Tanenhaus presents the tempestuous 1960s as a crossroads in Buckley’s public life. Would he grow into his own as a serious conservative intellectual, or would he succumb to the temptations of celebrity? Buckley had taken some tentative steps down the first path in 1963, when he began work on a book that would, Tanenhaus writes, be “a definitive statement on the meaning and value of an authentic American conservatism,” and not just another archly written attack on liberals. The thesis was Nockean, a critique of “the masses” and their demands for “egalitarianism,” and an argument for the need to restrict the votes of lesser Black citizens as well as whites—a proposal Buckley made in his infamous 1965 debate at Cambridge against James Baldwin.
But Buckley never made much headway on the idea, and not only because it complicated the Kendellian majoritarianism he’d evinced in his political life. The basic problem was, as Tanenhaus frequently points out, that Buckley was at his core “a controversialist, not a thinker and still less a theorist.” He was a “performing ideologue” who thrived on provocation and had trouble sitting still. As one contemporary of Buckley’s put it, he responded to “ideological battle like Pavlov’s dog to the sound of the bell.”
The argumentative bell wouldn’t stop ringing, especially once the debate show Firing Line debuted in 1966. It would last for more than three decades, launching Buckley to new heights of fame. He was recognized in airports and hounded for autographs on the street, as his unmistakable televisual style—the improbably mobile eyebrows, the serpentine tongue, the ironizing drawl—became fodder for generations of late-night impressionists.
It also invited accusations of frivolity, of Buckley the theatrical persona overtaking Buckley the movement leader. The literary modernist Hugh Kenner, who briefly worked as NR’s poetry editor and whom Buckley had asked to help him on his abortive book project, later wrote that Buckley had “ceased to be a public outrage. He became an ingratiatingly unpredictable personality.” Kenner had compared Buckley’s telegenic mayoral campaign to Andy Warhol’s Pop Art creations and homemade films. Buckley, the talk-show host Jack Paar said, was “the Tiffany lamp of television.” He was “pure camp,” the sensibility that, as Susan Sontag famously wrote, converts “the serious into the frivolous.” The most lacerating assessment of Buckley’s celebrity persona came from Gary Wills, who, in his memoir, Confessions of a Conservative, charged that Buckley had become a “dandy”:
He is the object of a personal cult subtly at odds with his own intentions. The very thing that charms even those on the left makes grimmer types on the right distrust him. Striving for objective results, he seems only interested in theatrical effects. What a curious trial for the aspiring ideologue: By restricting himself to combat, he floats above it—intending to strike blows, he is applauded for striking poses.