“John Lindsay, RIP”
National Review, January 22, 2001.
John Lindsay died many years after history was done with him. In the late Fifties and in the Sixties he was the primary young star of liberal Republicanism. He edged into victory as mayor of New York and harbinger of enlightened Republicanism in a race in which Conservative Party candidate William F. Buckley resonantly cleared his throat, challenging Mr. Lindsay’s political agenda and insisting that in the order of political reality, he belonged not with Republican gatekeepers of overweening government, but with Democrats. Four years later he lost the Republican nomination and ran (and won) on the Liberal ticket. Two years after that he left the GOP and joined the Democrats, who, however, discouraged his presidential bid. In 1980, he came in third in another bid, to win the Democratic nomination for senator.
What went wrong? An agenda, on questions of race and education and security, that didn’t take hold because New York City had mundane concerns which weren’t met by high rhetoric about welfare and racial integration and obligations by Albany and Washington to oblige Mr. Lindsay’s extravagances. His departure from the political scene was soon followed by a dismal series of enervating and awful illnesses which he fought bravely, and from which, finally, he was relieved in late December, at his home in Hilton Head, South Carolina. He was a dashing figure who’d have done better as a star than as a tribune. And he always, or nearly always, gave theatrical satisfaction, and that’s not something to be lightly dismissed. —WFB
In Ayn Rand, the novelist, screenwriter, philosopher, and cult object, Buckley found a vexing foe. Initially, it seems, he imagined that the author of novels such as The Fountainhead (1943), a best-seller that brimmed with antistatist fervor, might find common cause with the young publisher of National Review, but Rand’s opening line to WFB at their first meeting, in 1954—“You are too intelligent to believe in God”—ruled out any alliance. “Religion is the first enemy of the Objectivist,” WFB later noted. As with Bircherism, Buckley regarded Rand’s concept of “objectivism,” which exalted self-interest above fidelity to God and country, as a toxin to conservatism, urgently in need of expunging. To the task, no one at the time was better suited than Whittaker Chambers, whose review of Rand’s latest best-seller in the December 28, 1957, issue of NR, lamenting the “dictatorial tone” of her writing, carried the greatest put-down in the annals of literary criticism: “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’ ” In his 1963 essay “Notes toward an Empirical Definition of Conservatism,” WFB reveled in how Chambers had managed to “read Miss Rand right out of conservatism.” “Her philosophy,” WFB wrote, “is in fact another kind of materialism—not the dialectic materialism of Marx, but the materialism of technocracy, of the relentless self-server, who lives for himself and for absolutely no one else….Her exclusion from the conservative community was…the result of her desiccated philosophy’s conclusive incompatibility with the conservative’s emphasis on transcendence, intellectual and moral.”
“Ayn Rand, R.I.P.”
Syndicated column, March 11, 1982; published in National Review, April 2, 1982.
Ayn Rand is dead. So, incidentally, is the philosophy she sought to launch dead; it was, in fact, stillborn. The great public crisis in Ayn Rand’s career came, in my judgment, when Whittaker Chambers took her on—in December of 1957, when her book Atlas Shrugged was dominating the best-seller list, lecturers were beginning to teach something called Randism, and students started using such terms as “mysticism of the mind” (religion), and “mysticism of the muscle” (statism). Whittaker Chambers, whose authority with American conservatives was as high as that of any man then living, wrote in National Review, after a lengthy analysis of the essential aridity of Miss Rand’s philosophy, “Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal.”
I had met Miss Rand three years before that review was published. Her very first words to me (I do not exaggerate) were: “You ahrr too intelligent to believe in Gott.” The critic Wilfrid Sheed once remarked, when I told him the story, “Well, that certainly is an icebreaker.” It was; and we conversed, and did so for two or three years. I used to send her postcards in liturgical Latin; but levity with Miss Rand was not an effective weapon. And when I published Whittaker Chambers’s review, her resentment was so comprehensive that she regularly inquired of all hosts or toastmasters whether she was being invited to a function at which I was also scheduled to appear, because if that was the case, either she would not come; or, if so, only after I had left; or before I arrived. I fear that I put the lady through a great deal of choreographical pain.
Miss Rand’s most memorable personal claim (if you don’t count the one about her being the next greatest philosopher after Aristotle) was that since formulating her philosophy of “objectivism,” she had never experienced any emotion for which she could not fully account. And then one day, a dozen years ago, she was at a small dinner, the host of which was Henry Hazlitt, the libertarian economist, the other guest being Ludwig von Mises, the grand master of the Austrian school of antistatist economics. Miss Rand was going on about something or other, at which point Mises told her to be quiet, that she was being very foolish. The lady who could account for all her emotions at that point burst out into tears, and complained: “You are treating me like a poor ignorant little Jewish girl!” Mr. Hazlitt, attempting to bring serenity to his table, leaned over and said, “There there, Ayn, that isn’t at all what Ludwig was suggesting.” But this attempt at conciliation was ruined when Mises jumped up and said: “That iss eggsactly what you ahrr!” Since both participants were Jewish, this was not a racist slur. This story was mortal to her reputation as the lady of total self-control.
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There were other unpleasantnesses of professional interest, such as her alienation from her principal apostle, Nathaniel Brandon [sic; Branden]—who was so ungallant as to suggest, in retaliation against her charge that he was trying to swindle her, that the breakup was the result of his rejection of an, er, amatory advance by Miss Rand. Oh goodness, it got ugly.
There were a few who, like Chambers, caught on early. Atlas Shrugged was published back before the law of the Obligatory Sex Scene was passed by both houses of Congress and all fifty state legislatures, so that the volume was considered rather risqué, in its day. Russell Kirk, challenged to account for Miss Rand’s success if indeed she was merely an exiguous philosophic figure, replied, “Oh, they read her books for the fornicating bits.” Unkind. And only partly true. The Fountainhead, read in a certain way, is a profound assertion of the integrity of art. What did Miss Rand in was her anxiety to theologize her beliefs. She was an eloquent and persuasive antistatist, and if only she had left it at that—but no, she had to declare that God did not exist, that altruism was despicable, that only self-interest is good and noble. She risked, in fact, giving to capitalism that bad name that its enemies have done so well in giving it; and that is a pity. Miss Rand was a talented woman, devoted to her ideals. She came as a refugee from Communism to this country as a young woman, and carved out a substantial career. May she rest in peace, and may she experience the demystification of her mind possessed.
“We have nothing, nothing in the world, against Nelson Rockefeller,” National Review declared in August 1958 on the eve of the Republican Party’s nomination of Rockefeller for governor of New York State. “We have maintained, very simply, that he is not a Republican. Or, if it is better put another way, that if he is a Republican, Republicanism is a farce.” As governor of the Empire State from 1959 to 1973—when he joined Gerald Ford in the White House as an unelected vice president serving an unelected president—Rockefeller championed a brand of liberal Republicanism that resulted in a massive expansion of state enterprise, authority, and debt. This made him, along with Joh
n V. Lindsay, a favorite target of WFB’s polysyllabic derision. At the 1964 GOP convention, Buckley assessed that the “well-financed obstinacy of Nelson Rockefeller” constituted the chief obstacle to the consolidation of the pro-Goldwater forces. “The public’s reaction to Mr. Rockefeller is embarrassingly plain,” WFB wrote in a syndicated column at the time headlined “WHY DOESN’T ROCKEFELLER QUIT?” “He is well on his way to Stassenization: i.e., he has become half-ridiculous. (He would have become totally ridiculous except that no man with a couple of hundred million dollars to deploy is ever totally ridiculous.)” Buckley’s eulogy, published fifteen years later in the same column, noted with begrudging admiration: “Nelson Rockefeller never gave up.” However, neither the geniality of Rockefeller’s company nor the putative absolution that death confers served to dissuade WFB from pronouncing Rockefeller, in the eulogy below, “the central figure in the progressive decline of the economy of New York and New York City.”
“Nelson Rockefeller, R.I.P.”
Syndicated column, February 1, 1979.
Some years ago—it was during the period of indecision in 1967–68 over whether to contest Richard Nixon for the Republican nomination for the presidency—Henry Kissinger called to advise me that Governor Rockefeller would like to meet me. Meeting me is terribly easy to arrange, so not long after, HK and I rode up the elevator to the Fifth Avenue apartment, and Happy opened the door. What would I like to eat, drink, smoke, etc., and in a few minutes—powerful men, it is my experience, generally let a visitor cool for a moment or two to heighten the suspense: but it was easy to pause there, because within eyesight lay several million dollars of nicely distracting art treasures—he strode in. We exchanged pleasantries while I wondered what was the purpose of the meeting.
In due course I found myself listening to an hour-long recitation of his early career on the Latin American desk, at the Chapultepec Conference, and at San Francisco, where he had labored continually to counter Soviet machinations. All this was done quietly, in the tones, I gradually perceived—of a postulant. Nelson Rockefeller wished to convince me that he was profoundly anti-Communist.
I always believed this true of him, but notwithstanding his consistency on the question—marred by an ambiguity on Vietnam when, briefly, Adviser Emmet Hughes prevailed over Adviser Henry Kissinger, respectively the dove and the hawk in the inner circle—Nelson Rockefeller permanently alienated the right wing in America. He did this in 1963 when he was induced to denounce in extravagant terms the whole of the conservative movement as though it were a branch of the John Birch Society. His reward was the distasteful episode in San Francisco when delegates who went there grimly determined to nominate Barry Goldwater gave Rockefeller the Bronx cheer—as if to say: “If that is what you think of us, this is what we think of you.”
But Nelson Rockefeller never gave up. And so now, in 1968, he made a gesture to a representative of the right wing. During the convention itself, against the forlorn possibility that he might actually be nominated over Nixon and Reagan, a special representative of Rockefeller kept me regular company, his mission to guard against the preemptive denunciation of Rockefeller by certain quarters, which denunciation would have had on Rockefeller’s candidacy the same effect that the virtual denunciation of him by the labor leaders had on George McGovern in 1972.
Then, too, there was the image of Rockefeller the Big Spender. He was unquestionably the central figure in the progressive decline of the economy of New York and New York City. But he came gradually to recognize that there were limits to all of this. And so he quarreled with John Lindsay, who finally joined the Democratic Party, where he had always belonged. And on one occasion, with several dozen persons present, Nelson Rockefeller rose to toast Governor Ronald Reagan at the other end of the room:
“I feel the urge to confess,” said Governor Rockefeller, “that I tried a different approach to state welfare than Governor Reagan. And his has proved more successful than mine.”
In 1970 we met to discuss the senatorial race in which my brother James competed, and won. The incumbent Senator Charles Goodell, having been appointed by Governor Rockefeller upon the death of Robert Kennedy, had switched radically to the left, proving an embarrassment to Rockefeller. On that occasion he told me he would give only formalistic support to Goodell, to whom as a fellow Republican he was organizationally committed. “I really am a conservative, you know.” And then, winking, “I’ve got a lot to conserve.”
Classically, Nelson Rockefeller is another example of the man who, having nothing left to animate him, dies; like Napoleon at Elba, or Robert Taft after Eisenhower’s nomination. He was a very strong man, persuasive in conversation, dogged in his pursuit of his goals, unsentimental, yet generous.
Henry Kissinger believes he would have been a great president. I think it altogether possible that this is true. He had the strength of character to profit from his own mistakes. If he had been kinder to Nixon during the years of exile, Nixon might have appointed him to replace Agnew. If that had happened, Rockefeller would almost surely have been president last week—in which event, almost surely, he would still be alive.
How, in retrospect, did National Review go seven whole issues before taking on Eleanor Roosevelt? The former first lady represented just about everything Buckley, his family, and his fellow editors abhorred about midcentury America. In the eighth issue, which hit the newsstands in January 1956, WFB set to work. The pretext was Mrs. Roosevelt’s joining in a petition that urged President Eisenhower, in the spirit of Christmas, to grant clemency to sixteen leaders of the Communist Party serving prison sentences under the Smith Act. Buckley reminded Mrs. Roosevelt that the antisedition law had been signed “during the reign of” her late husband, President Franklin Roosevelt, and that much of her latter career had constituted an “indirect” rebuke of FDR’s legacy. Galled that the petitioners, including prominent socialists, had claimed to be motivated “by their intellectual attachment to the democratic way of life,” WFB argued that the petition in fact “discloses a deep contempt for the democratic way of life….Those who are prepared to defend democracy must be prepared to execute democracy’s decisions.” As a woman, a former first lady, and an intellectual darling of the Eastern Establishment, Eleanor Roosevelt presented an especially tricky target for WFB and other conservatives in the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, when she used her newspaper column and television appearances to advance causes she had championed, in some cases for decades: civil rights and humanitarianism, the value of the United Nations, the imperative of negotiating with the Soviet Union. To Buckley, she embodied the worst of what in subsequent decades would be called political correctness: the mindless application to every issue of a platitudinous egalitarianism whose practical effect invariably is to expand the reach of totalitarianism. Amid the tributes that poured in from around the world, the critical treatment in WFB’s eulogy below surely stood out; dissenting from the beatification of Eleanor Roosevelt was “standing athwart history” in its rawest form. But it paid handsome dividends historically: At their very first meeting, in 1961, a random encounter at a restaurant, the very first thing that Ronald Reagan said to WFB was to quote, with relish, one of his recent wisecracks about Eleanor Roosevelt.
“Mrs. Roosevelt, RIP”
National Review, January 29, 1963.
[signed by “Wm. F. Buckley Jr.”]
I have been sharply reminded that I have not written about [the death of] Mrs. Roosevelt, and that only a coward would use the excuse that when she died, he was in Africa. There, there are lions and tigers and apartheid. Here, there was Mrs. Roosevelt to write about. Africa was the safer place.
People get very sore when you knock the old lady. And it isn’t just the widow who thinks of Mrs. Roosevelt as the goddess who saved her children from getting rickets during the Depression. It is also the Left—intellectuals. “When are you going to stop picking on Mrs. Roosevelt?” a very learned writer asked me at a reception a few years ago after one of my books was pu
blished. (I had a sentence in it that annoyed him, something like, “Following Mrs. Roosevelt in search of irrationality is like following a lighted fuse in search of an explosion: one never has to wait very long.”) I answered: “When you begin picking on her.” I meant by that that people are best reformed by those they will listen to. Westbrook Pegler could never reform Mrs. Roosevelt, or her legend. But Adlai Stevenson, or Max Lerner, might have.
A GREAT MIND?
The obituary notices on Mrs. Roosevelt were as one in granting her desire to do good—she treated all the world as her own personal slum project; and all the papers, of course, remarked on that fabulous energy—surely she was the very first example of the peacetime use of atomic energy. But some publications (I think especially of Time) went so far as to say she had a great mind. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of Euclid.
Does it matter? Alas, it happens to matter very much. For Mrs. Roosevelt stamped upon her age a mode. Or, it might be said by those who prefer to put it that way, that in Mrs. Roosevelt the age developed its perfect symbol. Hers is the age of undifferentiated goodness, of permissive egalitarianism.
A Torch Kept Lit Page 23
