a “professional anticommunist,” implying that he was in the business of attacking the Reds to turn a quick buck. The authors correctly noted that Schwarz himself was not anti-Semitic and that he “avoid[ed] the extremes, relatively speaking, of Welch and the Birchites.”⁴ They also noted his scare tactics; in his traveling lectures, Schwarz would elaborate in grueling detail what the communists would do when they took over America (he predicted their goal was to accomplish this feat in 1973). They would take San Francisco as world headquarters, for example, and dump its people into the bay, or cast them into the Nevada desert. A color comic book that the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade distributed to Mexican children showed “communist soldiers prodding a priest with a bayonet; a woman with a hammer and sickle on her uniform flourishing a whip threateningly over helpless little children; [and] a group of slave laborers, one of whom was being lashed by a guard.”⁵

The Danger on the Right authors speculated that Schwarz’s scare tactics softened people up and made them more open to conversion by the John Birch Society and other far-right groups. They also noted that he had gotten a bit dumpy since beginning his anticommunist work in 1950, that he rarely smiled, and that he was nervous and insecure and bit his fingernails or cracked his knuckles when feeling unsure of himself.⁶ That such tacky comments added a bit of dash to a book that was otherwise a dull list of facts and figures was indisputable. But the gratuitous insults also undercut the book’s authority as neutral reportage.

Buckley resented Danger on the Right’s attack on both him and his magazine. If the authors had stuck to the facts—as when they quoted Buckley saying, in 1964, “I believe in potholing, rather than broadening, the highway to the voting booth”⁷—they would have had sufficient fodder to brand him an “extreme conservative.” (Buckley and his associates were comfortable describing their position as “right-wing”; it was the notion that there was anything “extreme” in this position that rankled them.⁸) Why then call him “the aging Boy Wonder of the American Right” (he was an old man of thirty-nine at the time) and suggest that, “if his propaganda strength were not so useful to the Radical Right, he would be very amusing and harmless”?⁹

Buckley disparaged the book repeatedly in the early years of Firing Line, and in 1966 he even devoted an episode to the topic “Extremism” and invited Dore Schary—former president of MGM and current national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League—onto the show in order to drive home his arguments against the book. Buckley said in his introduction to the show that the thesis of the book was “that America suffers from a terrible affliction, namely the conservative movement. The book makes, if only for the record, a distinction between what it calls the ‘rabble rousing right,’ for instance Gerald L. K. Smith, or the radical right, for instance Robert Welch, and the extreme conservatives, for instance me. But somehow the distinctions have a way of blurring, and the reader emerges with the impression that what might roughly be called the ‘Goldwater Right’ is a collection of radicals and extremists, whose exposure and resistance it is the sublime historical duty of the Anti-Defamation League to effect.”

Today, Danger on the Right’s labels might not seem so egregious, but at the Goldwater moment the fascist connotations of extremist were unambiguous. Schary attempts to moderate the book’s message, arguing that it had said that some who supported Goldwater “happened to be members of the radical right, in the same way that sometimes very liberal candidates will attract the support of those much further to the left than they are. I understood, from what I’ve been told, that what we were really going to discuss was extremism in the United States today, and I think it would be helpful and perhaps a little bit more purposeful if we were to avoid going back to books that were written two years ago, and discuss what the perils might be in terms of extremism in the United States today.” In what is perhaps an all-time first, Schary actually declines to engage in book promotion on TV. Undeterred, Buckley maintains that Danger on the Right is still being sold and merchandised and is still relevant. He goes on to attack a number of details in the book. On the book’s notion that “the new extremism, it appeared as the Coughlin movement, and flowered into the reactionary ‘America First’ movement,” Buckley says “that’s the kind of thing that sends me up a tree.” Here’s the exchange that ensues.

BUCKLEY: I know an awful lot of people who were in the “America First” movement. Jessup was there; Chester Bowles was a member; Norman Thomas was very, very close to it; it had the largest membership of any organization—any recent organization—in American history, but all of a sudden, I read ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: The Making of William F. Buckley Jr.
• Introduction: The Making of Firing Line: A “Bare Knuckled Intellectual Brawl” with “No Production Values!”
• Chapter One: Forging a New Image for the Right: Goldwater, Extremism, and Stylish Conservatism
• Chapter Two: “Apodictic All the Way Through”: Firing Line Takes On Communism
• Chapter Three: From “We Shall Overcome” to “Shoot, Don’t Loot”: Firing Line Confronts Civil Rights and Black Power
• Chapter Four: Chivalrous Pugilism: How Firing Line Tried to KO Women’s Lib
• Chapter Five: Tripping Over Tricky Dick
• Chapter Six: From the Mashed Potato Circuit to the Oval Office: Ronald Reagan, Firing Line, and the Triumph of the Right
• Conclusion: In Praise of Honest Intellectual Combat
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Also by Heather Hendershot
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher