>> A look back at the man who launched the modern American conservative movement.

This week on Firing Line.

>> You have greatly illuminated the conservative movement on the show.

>> William F. Buckley Jr.

's influence on our nation and our politics extended far beyond his generation.

>> There was nobody like him before.

There hasn't been anyone since.

>> In his new biography, Buckley, The Life and Revolution and The Changed America, Sam Tanenhaus chronicles Buckley's long career as both a public intellectual and an activist.

He was a ubiquitous presence for about 50 years, left or right, set the politics aside.

Bill Buckley was probably the most famous intellectual in America for that entire span.

Buckley made his mark early with his first book, God and Man at Yale, written just after college, and he continued to be a force in American politics to the end of his life as editor of National Review and host of Firing Line, which ran for 33 years.

Over those years, some of his views evolved and some did not.

What does Sam Tanenhaus say now?

Firing Line with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by and by the following.

Sam Tanenhaus, welcome back to Firing Line.

It's been a long time, Margaret, 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 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 best-selling 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.

>> With respect to Buckley's revolution, how did Buckley's revolution change America?

>> Well, what it did was to shift the power center from the East Coast, the old line establishment, which Buckley seemed to come from but actually didn't.

That was a mistake people make with Buckley.

They think he was a patrician.

He was not.

He looked like one.

It sounded like one.

>> His father was from Texas.

His mother from New Orleans.

>> From New Orleans.

>> They raised him in Connecticut, but they also raised him in South Carolina.

>> Yeah, the money was new.

They were Catholics in a time when Protestantism dominated the culture.

But also, the establishment politics of the time really came out of the media in New York City and a couple of places -- "Time" Inc., "Time" magazine, "The Herald Tribune," which no longer exists anymore.

Those are the publications that anointed the leaders of the Republican Party.

And Buckley was part of a group that led the revolt against that and shifted the power centers to what one of his disciples, Kevin Phillips, was to call the Sun Belt.

That's the politics of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan of the Bushes, coming from that part of the country, shifting the argument, the debate, and the geography, actually changing the map of American politics.

>> You appeared on "The Original Firing Line" in 1997 to discuss your biography of a former Soviet spy, Whittaker Chambers.

>> Who became the great anti-communist witness during the early Cold War and an early hero to William F. Buckley Jr.

>> Chambers was so admired in his radical phase by the other radical intellectuals of the day because they knew he was taking risks they never would.

They would never actually do anything that might jeopardize a nice teaching position at Columbia University.

Chambers, on the other hand, turned his back on a very promising literary career to become a spy, and this placed him in a different realm of experience.

your biography on Whittaker Chambers.

Buckley described as an "epical event," and he referred to you as a "major talent."

So, how did that book lead to this book?

>> Well, he liked it, as you've said, and it was really in the course of writing that book that I realized Bill Buckley would be my next subject if he agreed to do it.

He was the first really famous person I met who treated me as an equal.

And I thought, already there's something different about him.

There's something interesting about him that attracts me to him, and that maybe will help me unlock some of the secret of the movement he'd led, which was then at its peak.

This was 1990.

>> 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.

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

>> 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 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 they 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, 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.

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.

>> 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 necessity for us to jettison our entire civilization.

I noticed in your book you also wrote that Buckley said about the debate that night that, "Tonight is the lost cause," because he did resoundingly lose that debate.

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 were only expressing their right to cast a ballot to vote.

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

>> You write about how the years following the debate 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, you want to know what Huey Newton sounded like, and Eldridge Cleaver, you have to watch Firing Line because Bill Buckley had him on his program when almost 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.

>> The engaging ideas.

Seriously, a rigorous contest of ideas.

>> Yes, and 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.

>> You describe Buckley as a performing ideologue, and you write about his inability to articulate a grand, unifying, conservative philosophy.

You once said, quote, "The single greatest disappointment in Bill Buckley's intellectual life, letting down himself, friends, and admirers, and I increasingly feel the country at large, was his failure to articulate a serious, coherent, conservative philosophy.

Unpack what you mean when you also say that he was an arguer, not a thinker.

- Bill Buckley lived and thought in the moment.

So if a debate came up, he would almost always have a striking original, or at least sesquipedalian answer for you that would catch you off guard.

But if you ask him to step back from that and put all the arguments together, then he really struggled.

It wasn't something he was temperamentally suited for.

And I think you can be a conservative person without having a complicated or sophisticated system of ideas.

I don't think Bill Buckley needed that.

>> Buckley is often celebrated for driving the more extreme voices out of the conservative movement, like the anti-Semites, the Birchers, the John Birch Society.

In another book about Buckley that Al Felzenberg wrote, "A Man and His Presidents," he said, "He stood guard over the movement he founded and, in what he called his greatest achievement, kept it free where he could from the extremists, bigots, kooks, anti-Semites, and racists."

You present Buckley's relationship with Welch and the Birchers as primarily standing up to the Birchers as an act of self-preservation.

Robert Welch, of course.

>> Right, the founder of the John Birch Society in 1959 and leader of the most extreme fringe of the conservative movement.

>> Where did Buckley draw the line with the extremists he would stand up against and the extremists that he wrapped his arms around, like Joe McCarthy?

>> Yeah.

>> It's a very interesting question.

I think as the movement gained in respectability, that respectability was really important to Bill Buckley.

He did not want liberals to ridicule him and his movement.

He was very sensitive about that.

And some of Buckley's closest colleagues thought it was a mistake to read Welch out of the movement, as they said back then.

And Buckley's response then, I think, is very important.

He said, if people think the kooks are leading the movement, we're in trouble.

If they are the ground forces, the foot soldiers, that's OK.

Every movement has kooks.

But if they really think the guys at the top sound like that, then we're going to get ridiculed in the publications.

Buckley read first and foremost, which were the New York Times and the New Yorker magazine.

As far as I'm concerned, the only pro-crypto Nazi I can think of is yourself.

Failing that, I will only say that we can't have the right of assembly in the United States.

Let's stop calling names.

I'll sock you in your goddamn face.

And you'll stay plastered.

>> Gentlemen, let's -- >> In recounting Buckley's famous feud with the writer Gore Vidal, there is some time you spend on examining the suspicion that Buckley was himself gay.

Ultimately, you put this to rest.

>> I did.

I thought it -- That's what I thought part of my contribution was, but I guess some people are offended that I even discussed it.

But here's another thing, Margaret, too, that's interesting.

A friend of both men told me, someone I know quite well, said Gore thought Bill was getting away with something.

And what he meant by that was you could place Buckley in the line of fanatical or extreme anti-communists who are accusing other people of being subversives in order to conceal their own sexual deviancy in their language.

That's what my guy Whittaker Chambers was accused of.

And this is a very common thing.

And so, if you add Bill Rusher, the publisher of "National Review," who was closeted but known by everyone in that universe to be gay, and Marvin Liebman, another figure that many -- >> Marvin Liebman was openly gay and wrote a famous book about coming out gay.

>> Coming out, yeah.

Coming out conservative.

>> Coming out conservative, but being a gay conservative in the context of "National Review."

But is that detail about their orientation important to Buckley's biography?

>> It's important in a movement that -- whose main figure suggested gay men have their buttocks tattooed during the AIDS crisis, when some of his closest friends are gay and were shocked that he said it?

Yeah, I'd say it's important.

>> And when his wife, Pat Buckley, was one of the chief fundraisers for AIDS research.

That's right.

So the question of homosexuality and gay relations and then also AIDS is hugely important in the history of the modern right.

If we look at Marvin Liebman's famous letter to Bill Buckley, which was written to him privately but meant to be published, and it was published in National Review.

Which is the editorial where he comes out as conservative.

>> Yes, that's right.

It's a long letter Marvin Liebman wrote to Bill Buckley, his friend of 30, at that point 35 years or so, and he says, "What has happened to our movement where we are raising money on the corpses of gay men?

We're demonizing them to raise money in our campaigns.

Why are we doing this?"

It wasn't about who's gay and who's not, or are we spilling secrets.

No, it was exploiting it as an issue to attack weak people in the society and build a movement against it.

And if Bill Buckley, at the center and apex of that movement, is protecting the identities of gay men around him, yet also countenancing attacks on other gay men because their politics are different, yeah, we're talking about something that's essential to the modern conservative movement.

>> You argue in a recent column that the through-line from Buckley, the architect of the modern American conservative movement to a populist like President Trump is not immediately obvious, but upon closer inspection, Mr.

Trump is heir to Mr.

Buckley.

To what extent did Buckley pave the way for MAGA?

- That's the imponderable.

He certainly cleared the space for the attack on elites, on the cultural elite, particularly through his first book, "God and Man at Yale," which remains the most influential thing Buckley wrote.

It was 25 when it was published.

It's the most important book to come out of the right in our time, I believe, because it shifted the debate to a cultural one.

He made it about professors and students and ideologies and arguments.

So Buckley opened up that place for saying the problem with America is that the wrong people are in charge.

Not so much or necessarily that they have ideas that won't work, but they're ideas we don't like, and we can sharply criticize them, even if we may not have ideas of our own ready yet to replace them with.

And that's what we're seeing now.

It's really a politics of opposition and enmity.

And Bill Buckley was pretty candid about that.

That's why he couldn't write the big book.

He was very good at saying what he was against, but not so good at saying what he could envision as being a better world.

>> Does Buckley have responsibility?

I mean, some have claimed that there is an even more direct through line between Buckley and Trump.

Do you see that?

>> I don't think we needed Bill Buckley to give us Donald Trump.

Donald Trump comes out of different forces, I believe.

And that has to do with the complexities of American democracy.

And not to sound pompous or self-aggrandizing, but I think there's a lot about democracy we still don't understand.

And one thing we don't understand is how democracy itself might well give us a Donald Trump.

That doesn't require Bill Buckley to give us that.

Can you see connections?

Yes, absolutely you can.

But that doesn't mean Bill Buckley is responsible for Donald Trump.

And I think that's what some people seem to be saying.

And I think that's unfair.

>> 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 a National Review man.

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.

He 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.

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