Journalists who are conservative
Our National Review Institute has many fine programs and activities, but I think my favorite may be the William F. Buckley Jr. Communicators Program. WFB meant a lot to a lot of us. He does not necessarily figure in the lives of young people today. People come and go, except for Moses, Shakespeare, and Lucille Ball, as WFB himself might say.
Actually, today’s young may be a little hazy on who Lucy was.
I never knew who Murray Kempton was. But Bill Buckley adored him, and talked about him. Kempton was a newspaper columnist — and inspired a teenage George F. Will to go into exactly that line of work. When Kempton died, in 1997, WFB hailed him as “a great artist.”
So was WFB, of course. And this is one thing we try to communicate in our WFB Communicators workshops. Bill never had a “failure to communicate.” In addition to gusts of thought, he had the means of expressing them.
If you would like to support our WFB workshops, you may do so by making a tax-deductible contribution to our end-of-year campaign. Go here (and thank you).
Before Bill Buckley and National Review came along, conservatives had the reputation of being cranks and bigots and dopes. WFB and his compadres changed that. They presented a politics — a worldview — that was humane and logical and, often, elegant.
I love talking to young people about WFB, in part because it allows me to enthuse, in part because it allows me to reminisce, in part because it allows me to make important points — and timeless ones. Maybe I could provide just a taste.
Do you want to be a “conservative journalist” or a “journalist who is a conservative”? That is a Buckleyite framing. WFB was a journalist — and an intellectual, and a performer — who was a conservative. He was a “prose stylist,” to borrow a phrase from him. He also had style off the page — on a stage, for example (and in a thousand less public settings).
Style is one thing that made WFB admired by people of various political stripes. “Gotta hand it to him,” they’d say.
WFB always wanted to talk with — to debate — the best of the “other side,” not the worst. He did not want easy meat. He wanted the most formidable the Left had to offer. He wanted to be challenged, and, in turn, to challenge.
On his television show, Firing Line, he habitually had an “examiner,” whose job it was to challenge WFB and his guest or guests. The examiners tended to be bright young liberals: Jeff Greenfield, Michael Kinsley, Mark Green. (They are now bright old liberals.)
WFB had impeccable manners. (He probably wouldn’t like the cliché “impeccable manners.” “Why can’t you say ‘excellent’ or ‘faultless’ or something else?” he might say.) On air, everyone was “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” or “Miss” to him. (Later “Ms.”) There was one exception: Johnny Carson. He had to be “Johnny,” for “Mr. Carson” was just too stiff.
For WFB, manners were not merely a matter of honorifics or the right fork. They were not even mainly that. They were a matter of making the other guy, or gal, feel comfortable.
That said, WFB was no lamb, to put it mildly. Or he was a lamb with teeth. Not for nothing did he call his show “Firing Line.”
Anyway, these are some of the points I like to make in our WFB Communicators workshops. Best of all, I think, is hearing the man himself — Buckley himself — in video clips. Our young participants sometimes say: “That was on television?” Yes, Virginia, it was.
But enough television, let’s talk magazines, and in particular our favorite, National Review. NRI provides a William F. Buckley Jr. Fellowship in Political Journalism. Our current Buckley fellow is Luther Ray Abel, an able and affable person from Wisconsin. He is a Navy veteran too. He will go on in journalism, and be a credit to the craft, no doubt. The world hath need of him, and many others like him.
We also have a Thomas L. Rhodes Journalism Fellowship. The person in this job pays special attention to economic matters. So did Dusty Rhodes. He was a financial whiz who concluded his career as a partner at Goldman Sachs. He said to WFB, “I want to beat socialism. I want to help beat socialism.” So Dusty went to work for National Review (not for the money, trust us — he took none).
Our current Rhodes fellow is Dominic Pino, another able and affable Wisconsinite, who holds two degrees from George Mason University, that hotbed, or oasis, of free-market economics. Which reminds me: WFB once subtitled a collection of his — Happy Days Were Here Again (1993) — “Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist.”
“The future lies ahead of us,” LBJ once said. WFB poked a little fun at that. Where else would the future lie? In any event, we can shape our future, to a degree. We need not be passive. Que será, será, goes an old line. Well, maybe — but we, too, have a hand in what will be.
Thank you for giving whatever you can to our programs. (Again, donate here.) We are grateful for your support — for your investment in conservative journalists, journalists who are conservative. For your investment in the future of our American experiment.