Rick Brookhiser (whom I knew when he was an undergraduate but haven’t been in touch with since) knew Bill Buckley very well. I met WFB only twice. He is, then, far more expert than I on the father of modern conservatism. Nonetheless, I’m certain that he is dead wrong in his explanation of Buckley’s skepticism about the Iraqi campaign:
Two points: 1) Bill spent much of 2005 and 2006 writing that the Iraq War was lost, over, a bad job. I give instances on p. 232 of Right Time, Right Place, and I could easily have given more. The fact is indisputable. What do we make of it? What I make of it is that it was a major failure of Bill’s judgment, as great as his support for segregation in the 1950s (see pp. 12, 33). I believe the two failures are linked by an indifference, inherited in the first instance, atavistic in the second, to the rights and well being of dark people. 1950s Bill did not care that white people oppressed black people, 2000s Bill did not care that brown people tormented brown people.
I haven’t read Rick’s book (and paragraphs like that don’t encourage me to pick it up), but there’s no doubt that, if it presented solid evidence that Bill Buckley was a racist, the elite media would have been trumpeting it in their headlines, and excerpts from Right Time, Right Place would litter the pages of the New York Times. The inference that Buckley opposed federal civil rights legislation (which is what “support for segregation” must mean – at least, that’s all that I find in Up from Liberalism and the early National Review) and persistence in Iraq because he didn’t care what happened to non-whites is pulled out of the air.
Isn’t it far more likely that Buckley said in 2005 and 2006 that the war in Iraq was hopeless, because that was a reasonable view of the facts on the ground (not the only reasonable view – I didn’t believe it – but believable regardless of what one might think about “brown people torment[ing] brown people”)? Rick himself supplies the proof that Buckley wasn’t indifferent to the fate of the people of Iraq:
By the end of his life, Bill snapped out of it, supporting the surge and telling the last directors’ meeting he attended that the struggle against jihadists was our world war (p. 241).
As for civil rights in the 1950’s, there are two clear themes in Buckley’s writings from that period: that the government should not try to rectify individuals’ attitudes toward other people and that trying to impose non-bigotry from Washington, D.C. would spark massive resistance that would threaten the fabric of the nation. Those are non-racist arguments. They were, however, founded on false beliefs about the real situation of the South. Segregation was the perfervid cause of an intimidating minority, who kept everyone else in line through the threat of violence. The region’s accommodating reaction to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 showed that most whites had no real desire to perpetuate Jim Crow and welcomed an excuse to send him out to pasture.
Conservative politicians understood more about real popular attitudes than conservative intellectuals. Except for a handful of Goldwater libertarians, every conservative Republican in Congress in 1964 voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act, including, for instance, Rep. John Ashbrook, than whom no right-wing legislator was ever more sans peur et sans reproche.
As a Parthian shot (suggested to me by another ancient Brookhiser acquaintance), let me note that Rick became Bill Buckley’s protegé, a position with which he showed no discomfort, at a time when he could have read all that his mentor had written about civil rights. He doesn’t seem to have found any of it objectionable until he was passed over for the editorship of National Review.
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