Reviewed: The Incomparable Mr. Buckley

Too much drama and personality, too little anti-communism.

Author’s Note: If you enjoy reading about 20th century US politics, you’re probably aware that Sam Tanenhaus’ biography on the postwar conservative William F. Buckley Jr. is being released tomorrow. While I have no embargoed galley review, I did write up a review of a PBS documentary about the same man last year. In anticipation of the new book, I’m publishing this review today for you to enjoy. As you might tell from reading, I expect Tanenhaus to do a better job than PBS. More reviews to come.

Last year, PBS released a documentary The Incomparable Mr. Buckley on William F. Buckley Jr., leader of the postwar conservative movement. Initial reviews were mixed. Buckley’s own National Review was quick to note shortcomings, especially on the topics of McCarthyism and race. The Wall Street Journal’s review was more ecumenical and positive, while the left-liberal author Rick Perlstein complained at The American Prospect that PBS was just too nice to the man in light of the current Republican party. In frustration, Perlstein pleaded “Why do American elites seem to so desperately need this narrative of a respectable right wing” and he is not wrong to ask. PBS sought to contextualize the American right for a largely liberal audience favored to Perlstein’s read. What great motives can they find in a man who initially opposed Civil Rights and defended Joe McCarthy from critics?

The documentary tries to address this puzzle for its audience by emphasizing the harmony between Buckley’s friendly personality and his politics. But it provides trivia instead of a deeper analysis. For in truth, it was Buckley’s anti-communist foreign policy, not his quick wit or curious accent, which fueled his public role and editorship of National Review. While early critics like Peter Viereck compared the conservative anti-statist politics of National Review to the mobs of the Jacobin revolution, history has vindicated Buckley’s understanding of order. Unfortunately, the PBS producers do not begin to understand why.

That is not to say the biography falls flat on all counts. They stress that Buckley’s worldview was shaped by an upper-class upbringing to a father who made his money in the Mexican oil industry and adored Francisco Franco. The hierarchy and preparation of his early life in turn informed his rebellion at Yale University, where his feud with the administration eventually inspired his first book, God and Man at Yale. He was a man against the establishment and for conservatism. In so many snapshots of adventure on his yacht and repartee with intellectuals, The Incomparable Mr. Buckley makes its subject fun and interesting.

But while these traits make for good television, the film leaves the subject’s legacy unclear. For all the guests brought on to give asides about the man who shaped the postwar conservative movement, the documentary never convincingly answers what it all means for politics today. The film appears uncomfortably aware of this shortcoming while juxtaposing footage of the January 6th riot with an interview of the subject’s son, Christopher Buckley. He and the film ponder what his father would think of the American right today, before telling the viewer to go read Buckley’s vast record. This comes off as a sloppy excuse, as if the documentary’s writers gave up on doing their homework and slapped a post-it note in the place of an index.

To understand Buckley’s role in the 20th century and relevance today, one must understand him as a kind of poet of Cold War politics rather than as a domestic policy activist or even public intellectual. After all, Buckley did not write big theoretical books. His contributions in writing often took the form of essays, columns, forewords, and spy fiction. The spy fiction genre creeps into the documentary, which describes Buckley’s ties to the OSS (which would become the CIA) less as the mark of a serious patriot and more like an accessory for petty intrigue. At one point the film mentions that Buckley’s sparring partner Gore Vidal feared he held compromising surveillance on his sexual liaisons. This aside is utterly pointless and vulgar. Buckley detested how his rivalry with Vidal played out in public; he preferred to quickly change the subject to higher things when asked by fans about his infamous outburst against Vidal. The documentary should have taken this advice to heart.

Buckley’s creation of National Review in 1955 was not for petty insults, but took place in the midst of a postwar backlash to the military industrial complex created by the Second World War. Not unlike today, many leading academics then suggested a “radical right” was irreconcilable with any rational American political traditions. But the political scientist Aaron Friedberg demonstrated the opposite in his book In the Shadow of the Garrison State. In fact, America’s Cold War grand strategy owed a lot to American pushback against the state. The effort to push back included both a record number of Congressional investigations into Truman’s executive branch, tax cuts and union reform legislation like the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 passed over Truman’s veto, and less effective populist elements like the Senator Joe McCarthy. Numerous military suggestions toward full male conscription were stopped by elected politicians. The backlash mattered and secured Americans a freer future than they would otherwise have.

Any account of Buckley’s role in building a political magazine and movement off these discontents must give the anti-statists their due. As Friedberg explained in his 2000 book, the Cold War was won not by vast weaponry, but self-government and democratic accountability pulling America back from total military statism. The USSR was not so lucky and would spend somewhere between two to three times as large a share of its economy on the military as the US throughout the Cold War. Lacking a middle class democracy to pull its politburo back from military state capture, America’s geopolitical rival sacrificed any civil society or economy on the altar of the garrison state. The Soviet empire would be buried under these costs.

All countries must carefully weigh their costs internally and abroad or face a similar danger. It is a simple fact eluded by PBS that the chief concern of Bill Buckley (and the American intelligence agencies he worked with) was a foreign policy in America’s national interest. A year before Buckley’s death, his future biographer Sam Tanenhaus (who provides a few brief comments in the film) asked Buckley if he thought the Iraq War would tear apart the Republican party as Vietnam did to the Democratic party. “Absolutely,” he replied in 2007. The passage of time has made Tanenhaus’s question and Buckley’s response all the more prophetic. Some of the biggest proponents of the Iraq War have gone on to leave and oppose the Republican party today. Among them is the former Bush speechwriter David Frum, a man who knew Buckley but does not appear in the documentary.

Three decades ago, a younger and more conservative David Frum told his interviewer on C-SPAN that Buckley’s biggest accomplishment was melding Republican party elements with Cold War imperatives. In Frum’s words, Buckley’s greatness lay in “taking the Republican Party by the scruff of the neck and making it a party that was committed to the military defense of Europe.” One minute of this old interview delivers a sharper and more timely insight than PBS can manage in over an hour and a half (1:42:08.) As the Russo-Ukrainian war continues, Europe’s defense becomes an expensive and open-ended proposition. Republicans generally do not like spending on open-ended propositions. Perhaps Buckley’s great accomplishment is now coming undone. On the other hand, Buckley’s anti-communism might not apply to a non-communist Russia and a richer Europe than seventy years ago. This is a live division within thinkers on the right that steadily appears in Republican congressional votes.

The PBS documentary does not bother with the curious return of a Euro-skeptic faction in the GOP. This is a remarkable oversight. Instead of asking Buckley’s son for a reading list to explain right-wing politics, it might have been more instructive to show Republican lawmakers giving speeches for and against funding for Ukraine. Political pundits too often discuss the drama in politics without any legislative details. PBS regrettably followed the crowd in this regard. As Buckley would be the first to know, America’s democracy and lasting alliances rely chiefly on the work of Congress, not television personalities or controversial presidencies.

To answer Christopher Buckley’s inquiry, PBS could have delved into the first issue of National Review, featuring Senator William Knowland’s essay Peace — with Honor. In this piece, Knowland (who was sometimes derided as “the Senator from Formosa”) rhetorically united the Asian and European fronts in a broader struggle against communism. The producers also could have sought out more obscure examples of Buckley directly speaking with allies on the right, such as his strong remarks at a dinner dedicated to Alfred Kohlberg, a financier of networks opposed to Chinese communism and early national member in the John Birch Society. In both cases, Buckley’s editing and speaking sought to unify the Asia-first wing of Republican politics with a broader mission.

Without uniting the margins on the right, without bringing the old Euro-skeptic Republicans of the Midwest into holding the line after the scandal of Yalta, and perhaps without Joseph McCarthy’s ruthless anti-communism (and his vote for the creation of NATO) which changed the Republican party, American democracy might not have as effectively handled the struggle against the Soviet Union. Confronting such a power required a notion of what made America worth defending. It was Buckley who made right-wing anti-statism and anti-communism rhyme into a particular internationalism. If PBS paid tribute to this fact, it would become clearer to its audience why liberals put up with a man who kept a bit of reactionary company. But beyond just personalities and taboos, it would humble us all to remember that crafting a successful bipartisan foreign policy is easier said than done. William F. Buckley Jr. certainly shaped the postwar conservative movement, but any serious biography of his life and mission must start with that adjective prior to conservative.