Loading summary
Transcript115 lines
- [00:01]
Eli Lake
This November will mark the 100th anniversary of William F. Buckley Jr. S birth. He, more than any other figure, is responsible for creating the American conservative movement that fueled the Reagan Revolution nearly 50 years ago. After the break, what happened to that revolution in the era of Donald Trump?
- [00:33]
Irving Berlin
Irving Berlin, what happened once happens again.
- [00:41]
Eli Lake
Hey there, it's Eli. With a constant barrage of alarming headlines, wars, a warming planet, and high stakes politics, it might feel like we're teetering on the edge, but the world contains a lot more good news than you hear on mainstream media. If you're looking for another show that questions the status quo, and then I recommend what Could Go Right, the twice weekly news podcast hosted by Zachary Carabelle and Emma Varvaloukas, recently nominated for best politics or opinion podcast at the Ambie Awards. What Could Go Right provides a balanced view of what's going on across the globe, even during difficult times. Each Wednesday they sit down with leading minds like best selling author John Green and environmental reporter Emily Atkin to discuss today's biggest challenges with nuance and insight. And on Fridays, they highlight the latest progress reports from around the world, from life changing medical advancements to groundbreaking efforts to combat climate change. If you need a place to start, check out their recent episode with economics expert Matt Stoller, who breaks down the 100 year war between monopoly power and democracy. It's an enlightening conversation that's perfect for breaking history fans. So fight the urge to doom scroll, tune in to what Could Go Right wherever you get your podcasts. Remember when conservatives sounded like this?
- [02:07]
Ronald Reagan
I should like to begin by asking President Reagan, what would you do if, say, one afternoon you were advised that a race riot had broken out in Detroit? Well, I would be inclined to say that that was a problem for the local authorities in Detroit, unless those local authorities were unable to control the situation and called in the federal government for martial help such as troops. But otherwise, it really is a local problem. And maybe one of the things that's been happening too much is the federal government has been interfering with where they haven't been invited in.
- [02:47]
Eli Lake
That was Ronald Reagan as he was campaigning for the presidency in conversation with his friend William F. Buckley Jr. That clip feels like it belongs in a Museum in 2025, when the Republican President, Donald Trump, has just sent the National Guard into Los Angeles over the objections of California's governor. He is not a monarch, he is not a king, and he should stop acting like one.
- [03:11]
Ronald Reagan
He's an incompetent governor. He's destroying one of our great states. The situation was winding down. That's not what Donald Trump wanted. He again chose escalation. He chose more force. He chose theatrics over public safety. We would bring more in if we needed it, because we have to make sure there's going to be law and order.
- [03:30]
Eli Lake
It's not just on the National Guard. Here is Donald Trump last month warning Republicans to leave one of the biggest entitlement programs intact during his budget negotiations. Can you guarantee that Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security will not be touched?
- [03:45]
Ronald Reagan
Yeah, I mean, I have said it so many times. You shouldn't be asking me that question. Okay, this will not be read my lips.
- [03:53]
Irving Berlin
It won't be read my lips anymore.
- [03:56]
Ronald Reagan
We're not going to touch it.
- [03:58]
Eli Lake
We are a long way from Reagan's famous quip.
- [04:01]
Ronald Reagan
I think you all know that I've always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
- [04:11]
Eli Lake
So what happened to the American right? Is it even a conservative movement anymore? Or has it given way to the grievance politics of populism? Well, to answer that question, we have to go back to the origins of the conservative movement that many in the Trump coalition today believe they are rejecting. We have to travel back to the beginning of the Cold War, a time when FDR's new deal and welfare state appeared immovable and when the opponents of big government and global communism really did feel they were a scattered and permanent political minority. In this world emerges a young Yale graduate with a gift for talking, writing, and listening. His name was William F. Buckley, Jr. And he founded National Review, a magazine that opposed mainstream Republicans and Democrats, that opposed a consensus that the welfare state was here to stay and that the Soviet Union could only be contained but never rolled back. It's fitting that this magazine's motto summed up both the stakes and the chances of this daunting political project.
- [05:15]
Charles Kessler
It promised to, quote, stand athwart history, yelling stop at a time when no one is inclined to do so or have much patience with those who so urge it.
- [05:24]
Matthew Continetti
Well, I don't think there would be an American conservative movement without William F. Buckley, Jr.
- [05:29]
Eli Lake
This is free Press columnist and author of the Right. Matthew Continetti.
- [05:34]
Matthew Continetti
Is always a conservative tendency in politics. As long as we have a left, we will have a right to react to the left, to address the challenge posed by the left, possibly even to reform institutions to insulate them against the left. But the American conservative movement is something very special. It really emerges after the Second World War as a result of the welfare state that was created by Franklin Delano roosevelt before the Second World War during the 1930s, and its perpetuation under first a Democratic President Truman and then a Republican President Eisenhower.
- [06:12]
Eli Lake
Buckley was not a politician or a statesman. He did not invent a philosophical system. And even though he wrote more than 50 books, he could never finish his manuscript on the history of the American conservatives. Buckley's primary profession was journalist. His job was to persuade Americans of the dangers of the modern welfare state, the secularization of American society, and the threat posed by international communism. But he managed to knit together a movement that began as a political insurgency and ended up in a conservative revolution. There are many others who are owed credit for that success. But Buckley stands apart as the first to incubate the ideas and thinkers that came to define the American right that Trumpism has in many ways supplanted.
- [06:59]
Ronald Reagan
Many of you have known and been grateful for Bill's friendship, and like everything else he does, he is made of that, too, an art form. So, Bill, one last word to you. We thank you for your friendship. You are, of course, a great man. And so we thank you also for National Review for setting loose so much good in the world. And, Bill, thanks, too, for all the fun. God bless you.
- [07:31]
Eli Lake
The Reagan revolution was the apogee of Buckleyism, and yet today that revolution is described by many in Trump's movement as yielding a zombie ideology that ended up harming the very constituency it purported to defend. This is the editor of the Claremont Review of Books, Charles Kessler.
- [07:49]
Jonah Goldberg
As young people on the right, particularly today, think of themselves, they don't think of themselves as a continuation of the Buckley or the Buckley Reagan conservative movement. They think that's ancient history and that.
- [08:03]
Eli Lake
Zombie Reaganism, as they say.
- [08:05]
Jonah Goldberg
Yes. Right. And that it's no longer relevant, if it ever was relevant to the American right. That, I think, is a. Is a misjudgment on their part and one that I hope they will revise as experience suggests itself to them and recommends itself to them. Because I think there's a lot that they could learn from the old right.
- [08:31]
Eli Lake
And this is what makes the Buckley legacy so fascinating today. Even those who believe they are discarding it remain indebted. Welcome to its wisdom. I'm Eli Lake, and you're listening to Breaking History. In this episode, we examine the charmed and momentous life of Bill Buckley, the man who built the American conservative movement, and why it seems like conservatives in 2025 have run out of William F. Bucks to give.
- [09:01]
Irving Berlin
Get your hand out My pocket My money's better spent on groceries and doctors paying off rent I'd like to help my neighbor those with less than me I'll set aside some extra and call a charity that is not the common spent Spread the wealth around Debating ways to tax to spend our money that they found the time is on the March Glory, I am religious.
- [10:02]
Eli Lake
November 24th this year would mark the 100th birthday of William F. Buckley, Jr. He was born into immense privilege. His father, William F. Buckley Sr. Was an oil man who made his fortune in Mexico and then later Venezuela. And he lavished his son with private tutors, sending him to European boarding schools, Yale University. Buckley led an aristocrat's life with lavish skiing vacations in Switzerland, a manor home in Connecticut and a maisonette in Manhattan. He loved the harpsichord, sailing and $20 words.
- [10:35]
Sam Tanenhaus
His parents were from the South.
- [10:37]
Eli Lake
This is Sam Tanenhaus, whose long awaited authorized biography of Buckley was published this month.
- [10:42]
Sam Tanenhaus
You know, people think of Buckley as being very Connecticut Yankee, very kind of uber patrician, but he wasn't all that was kind of a. An affect, but a great affect. His family lived in Europe for several years, multilingual family. And so they divided their time between Sharon, Connecticut, what's called the northwest corner of Connecticut, near the Berkshire. That's where they lived most of the. But in the winters I went down south. And the father, his father, William F. Buckley Sr. I'm an oil speculator and real estate guy. Brilliant lawyer, incredibly quick mind. Bill inherited the mind from his father. Bill was the sixth of 10 children. So I tell people he grew up very lonely because everybody was always off in boarding school and his parents were never around. He was raised by servants. And I said, because Bill Buckley was so lonely, we got the American conservative movement. He had to have people around him, right? He's looking for companionship.
- [11:33]
Eli Lake
Buckley's political identity took shape at Yale as an undergraduate between 1946 and 1950. On the surface, he flourished there as the chairman of the Yale Daily News and a dazzling debater in the Yale political Union. Eventually, he was tapped for Skull and Bones, the exclusive secret society whose members are a who's who of the American 20th century establishment, including three presidents. And yet, despite these establishment endorsements, Buckley saw himself as a kind of renegade. Buckley used the Yale Daily News to rail against Yale itself. The college was too secular, he wrote. Its professors were too enamored with collectivism. And academic freedom had become a license for indoctrination. In one telling editorial, Buckley singled out a popular sociology professor named Raymond Kennedy for mocking Catholicism and the Eucharist. This was controversial on campus because the student paper at Yale was not expected to slander professors. But Buckley changed that and this piece of writing became the grist for Buckley's first book, God and Man at Yale. In its preface, he writes, I propose.
- [12:47]
Charles Kessler
Simply to expose what I regard as an extraordinarily irresponsible educational attitude that under the protective label academic freedom has produced one of the most extraordinary incongruities of our time. The institution that derives its moral and financial support from Christian individualists and then addresses itself to the tasks of persuading the sons of these supporters to be atheistic socialists.
- [13:14]
Eli Lake
The book marked Buckley's arrival in the Republic of Letters, but he would not immediately become a public intellectual. He spent a year working for the CIA in Mexico City as a deep cover agent. Buckley would later explain that most of his work was involved in helping edit and rewrite a memoir of a Peruvian former Communist. But his stint in the agency only deepened his hatred of Communism. And the chief anti communist of the early 1950s, Senator Joe McCarthy, became the main character of William F. Buckley's next book.
- [13:45]
Ronald Reagan
One Communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many. One communist among the American advisors at Yalta was one Communist humani. And even. Even if there were only one Communist in the State Department, even if there were only one Communist in the State Department, that could still be one Communist too many.
- [14:21]
Eli Lake
Today, McCarthy's legacy is in foul odor. He was a classic demagogue, inventing statistics, claiming to have secret lists of communist traitors that had infiltrated the highest ranks of the government. And this is largely true. But it also leaves out the fact that there were real Communists who really did infiltrate the government. McCarthy stoked a moral panic about these infiltrators, but his counterpart in the House, Richard Nixon, was a diligent red hunter.
- [14:48]
Ronald Reagan
I am holding in my hand a microfilm of very highly confidential, secret State Department documents. These documents were fed out of the state department over 10 years ago by Communists who were employees of that department and who were interested in seeing if these documents were sent to the Soviet Union, where the interests of the Soviet Union happened to be in conflict with those of the United States.
- [15:13]
Eli Lake
Unlike McCarthy, Nixon got the goods. His house investigation exposed a former senior State Department official named Alger Hiss. And this is where Buckley comes in. For Buckley, McCarthy may have been wrong in his specifics, but he was right about the broader threat posed by Communist infiltrators. In his second book, co authored with his brother in law, Brent Brozell, Joe McCarthy and his enemies. Buckley turned the tables on the establishment consensus that McCarthy was a clownish demagogue. He may have misplaced some allegations, but he understood the risks at hand. After all, in 1949, America lost her nuclear monopoly when Soviet spies stole the atom bomb design from Los alamos. Buckley and McCarthy had tapped into something before World War II. And even in its immediate aftermath, the inclination of the American right was to stay out of Europe until the Japanese fascist bombed Pearl Harbor. The Buckley family was part of the America first movement that opposed providing material support to the United Kingdom even as London was being bombed by the Nazis. But the Second World War and the expansion of Soviet dominion into Eastern Europe, along with the success of Mao's communist revolution in mainland China, all of that changed the calculus. The New Right could no longer support an America isolated from the world. Again, this is Matthew Continetti.
- [16:36]
Matthew Continetti
The American conservative movement was reacting to the other victors In World War II, that is the Soviet Union and the emerging Soviet Empire and the challenge of global Communism. And so this was the unique situation we had in America after the Second World War where you had conservatives who had always been opposed to Roosevelt, but now they're beginning to change their views on foreign policy and they even believe that we need to maintain a strong defense, a standing army, a national security state, in order to defeat the Soviet Union. So these sentiments were out there, but it really took one figure to kind of synthesize them, to lead them, and also to build long lasting institutions that would guide, direct and shape this movement in the future. And that individual was William F. Buckley.
- [17:27]
Eli Lake
Jr. Buckley's book on McCarthy was another bestseller, but the timing wasn't great. It came out in early 1954 as the senator from Wisconsin was self destructing. He was drinking himself to death and his conspiracy theories were getting wilder. In April of that year, McCarthy took aim at the US army after discovering an army dentist had left a section of his security clearance blank. It was the thinnest of gruel. The section that he left blank was supposed to acknowledge subversive political activities. But McCarthy himself had no evidence that he was concealing anything. Nonetheless, Senator Joe McCarthy spun that little detail into a paranoid conspiracy of Soviet infiltration. And that paranoia became the theme of televised hearings that year with chief counsel for the Army Joseph Welch. While Welch did something that prior victims of McCarthy's allegations and innuendo didn't do, he called his bluff after he tarred a younger lawyer by association with no evidence whatsoever.
- [18:34]
Ronald Reagan
Let us not assassinate this lad further. Senator. What? You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
- [18:49]
Eli Lake
That was the beginning of the end of McCarthy, and Buckley's reputation suffered as well. But at the same time, Buckley's status for the millions of Americans who shared his concerns about the Communists, well, it was undiminished. McCarthy was the wrong messenger, but the message still resonated. After the break, Buckley starts a magazine and defends the indefensible. We're being used. Jews are being used on Israel, on anti Semitism, for other purposes. And that puts us in a dilemma. If it was Jews qua Jews, it's one thing to stand up. But now when Jews are being used on immigration issues, on woke issues, makes it a lot more difficult when to say something or not say something. On the most recent episode of Identity Crisis, Yehuda Kurtzer speaks with Abe Foxman, longtime Anti Defamation League leader and Holocaust survivor, about the relationship between major Jewish organizations and those in power. And to understand when and how to speak up for the Jewish people. Join us as we take on the issues facing contemporary Jewish life on Identity Crisis from the Shalom Hartman Institute, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [20:08]
Unknown
What is daddication?
- [20:09]
Eli Lake
The thing that drives me every day as a dad is Dariona.
- [20:12]
Ronald Reagan
We call him Day Date for short.
- [20:13]
Eli Lake
Every day he's hungry for something, whether it's attention, affection, knowledge, and there's this huge responsibility in making sure that when.
- [20:22]
Ronald Reagan
He'S no longer under my wing that.
- [20:24]
Eli Lake
He'S a good person.
- [20:25]
Ronald Reagan
I want him to be able to.
- [20:26]
Eli Lake
Sit back one day and go, we worked together.
- [20:28]
Ronald Reagan
We did a good job.
- [20:29]
Eli Lake
That's dedication.
- [20:31]
Unknown
Find out more@fatherhood.gov brought to you by.
- [20:33]
Eli Lake
The U.S. department of Health and Human.
- [20:34]
Unknown
Services and the Ad Council.
- [20:44]
Eli Lake
In 1955, Bill Buckley turned 30, and finally it was his time to embark on his most important project, the National Review. The small magazine initially called National Weekly, but changed after it was discovered that a publication for the booze industry called National Liquor Weekly already existed, would eventually become the premier journal of the American right. In some ways, you could say it was its ideological Supreme Court. In its first years, though, the entire project was a long shot. Nonetheless, the original staff of the National Review sparkled with talent. Buckley's magazine and the movement it represented was drawn to converts like former Communist Frank Meyer, Whitaker Chambers, the key witness in the Alger Hiss case, and, of course, James Burnham, a former follower of Leon Trotsky, who authored the strategy of rollback for the Cold War. An early investor in this magazine was future CIA director William Casey, and Burnham, too, was linked to the CIA, offering his assessments to its analysts. The magazine also gave a column to Russell Kirk, whose book the Conservative Mind is considered one of the classic texts of American conservatism. So at this point, it's important to understand how American conservatism is a peculiar phenomenon. To understand this, one must ask what exactly the movement seeks to conserve. In Europe, the right initially was conserving a pre democratic order of kings and the church, or throne and altar. The American Right is conserving the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence. I will now hand it over to Jonah Goldberg, founding editor of the Dispatch and author of Suicide of the west, to explain it here.
- [22:30]
Unknown
So conservative in Europe meant bound by notions of hierarchy, authority, tradition, nobility, aristocracy, monarchy, clerisy and the rest. And in America, conservatism means conserving the principles of the Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence and all of that. When British Chartists, who were for all sorts of reforms in Great Britain, were fighting for universal male suffrage and a secret ballot and all of these sorts of things, they were considered radicals. When they moved to the United States, they started calling themselves conservatives because what was there, a radical reform was in the United States a birthright.
- [23:12]
Eli Lake
So that sounds pretty good. But an element of the American experience that National Review was trying to conserve in the late 1950s was also the racial caste system that dates back to America's original sin, slavery. Buckley sided with segregation in this period. His magazine was enamored with the constitutional theory of the late South Carolina senator John Calhoun, who asserted that states had the right to nullify federal laws if they wished. Buckley's argument did not go as far as many other racists of that era who asserted that blacks were biologically inferior to whites, an argument that Buckley and National Review did not make. But nevertheless, he penned a 1957 column that haunts his legacy today. It was titled why the South Must Prevail.
- [24:02]
Charles Kessler
He wrote, the central question that emerges is whether the white community in the south is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail politically and culturally in areas in which it does not predominate numerically. The sobering answer is yes. The white community is so entitled because for the time being, it is the advanced race.
- [24:24]
Eli Lake
And here it's worth emphasizing a kind of irony of the current moment. Buckley, in the 1950s and early 1960s, opposed federal intervention in the states to remedy the injustice of segregation. The principle of limiting the reach of the federal government appealed to both Southern supporters of the lost cause, but also the old critics of the New Deal. That was what Reagan was getting at when he said he would not send the National Guard to Detroit unless the governor of Michigan asked him. So how does a patrician born in Connecticut come to embrace the lost cause of segregation? In his new biography, Sam Tanenhaus traces it back to the Buckley family's Southern roots and in particular, its winters in Camden, S.C. because of the family Southern.
- [25:10]
Sam Tanenhaus
Connection, his attitudes were of a progressive, a genteel, progressive, white segregationist. So I interview a man, it's, I think, one of the high points of the story. Black man who's in his 80s when I talked to him, and I think he's 90 now, whose father had been the gardener in the Buckley's estate in Camden, South Carolina. And he told this wonderful story about how this man's name, the man I interviewed was named Edward Allen, and his father was Walter. So this is in the 1940s. Walter Allen is on the property who with where he met Buckley Senior, the father. And a white man goes up this long drive and, you know, we saw the mansion ruins now, the beautiful antebellum mansion. And he walks up, strides up to Buckley Senior, does not look at the black man standing next to him, and he looks at him and he says, I can do that job. Hire me as your gardener. And Buckley Senior looks at him and he has these blue eyes. Bill Buckley had these very blazing blue eyes. No. And he says, Spitz says, I wouldn't hire 10 of you. Get off my place. And he, Walter Allen goes home and he tells his children that there were 11 Allen children. Soon they're all working at the house. And when the Buckley family goes back up north, when the winter colony disperses, the Buckleys were the first families who made sure there was work for the people they left behind. Either they took them up north or they farmed them out for other work. And if there wasn't other work, they found work for them. Go over to the bank vault and polish the silver. And it's very easily mocked. It's really hard to capture, except when Edward Allen the son said to me, and Edward left, went to New Jersey, became a union leader and sent all his kids to college, right? He had a, you know, pretty good American life. But he said, I walk by the Buckley house and I look up to the heavens and I say, thank God for the Buckleys.
- [27:26]
Eli Lake
Now, it's important here to note that Buckley never defended slavery. Indeed, one of his defenses of Senator McCarthy was to compare him favorably to the 19th century abolitionists. Also, Buckley had the good sense to allow dissent on civil rights in his own magazine. His brother in law, Brent Posell, argued in the pages of the National Review the very issue that Buckley ran the editorial on why the south had to prevail, that the Constitution demanded that blacks have the rights to vote. In the 1960s, after the passage of the Civil Rights act and Voting Rights Act, Buckley's position slowly began to evolve. Now, I should say this is a testament to one of the man's best qualities, his curiosity, his willingness to engage with people with whom he disagreed. Buckley was able to cultivate a friendship, for example, with Norman Mailer, the left wing novelist. And later, Buckley would make common cause against the Soviets with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, even after he defeated his brother James buckley in the 1976 New York Senate election. This curiosity and gift for engaging conversation is what made his television show Firing Line such a riveting watch.
- [28:38]
Irving Berlin
Sounds of Aleph and Aum through forests of gristle My skull and Lord Hereford's.
- [28:45]
Ronald Reagan
Knob@All Albion1 I kind of like that.
- [28:52]
Eli Lake
So it was Firing Line where Buckley began to change his mind on civil rights. Here is his introduction, for example, of the interview with the greatest boxer of all time, Muhammad Ali.
- [29:04]
Ronald Reagan
In 1942, in Louisville, Kentucky, Mr. And Mrs. Cassius Marcellus Clay christened their newborn son Cassius Clay Jr. 22 years later, Cassius Clay renounced his name and its associations and elected to call himself Muhammad Ali, which is of course how we shall refer to him tonight, even as tomorrow, should he change his name back, we would refer to him as Cassius Clay.
- [29:28]
Eli Lake
This is in 1968.
- [29:29]
Ronald Reagan
Muhammad Ali intended to disavow his culture.
- [29:32]
Eli Lake
When Ali was effectively banned from the sport of boxing in his PR for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War. Significantly, Buckley addressed him as Muhammad Ali, not the name that his parents gave him, Cassius Clay. And by calling him Ali by his chosen name, Buckley was taking on not only many conservatives but also establishment liberals who called Ali Cassius Clay even after he changed his name. Here is Sam Tanenhaus again explaining how Buckley begins to understand how he got the race issue wrong.
- [30:07]
Sam Tanenhaus
Buckley gets a letter in the mail, 1967, from a black Air Force lieutenant. And he said, Dear Mr. Buckley, I watch your program all the time and I know you're a great fan of Senator Goldwater. I'm in Arizona. I'm posted here in Arizona. I can't find a place to live. Nobody will rent to me. What am I supposed to do. I just wonder if you have any thoughts on this. Buckley replies, and he says, I'm going to ask Goldwater about this. And I see. I mean, it's in his files, the letter he sent to Goldwater. Goldwater writes back, I thought we got rid of this problem. Right. And so you start to see there's already a disjunction because constitutionally, you find yourself in one place, but there's also the human dimension of it. How do you make it work? So then not long after that, Buckley was invited on a National Urban League tour because the Whitney Young was following all this very bright guidance. He said, buckley's interesting. There's something going on with him. He's doing Firing Line. He's got Muhammad Ali on.
- [31:11]
Ronald Reagan
Right?
- [31:11]
Sam Tanenhaus
Right. He's got Eldridge Cleaver on. There's something different with. So they invite him in the National Urban League tour, and they go to eight different cities. They go to, you know, the. The inner city and stay with families there. And it's a revelation to Buckley. Why? Because he meets these young organizers and activists and he writes columns. You can see the columns. He said, don't go to Harvard. You want to see where the leaders are. You want to see people with passion who know what they're talking about, who really mean to change things, meet these young leaders.
- [31:42]
Eli Lake
So Justice Buckley was a great conversationalist with those with whom he disagreed. He was also a gatekeeper against those on his own side that had gone too far. And there is no better example of this than his decision to purge Robert Welch, the leader and founder of the John Birch Society, the anti communist advocacy group. At first, Buckley tolerated and even defended Welch. In 1957, the National Review ran a Q and A with Buckley about Welch in which he made a similar case for him that he made with McCarthy. Welch may be wrong in some of the particulars, Buckley said, but he was directionally correct to be vigilant in his opposition to communism. By 1961, though, as Welch became more extreme, this position became untenable. Welch accused President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who authorized at least three coups in the 1950s against communist regimes, of being a communist agent himself. Bananas. He led a movement to impeach Earl Warren from the Supreme Court on the grounds that he too was a communist subversive. What's more, the local chapters of the John Birch Society had devolved into wicked little mobs trying to lead purges of local government officials with baseless and insane accusations. So in 1961, Buckley penned a column kicking Welch out of the movement.
- [33:06]
Charles Kessler
Mr. Welch, for all his good intentions, threatens to divert militant conservative action to irrelevance and ineffectuality. There are, as we say, great things that need doing. The winning of a national election, the re education of the governing class. John Birch chapters can do much to forward those aims, but only as they dissipate the fog of confusion that issues from Mr. Welch's smoking typewriter. Mr. Welch has revived in many men the spirit of patriotism. And that same spirit calls now for rejecting, out of a love of truth and country, his false counsels.
- [33:42]
Eli Lake
I love this detail from the Tanen House biography. Right before Buckley published that column, he sent a telegram to Welch that said.
- [33:48]
Charles Kessler
You will no doubt be hearing that I have been criticizing you and the John Birch Society. The rumor is not true. I have been criticizing you, but not the Society. I hope we can maintain a pleasant personal relationship. I am prepared to, if you are spoiler alert.
- [34:05]
Eli Lake
Their relationship was finished. But it's important to note here that Buckley was careful to explain he did not want to alienate Welch's followers. Buckley was not an intellectual concerned only with capital T, truth. He was building a movement. He didn't just want to argue his side, he wanted to win. We should say that 30 years later, Buckley performs a similar service when he wrote a lengthy essay arguing the vehement criticism that Pat Buchanan and Joseph Sobrand made against Israel was also a form of antisemitism. Buchanan and Sobrin, by the way, were contributors to the National Review. The column, which later became a book, was published on the eve of the 1992 Republican primaries, when Buchanan was challenging incumbent George H.W. bush for the Republican nomination. In the 1960s, Buckley and National Review gained stature and influence. By 1964, they found an insurgent candidate to lead the Republican Party against Lyndon Johnson, Senator Barry Goldwater.
- [35:10]
Ronald Reagan
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
- [35:33]
Eli Lake
He was, in many ways what buckley had hoped McCarthy would be, a cold warrior committed to reeling back the welfare state and returning sovereignty to the American people and the American states. But that year, at the same time, an even brighter star emerged. A former B movie actor who became Goldwater's most significant endorser. Ronald Reagan.
- [35:56]
Ronald Reagan
If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is morally right, we cannot by our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we're willing to make a deal with your slave masters.
- [36:22]
Eli Lake
Now, that speech, A Time for Choosing, was delivered only a week before election day in 1964, and it was the very embodiment of Buckley's vision for the right. Reagan understood the struggle against communism abroad was directly linked to the struggle against liberalism at home. And in that oration, Reagan delivered a timeless and poetic summary of this new kind of conservative cause. So Goldwater would be trounced in the 1964 election. The immediate political lesson was that Buckley's conservatism was too radical for America. Senator Goldwater had stood athwart history only to be steamrolled. The establishment Republicans who wanted to nominate Nelson Rockefeller that year, the the governor of New York, well, they had a hearty I told you so moment. Buckley's insurgency had led to electoral ruin. And as a result of Johnson's victory, the administrative state expanded even further with his war on poverty and his escalation in the Vietnam War. So that sounds like Buckley would be on the outs. But there was a silver lining. Buckley had also found a future tribune for the movement. Ronald Reagan. The conservative insurgency now had real campaign experience. His Young Americans for Freedom, or yaf, was energized by Goldwater. And as it would turn out, Bill Buckley may have lost the battle in 1964, but he would end up winning the war. When the election of 1968 came around, Buckley and the National Review had matured. They were no longer the journal of outsiders. They were no longer just standing athwart history. Now, Buckley believed it was National Review's duty to support the most conservative candidate with the best chance of winning. And with that, he threw himself behind Richard Nixon. The race was closer than it should have been because of the third party run of the segregationist George Wallace. But 1968 was a year of assassinations and riots. Nixon's law and order campaign and his vague promise of a secret plan to end the Vietnam War was enough for the victory. For the first time under Nixon, Buckley had real influence and power at the White House. He joins the board of the U.S. information Agency, and he enjoys extraordinary access to Nixon's National Security advisor, Henry Kissinger. And when the Watergate scandal destroys Nixon's presidency, Buckley played a minor role. His mentor in the CIA was Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt. Buckley and his wife Patricia were the godparents to Hunt's children. They were very close friends. And as Tanenhaus establishes in his biography, Hunt shared many of the details of the break in with Buckley months before they ever appeared in the press. Here is Buckley in 1973 putting his best spin on the scandal that would end up destroying Nixon's presidency.
- [39:24]
Ronald Reagan
You think the President has been damaged by what's going on? Of course he's been damaged. Should he be made held accountable? Of course he should be made accountable. In what respect? Well, there are grand juries and Senate investigating committees scheduled on the basis of those. Mr. Nixon's personal involvement, however detached, is going to be exposed. Whether that accountability is going to be legal or purely moral.
- [39:53]
Eli Lake
Tanenhaus judges Buckley harshly in this episode. He concludes that Buckley had allowed the friendship with Hunt to compromise his integrity as a journalist. But that's not the whole story. Buckley's brother, James Buckley, had won the 1970 New York Senate election, and he was one of the first Republicans to call for Nixon to resign. It's hard to think that that was not coordinated with his brother, William F. Buckley. And Buckley also allowed for dissenting views in his own magazine. The new Washington correspondent for National Review, George F. Will, was unrelenting in his coverage of Watergate and called out Nixon early on for covering the whole thing up. After Nixon's resignation and the brief presidency of Gerald Ford, the mainstream Republicans that Buckley and National Review had fought against for nearly 20 years were a spent force. The Watergate scandal destroyed the GOP brand. Buckley himself was in a tricky position. He had been a Nixon defender, though he never could bring himself to fully support Kissinger and Nixon's opening to communist China. He was in the press delegation when Nixon went to China. And when his minders took journalists to various landmarks, Buckley would ask, where are the actual people? But the conservative movement was still gaining momentum. And Ronald Reagan, by now Buckley's personal friend, was in the ascendancy.
- [41:17]
Ronald Reagan
That's why I'm running for president. Only one man has the proven experience. We need Ronald Reagan for president. Let's make America great again.
- [41:26]
Eli Lake
When Reagan begins his 1980 campaign, Buckley is given extraordinary access. And the press had started to notice that friendship between Reagan and Buckley seemed a little bit uneven. Here was a B movie actor palling around with one of the era's great public intellectuals. Was Reagan Buckley's puppet? Perhaps it was this perception that led Reagan to snug Buckley after he won the 1980 election. Buckley wanted Reagan to deliver the keynote address for the National Review's 25th annual gala at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Reagan. Reagan said he would try to make it, but at the last minute said the event was not on his calendar. Tannenhouse writes that privately, Buckley was stung. He told his son Christopher that he would not attend the inauguration. Reagan called him and apologized. It wasn't on the calendar, he explained. He offered to send a video message instead, and Buckley coldly replied, we don't do that. In his speech, Buckley offered a sharp barb to the President elect. He said he had called Reagan up and Reagan had asked him if Buckley's entry in America's who's who should replace his profession of editor and writer with ventriloquist.
- [42:41]
Charles Kessler
He laughed, but he laughed longer than I would have done. And this persuaded me that as a ventriloquist, I was a failure.
- [42:49]
Eli Lake
The two men managed to patch things up. Buckley managed to play an important role in the presidential transition, getting several friends and colleagues important jobs in the Reagan administration. His Yale classmate Van Galbraith was nominated to be ambassador to France. His brother James, the former New York senator, was nominated to the D.C. court of Appeals. National Review writer Mona Charon got a job as a speechwriter for Nancy Reagan. The Reagan years were very good. For William F. Buckley, National Review's mission, in some ways was accomplished. But 25 years after its founding, finally a real conservative won the presidency. But did that revolution really bring about the kind of America Buckley and his movement had envisioned? After the break, the consequences of Buckleyism. Have you ever spotted McDonald's hot crispy fries right as they're being scooped into the carton?
- [43:56]
Ronald Reagan
And time just stands still. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile.
- [44:06]
Eli Lake
With the price of just about everything going up, we thought we'd bring our prices down. So to help us, we brought in.
- [44:12]
Ronald Reagan
A reverse auctioneer, which.
- [44:13]
Eli Lake
Which is apparently a thing.
- [44:14]
Unknown
Mint Mobile Unlimited Premium wireless.
- [44:17]
Charles Kessler
Everybody get 30, 30. Better get 30, better get 20, 20, 20.
- [44:19]
Unknown
Better get 20, 20.
- [44:20]
Sam Tanenhaus
Everybody get 15, 15, 15, 15.
- [44:21]
Charles Kessler
Just 15 bucks a month.
- [44:23]
Eli Lake
Sold. Give it a try@mintmobile.com switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of network's busy. Taxes and fees extra see mintmobile.com and Reagan's was consequential. There are many reasons why the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991. But a big one was because Reagan was unrelenting in his desire to outspend the evil empire on the military and because he took up the cause of the communist world's. Dissidents. Buckley and National Review, which was a home for ex communists from the beginning, gets a lot of credit for that. And Buckley also gets credit for changing the debate on some of the social entitlements that so offended National Review in its early years. Ideas have consequences.
- [45:16]
Ronald Reagan
After I sign my name to this bill, welfare will no longer be a political issue. The two parties cannot attack each other over it. Politicians cannot attack poor people over it. There are no encrusted habits, systems and failures that can be laid at the foot of someone else. We have to begin again. This is not the end of welfare reform. This is the beginning, and we have to all assume responsibility.
- [45:45]
Eli Lake
That was Bill Clinton, a Democratic president, signing momentous welfare reform legislation. He was making an argument National Review had ceded decades earlier, that the state had created a permanent underclass dependent on government handouts. That is also a testament to the power of Buckley and his project. Buckley lived until 2008. He wrote his column until the very end.
- [46:16]
Jonah Goldberg
This was in late January 2008. He would die about three weeks or so later, in February 2008.
- [46:24]
Eli Lake
And.
- [46:24]
Jonah Goldberg
But I, my wife and I and a friend were visiting him for, you know, we sort of knew was. It was getting near the end, so we wanted to see him.
- [46:36]
Eli Lake
This again is Charles Kessler.
- [46:38]
Jonah Goldberg
He was in very bad shape with, as he liked to say, terminal emphysema, which is, I guess, a technical diagnosis, and lots of oxygen bottles everywhere and so forth. But he was still carrying on like the Bill Buckley of old. You know, before dinner, there was a caviar and vodka course which he partook of generously, and as did we. And so he. He had just gotten home from the hospital where he had been, I think, for maybe a couple of days. I'm not sure how. How long he spent in the hospital. He had broken his left wrist. He was left handed. So the result of that was that he couldn't type for the first time in his life. Essentially, he was a very good fast typist. He couldn't type his column. And so the next morning when we were preparing to leave, he had had an early breakfast and was at work in his garage study working on his column. But he hadn't realized, I guess, sort of the lingering damage to his wrists. Everyone else was enjoying our breakfast when a call came from his office to the kitchen announcing that I was the only person in the world who could help him.
- [47:57]
Eli Lake
So Kessler, who some 35 years earlier had begun his friendship with Buckley, helped him bang out his last column. Buckley would die A few weeks later, he left instructions. If he was still famous, his memorial should be at St Patrick's Cathedral in New York. Well, William F. Buckley was still famous and the world mourned him. Here is a snippet of his friend Henry Kissinger's eulogy.
- [48:22]
Ronald Reagan
His conservatism was about the liberation of the human spirit, which is a deeper and more eternal undertaking than causes geared to political timetables. I am a Burkian, he would say. I believe neither in permanent victories nor in permanent defeats. But he did believe deeply in permanent values. We must do what we can, he wrote to me once, to bring hammer blows against the bell jar that protects the dreamers from reality. The ideal scenario is that pounding from without we can effect resonances which will one day crack through to the latent impulses of those who dream within, bringing to life a circuit that will spare the republic.
- [49:31]
Eli Lake
So what has become of those permanent values today? What would Buckley think of Donald Trump and the right in 2025? It's impossible to get a definitive answer. Buckley didn't write really on Trump, but there is one revealing detail. In a 2000 column that he wrote for Cigar Aficionado, he offered this observation about the man when he was toying with a run for president of the Reform Party ticket.
- [50:01]
Charles Kessler
When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection. If Donald Trump were shaped a little differently, he would compete for Miss America. But whatever the depths of his self enchantment, the demagogue has to say something. So what does Trump say? That he's a successful businessman and that that is what America needs in the Oval Office. There is some plausibility in this, though not much. The greatest deeds of American presidents midwifing the New Republic, freeing the slaves, harnessing the energies and vision needed to win the Cold War had little to do with the bottom line. So what else can Trump offer us?
- [50:37]
Eli Lake
I suppose one answer to that question is that Trump has fundamentally changed the American debate on immigration and China. But in terms of those permanent values that Kissinger spoke about, Trump has largely ignored or trashed Buckley's conservativism. Consider Elon Musk's decision to break with Donald Trump, the man he helped get elected in 2024. It was because of Trump's big, beautiful budget bill, which Musk correctly skewered for doing next to nothing to curb the national debt. And the conservative movement that Buckley built has largely gone along with all of this, even though Trump has abandoned some of the core principles like free trade and robust internationalism that National Review fought for for so many years.
- [51:26]
Unknown
You have lots of conservatives who negotiate with themselves and say, well, it's got to be for the good of the party, and they care more about the party.
- [51:36]
Eli Lake
Again, this is Jonah Goldberg.
- [51:38]
Unknown
And so when you finally get a truly non conservative, he can, you can call him anti conservative, you can call him, I don't think he's left wing. I think Donald Trump is a right wing populist with some certain bells and whistles, but he's not a conservative. And when you've internalized the idea that your job is to root for the Republican Party and to craft messages so that the Republican Party can win, rather than craft messages to convince the Republican Party to be conservative, you sort of lost the plot. And there are an enormous number of conservatives out there who I think are much more concerned with defending whatever the Republican Party does and selling the Republican Party as being in the right than they are about making serious conservative arguments and the like. There's just simply no way that the conservative. If you hold the definition of what conservatism means constant from the Buckley era, almost anytime in Buckley's lifetime, you would stand athwart Donald Trump yelling, stop. You would not be for his industrial policy, you would not be for his tax policy, not before his trade policy, you would not be for his foreign policy. And when people say that's because the times have changed, a, they're right, but B, whatever happens to standing authority yelling stop.
- [53:04]
Eli Lake
All of that said, Trump also represents a kind of continuation of Buckley's politics. Like the Reagan coalition nearly 50 years ago, Trump's movement contains multitudes. Trump's appeal to blue collar voters, for example, is a macrocosm of Buckley's political strategy in his 1965 run for New York mayor, when his support largely came from the white ethnics in the outer boroughs, that same milieu from which Trump emerged, one can find Buckley's influence in some of Trump's causes as well. His administration's war against Harvard and the Ivy League looks like it came straight out of Buckley's first book, God and Man at Yale. Buckley would have approved of the justices that Trump appointed to the Supreme Court in his first term. But he would have shuddered at Trump's recent attacks on the man who helped select those justices, the Federalist Society's Leonard Leo. In the end, though, in my view, the greatest difference between Trump and Buckley is in their character. Trump demands total loyalty and fealty from his movement. He cannot brook dissent. Buckley was delighted by dissent. He published writers with whom he disagreed regularly in National Review, and some of his proteges went on to become his greatest apostates, like the great historian and journalist Garry Wills. That is because even though Buckley rarely changed his mind, that mind was driven by an engine of burning curiosity. He had a genuine interest in people with whom he disagreed, and he loved conversation. Can you imagine a MAGA influencer today spending an hour politely debating a member of Antifa the way that Buckley would invite members of the Black Panthers or Noam Chomsky onto Firing Line? So I guess I would say that is his greatest gift, William F. Buckley, Jr. S ability to disagree agreeably. It feels like our republic has forgotten how to do that in our tribal political silos today, and the state of affairs is not the fault of Trump, although I think it's clear that Trump is its symptom. Perhaps the cure would be to revisit Buckley's legacy not for its political program, but for his habits of mind and reverence for debate.
- [55:26]
Irving Berlin
Get your hand out my pocket My money's better spent on groceries and doctors paying off rent I'd like to help my neighbor those with less than me I'll set aside some extra and call it charity that is not the common spent Spread the wealth around it mayn't waste tax Spend our money that they found.
- [56:01]
Eli Lake
Thanks for listening to Breaking History. If you liked this episode, if you learned something, if you disagreed with something, or if it simply sparked a new understanding of our present moment, please share it with your friends and family and use it to have a conversation of your own. And remember, if you want to support Breaking History, follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a five star rating and a nice comment too. Also, if you love this episode, there's more great content at the fm. Please become a subscriber today and until then, I'll see you next time.
- [56:48]
Irving Berlin
From bottom to the top yes this history we stand there yell and stop is on the march glory I entered in the universities I wallow in instant government expands from babu to the top at fort this history stand here yelling stop.
- [57:22]
Eli Lake
Sa.