The Pleasure of Disagreeing with Bill Buckley

Icame to know Bill Buckley because I was broke.

As a Yale Law School student on an inadequate scholarship and a budget tighter than Granny’s corset on a Texas summer day (thanks, Dan Rather), I found myself in the fall of 1966 desperately short of cash. Somehow I persuaded the Yale Alumni Magazine to let me write up a debate between Buckley and the left-leaning chaplain of Yale, William Sloane Coffin (“left-leaning” in the sense that the Titanic was listing a bit after hitting the iceberg). I followed Buckley on his daylong visit to the alma mater he’d excoriated in his first book and wrote a piece whose freewheeling tone was inspired by an up-and-coming journalist named Tom Wolfe.

Buckley found it “amusing,” and a few months later, I joined two other twentysomethings to interview him for another magazine. More surprisingly, a few months after that, the producer of Buckley’s Firing Line invited me to serve on the telecast as an “examiner,” which entailed offering contrasting views at the end of the program. I jumped at the chance to test wits with a figure who had for a decade been a commanding presence in the political arena. It was as if a rookie in his first season of minor league baseball had been invited to try batting against Sandy Koufax. What I did not expect is that it would begin a friendship that endured for the rest of his life — a friendship fueled in large measure by Buckley’s willingness, even eagerness, to engage with views wholly different from his.

If you’re at all familiar with the contours of Buckley’s life, you likely know that he was friends with and/or an admirer of an array of figures on the left: the brilliant socialist columnist Murray Kempton, longtime activist Al Lowenstein, novelist Norman Mailer, economist (and skiing buddy) John Kenneth Galbraith. The intriguing question is why. Why, given the withering “take no prisoners” persona he presented in public debate, was he so comfortable in the company of his political adversaries?

The key, I think, is less our scintillating personalities and more how much he savored the give-and-take of argument — emphasis on the give and take. As William Kristol put it, “Buckley really believes that in order to convince, you have to debate and not just preach, which of course means risking the possibility that someone will beat you in debate.” He welcomed challenges to his views as much as he enjoyed probing for weaknesses in ours. (His supreme confidence in his beliefs may have been one reason why he was so inclined.) This is most evident in the guests he invited on Firing Line, who included as many figures from the Left as from the Right. (His third guest was longtime Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas.) Those whose exposure to political “debate” these days is confined to outlets that never open themselves to contrary views would likely be startled by the parade of figures who jousted with Buckley on air: Noam Chomsky, Saul Alinsky, Allen Ginsberg, Julian Bond, and Jesse Jackson, among literally dozens of other ideological adversaries.

More telling, Buckley often gave us “examiners” a generous amount of time to challenge guests on his side of the political divide. When Friedrich von Hayek, godfather of modern conservative thinking, appeared, Buckley allowed me to spend a considerable portion of the show arguing about whether “social justice” was a worthy pursuit of public policy. I got the sense that he wanted to see where the argument was going, rather than stepping in to buttress his political soul mate. And when future British prime minister Margaret Thatcher scored me for asking whether her sex posed a challenge to her political rise, Buckley was quick to insist that of course it was a legitimate question.

I don’t mean to suggest that there wasn’t plenty of room for sharp disagreements. In 2005, I was on a panel with Buckley during a celebration of National Review’s 50th anniversary. One of the questions raised was about the “mistakes” the magazine had made. Buckley was talking about its approach to the Eisenhower administration. No, I said, it was the magazine’s views on race during the 1950s and ’60s. In what has to be the most infamous of any of Buckley’s writings, he argued that the white minority was justified in dominating Southern politics because it was, for the moment, “the advanced race.” It simply was not part of Buckley’s thinking then that the fact that blacks were systematically, often brutally, denied the right to vote made the governments in those states fundamentally illegitimate. (Other conservatives did think this; it was Jack Kemp’s belief that conservatives “should have been there with Dr. King on the streets of Atlanta and Montgomery. We should have been there with John Lewis. We should have been there on the freedom marches and bus rides. We should have been there with Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, in December of 1955.”)

Nor did Buckley hesitate to challenge me. When writer Jack Newfield and I were guests on the show to talk about our book A Populist Manifesto, Buckley leaned on the views of right-thinking economists to aver that our arguments were somewhere between simplistic and woolly-headed. (Spoiler alert — he was partially right.)

It was one of Buckley’s admirable attributes — one unfortunately shared by too few across the political spectrum — that he was comfortable with changing his mind. He came to regret his early arguments about race; he came to see that Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose work he had championed in a book, was an impediment to the cause of anti-communism, and he wrote a novel reflecting that revised view. 

Allied with that trait was a buoyancy of spirit that made him a delight both as a public figure and as a friend. When he ran for mayor of New York in 1965 and was asked what he’d do if he won, he famously replied, “Demand a recount.” And his campaign included proposals not usually thought of as part of the conservative cause, such as bicycle lanes to ease traffic congestion.

At a gathering, he could be playfully provocative, asking me during a dinner party to “say something clever about socialism.” (As I recall, my response was the much-quoted aphorism that “nobody ever washed a rented car . . .” but, I added, “they do wash a leased one,” marking me, I suppose, as something of a social democrat.) When he visited my wife and me at our weekend home near his childhood home in Connecticut, he was so gracious that my wife, not exactly a political ally, more or less fell in love with him. He was also “flexible” enough in his politics to enjoy the gift of a fine Havana, despite his wife’s denunciation of his taste for “communist cigars.”

I look back at my time on Firing Line with mixed emotions. From a self-centered point of view, it was an invaluable help to my later work; when you begin your TV life by crossing swords with the most formidable debater of his era, then interviewing politicians and offering analysis hold no terror. From a more civic point of view, Firing Line stands as an unhappy reminder of the distance that political discourse has traveled since its time, mostly because it would be difficult if not impossible to find a host both ideologically committed and open, even delighted, to engage in lengthy, civil discourse with his or her foes (much less breaking bread with them). So I owe Bill Buckley much, beginning with that Yale Alumni Magazine assignment that permitted me to afford food, and continuing through decades of collegial combat.