Lately, there has been a lot of talk about race — when is there not? — and the talk has been occasioned by President Trump’s tweets, and the reaction to them. Which tweets, which reaction? I don’t think it matters much. There’s always something, isn’t there?
The recent talk has included plenty of comments on race and the American Right. Some of these comments have been directed at National Review — and at William F. Buckley Jr. in particular. He has come in for some rough treatment. I don’t want to get into a long history — Kevin (Williamson) is better at that than I am, anyway — but I would like to relate two things. A couple of personal memories.
In Bill’s last years, I was on a platform with him, a platform that included Jeff Greenfield, the longtime Democratic journalist. (He was also a longtime friend of WFB’s.) Jeff was pressing him on the Right and civil rights, and I made an intervention or two, saying that Goldwater was worried about the faithful application of the Constitution, etc. — you know, all the things we’ve always said.
Bill would have none of it. He shut me down. He said the Right, including himself, had been wrong on civil rights, and that’s all there was to it. He regretted it keenly.
Flash forward to the last conversation I ever had with him — at least, the last in person. It was in February 2008, the month he died, and I was just about to go off to India. He was reminiscing. With the most pained expression, he recounted an incident that occurred in Camden, S.C., in the home of his mother. A friend of hers, a leading lady in town, had come to visit. She had just interviewed a maid — a black woman — who introduced herself as “Mrs. Sullivan.” The leading lady was aghast: Imagine someone like that, wanting to be called “Mrs.” Somebody!
Why Bill was reliving this, I don’t know. But it was on his mind, and he hated the inhumanity of that little episode. (Of course, everyone first-names now. But it was different then. Bill wanted this lady — Mrs. Sullivan — to have had her dignity.)
I offer these things simply because they are true, and relevant. It’s not fair to keep Bill Buckley frozen in time, or any of us, really. WFB moved on a number of things: I think of McCarthy and McCarthyism, too. (“Set back the cause of anti-Communism by ten years, at least.”) And Israel. People ought to be allowed the fullness of their lives. Few are so fruitful and beneficent as Bill’s.