William F. Buckley Jr.: The Catholic and The Juggler
E.J. Dionne Jr.
Portsmouth Institute
June 19, 2009
It is a joy to be back at Portsmouth, and a special joy to be secure in the knowledge that at the end of this talk, I will not have to face a grade and, potentially, an acerbic comment worthy of William F. Buckley Jr. himself from Father Damian, with that trademark scrawl of “DK” at the bottom of the page. I am in the company of hundreds and hundreds who can say that Father Damian taught us how to write, although I would never claim that my writing has ever lived up to his standards. I always edit myself furiously, knowing that a sentence can always be better than it is, that a different word might be better than the one I’ve used, that a metaphor might be overwrought. And I try to catch that dangling participle before it crashes to the ground – and I’ve just used a metaphor that Father Damian would have told me to cut out altogether. Father Damian helped produce in all of us something very rare: the literary version of Catholic guilt.
In fact, I would love to know how Father Damian would have graded Bill Buckley. One can imagine his taking Buckley to task for using a multisyllabic word when a simple word would do, and repeating the observation of a writer who said of Buckley: “He used so many outsized words that you would have thought he was doing research for a spelling bee.” Then again, Father Damian might have softened, as this same writer did, and add: “In his whole public career, Mr. Buckley never dumbed down a single sentence or spent three seconds pandering to an audience.”
I also want to pay tribute to all of the monks and brothers and teachers at Portsmouth Abbey, and to say a special thanks to the Abbott, who did all he could to teach me Latin when he was known as Mr. Holmes. We are grateful that this wise and humble man of spirit has assumed leadership of the monastery filling the very large shoes – I mean this in a spiritual and intellectual sense – once worn by Father Matthew. I have said many times to friends that the actions and attitudes of the Benedictines here were at least as important in shaping my own faith as their often brilliant words. (Gregorian chant helped, too.) Because of them, I always rejected the counsel of those who claimed that religious believers were ignorant, blind, culturally backward or intellectually unsophisticated. Here were some of the most intelligent and sophisticated people I would ever encounter who could speak of faith, and culture, and politics, with clarity, erudition, and elegance. Time will tell whether they helped save my immortal soul, but they certainly saved me from a sometimes popular and always foolish prejudice against men and women of faith.
The organizers of his event are clearly part of the vast right wing conspiracy. They are, to be sure, some of my favorite members of the right-wing conspiracy, and that very much includes former Senator Jim Buckley, one of the most decent people to serve in the Senate. There is the great story of the debate between Senator Buckley and Daniel Patrick Moynihan in which Jim Buckley kept referring to Moynihan as “Professor Moynihan.” And Moynihan looked at him and said: “Ah! now the mudslinging begins!”
These right wing conspirators have engaged in a clever trick in inviting me here. They clearly have the same definition of the words “fair and balanced” as do the folks at Fox News. They loaded up their program with one smart conservative after another, and then they invited me, a self-confessed liberal, to give the dinner speech tonight. That might be a modest, if not necessarily fair, form of balance. But of course they knew that I am a fan and friend of Chris Buckley’s, with whom I was lucky enough to attend the Abbey, then the Priory, and one of scores of liberals who has always been soft, very soft, on William F. Buckley Jr. It’s right there on the record. I wrote a column four years ago that began with the words: "It is time that I confess to an illicit love. I am now, and have been almost all my life, an admirer of William F. Buckley Jr." In that same column, written in the first year of George W. Bush’s second term, I also said: “My main criticism of Buckley is that he was far too effective on behalf of a movement that I think should be driven from power.” And if you hear that as a compliment, you're right.
I think it’s very hard -- no matter your politics -- not to be soft on Bill Buckley.
The skeptical conservative might say it was easy for liberals to like this elitist Yale grad who used those big words, hung out with the likes of John Kenneth Galbraith, and led a rather glamorous life. I'll admit to admiring Buckley's love of life, to enjoying his novels and to sharing his respect for Galbraith. But I'm not a fan of big words, Yale grads (except, of course, Father Damian), glamour or elitism.
And it's not easy for any liberal to agree with Buckley support long ago for Joe McCarthy. (His novel about McCarthy was better). It's hard to credit his early views on civil rights, which I will return to, or on a number of other subjects.
But what a marvelous man and what a marvelous life he led. For his one liners alone, we should honor him. For his sense of humor, we should revere him. For his zest and energy we should envy him. As Garry Wills writes in his lovely memorial to him in the current Atlantic, “Hour by hour, day by day, Bill Buckley was just an exciting person to be around.”
Let us begin by laughing along with Buckley. Here is just a small collection of his zingers, including a few of his pithy replies to some of the many readers of the National Review who would write him.
Buckley once said: “It had all the earmarks of a CIA operation; the bomb killed everybody in the room except the intended target!”
“The academic community has in it the biggest concentration of alarmists, cranks and extremists this side of the giggle house.”
“One must bear in mind that the expansion of federal activity is a form of eating for politicians.”
And this certainly seems appropriate to at least one recent presidency I can think of. “The more complicated and powerful the job,” Buck said, “the more rudimentary the preparation for it.”
And then there are those letters. A gentleman named Ron Kelley wrote Buckley a letter with the single sentence: “Your syntax is horrible.” To which Buckley replied: “If you had my syntax, you’d be rich.”
A reader named Earl Beck wrote Buckley a long letter complaining about his use of big words. Mr. Beck’s letter contained nothing but big words, including a few invented ones. Two sample sentences: “In promulgating your esoteric coagitations or in articulating your superficial sentimentalities of psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity….Sedulously avoid all polysyllabical profundity, pompous prolixity and ventriloqual verbosity.”
Buckley took Mr. Beck’s advice to heart and wrote back this note: “Me Bill. Me no like-um Beck. Bad Beck. William F. Buckley.”
In the early 1970s, a high school girl named Glenda Warren wrote Buckley with great deference: “Dear Liege Lord,” she wrote, “Help. I’ve fallen in love the leader of the revolution in my high school. What do I do?”
Buckley’s reply: “Spy on him for the FBI and send us copies.”
During the 1984 campaign, Richard Whyte of Vienna, Virginia wrote Buckley: “Your portrait on the jacket of Up From Liberalism looks more like Walter Mondale than does Walter Mondale. Perhaps you should have a secret service guard.”
To which Buckley replied: “Dear Mr. White, Perhaps I should have an exorcist!”
And I couldn’t resist one last letter: A Bill Howell from Clarksburg, West Virginia wrote Buckley to say: “This past week my copy of National Review and Sports Illustrated’s celebrated swimsuit issue arrived simultaneously in my mailbox. To my surprise, I found that I read NR cover to cover before examining the SI. Does this signal that my espousal of conservatism is now complete.” Buckley answered him: “In part, yes. But it also signals that your espousal of other things is less than complete.”
Buckley himself espoused life whole. And he did not fear snap judgments. He welcomed them. Some of them were simply wrong, or at least seem so in the light of subsequent history. Consider his early view of the Beatles. “The Beatles are not merely awful,” he said. “They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of antimusic.” Maybe some people in this room still believe that.
This meeting has focused its attention on Buckley as a believer and as a Christian. It is right and fitting that we do so. Buckley’s faith was central to who he was and to everything he believed about everything else.
I was baptized a Catholic [he wrote in his book Nearer, My God] and reared as one by devoted parents whose emotional and intellectual energies never cloyed. My faith has not wavered, though I permit myself to wonder whether, if it had, I’d advertise it: Would I encourage my dinner companions to know that I was blind in my left eye?
The Church is unique in that it is governed by a vision that has not changed in two thousand years [Buckley wrote]. It tells us, in just about as many words, that we are not accidental biological accretions, we are creatures of a divine plan; that the God who made us undertook to demonstrate his devotion to us as individual human beings by submitting to the pain and humiliation of the cross. Nothing in that vision has ever changed. Nothing at all, and this for all Christians is a mind-shaking, for some a mind-altering certitude, with which Christians live, in our earnest if pitiable efforts to clear the way for a love that cannot be requited.
And consider this poetic response to the scientifically inclined who see accidents of nature where others see the hand of God.
Skepticism about life and nature [Buckley said] is most often expressed by those who take it for granted that belief is an indulgence of the superstitious — indeed their opiate, to quote a historical cosmologist most profoundly dead. Granted, that to look up at the stars comes close to compelling disbelief — how can such a chance arrangement be other than an elaboration — near infinite — of natural impulses? Yes, [and] on the other hand, who is to say that the arrangement of the stars is more easily traceable to nature, than to nature's molder? What is the greater miracle: the raising of the dead man in Lazarus, or the mere existence of the man who died and of the witnesses who swore to his revival?
But if Buckley’s faith was central to him, his worldly mission was political, and boy did he do well. How much would all of us wish to be as successful as this columnist, editor, novelist, lecturer, organizer, adventurer, television star and one-time political candidate who said that his first act upon winning election would be to demand a recount. I would certainly be satisfied if I could be just five percent as effective on behalf of the ideas I believe in as he was on behalf of his own political faith. Buckley undertook a mission and carried it out with real genius.
He knew conservatism needed a serious intellectual life if conservative ideas were to be considered by those outside the right's faithful remnant. That's why he founded National Review. He knew cranks were bad for the movement. He knew that deep splits among conservatives -- between internationalists and isolationists, libertarians and traditionalists -- had to be resolved.
Buckley felt no compunction about challenging liberal elites on their own ground. He fired plenty of shots at liberal dominance of academe, beginning with his first book, "God and Man at Yale." In the process, he pioneered the most effective form of conservative jujitsu: a movement devoted to the interests of the wealthy and powerful casting itself as a collection of populists challenging liberal snobbery.
Buckley was determined to rid the right of the wing nuts. He was, to his everlasting credit, the scourge of an anti-Semitism that once had a hold on significant parts of the right. He also blasted the strange conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society. Garry Wills, again, had it right: “By the time of his death, even Bill’s earlier critics admitted that he had done much to make conservatism respectable by purging it of racist and fanatical traits earlier embedded in it. He distanced his followers from the southern prejudices of George Wallace, the anti-semitism of Liberty lobby, the fanaticism of the John Birch Society, the glorification of selfishness by Ayn Rand. . . the paranoia and conspiratorialism of the neocons. In each of these cases, right-wingers tried to cut off donations from National Review, but Bill stood his ground. In doing so, he elevated the discourse of American politics, making civil debate possible between responsible liberals and conservatives.”
Buckley was vexed by conservatism’s contradictions. He tried mightily to resolve them, and his exertions made it possible for Barry Goldwater and then Ronald Reagan to turn the conservative remnant into a mighty political force. Buckley once offered a very kind column about a book I had written. I remain hugely grateful – but I also came to realize that of course he liked the book because it assigned him a larger role in the rise of conservatism than even the Gipper himself.
Buckley dumped isolationism, which was not so hard since many former isolationists were happy with an aggressive American foreign policy as long as the enemy was Soviet communism. More difficult was resolving the contradiction between anti-government libertarians – their primary love was individual freedom – and the traditionalists who believed in government's role as a promoter of virtue and community.
One of National Review'sprimary tasks was dealing with this doctrinal conundrum. Frank Meyer, Buckley's friend and magazine colleague, came up with what is known as "fusionism." It was an attempt to fuse the two forms of conservatism into one.
Libertarians needed to learn that the freedom they revered was insecure absent the cultivation of personal virtue and a moral order hospitable to liberty. Traditionalists were not to confuse the legitimate authority of tradition with the illegitimate power of big government. The United States was fundamentally a conservative society, the theory went, so our country was a place in which liberty was conducive to a reverence for tradition.
Fusionism, brilliant though it was, never fully cohered. Contemporary conservatism always threatens to fly apart, as it seems to be doing now. Conservatism's goals are a combustible mix: an expansive and expensive foreign policy, low taxes, support for government intervention in the personal sphere (to promote a conservative vision of virtue) but not in the economic sphere.
For some of us, the mix makes little sense. I could go on – I have gone on – about the many contradictions of contemporary conservatism. I believe conservatism is now in deep crisis and that Buckley’s achievement is flying apart. There is evidence that Buckley himself experienced intimations of his beloved conservatism’s troubles. But that is for another evening or another day.
There is another paradox to Buckley’s conservatism that might make a Catholic liberal smile. He was a rebel, a dissident, even an advocate of a counter-culture, though his counter-culture involved harpsichords, not electric guitars or drums.
Despite his differences with the left, Buckley had much in common with the young New Leftists whom he would later criticize. He rebelled against the conformity of the 1950s no less than the Left did. “Middle-of-the-road, qua Middle of the Road, is politically, intellectually and morally repugnant,” Buckley and his colleague Willie Schlamm wrote in their prospectus for National Review. It’s something that, say, Daniel Berriganmight have said.Asked by Max Eastman to exercise discretion in the magazine, Buckley replied: “All I can say to satisfy you is that I want discretion in the sense that I want intelligence, and no crackpottery. But I want some positively unsettling vigor, a sense of abandon, and joy and cocksureness that may, indeed, be interpreted by some as indiscretion.” Unsettling vigor? Abandon? Joy? Was he on the road to Max Yasgur’s farm in Woodstock?
Buckley’s radicalism could be seen in his feelings about Dwight D. Eisenhower. No figure seemed to annoy Buckley quite so much as Eisenhower, a sign of things to come, since moderate-to-liberal Republicans tended to trouble Buckley much more than liberal Democrats, who at least stayed in the party where they belonged. Eisenhower, Buckley wrote in Up from Liberalism, is the “symbol of the modulated age.” Buckley went on:
It has been the dominating ambition of Eisenhower’s Modern Republicanism to govern in such a fashion as to more or less please more or less everybody. Such governments must shrink from principle: because principles have edges, principles cut; and blood is drawn, and people get hurt. And who would hurt anyone in an age of modulation?
The struggle these days, if that is the word for it, is toward blandness; toward a national euphoria. Leadership consists in giving people everything they want.
The “Eisenhower program,” Buckley went on, is “an attitude, which goes by the name of a program, undirected by principle, unchained to any coherent idea as to the nature of man and society, uncommitted to any sustained estimate of the nature or potential of the enemy.”
I like Ike more than Buckley did, but who cannot love him for detesting blandness and for insisting on principle?
I do want to focus briefly on what may be Buckley’s largest moral mistake – a mistake he gradually corrected – because I do think it should give conservatives pause. This is, by the way, the only polemical point I will make tonight.
Buckley’s initial reactions to the civil rights movement were hostile and his instincts, I believe, were plain wrong.
In Up from Liberalism, Buckley declared flatly that "yes, there are circumstances in which the minority can lay claim to preeminent political authority, without bringing down on its head the moral opprobrium of just men." Buckley went on:
In the South, the white community is entitled to put forward a claim to prevail politically because, for the time being anyway, the leaders of American civilization are white -as one would certainly expect given their preternatural advantages of tradition, training and economic status.. .
A conservative feels sympathy for the Southern position which the Liberal, applying his ideological abstractions ruthlessly, cannot feel. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be the indicated, though concededly undemocratic, course. It is more important for the community, wherever situated geographically, to affirm and live by civilized standards than to labor at the job of swelling the voting lists.
Buckley suggested that the South could strengthen its case if it applied "voting qualification tests impartially, to black and white." It could be accused of being undemocratic, but not racially discriminatory. And being undemocratic, in Buckley's eyes, was by no means the worst sin: "The democracy of universal suffrage is not a bad form of government; it is simply not necessarily nor inevitably a good form of government. Democracy must be justified by its works."
Now I am here tonight to praise Buckley, not to condemn him – and, again, it’s important to underscore that his views on these matters changed, as did the views of millions of other white Americans.
But I would say to my conservative friends here that it is worth considering the source of Buckley’s error because his argument for segregation was impeccably conservative. Those of us who are progressive are not always sufficiently alive to the possible unintended consequences of our plans for reform and renewal. But I do believe conservatives can be led badly astray by their suspicion of change, their tendency to endorse existing hierarchies, their skepticism of equality and (as Buckley’s quotation attests) their quiet and often unspoken skepticism of a democracy of universal suffrage.
I would argue that Christian and Catholic conservatives should be especially alive to this problem, hailing as they do from a tradition that promises that the first shall be last, sees the poor as inheriting the earth – and who follow a savior whose first commandment, as the reading tonight at Vespers reminded us, was not about efficiency or hierarchy or even freedom, but about love.
But one of the many things that made Buckley great was his awareness that sinners exists in all philosophical realms and that conservatives, no less than liberals, needed to be wary of their own certainties.
“Conservatives pride themselves on resisting change, which is as it should be,” Buckley said. “But intelligent deference to tradition and stability can evolve into intellectual sloth and moral fanaticism, as when conservatives simply decline to look up from dogma because the effort to raise their heads and reconsider is too great.”
No liberal could have said it better, and if conservatism is in the trouble I think it is, those difficulties arise in large part from the failure of my friends on the right to heed this wise admonition from their muse and patron saint.
The title I was supposed to speak to tonight was “The Catholic William F. Buckley and the Present Progressive Movement.” I have consciously spoken to that title only indirectly, knowing that Buckley himself would advise each of us never to follow any orders we’re given too closely.
But I would like to suggest that those of us who would think of ourselves as Catholics and progressives and patriots might find common ground with the Bill Buckley who was a Catholic and a conservative and a patriot. We can come together around our obligation to gratitude.
In 1990, Buckley wrote a lovely little book called Gratitude subtitled, Reflections on What We Owe to Our Country. Buckley used the book to endorse national service.
Here is what he wrote:
If the idea takes over the public imagination, as it has done my own, the cost will prove bearable, and its fruits beyond the reach of slide rules. And then, properly conceived, the status of the citizen in a republic, uniting privilege with responsibility, evolves into a kind of nobility no less aristocratic for being widespread and universally accessible (is there any difficulty in conceiving of a society, every one of whose members is of an aristocratic order?). Materialistic democracy beckons every man to make himself a king; republican citizenship incites every man to be a knight. National service, like gravity, is something we could accustom ourselves to, and grow to love.
No Catholic liberal – or for that matter Catholic socialist – could have said it better, though we might insist Buckley’s metaphor as unduly monarchist, which surely didn’t bother him.
I’d like to close with the first paragraphs of Buckley’s tribute to gratitude.
I have always thought Anatole France’s story of the juggler to be one of enduring moral resonance. This is the arresting and affecting tale of the young monk who aspires to express his devotion to the Virgin Mary, having dejectedly reviewed, during his first week as a postulant at the monastery alongside Our Lady of Sorrows, the prodigies and gifts of his fellow monks. Oh, some sang like nightingales, others played their musical instruments as virtuosi, still others rhapsodized with the tongues of poets. But all that this young novice had learned in the way of special skills before entering the monetary was to entertain modestly as a juggler. And so, in the dead of night, driven by the mandate to serve, walking furtively lest he be seen and mocked by his brothers, he makes his ardent way to the altar with his sackful of wooden mallets and balls, and does his act for Our Lady.
This account of the struggle to express gratitude is unsurpassed in devotional literature. The apparent grotesquerie—honoring the mother of the savior of the universe, the vessel of salvation, with muscular gyrations designed to capture the momentary interest of six-year-olds—is inexpressibly beautiful in the mind’s eye. The act of propitiation; gratitude reified.
I am honored to have been asked to play a role at a conference which itself is an expression of our gratitude for William F. Buckley Jr’s life. Personally, I wish he had been less politically effective. I wish that he had paid a bit more attention to the progressive encyclicalsof Pope John XXIII, and taken more advice on social and economic matters from his friend Galbraith. But who, in the end, can escape loving this man who spent his own life as a juggler – of words, of ideas, of friendships, of commitments, of adventures. God granted Bill Buckley life, and in doing so, blessed the rest of us, and that is why we are here, in witness to our gratitude.
Thank you.
