- The modern American conservative movement and the man who launched it.

(dramatic music) This week on "Firing Line".

- [Narrator] Tonight from Washington DC, "Firing Line".

Tonight's guest, Barry Goldwater.

- [Margaret] William F. Buckley, Jr. never held public office, but he unquestionably helped to shape the world we live in today.

Founder and editor of National Review and creator of "Firing Line", which he hosted for 33 years, he is credited by some for making Ronald Reagan's presidency possible.

- Governor Reagan sees no contradiction between a commitment to progress and a commitment to conservatism.

- What Bill Buckley did was to see that conservatism had to define its states culturally rather than just politically, ideologically or economically.

- Sam Tanenhaus' new biography, "Buckley, The Life and Revolution "that changed America" was 27 years in the making.

Buckley himself chose Tanenhaus, who is not part of the conservative movement, as his biographer a decade before he died.

What does Sam Tanenhaus say now?

- [Narrator] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, the Tepper Foundation, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation and by The Pritzker Military Foundation.

- Sam Tanenhaus, welcome back to "Firing Line".

- It's been a long time, Margaret, (Margaret laughs) but I'm glad to be here.

- William F. Buckley Jr. asked you to write his biography.

It spans more than 80 years of Buckley's life and is more than a 1,000 pages, including footnotes.

For the uninitiated, what is the significance of the life of William F. Buckley Jr.?

- Well, he is the architect of the modern, conservative movement.

There was nobody like him before.

There hasn't been anyone since.

He was a showman.

He was a brilliant writer.

He was a great debater.

He was a socialite.

He was a sailor and skier, kind of a renaissance man.

He spoke languages.

He wrote novels.

He wrote bestselling spy novels.

He was a ubiquitous presence for about 50 years.

There was no more famous intellectual, left or right.

Set the politics aside, just as a public figure, Bill Buckley was probably the most famous intellectual in America for that entire span.

- What was Buckley's Revolution?

- The revolution was to rethink the conservatism he inherited.

He grew up with, that he got mainly from his father, who was also an extraordinary figure.

And Bill Buckley, who was the sixth of 10 children, inherited an idea of conservatism that actually looks very familiar today.

It's the old protectionist America first, isolationist, anti-regulatory conservatism of the 19th century, the Gilded Age.

And what Bill Buckley did was to see that, with all the changes that happened in the 20th century, beginning with the Great Depression, which happened when he was young, all the way through the Vietnam War and the upheavals of the 1970s, climaxing with the election of his two T, his disciple, Ronald Reagan, that conservatism had to present itself to the public in a very different way.

It had to define its stakes culturally rather than just politically, ideologically or economically.

- Do you think that Buckley's key insight was to focus on the cultural wedge issues or was it something else?

- It's not necessarily cultural wedge issues.

It's defining where the battle will be fought.

- Ah.

- It's gonna be fought in print.

It's gonna be fought in the debate stage.

It's gonna be fought by out arguing and out writing and out thinking the other side.

It's giving conservatism a kind of modern, up-to-the-minute feel that it hadn't had before.

It seemed like the ideology of old people, of the old guys.

- Yeah.

- And he wanted to make it the politics of vitality and youth, which he himself personified.

- Why did he pick you?

- If the book were written by a disciple, you would get Bill Buckley, the leader of the conservative movement, or the defender of important conservative principles.

But you might not get the outsized really large figure who swept through life.

- So you think it it's that he explicitly knew you weren't one of his disciples?

- Yes, I think so.

And you could also say that it's a strategic choice on his part too, because he knows his life will get a better hearing if it's presented by someone who's not in the fold or, you know, part of the movement.

- Do you think he's right?

- That it's getting a better hearing for that reason?

I can't say.

It's certainly getting a lot of attention.

I think it would have, anyway.

There's been a lot written about this book and some of it's favorable, some not so favorable, some kind of neutral.

I will say what's most interesting to me is the debate I've seen among conservatives.

Liberals are really reviewing Bill Buckley himself when they review my book.

Do they like him or don't they?

What I found with many of the readers and reviewers on the right so far is they're having a debate among themselves about where Bill Buckley fits in this fraught moment of our own, this very precarious, parlous moment, as they say, of our own.

They're trying to figure out where Bill Buckley fits in.

Liberals think they can answer that question more easily.

I like that the conservatives are wrestling with it.

- They are.

What do you make of the disciples and the conservative intelligentsia that feel Bill was shortsighted in selecting you?

- They could be right.

(Sam laughs) You know, somebody said to me, "So what about this idea that you wrote a flawed portrait?"

And, of course, of course it's a flawed portrait.

How could it not be?

Every portrait is.

I think of it as being more like a Picasso portrait where, you know, you get the nose from three different angles.

I think it's a multifaceted portrait of Bill Buckley and he led a very unusual life.

And there are episodes I think are important that maybe a disciple doesn't.

They wonder why there's as much as there is on the Buckley family and its racial history.

I think it's very important to understanding the conservative movement and to understanding Bill Buckley.

Bill Buckley's financial dealings, his involvement with the inmate, the death row inmate, Edgar Smith, and there are many facets to Bill Buckley I think some of his disciples aren't comfortable with some of those.

- Buckley was a devout Catholic.

You write about it in his book.

You don't seem to take on how his political views were influenced by his Catholicism.

You don't address abortion, gay rights, prayer in schools, the AIDS epidemic in the context of his Catholicism.

Why not?

- Well, because in the sense you may be thinking of, they affect him no differently than they would from any other Catholic, any other conservative Catholic.

He was a conservative Catholic.

- Right.

- He was not a theological Catholic.

He knew very little about Catholic teaching and theology.

He depended on others for that.

If you read his book- - So then how did it affect, like his views about abortion?

He wrote for the overturning of Roe in 1974.

- All that came later.

Don't you see what's going on here?

- Tell me.

- What's going on is the positions, his positions are changing as the parties (indistinct), not the other way around.

- So his Catholicism is not informing his political views?

- Only in the most routine way, not in the philosophical way.

- Explain that to me.

- Bill Buckley had one year of formal Catholic training.

The rest, he had a secular education.

In fact, his mother, Eloise Buckley, Steiner Buckley, who was the truly devout, she was a daily communicant, thought her children had not been taught enough Catholicism.

- How much did Buckley's faith influence his trajectory on race, which, you know, his trajectory did change.

- We've talked about how Buckley's Catholicism influenced, or didn't, his views on questions like abortion, but where it mattered in a more complicated way was in race relations.

Because Buckley, although he was not a learned Catholic, was a devout Catholic and very much a believer in the liturgy and the three pillars of faith, hope and charity with emphasis on the last, so charity.

So when Buckley in unsigned editorials criticized northern liberals for being too hard on white southerners, he said they were being uncharitable toward the white south because he believed on the basis of his own family's relationship with the black people who worked for them, that there were the essence of charitable dealings with the disadvantaged, as they used to say.

And there you get a sense of Buckley's feeling of personal obligation and responsibility.

The philanthropic side of Buckley.

I found in the archive, checks Bill Buckley wrote all his life to historically black colleges and universities.

He wasn't a supporter of integration in those early years, but he and his family helped the black people around them.

And I interviewed someone who'd worked for the family in the South, who said the Buckleys were the finest white family in the town of Camden, South Carolina.

- So was the emphasis on charity came directly from their Catholicism?

- Yes, and charity does mean, you know, to love thy neighbor and sometimes your enemy.

And to treat people with a kind of kindness and equality.

The Buckleys and the household staff, both when he was growing up and then when he himself was a kind of paterfamilias in his own home with Hispanic workers.

They all went to church together.

They climbed into the car and went to church together.

That's the older style of Catholicism.

And it sounds very paternalistic, and it was.

And it sounds archaic, and it was, but that doesn't mean the feeling wasn't real.

- They went to church together.

And yet one of the pieces of reporting you uncovered in the archives in Camden, South Carolina, was that the Buckley family had actually supported and funded one of the segregationist newspapers in the town.

Something that was heretofore unknown by conservatives or by history.

- Buckley never mentioned it.

No one in his family ever mentioned it.

His elder sister, Priscilla, who was one of the great text editors of her time, worked at National Review for many years- - Do you think they didn't know?

- Was the editor of that newspaper?

She was the editor of it.

She never mentioned it.

They knew, of course, they knew.

And it was a secret they guarded for many years.

- You write that the pages that mean the most to you were the chapters that you wrote about the Buckleys in the South and this complicated set of racial relationships.

Why?

- Well, as a storyteller, they were the most challenging.

And, to me, they felt the richest because of the complexity of the situation that you have to imagine what it was like to discover totally unexpectedly that the family had published this newspaper.

I had no idea.

And people have said to me, "How do you reconcile it?"

And the answer is you don't reconcile it.

That's what I mean about the Picasso portrait that has two noses.

You show both noses.

- Yeah.

- And then you get the fuller picture.

So, to me, it was satisfying as a storyteller to be able or at least try to make a reader see and feel what it was like to be there in that time and experience the things the Buckleys did and the black people who worked in their household did.

As a writer, that's a wonderful challenge.

- So this is also important context for how Buckley comes to take the position of penning the editorial for the National Review, The South Must Prevail in 1957, and then sort of more of the background with which he came to the debate with James Baldwin in the Cambridge Union in 1965.

- And I built the railroads under someone else's whip for nothing.

- [Margaret] In response to Baldwin's case about the American dream having been achieved at the expense of black Americans, Buckley responds this way.

- Thus, Mr. Baldwin can write his book "The Fire Next Time", in which he threatens America.

He didn't, in writing that book, speak with the British accents that he used exclusively tonight in which he threatened America with a necessity (crowd murmurs) for us, to jettison, for us to jettison our entire civilization.

- I noticed in your book you also wrote that Buckley said about the debate that night, that quote, "Tonight is the lost cause."

- Yeah.

- Because he did resoundingly lose that debate.

- Yeah.

Buckley misread the room and the scene.

This debate was happening at the very moment of the march on Selma in Alabama where white sheriffs and police officers were brutalizing black Americans who are only expressing their right to cast a ballot to vote.

And Buckley sounded as if he had no sympathy for them.

And- - And yet he became a hero to the policemen of New York City, right?

And he returns home and gives a speech to 6,000 police officers in New York City prior to his run for mayor.

- Well, the interesting thing about that debate with Baldwin, it was the first of two, and not many remember the second debate.

And that happened in New York and Buckley did much better in that one.

And they were talking specifically about the issue of police brutality.

And what Buckley realized with those antenna of his, which were very sharply attuned, and Buckley was also, I make this point over and over again in conversation and the book, 'cause people don't realize it, including people who knew him very well, Buckley was a great listener.

He's like you.

He's good at doing this program because he's hanging on every word that the other person says.

- There are a lot of disciples who are gonna be very angry you just said that.

- Well, the phrase I- - I'll take the compliment.

- The phrase I came up with was as a predatory attentiveness.

He's gonna jump on you.

- I thought that was a brilliant- - He's gonna hear exactly- - A brilliant characterization of exactly what Buckley was doing.

- It's what you try to do.

- Like a praying mantis just waiting.

- Yeah, that's it.

While he's hanging on every word, he's gonna turn it against you.

And what he realized in New York, Margaret, was that the arguments that were shocking when he talked about the South sounded different if you talked about them in the North.

- Yeah.

- And that was Buckley's genius.

He himself was partly a Northerner raised in Connecticut, partly a Southerner raised part of the year in the South.

He combined those persona in himself.

- And he evolved on race.

And you write about how the years following the debates with Baldwin, Buckley's views changed on race.

He went on a tour of inner cities and he brought prominent black civil rights leaders on "Firing Line".

Many of them, I mean, he had great respect for Jesse Jackson.

He argued with Muhammad Ali about Malcolm X, as you point out, in defense of Malcolm X's position, lest I get the details wrong.

So how does he then evolve from declaring the South must prevail to ultimately acknowledging that the Civil Rights Act was necessary?

- The great thing about Bill Buckley was that he changed the way most of us do.

Not because he read a brilliantly-nuanced argument on a point he disagreed with that turned his mind two degrees.

It's because he met people, looked them in the eye, talked to them, listened to them, and realized they might be different from what he thought originally about them.

And so, his world got bigger and bigger.

And so, people know who study this period, if you want to know what the Black Panthers sounded like in debate, want to know what Huey Newton sounded like, and Eldridge Cleaver, you have to watch "Firing Line" because Bill Buckley had 'em on his program when almost nobody else would do it.

- Nobody else would do it.

- He thought people should hear them.

It didn't mean he agreed with them.

In fact, he thought that they would lose support if people heard them.

But you should hear what they had to say and not just see newsreel footage of them being scary.

That was one of the great things about Buckley.

He thought if you could turn everything into a debate and an argument, the better side, his side would win.

Often, his side did not, but the argument always got better when Bill Buckley was involved in it.

Even with James Baldwin, you can make the case that had Buckley not been so ferocious and antagonist to James Baldwin, you would not have gotten those magnificent remarks Baldwin made.

He knew Buckley had been coming after him.

Buckley had been calling him names long before that debate.

He called him the number one America hater in the country.

Baldwin knew that.

So he came in ready to make his case.

Well, that's what we want our politics to be.

Not the name calling part, but the debate part.

- The engaging ideas seriously.

A rigorous contest of ideas.

- Yes, and that's why when I say Buckley's Catholicism didn't shape in a profound way his ideas on certain issues, I don't mean that they didn't shape the way he felt about them.

I just mean you won't find arguments he made that are more sophisticated than arguments other Catholics made.

So that's not the foundation of it.

Really, the foundation of it is the way Buckley lived his life.

That's why his best books are these wonderful memoirs he wrote where he just takes you inside his life.

His book "Cruising Speed", I recommend anyone read, and partly because that book was published in 1971 at a terrible moment in American history, and Bill Buckley wrote a book that says, life can be rich.

You can be friends with almost anybody.

You can make fun of yourself.

You can try to have the most civil kind of discussion with people who stand on the opposite side.

You can lighten the tone a little bit.

It's what we could use more of today, I think.

- Yeah.

Of the 1,505 episodes of "Firing Line", you write that the one that Buckley was most proud of was the Panama Canal Treaties debate with Ronald Reagan, George Will.

Here is one exchange from that debate.

Take a look.

- Well, Bill, my first question is, why haven't you already rushed across the room here to tell me that you've seen the light?

(audience laughing) - I'm afraid that if I came any closer to you, the force of my illumination would blind you.

(audience laughing) - Why was this episode in particular so significant in the history of the original program?

- One thing we forget now is how divisive an issue the Panama Canal treaties were in the late 1970s.

Reagan was very much the leader of the movement that did not want to return the Panama Canal to Panama and signed the treaties.

Buckley thought that was a mistake.

In part, this is classic Buckley, because he went down to Panama, remember he spoke good Spanish and he went to Panama and he met with leaders there, and he said, "These are people who are proud "of their country.

"Why shouldn't they retain it?"

He used a wonderful phrase where he says, "We should, as a great superpower, "we should not be like a peacock strutting around.

"That's not what the mighty powers do.

"They're more like lions."

And he said, "The real issue is defeating global communism.

"That's the issue.

"That's where we wanna put our resources, "not into beating up "some small country right in our backyard."

Buckley knew if Reagan stuck to his position, which was a fringe position, it might do him some good with the base, but it was not gonna help him in a general election.

- And yet Buckley says that had Reagan not taken the position he had taken, he wouldn't have received the nomination in 1980.

- Yeah, he knew that was the dynamic he'd figured out, that Reagan had to take that position to satisfy his base.

And then when the question came up, well, how could Reagan make this absurd argument?

Buckley would say, "Oh, really, absurd?

"Watch him on "Firing Line"."

To me, that was Bill Buckley at his finest.

No one else could have done it.

No one else would've thought to do it or could see all the steps you needed to take.

And Bill Buckley did.

Quite remarkable.

- Final question.

You spent 27 years with Bill Buckley.

Did you enjoy your time with him?

- It was more than that, and I'll speak for two of us.

My wife as well, we loved him.

He was a wonderful person.

I interviewed spouses of National Review, men, it was mainly men who worked there.

And they said to me, Buckley treated them with more respect than their Radcliffe professors ever did.

To me, the most moving part of the very long story I tell is something I haven't seen a single of the, what, three dozen reviewers mention, that when the Berlin Wall finally fell and communism was defeated, Buckley said, "Oh, that's nice."

"But Bill, don't you realize "how much you had to do with it?"

"No.

Why was I important?"

He was hugely important in it.

He kept that argument alive, but he never overrated his significance in that way.

He had a very human understanding of himself.

That's what my wife, Kathy, says about Bill Buckley.

She said, "He was so human, he was a human being."

You felt it from the kind of vulnerability, the quickness to laugh, the way Pat would endlessly ridicule him, make fun of him.

And he took it, he didn't object.

There was a warmth and generosity about him.

I've just never seen it in somebody that large and I don't expect to encounter it again.

And it was a lesson if I ever became famous like that, I would want to treat people that way.

My own father died young.

He died in 1980 at the age of 56.

And when Bill Buckley died, I felt the way I did when I lost my father, that a really great presence had been taken from my life.

That's why it hurts a little bit when some say, "Well, you seem to be undermining "or attacking Bill Buckley."

No, I'm not.

I'm showing you how big he was, you know?

And that's how he felt to me.

And that's what I try to convey to the best of my admittedly limited capacities in a very long book that was written with a lot of dedication and care.

- Sam Tanenhaus, thank you for returning to "Firing Line".

- What a pleasure, Margaret.

(dramatic music) - [Margaret] I'll have more of my interview with Buckley biographer, Sam Tanenhaus, next week.

For an expanded version of the interview, listen to the "Firing Line Podcast".

- [Narrator] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, the Tepper Foundation, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation and by The Pritzker Military Foundation.

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