A Torch Kept Lit

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Mrs. Roosevelt’s approach to human problems, so charming in its Franciscan naivete, was simply: do away with them—by the most obvious means. The way to cope with Russia is to negotiate….The way for everyone to be free in the world is to tell the UN to free everyone….The way to solve the housing shortage is for the government to build more houses….

  All that is more than Mrs. Roosevelt writing a column. It is a way of life. Based, essentially, on unreason; on the leaving out of the concrete, complex factor, which is why they call it “undifferentiated” goodness. Negotiation with Russia, you see, implies there is something we are, or should be, prepared to yield….And everyone in the world cannot be free so long as freedoms are used by whole nations to abuse the peoples of other nations or the freedoms of their own people….Latin American poverty is something that grows out of the pores of Latin American institutions and appetites, and cannot be seriously ameliorated by mere transfusions of American cash….And the way to get houses built is to reduce their cost, so that poor people can buy them, without paying crippling wages to monopoly labor unions, or crippling prices to manufacturing concerns that have to pay the taxes of a government which among other things decides it needs to get into the housing business….

  PRINCIPAL BEQUEST

  Mrs. Roosevelt’s principal bequest, her most enduring bequest, was the capacity so to oversimplify problems as to give encouragement to those who wish to pitch the nation and the world onto humanitarian crusades which, because they fail to take reality into account, end up plunging people into misery (as Wilson’s idealistic imperialism plunged Europe into misery for years, and spawned Hitler), and messing up the world in general (under whose statecraft did Stalin prosper?). Above all it was Mrs. Roosevelt who, on account of her passion for the non sequitur, deeply wounded the processes of purposive political thought. “Over whatever subject, plan, or issue Mrs. Roosevelt touches,” Professor James Burnham once wrote, “she spreads a squidlike ink of directionless feeling. All distinctions are blurred, all analysis fouled, and in the murk clear thought is forever impossible.”

  Some day in the future, a Liberal scholar will write a definitive thesis exploring the cast of Mrs. Roosevelt’s mind by a textual analysis of her thought; and then history will be able to distinguish between a great woman with a great heart, and a woman of perilous intellectual habit. “With all my heart and soul,” her epitaph should read, “I fought the syllogism.” And with that energy and force, she wounded it, almost irretrievably—how often have you seen the syllogism checking in at the office for a full day’s work lately?

  Asked if he had recruited Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., to the White House to write the president’s memoirs, JFK reportedly told aides he would handle the chores himself before adding: “Arthur will probably write his own, and it will be better for us if he’s in the White House, seeing what goes on, instead of reading about it in the New York Times and Time magazine.” Kennedy needn’t have worried; Schlesinger’s books about the president and his brother—A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1966) and Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978)—offered hagiographic portraits of the Kennedys, who afforded the owlish liberal historian his only proximity to power. The son of the chair of Harvard University’s history department, the younger Schlesinger first captured national attention with his publication, at the age of twenty-seven, of The Age of Jackson, which won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize. (A Thousand Days would garner Schlesinger his second Pulitzer, for biography, as well as the National Book Award.) “Last night,” Schlesinger wrote in his diary in January 1995 (unpublished until six months after WFB’s death), “Bill Buckley and I appeared on the Charlie Rose show. Our performances must have disappointed all those who looked forward to a slam-bang, no-holds-barred fight. Indeed, as I saw the show myself (it was taped at 6 P.M. and shown at 11), I thought that here were a couple of old gladiators who in their genial decline were substituting jollity for combat.”

  Thirty years ago Bill Buckley and I went on occasion from city to city like a couple of professional wrestlers. We really disliked each other then, and no holds were barred. Once, out of my own sense of mischief, I entered a National Review contest of some sort and won a prize. Buckley, out of his bolder sense of mischief, awarded me a live donkey, which lived on our backyard on Irving Street for a couple of days until I hired someone to take it away. Our relationship in those times was one of incessant—and heartfelt—reciprocal insult.

  Then I came to New York. I liked Pat Buckley. Bill liked Alexandra. Alistair Horne, Bill’s old friend and my new friend, took it on as his mission to bring us together. Bill’s views moderated; today he would no longer defend Joe McCarthy, as he did forty years ago. My attitudes mellowed with age. I developed a regard for Bill’s wit, his passion for the harpsichord, his human decency, even for his compulsion to épater the liberals (which is about all that remains from the wrathful conservatism of his youth). So now we are friends—and go easy on each other.

  For Schlesinger, the rapprochement had been years in the making. A diary entry from May 1984, after a joint appearance on Nightline, had found Schlesinger reflecting: “I did the Ted Koppel show with Bill Buckley….I am compelled to confess that my old dislike of Buckley has given way to a certain liking, if not affection. I surmise that a reciprocal change has taken place on his side….We differed, of course, but amiably; we had enjoyable talk off camera; and when we went our separate ways in the night, Buckley said improbably, ‘Good night, my dear.’ ” If WFB never quite reciprocated Schlesinger’s conciliation, it may derive from how central Schlesinger was to Buckley’s mission: Bow-tied, egg-headed embodiment of all WFB aimed to stand athwart, the Harvard historian was present at the creation. Writing in Facts Forum News in June 1955—identified as the editor of National Weekly, which was set to launch in September—WFB recounted a kind of baptismal tale:

  I first caught on to the Liberal political game many years, I am certain, after you did. It happened to me rather suddenly, in the spring of 1950, after reading an article in the New York Times Magazine called “The Need for an Intelligent Opposition.” The article was written by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. He was reading not only the Republican party and its leaders, but all conservatives as well, a little lecture, the gist of which was this: We Liberals, said Schlesinger, think it’s important for you conservatives to be around. It gets stagnant otherwise; it keeps us on our toes to have to cope with you. We’re all for you….Mr. Schlesinger then proceeded to tell us how to be intelligent. What it amounted to was for us to desert our principles and embrace his.

  The first sentence WFB published about Schlesinger in National Review, in April 1958, stated: “Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s, obsessive partisanship has disqualified him as a historian.” For NR’s “Books in Brief” section, he reviewed Schlesinger’s 1960 pamphlet Kennedy or Nixon—Does It Make Any Difference? in three savage sentences:

  A cream puff for Jack, by a historian whose simple-minded partisanship strips him here of style and manners. He sits at table gorging with his fingers and spilling food down his front, in his ravenous desire to feed the gnawing hunger-at-large for a plausible set of reasons why anyone in his right mind should vote for Mr. Kennedy. Professor Schlesinger’s recipe: Hate Nixon.

  Two years later, after Schlesinger claimed he had denounced the fringe left, WFB demanded the evidence: “I shall always be glad to give publicity to any lapse by Professor Schlesinger into sanity, and do not worry that such a guarantee will heavily mortgage my future time.” After quoting from the speech Schlesinger supplied, WFB mocked his adversary’s appearance: “One wishes the eloquent Professor Schlesinger had sunk his pointed teeth a little deeper.” As late as May 1977, Buckley devoted an entire column to dissecting a sycophantic memo Schlesinger had sent JFK in April 1961, unsealed by the Freedom of Information Act, in which the eminent historian had counseled Kennedy at length on how to lie. “In later years,” WFB wrote, “a successor courtier would call that stonewalling.” Schlesinger’
s diary recorded his fury, as in October 1976: “The egregious William F. Buckley, Jr., printed a flat lie about me in his column…filled with Buckley’s usual malice….The last thing in the world that Buckley wants is to have the facts violate his prejudices.”

  It is odd: whenever I encounter Buckley, he is excessively genial, as if he wanted to be friends; but whenever I begin vaguely to soften under his personal courtship, something like this reminds me how odious he is.

  The opening line of WFB’s eulogy shows that the distance between the two men remained unbridgeable to the end, most acutely on the very point that Schlesinger had made in his diary twelve years before his death about him and Buckley emerging at last as “friends.”

  “Arthur Schlesinger, R.I.P.”

  Syndicated column, March 2, 2007; published in National Review, April 2, 2007.

  I always regretted that we didn’t become friends, because the thousands who succeeded in doing so found friendship with Arthur Schlesinger very rewarding. For one thing, to behold him—listen to him, observe him, read him—was to coexist with a miracle of sorts.

  It is an awful pity, as one reflects on it, that nature is given to endowing the wrong men with extraordinary productivity. If you laid out the published works of John Kenneth Galbraith and of Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., the line of books would reach from Galbraith’s house in Cambridge to Schlesinger’s old house in Cambridge.

  A week or two back, Schlesinger acknowledged to someone that he wasn’t quite on a par with his old self, his old self having been just fine until about age 86, three years ago, after which the decline began. He walked more slowly and, he said, his speech was not as fluent as usual.

  Any reduction in his productivity must have been shattering to him, as to his many clients, beginning with Clio, the muse of history, which he served so diligently, beginning with his first all-star history, The Age of Jackson, and going up to his last book, published a couple of years ago, deploring President Bush for one thing and another.

  Schlesinger wrote serious studies, of the age not only of Jackson, but also of Roosevelt and of Kennedy, for whom his enthusiasm was uncontainable. Arthur proceeded to write not one but three books on JFK, whom he venerated. He lived with the risk entailed in following so uncritically the careers of his favorites. Professor Sidney Hook dismissed one of his Kennedy books as the work of a “court historian.” Schlesinger minded the derogation not at all, so much did he cherish public controversy that cast him as maintaining the walls of the fortresses that protected his idols.

  He was, I record regretfully, not very deft at close-up political infighting. I say this as the survivor of a half-dozen encounters designed, by Arthur, to kill, which failed. In one of them he hurled a sarcasm, saying of me, “He has a facility for rhetoric which I envy, as well as a wit which I seek clumsily and vainly to emulate.” I thought that so amusing, I copied the words exactly on the jacket of my next book as though they were a great, generous compliment. If you see what I mean about Arthur’s awkwardness in combat of this kind, he actually sued me and my publisher, drawing much attention to his careless use of sarcastic praise, and, of course, to my wit.

  But we kept on bumping into each other with less than mortal exchanges, and I had to endure my wife’s huge affection for him, which unhappily did not quite effect a personal rapprochement. He died in New York on February 27, after being struck by a heart attack at dinner in a restaurant, and I think back on the lunch we shared after the funeral of Murray Kempton, and of the sheer jolliness of the great and productive historian when he didn’t feel that his gods were being profaned.

  There is no honor payable to an American historian that he did not earn. One of his books got the National Book Award and a Pulitzer. Meanwhile he entertained himself by writing movie criticism, and hordes of others by writing essays on every subject that interested him, including what it is in society that creates history. He was a liberal partisan, but he did not turn a blind eye to transgressions by accommodationist liberals who permitted themselves to follow the Communist Party line. He was devastating in his expulsion of them from his movement, which he served more diligently than perhaps any other human being in modern history.

  There we sat, Bill Buckley and me, in the National Review library, shooting the breeze. It was September 17, 1991: George H. W. Bush was president and the Soviet Union was collapsing. A recent Johns Hopkins graduate, I was seated across from my hero because I had stumbled, in a used bookstore, upon a book that had belonged to him and had mailed it to him. He invited me to meet him.

  Toward the end, I mentioned a Kurt Vonnegut essay titled “Who in America Is Truly Happy?” What year? WFB asked. “1979,” I said. It had described Buckley’s writings as “uniformly first rate,” examples not only of “unbridled happiness…but as shrewd comedies and celebrations of the English language.”

  He is a superb sailor and skier as well—and multilingual, and a musician, and an airplane pilot, and a family man, and polite and amusing to strangers. More: He is, like the Yale-educated hero of his novel Saving the Queen, startlingly good-looking….So whenever I see Mr. Buckley, I think this, and, word of honor, without an atom of irony: “There is a man who has won the decathlon of human existence.”*

  “Never more so than now,” I said. WFB shot me a quizzical look. “If there is any reason to envy a man like you,” I said, “it’s not because of the trappings that surround you but because you’ve accomplished what you wanted to when you were a young man. Domestically and internationally, communism as an ideology is entirely discredited. You’ve won! Game over!”

  Except, WFB replied, in the sense that there are no final victories. But essentially you’re right.

  It pains me to disagree with Bill, but I regard A Torch Kept Lit as a final victory and owe my first expression of gratitude for it to WFB himself: for the example of his life, his massive body of work, and his many overtures of friendship and support. I never met Pat Buckley, but suspect I owe her deep thanks as well.

  Jack Fowler, publisher of National Review, understood the need for this book and opened NR’s archive and licensing, and his own big heart, to make it possible. Christopher Buckley gave his blessing, and, late in the process, wise counsel. NR editor Rich Lowry, a friend for two decades, was always available when I needed him. Senior editor Jonah Goldberg, also a dear friend, offered support on many fronts. Editor at large Linda Bridges, who whipped my very first published article into shape—for NR, in 1992—provided encouragement. Executive editor Reihan Salam, managing editor Jason Steorts, literary editor Mike Potemra, Madison Peace, and Rachel Ogden were all very kind.

  At Crown, I am indebted to Campbell Wharton and Mary Reynics, Derek Reed and Julia Elliott, Owen Haney and Jennie Pouech. Nowhere in publishing is there a finer team.

  Keith Urbahn and Matt Latimer, and everyone at Javelin, the literary agency that represents me, are the best in the business. My thanks also to those who provided the blurbs for the dust jacket.

  At Fox News, there are always more generous people than can be listed, and by way of thanking them all, I offer my gratitude, once again, to chairman and CEO Roger Ailes, whose vision provides working space for so many talented people.

  By divine coincidence I received the Earnest C. Pulliam Fellowship to teach at Hillsdale College, which maintains the indispensable online archive of WFB’s canon, just as work commenced on ATKL. My thanks to Hillsdale’s president, Dr. Larry Arnn; John J. Miller, National Review writer and director of Hillsdale’s Dow Journalism Program, and his wife, Amy; Matthew Bell; Kathy and Craig Connor; Jim Drews; Soren Geiger; Margie King; Marcy Rader; Laura and Paul Rahe; Calvin Stockdale; and not least to the uniformly bright and kind students I met on campus. Deep thanks also to the Hoover Institution, which catalogued and transcribed portions of the Firing Line archive, available at the Hoover website.

  My thanks also to Neal Adams, Eduardo Arteaga, Mary and Denny Barket, Marty Baron, Dr. Jennifer Barron and Ryan Durkin, Vince Benedetto, Shelb
i Bivons, Brad Blakeman, Karna Bodman, Katie Boothroyd, Rick Borman, Brent Bozell, Greta and Billy Brawner, Donald Bryant, Inez and Joao Cabritas, Kim Caviness and Lyn Vaus, Shaun K. Chang, Bronwyn and David Clark, Susan Coll, Monica Crowley, Mark Cunningham, Lorraine and Joe Durkin, Josh Earnest, Al Felzenberg, Rainey Foster, Mark French, Dr. Ashley and Hugh Gallagher, Philip Glass, Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, Juleanna Glover, Lauren Guaraldo, Jacob Heilbrunn, Hugh Hewitt, Connie and Chris Hillman, D. J. Hoek, Rick Hohlt, Elodie and Austin Hunt, Hollis Hunt, Heather and Derek Hunter, Matt Jones, Patrick Judge, Greg Kelly, John Kirby, Kathy Lash and Joe Trippi, Matt Lee, Kevin B. Leonard, Daniel Lippman, Maia and Dan Magder, Tony Makris, Christopher Malagisi, Tom Mallon, Seth Mandel, Andrea Mays and James Swanson, Skip McCloskey, Edward F. Meehan III, Hilary and Noah Mehrkam, Dan Miller, Amy Mitchell, Rob Mitchell, Dan Moldea, Vida and Rob Myers, Bobby Nash, Chuck Nash, George H. Nash (who first suggested the need for a volume like this), Graham Nash, Larry O’Connor, Tracy and Todd Pantezzi, Mark Paoletta, Kaja Perina, Dana Perino, Susan and Mike Pillsbury, Charles Pinck, John Podhoretz, Michelle Rice and John Hamilton, Peter Robinson, Dr. Shilpa Rose, Eric Rosen, Regina and Mike Rosen, Eric Roston, Ryan Samuel, James Schneider, Julie and Will Schrot, Cindy and Ryan Schwarz, Ellen Shearer, Nancy Shevell, Ricky Skaggs, Kiron Skinner, Juli and David Smith, James Sprankle, Jim Steen, Beth and D. J. Sworobuk, Gayle and Joel Trotter, Michael Von Sas, Ildi and Mory Watkins, Craig Weiner, Rachel Westlake, Brian Wilson, and Matt Yurus.

  My apologies to anyone I’ve forgotten. Any errors that appear in my introductory material are solely mine.