William F. Buckley Jr., 1925-2008, masterminded a conservative, Catholic challenge to selective liberal dogmas. His fame exceeded his intellectual depth and principles. He knew what he was against more than he knew what he was for. And what he was for was not always commendable, for example, defending Jim Crow, McCarthyism, the warfare-surveillance state, even nixing his sister’s marriage to a Jewish man.
Biographer Sam Tanenhaus has written a meticulous, tome-like biography of Buckley. He vastly overstates Buckley’s influence on America. He asserts or implies Buckley engineered a “revolution” of the magnitude of the American Declaration of Independence or the storming of the Bastille.
To the contrary, since Buckley’s comet began to soar in 1951 with the release of his first book, “God and Man at Yale,” the U.S. government has steadily grown into a mighty oak — from a republic that glorified liberty and the march of the mind to an empire that exalts the armored knight and world domination.
The growth has been fueled by chronic, unconstitutional presidential wars, a global projection of military power featuring 800 military bases abroad, defense pacts superfluous to national security, dragnet spying on the “not-yet-guilty,” a national debt galloping past $36 trillion boosted by chronic trillion-dollar budget deficits, and hundreds of thousands of federal regulations entering every nook and cranny of business and private life. The more political personalities changed during Buckley’s lifetime, the more the federal Leviathan grew year after year. The national debt tripled on President Ronald Reagan’s watch.
Buckley was intellectually at war with himself. On the one hand, he preached government frugality and limited government. On the other hand, he saluted a multitrillion-dollar warfare state to fight a vastly inflated global communist threat. He was clueless of James Madison’s wisdom: “The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” The surveillance state that has destroyed privacy and the Fourth Amendment right to be let alone was fueled by Buckley’s fevered anti-communist zeal.
He served as a CIA officer in the early 1950s, years when the agency orchestrated the overthrows of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in favor of the cruel, corrupt Shah Mohammad Pahlavi, and of Guatemala’s President Jacobo Arbenz in favor of genocidal military dictators.
Buckley voiced no opposition to President Harry Truman’s unconstitutional war in Korea, which the latter dismissed as a “police action.” The war featured 3 million casualties and the threat of nuclear war urged by General Douglas MacArthur. Buckley voiced no opposition to NATO, the first United States defense treaty in 160 years. NATO contradicted President George Washington’s Farewell Address warning against “entangling alliances” and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams’ admonition against going abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Buckley was heedless of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s profound concern over a military-industrial complex pushing the nation into gratuitous wars for ulterior motives, i.e., money and power.
He bugled for the disastrous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the ill-fated Vietnam War. He defended the Bay of Pigs fiasco to overthrow Cuba’s Fidel Castro and the 2003 criminal war of aggression against Iraq (which made Iran a regional hegemon) resting on President Saddam Hussein’s imaginary WMDs. He voiced no objection to CIA assassination attempts against Castro, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, or the shocking intelligence agency abuses exposed by the 1975 Senate Church Committee.
Buckley became part of the glitterati through National Review magazine, a syndicated newspaper column, On The Right, the widely acclaimed television show “Firing Line,” and endless speaking engagements. He was an intellectual entertainer more than a political philosopher. He relished creature comforts and amusements. He was not free from narcissism. His wife Patricia and son Christopher make but fleeting appearances in Tanenhaus’ magnus opus like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in “Hamlet.”
The man was gifted, gracious, often generous and seldom mean-spirited. But only a tiny handful of the greatest leave footprints on the sands of time. Buckley did not make the grade.
Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.” His website is www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com and X feed is @brucefeinesq.
