PBS, the home of William F. Buckley Jr.’s Firing Line from 1971 to 1999, has chosen our founder as the subject of the latest installment of its American Masters documentary series. The two-hour film, aptly titled “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley,” airs tonight. More WFB on our televisions is welcome, especially in these times. But the film ends on a tendentious and discordant note that detracts from the whole.
There is much to recommend the documentary, which spans WFB’s well-lived life from beginning to end, covers the major episodes in his career from his time as a student at Yale to the fall of the Soviet empire, and aptly situates him within the context of his times. The nearly two dozen people interviewed include many hostile left-leaning historians, but also Christopher Buckley, Matt Continetti, Peter Robinson, Alvin Felzenberg, Lee Edwards, and our own Rick Brookhiser and Jay Nordlinger. There is extensive archival footage of WFB, which captures his wit, eloquence, gentlemanliness, and joyous mischievousness.
A few stops along the way could use a corrective. Beverly Gage describes WFB’s attitude toward Joseph McCarthy as excusing McCarthy’s tactics due to the justice of his cause. She paraphrases him as saying, “That’s okay.” This simplifies things to the point of turning them upside-down: Even writing in 1953, Buckley took pains to separate McCarthy’s demagogic approach from the broader issue of communist infiltration, and the subsequent opening of Soviet archives justified this attitude. “I think he did more harm than good,” Buckley told Charlie Rose in a 1999 interview, observing that “he engaged in excesses that were suicidal in character. Plus also, he aroused in his critics reserves of odium and exaggeration.” In summary, he said, “It’s impossible to defend McCarthy, and it’s super-impossible to defend his critics.”
The film dwells upon WFB’s views on civil rights and his Oxford debate with James Baldwin on race, all of which are appropriate to examine. A fairer presentation, however, would not have omitted how he came around to change his views on those topics, and why he did so. This was an instance of his willingness to re-examine even his own premises and arguments that illustrates his character as a public man. The film instead, by concluding only with the assertion that WFB always believed he had won the debate with Baldwin, implies that Buckley learned and changed nothing. That is not the truth.
As Al Felzenberg writes in his biography of Buckley, by 1965 he showed “increased sympathy for the goals of the civil rights movement and for the rights of citizens to demonstrate.” In 2004, Buckley told Time magazine, “I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong. Federal intervention was necessary.”
On questions of tolerance and equality, a fuller and timely picture of Buckley’s thinking would also have addressed his vigorous advocacy against antisemitism on the right.
In April 1959, Buckley issued a directive that the magazine would “not carry on its masthead the name of any person whose name also appears on the masthead of The American Mercury,” a cranky publication that printed antisemitic writing. He also made examining and condemning antisemitism a particular focus of his writings in the 1990s. This is perhaps the largest topic entirely omitted in the documentary.
WFB’s celebrated battle with Robert Welch and the John Birch Society — which is mistakenly portrayed as taking place after the 1964 election, rather than during the presidency of John F. Kennedy — also plays many correct notes, yet gets the tune wrong. The filmmakers emphasize, rightly, why Buckley was reluctant to take on the Birchers, but end with the erroneous impression that he therefore pulled his punches. There is no mention of how relentlessly he went after Welch’s untruths in the pages of National Review, nor of how he marshaled in advance the public support of figures such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan to get the movement behind his written pronouncements.
The people who knew Buckley could, and did, set the filmmakers right on such points, but their comments were ignored.
These might be mere quibbles but for the concluding two minutes. After ignoring everything of substance that WFB wrote or said between 1990 and his death in 2008, and then further ignoring everything that happened between 2008 and 2021, the documentary veers abruptly into a montage of the events of January 6, 2021, and gives a platform to critics of conservatism to argue that Buckley’s philosophy contained dark and menacing elements that laid the groundwork for January 6. “By the end,” we are told, “it was clear that the nastier forces had won out.”
WFB would have been the first to warn that nothing in our politics ever ends, and no victory is permanent but that of the Cross. The disgraceful events of January 6 were at odds with his decades of advocacy against riot and disorder and in favor of America’s founding charters. To equate Buckley’s conservatism with darkness, grievance, and conflict for its own sake is a smear based on any fair reading of the record.
What would Buckley have thought of Donald Trump? The filmmakers choose to close with Christopher Buckley’s quip that one should seek an answer in the vast volume of his father’s written and spoken work. Had they been interested, they could have followed that up by quoting the essay WFB wrote in 2000, when Trump was sticking a toe in the Reform Party primaries, in which Buckley branded Trump a “narcissist” and a “demagogue.”
In sum, it is good that PBS felt compelled to feature Buckley in its series. Given his consequence, there will long be contention over his legacy. But the makers of this documentary should have resisted their ideologically driven temptation to connect him to an event that took place more than a dozen years after his death and that everything in his decades of public advocacy suggests he would have wholeheartedly condemned.