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Greenfield at Large

A Conversation With William F. Buckley Jr.

Aired September 03, 2001 - 22:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JEFF GREENFIELD, HOST: For more than four decades, he has been one of the most recognizable, controversial and influential conservative voices of his time as the founder of a provocative political magazine and host of one of the longest political debate TV shows. He has also written some pretty good spy novels.

We're going to look back and look ahead with William F. Buckley Jr. tonight on GREENFIELD AT LARGE.

It will not entirely displease my guest tonight, I hope, to suggest that William F. Buckley Jr. has been driving adversaries nuts for more than half a century. It is not just that he paints his views in bold colors. It is not just the confidence -- arrogance, his foes might say -- with which he propounds his views. It's not just the vocabulary -- distinctive, quirky, even -- that is as identifiable as Tom's Wolfe's white suit.

It is not even the fame he has accumulated as editor, lecturer, essayist, novelist, diarist, TV host, candidate. No, what really drives his adversaries up the wall, I think, is that Bill Buckley seems to have had such a damn good time of it for so long.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(voice-over): You might ask: What took him so long? It wasn't until the ripe old age of 26 that Buckley published his first book: "God and Man at Yale," the full-throated assault on the liberal sensibilities of his alma mater. But he did pick up the pace.

In 1955, he founded "National Review," a conservative magazine whose goal, he said, was to stand athwart history yelling "Stop." It helped shape the thinking of two generations of readers. In 1962, he became a syndicated newspaper columnist. At its peak, the column appeared in more than 300 papers.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, 1966)

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR., FOUNDER, "NATIONAL REVIEW": A great many New Yorkers feel increasingly insecure as a result of the riotous spending of my predecessor, Mr. Wagner.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GREENFIELD: In 1965, Buckley won 13 percent of the vote as the Conservative Party candidate for mayor of New York, the capital of big city liberalism.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "FIRING LINE")

BUCKLEY: Would you grant amnesty to everyone involved in the so- called Watergate affair?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GREENFIELD: One year later, he launched "Firing Line," a one- hour talk show that ran for more than 30 years and that featured just about every significant political and cultural figure of its time.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Because of the madness that exists...

BUCKLEY: Who's mad? I'm not mad.

(LAUGHTER)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GREENFIELD: While "Firing Line" stressed civility, one of Buckley's most famous TV appearance was anything but. At the 1968 conventions, Buckley was paired with liberal writer Gore Vidal, who called Buckley a crypto-Nazi, eliciting this response:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, 1968)

BUCKLEY: Now, listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face. And you'll stay plastered.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GREENFIELD: Buckley's books have included a good number of novels, including the best-selling "Blackford Oakes" thrillers and subjects that range from the late Senator Joseph McCarthy to Elvis Presley in his latest novel, "Elvis in the Morning."

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GREENFIELD: Now, I have left for last the deed for which Mr. Buckley may have the most to answer. In 1968, he gave me my first regular TV gig as one of the examiners on "Firing Line" who questioned both Buckley and his guest at the end of the program. So I am delighted, after three decades and change, to turn the tables and welcome William F. Buckley Jr.

BUCKLEY: Nice to be here.

GREENFIELD: Your novels have featured, among others, a dashing, devastatingly attractive secret agent -- perhaps autobiographical -- James Angleton of the CIA -- Elvis Presley?

BUCKLEY: You ruined a wonderful line I would have otherwise extemporized, which is that when I set out to write my novel, I was determined to fly in the face of contemporary depictions of Americans as paunchy, drunkard, cuckolded, bawling. So I made my hero almost offensively attractive.

GREENFIELD: This is "Blackford Oakes."

BUCKLEY: This is "Blackford Oakes," yes.

And a reviewer, a University of Missouri guy reviewing my book in the "Kansas City Star," he hated me and my work and everything. But he couldn't quite hate the novel. So he wrote: "Mr. Buckley's hero is attractive, compassionate, engaging, from which at least we can take satisfaction from knowing it's not autobiographical."

GREENFIELD: Ah. It also reminds us that you do remember things people have written and said about you at some length? That's a...

BUCKLEY: Well, that

(CROSSTALK)

(LAUGHTER)

GREENFIELD: But, Elvis Presley -- look, it's not -- when I think of your musical taste, I do think Bach. I seem to remember you're quiet an aficionado. Elvis would not have been somebody that I would have thought was on your radar screen as someone that you would have spent time writing a novel.

BUCKLEY: Well, he wasn't. No, he wasn't. I've now heard it was a fair amount of Elvis. And some of his ballads I think are remarkable. It isn't the bel canto. It's a kind of twangy approach to them, which is singular.

But this book is called "Elvis in the Morning," though he's not the dominant -- he's the dominant character in it in the sense that an evening with Gershwin becomes a Gershwin evening. But he's not the protagonist. However, it's a splendid book, a fascinating read.

GREENFIELD: So you are now reviewing your own book.

BUCKLEY: Well, you don't want me to?

GREENFIELD: No, it's fine.

(LAUGHTER)

GREENFIELD: I think it underlines the sense of confidence we were talking about. I don't...

BUCKLEY: I don't like the

(CROSSTALK)

BUCKLEY: The point I was trying to make is that Elvis -- the music of Elvis is not the dominant source of inquiry in this book. It's the atmosphere in America in the late '50s and the '60s. My guy, when he's 15, 16 years old, he is hypnotized by a left-wing professor in Germany. He goes to school in Germany.

And he wants to be a utopian socialist. He wants to give everybody everything. In the course of these movements, he bumps into Elvis Presley for fictional reasons that I think are plausible and engaging. And so we follow those two people to the deathbed of Elvis in 1977. But, in any case, if you want me to say some nice things about Elvis and his voice, I'm perfectly ready to do so.

GREENFIELD: Well, what strikes me about it is there may be a lesson here in how the great wheel turns -- that is, in 1956, when Presley hit the national -- and some of us rock 'n' roll aficionados found him entertaining -- it's safe to say, I would guess the art section of the "National Review" didn't greet him at the time with hosannas.

And now, by the time he died, he was Middle America's favorite guy, the guy who was nice to his mother, emblematic of the values that people thought 20 years earlier he was challenging.

BUCKLEY: Look. Elvis sounded like a Baroque fundamentalist compared to the stuff that one (UNINTELLIGIBLE) But there is not much of a preoccupation with him as a cultural figure because Elvis was unique, by which I mean he wasn't set being in an orderly formation that went A, B, C, D, E.

He just appeared and left and -- although rock 'n' roll endures. He was not exactly the initiator of it.

GREENFIELD: No.

BUCKLEY: So what does endure, in my judgment, is the myth. He's a mythogenic guy. He probably wouldn't have been if he had lived another 20 years -- plus, also, that exquisite, in my judgment, voice.

GREENFIELD: No, I think you're right.

We're going to take a break and switch the ground a little bit, because I want to talk about the battles and wars of William F. Buckley. Things have been won and lost. And maybe does he now think, on some them, he may have been on the wrong side of those battles?

When we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GREENFIELD: We're back with a kind of special edition of GREENFIELD AT LARGE -- my guest for this entire half hour: William F. Buckley Jr.

Let's turn to the arena of public policy and battles won, lost, abandoned. Communism is dead, except in a few select places. Socialism as we knew it 50 years ago is certainly dead. But in the area of the role of government in public life, Margaret Thatcher was unable to undo a welfare state. Ronald Reagan wasn't able to undo it.

Are we at a point now where that central premise that government -- in our case, the federal government -- has a major role to play in all kinds of areas -- health, education, welfare -- is here to stay?

BUCKLEY: As far as we can tell, it is, unless you go back to sort of a reconstitution of a new world on the order of Ayn Rand's fantasy about the end of the world, and all of a sudden, three people find themselves on an island. It is.

I think one has to remember that although it is correct what you say, communism is dead and the socialism as dogma is dead, the forms of socialism are by no means dead, in my judgment, because what they do is simply assert the appetite of individuals to use, in the famous phrase, political for economic means of self-aggrandizement: If I can better my life economically by voting this and taking from you, it's tempting to do.

(CROSSTALK)

GREENFIELD: But so tempting that, in the last election, the conservative of the major candidates for president was telling us that he was going to expand prescription drugs for the elderly. His education program -- he was quite clear about this -- vastly increases the role, not only of the government, but of the Department of Education, that Ronald Reagan wanted to abolish.

My question is: So is that particular aspect of the battle gone, done?

BUCKLEY: Well, it is done in the sense that it is acknowledged that it is going to continue to happen. What is not done is the intellectual case against it. Free means somebody else pays for it. An explanation of that continues to be made and occasionally has resonance.

GREENFIELD: But as far as you can see down the road in terms of reserving this notion...

BUCKLEY: You lawyers know about slippery slopes.

GREENFIELD: I've told you 15 times in our life, I never took the bar. I am proudly not a lawyer. And you should know better. But we'll let that pass.

BUCKLEY: You people educated

(CROSSTALK)

GREENFIELD: OK.

BUCKLEY: The slippery slope argument says that, if you -- if you don't guard yourself here, somebody is going to take advantage of gravity and go all the way. For instance, if you -- if you don't permit "Deep Throat", you are going to end up banning "Ulysses."

Now, if you apply that metaphor to the government, I think you make useful progress, by which I mean, if you count the number of dollars that are generated in the course of the year, and ask yourself the question, "At what point do you walk into the private sector?" you've asked an interesting question.

It was recorded a couple years ago that May the 6th is when we start working for our ourselves -- i.e.: State and federal government spend everything that is earned for four and a half months. By observing the slippery slope at that level, you get an impressionistic, but a pretty reliable view at the extent to which there is that movement, which socialism, of course, applauds, from the social -- from the private to the social sector.

GREENFIELD: But, basically, nobody is showing up with the political clout to say: Push that back to, say, February 15 -- maybe April 30.

BUCKLEY: Obviously not, not with the political clout to do that. But there are people who are saying: It ought to be done.

GREENFIELD: Shifting ground a bit, one of the battles you have been waging, and conservatives have been waging for -- from almost the moment you left Yale, was what they call the "Culture Wars." You had alluded to, you let "Ulysses" in and the door is open to "Deep Throat."

On that score, on the increased freedom or coarsening of the culture, would you say that the last 50 years has been a series defeats for your view of how things should be?

BUCKLEY: I would say it has been defeats. There is, in my judgment, a widespread cultural instability at the moral level, by which I mean that the majority of people who graduate from high school have had very little training in trying to ascertain what's right and what's wrong, what's good and what's bad.

Under those circumstances the perspectives that they bring to the political scene tend to be utilitarian, self-gratifying. They don't ask, for instance, in the case of, say, abortion: Is it right or wrong? They ask: Is it useful?

GREENFIELD: Or they say: Well, I think it is wrong, but sometimes necessary -- which is where the so-called mushy middle of Americans seem to be. Is that coherent, in your view?

BUCKLEY: It's an applicable question. Wars are wrong, but necessary sometimes. Killing is the same thing. But what I'm talking about, Jeff, is the tendency to ignore the steps through which one traditionally marches in order to be confident that there is some basis in the judgment that one is making that is morally defensible. And I think that's slipping.

The kind of -- gosh -- the kind of pornography, for instance, that is now available to people at almost any age, and the utter lack of resistance to it...

GREENFIELD: Ah, utter lack of resistance to it.

BUCKLEY: Yes. GREENFIELD: So, I mean, people talk all the time in this country that we're going to hell in a handbasket, that they want a leadership that speaks to morals. But if you look at the purely voluntarily act of consuming mass quantities of pornography, that's not confined to degenerates in big cities. That's a national pastime.

BUCKLEY: That's correct. And it's also -- it also suggests the absolute victory of First Amendment totalists over -- against other views of things, the notion that your right to speak involves your right to show fornication over television that today...

GREENFIELD: We are going to renew Mr. Buckley's right to speak -- not in the area that we've just been talking about, I assure you -- in a moment.

And later: Buckley's impact on our life and times, which may be even bigger than any of us can possibly imagine.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GREENFIELD: Back with our guest, William F. Buckley Jr.

Mr. Buckley, Jack Kemp, a prominent conservative, said many years ago that he thought conservatives should have been in the streets of Selma and Birmingham and Montgomery. And his larger point was, on the issue of race and racial justice in America, that is one where he thought conservatives were AWOL. Is he right?

BUCKLEY: I think it's a very compelling retroactive position. And I can think of a hundred other historical situations in which one would feel the more militancy at the beginning, the purer are our credentials. But I think we have to acknowledge about conservatism that it, I think it was basically attempts to limit mass, let alone military action.

I know you're not permitting yourself to observe what I say in this situation. But suppose 15 years had gone by and the equivalent of the 13th Amendment had been passed, and 800,000 people who were killed were not killed. Is this an exchange you'd have been willing to make?

GREENFIELD: You mean the slavery amendment?

BUCKLEY: Yes. Yes. Mutatis mutandis in the case of civil rights. People I think can persuasively say, it wasn't getting anywhere. On the other hand, when Martin Luther King backed the Parks lady in the bus, a lot of sympathy was aroused. The market was, in a sense, working for liberation because white businesses wanted black patronage.

GREENFIELD: So you think without the moral force that ultimately brought federal troops in to enforce the right to vote, that it would have happened anyway?

BUCKLEY: I think it might have. I'm simply saying one can't dismiss that possibility. But I think that Jack Kemp was right in saying that the conservatives should have simply been more vocal on the subject. I wrote a piece on it in favor of Martin Luther King back then. But I didn't favor the Civil Rights Act.

GREENFIELD: On the broader question, one of the changes since you got out of Yale as an angry young man, the country back then, I think it's fair to say, the major institutions were dominated overwhelmingly by white, male Christians. It's a very different country today in terms of who has what: who's on the Supreme Court; who's in the Senate.

Were conservatives AWOL on that broader question of opening the country up in terms of who got to do what?

BUCKLEY: Well, I don't think so. And the reason I say not is that the general acquiescence by such a community in the rise of the Jewish contingent in colleges and in the economy, in sciences, I think pretty much are uniform, so that the attachment to the idea of upward mobility was definitely a conservative position.

Now, upward mobility, in many situations, didn't work. I studied at Yale under the first Jewish professor who had tenure in the history of Yale, which, as we will all know soon, will be 300 years.

GREENFIELD: I'm sorry. We have a couple of minutes left, only. And I wanted to get your take on -- I won't call them your heirs -- but the airways are now filled with conservative voices. But they are not, it's fair to say, the same kind of conservative voice that you brought, in their tone, in their background, whether it's Rush Limbaugh or the many voices on talk radio.

When you hear them, whether or not you agree with them on their positions, how do you -- how do you respond to the tenor of the arguments?

BUCKLEY: You are urging fratricide, aren't you?

(LAUGHTER)

GREENFIELD: I'm just asking for your honest judgment.

BUCKLEY: Everybody has his own style. Yours is different from Barbara Walters.

I think the demands of a situation require a certain conformity with that style. Imagine speaking 15 -- not even you can speak 15 hours a week, can you? And that's what Rush Limbaugh does. That causes a certain elongation.

GREENFIELD: I haven't tried it.

But I do have to say that this being a half hour show with commercials, rather than "Firing Line," we're out of time.

My thanks to William F. Buckley Jr. Happy Labor Day, if that holiday happens to be one he celebrates.

But in a moment: You think you can measure his impact on our lives and times? Ha. Watch.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GREENFIELD: "And Another Thing": I did not know it at the time, but "Firing Line" was one of the best things that could possibly have happened to me. When your first TV experience is butting heads with Bill Buckley, it's kind of like being a young rookie baseball player whose first at bat is against, say, Randy Johnson. It makes whatever follows a lot less intimidating.

But, you know, even those of us who see Mr. Buckley as an important figure may not truly measure the astonishing influence of this man. Consider: When Buckley graduated college, the Soviet Union was emerging as a world superpower, with dominion over half of Europe. Today, the Soviet Union is no more.

When Buckley's "Firing Line" began, the world pole vault record was 16 feet. It is now 2 feet higher.

And when Buckley left college, the Ivy League was dominated by a faculty and outlook overwhelmingly liberal. Today -- well, you can't win them all.

I'm Jeff Greenfield. Thanks for watching.

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