“Without William Buckley,” a talking head in the PBS documentary tells us early on, “conservatism, as we understand it, would never have happened.” But if he had actually accomplished what the show says he did—purged its fringe, made conservatism respectable—conservatism as we would have understood it would not have happened, either.
THE SHOW ENDS WITH IMAGES OF DONALD TRUMP SPEWING HATRED and January 6th rioters throwing metal barriers at cops. This, we are to understand, is the direct antithesis of what Buckley had wrought: the reason, really, he is a figure worth paying particular attention to now in the first place. Goodman had to ignore great draughts of evidence to get there.
In my interview, I pointed him to this evidence. Another talking head told me he spent some of his own two hours in the chair doing so as well.
There’s a whole article in Politico by a Buckley hagiographer claiming Buckley supposedly “changed his mind” about the fitness of Black people for democracy. But only in the United States, it turned out. In “‘Will the Jungle Take Over?’ National Review and the Defense of Western Civilization in the Era of Civil Rights and African Decolonization,” a scholar named Jesse Curtis cited Buckley’s writing that Africans were “savages” who would be ready for self-government “when they stopped eating each other.” My co-writer Miller, the scholar of the John Birch Society, avows he never witnessed racism like that even in Robert Welch’s private papers.
Regarding his National Review confreres, according to a tidbit leaked to Spy magazine for the 1989 article “The Boys Who Would Be Buckley,” his close friend and colleague Jeffrey Hart (I sat two seats down from him at one of Buckley’s fortnightly “stag dinners”) once said at an editorial meeting, “Under a real government, Bishop Tutu”—Desmond Tutu, the Anglican priest who helped lead South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement—“would be a cake of soap.”
Historian and journalist Jeet Heer demonstrated as far back as 2015 how National Review habitually minimized the Holocaust. And any claim that Buckley forswore antisemitism was surely put to bed back in 2007 by what biographer Sam Tanenhaus learned in an interview with an unapologetic George Will, the magazine’s longtime Washington correspondent: He and Buckley agreed that a Jew could not be allowed to replace him as editor. (At the time, rumors were that Jews David Frum and David Brooks were under consideration. Sorry, Davids!)