by Garry Wills
By the time of his death, even Bill’s earlier critics admitted that he had done much to make conservatism respectable by purging it of racist and fanatical traits earlier embedded in the movement. He distanced his followers from the southern prejudices of George Wallace, the anti-Semitism of the Liberty Lobby, the fanaticism of the John Birch Society, the glorification of selfishness by Ayn Rand (famously excoriated in National Review by Whittaker Chambers), the paranoia and conspiratorialism of the neocons. In each of these cases, some right-wingers tried to cut off donations to National Review, but Bill stood his ground. In doing so, he elevated the discourse of American politics, making civil debate possible between responsible liberals and conservatives.
Intellectual Snob?
Bill was considered an elitist because he loved to use big words. This was a part of his playfulness. He liked to play games in general, and word games were especially appealing to him. He did it not from hauteur but from impishness. He used the big words for their own sake, even when he was not secure in their meaning. One of his most famous usages poisoned the general currency, especially among young conservatives trying to imitate him. They took “oxymoron” in the sense he gave it, though that was the opposite of its true meaning. He thought it was a fancier word for “contradiction” (a perfectly good word that needs no fancy dress), so young imitators would say that an intelligent liberal is an oxymoron. But the Greek word means something that is surprisingly true, a paradox, a “shrewd dumbness.”
Bill’s love of exotic locutions came out when he asked me, one time, for the meaning of a word I had written, “subumbrous.” I said it meant cloaked in darkness. He protested that he could not find the word in any of his dictionaries. No wonder, I said; I made it up from the Latin sub umbra. He loved that—it continued the word games. But his lunge toward risky words was like his other ventures into risk. I wrote him once giving him five examples of Latin words he had used in the wrong cases. He did not yield easily. He said he used not the grammatically correct forms but the ones he thought would be most familiar to his audience. It was one of the few times I saw him resort to a populist argument.
Bill was not, and did not pretend to be, a real intellectual. He gave up the “big book” that his father and others were urging him to write. For years he tried to do a continuation of José Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses. This had been a sacred text for his father’s guru, Albert Jay Nock. Bill took intellectual comrades like Hugh Kenner with him for his winter break in Switzerland, to help him get a grip on this ambitious project. But he told me he realized in time that this was not his métier. He was not a reflective thinker. He was a quick responder. He wrote rapidly because he was quickly bored. His gifts were facility, flash, and charm, not depth or prolonged wrestling with a problem. He made it his vocation to be the promoter, popularizer, and moderator of the conservative movement, defending it from liberal critics with wit and effrontery. In this he was entirely successful.
Bill needed people around him all the time. Frequently, when he told me he had to write a column, I would offer to withdraw from the boat cabin or hotel room or office where we were. He urged me not to, and as he typed (with great speed and accuracy) he would keep on talking off and on, reading a sentence to me, trying out a word, saying that something he was saying would annoy old So-and-So. When I appeared on his TV show to discuss a new book of mine, it was clear to me that he had not read the book—he was given notes on each author he interviewed. Once he asked me if I had read all of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. I said yes. “Haven’t you?” He had not. “Das Kapital?” No, he had not read that through either. I suspect the same was true of capitalist classics he referred to—by Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm Röpke, and others. He could defend them with great panache. But he did not want to sit all by himself for a long time reading them. One of his teachers at Yale, the philosopher Paul Weiss, told me that Bill was very good at discussing books he had not read. His garage-office in Stamford was piled high with mounds of books, mostly sent to him, hundreds of them, in no order. That is not how a person who loves books keeps them.
Bill was heatedly attacked by Catholic liberals when he dismissed papal criticism of capitalism. He objected to John XXIII′s encyclical Mater et Magistra (the Church as “Mother and Teacher”) for its challenge to the free market. I joked that his attitude was “Mater sí, Magistra no,” playing on a slogan of the time, “Cuba sí, Castro no.” He printed the quip in the magazine and was attacked on the assumption that the saying was his own and he was rejecting the whole teaching role of the Church. He questioned me about Church teachings. He felt insecure because his Catholic education was so exiguous—it amounted to one year at a Jesuit prep school in England. I had been entirely educated in Catholic schools before entering graduate school at Yale, and he exaggerated what knowledge that had given me.
He wanted to know more about encyclicals. I told him I did not know much. I had read carefully the so-called social encyclicals—Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931)—because Chesterton admired their praise of medieval guilds. He asked if I would bone up on the subject, and I agreed to. (Once again, he did not want to read all those boring encyclicals himself.) After I had done some research on the matter, he drove up from Stamford to New Haven to spend an afternoon discussing the subject. He had been challenged to a debate with an editor of Commonweal, William Clancy. Bill suggested that each side be defended by a two-man team—by Bill and me on one side, by Clancy and a partner of his choosing on the other. Clancy turned down the idea. Nonetheless, when it came time for the debate, to be held across the river from Manhattan in New Jersey, Bill asked me to go along with him for some last-minute preparation in the car. Once again, he was driving his own car. We had to grab a quick dinner before the event, so we stopped at a greasy spoon in New Jersey. When Bill asked for a bottle of red wine, it came out ice-cold, so he asked that it be run under hot water for a while, and we kept up our informal seminar on encyclicals.
Bill handled the debate with his customary forensic stylishness. But the Catholic attacks on him continued. They had become so voluminous at this point that our friend Neil McCaffrey made a collection of them, to be published with Neil’s sulfurous comments on each item. Bill asked me to write an introduction to the collection, on the status of encyclicals. When Neil had the book ready, Bill asked me to come down from New Haven to his garage at Stamford. He found Neil’s intemperate running commentary embarrassing. He wanted to cancel the project—unless I was willing to expand my introduction, incorporating some of the attacks into a calmer treatment of the matter. I said that I doubted Neil would be amenable to having his concept taken away from him. Bill said I should just leave that to him. Somehow, with his smooth persuasiveness, he took the project over without losing Neil’s friendship, and I published Politics and Catholic Freedom, the first of my books on the papacy.
Bill lived and wrote and lectured—and played and socialized and exercised—at a furious pace. Partly this was because he bored so easily. But partly it was to make money. He was commonly thought of as a spoiled rich boy. But he had never had the kind of money people imagined. His wife did—she came from a far wealthier family than his. But he did not want to live on her inheritance. Bill’s oilman father had drilled many a dry hole. Bill’s biographer did the numbers, and concluded that the senior Buckley’s money was exaggerated.7 After the father’s death, Bill’s oldest brother, John, a heavy drinker, did not run the oil company with great skill.
Bill’s own investments, especially in radio stations, rather set back than advanced his financial affairs—as always, he was too in love with risk. Bill made a good living, initially from his heavy lecture schedule, then from his widely syndicated newspaper column, then from his profitable series of spy novels. But he worked for much of his own money. I remember how delighted he was, in 1960, when for the first time he was paid a dollar a word for a magazine article (a good sum then). He did not, of course, have to work for a living. He co
uld have lived on a lower scale than the one he maintained. But he wanted to support the swashbuckling yachts, the custom-made limousine, the ski lodge in Switzerland, and the great generosity of his gifts to others; and he did not want to do this on his wife’s money. Thus he secretly acquired what some will consider his least plausible identity, that of a working stiff.
For a longer time than I now wish, Bill and I were estranged. For the first twelve years after we met, we were in almost constant contact. I sailed with him often (crewing for two of his international ocean races). We traveled together—in Ireland, to observe the Catholic-Protestant conflict, we went to an Ian Paisley sermon and a Bernadette Devlin rally. We attended two national political conventions. While working on his biography, I talked to him almost every day. We conferred on Catholic matters (especially during the Second Vatican Council). But the convulsions of the sixties and their aftermath tore many people apart, and they did that with us. He was a hard supporter of the Vietnam War, though I went to jail twice to protest it. I called his dear friend Henry Kissinger a war criminal (for approving the use of flechette bombs in cities). Though Bill had abondoned the southern view of black inferiority, he thought that Martin Luther King Jr. was hurting America in its struggle with Communism by criticizing its racism. Even my own friend at the magazine, Frank Meyer, tried to have my comments against Richard Nixon killed. My critical review of Whittaker Chambers’s book of essays was spiked (I published it in Modern Age). The final break came when Bill refused to publish an essay in which I argued that there was no conservative rationale for our ruinous engagement in Vietnam. For the next thirty years communication between us was at first minimal, and then nonexistent.
When I moved out of my office at Northwestern, reducing my library to what would fit into my home, I gave a used-book store owner the pick of my volumes at the university. He went off with many titles that Bill had inscribed to me, and when some of Bill’s irate fans found them in the store, they bought them and sent them back to him, calling me an ingrate for selling his gifts. When Bill’s service in the CIA under Howard Hunt came to light during the Watergate scandal, I wrote a column about Bill’s CIA connections. Perhaps he thought I was using confidential knowledge he had given me on the tapes I made for his biography; but I used nothing that was not public knowledge by then. He circulated my column to the National Review board of editors with his marginal notation, “I think we should smash him”—an item that his biographer found in his papers at Yale.8 For a time the magazine ran a recurring feature, “The Wills Watch,” recording the latest liberal abomination I was guilty of. The principal Wills Watcher was M. Joseph Sobran. A man who later became an editor at the magazine, Rick Brookhiser, wrote:It was clear to me as a reader of National Review that Wills had been an important figure at the magazine, if only because the magazine continued to needle him. One cover pasted Wills’s head on a famous image of Black Panther Huey Newton, enthroned with spear and shotgun on his wicker chair.9
John Leonard, another “National Review apostate,” as Bill called us, told his biographer: “When Garry said what was happening to blacks was more important than what was reflected in the magazine, and it hurts me personally, he spoke to the best part, that most vulnerable part, of the Buckleys. It [the disagreement] went from blacks to Nixon to Vietnam.”10 Sobran, comparing me with another “defector,” said: “I don’t think Kevin Phillips got anywhere near his heart the way that Garry Wills had. He didn’t covet Phillips’s esteem the way he had Garry′s.”11
When Bill went to speak at Yale, on one of his innumerable visits there, my son, Garry L. Wills, was in the host line of students receiving him to shake hands. When my son gave his name as Garry Wills, Bill said, “No relation, I hope.” Garry, who can be as pixieish as Bill, serenely said, “None at all”—which left Bill turning back with puzzled looks as he moved on down the line. On another occasion, Bill’s son, Christopher, whom I had met years before as a boat boy on Bill’s yacht, and who was now a student at Yale, invited me to come speak at the annual Yale Daily News dinner. I suspected that Christopher was in one of his moments of conflict with his father, and I declined to take part in that drama.
But Bill’s wonderful and selfless sister Priscilla, who always kept me in her loving circle, trusted to the real regard Bill and I still had for each other. She called me in 2005 to say it was silly for two people who had been such friends not to be talking to each other. She set up a dinner at our old restaurant, Paone, where Bill and I resumed our friendship and, after that, our correspondence. Bill wrote to tell me he had given my What Jesus Meant as a Christmas gift to friends. It was clear that our disagreements had been transcended. Bill even ended up a critic of the Iraq War—unlike the Vietnam War he had once defended, leading us to part company so many years before. When Bill suggested on Charlie Rose that he was ready to die, I found his words heartbreaking, and I wrote to tell him so. When Priscilla told me that in his last days, weakened by emphysema, he could not move across the room without her pulling him up and supporting him, I thought of the figure—lithe, athletic, prompt—who brought his sailboat to rest with one deft turn of his foot on the wheel, and I grieved for one who brought so much excitement into my life.
NOTES
1 William F. Buckley Jr., Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith (Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997), pp. 9-10.
2 Christopher Buckley, Losing Mum and Pup (Twelve, 2009), pp. 57-58.
3 Ibid., pp. 65-67.
4 John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr., Patron Saint of the Conservatives (Simon & Schuster, 1988), p. 128.
5 Ibid., p. 191.
6 William F. Buckley Jr., In Search of Anti-Semitism (Continuum, 1992).
7 Judis, op. cit., p. 164.
8 Ibid., p. 359.
9 Richard Brookhiser, Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement (Basic Books, 2009), p. 32.
10 Judis, op. cit., p. 325.
11 Ibid., pp. 379-80.
14
Natalie
Though Bill did not succeed in matching me with his sister Maureen, he inadvertently proved a matchmaker after all. He sent me where I met Natalie. When I arrived at National Review′ s office in 1957, invited there because of an article I had sent “over the transom” about Time magazine, I told Bill I was doing my graduate-school work in Greek tragedy, and he offered me a job as the magazine’s theater critic. I turned him down—I meant to return to classes at the end of the summer. He had called me up at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where I was serving as an assistant to a patristics scholar, collating Chrysostom manuscripts. I had left the seminary so suddenly that I had no time to apply to graduate schools—my seminary Greek teacher had hastily arranged for me to attend Xavier, a Jesuit school, while applying to other graduate programs.
Bill, as usual, tried to help me in my quest for a scholarship. He invited the classics scholar Revilo Oliver to come with us for a day sail, and asked Revilo if he could offer me financial support at the University of Illinois. Revilo said he would be glad to. “We can give you a first-rate education, but you will not have the first-rate chances at a good position you would get by coming from an Ivy League school.” He recommended that I apply to them, and if I could not get a scholarship that would support me there, then he would take me on at Illinois. Luckily, I got a McCormick Fellowship at Yale.
When I said I could not accept Bill’s offer of regular employment, he asked if I would stay for the rest of that summer, living in his father’s suite at 80 Park Avenue (since the senior Buckley was out of town), and doing odd jobs for the magazine. I reviewed the plays that were still running that summer: Auntie Mame with Rosalind Russell, New Girl in Town with Gwen Verdon, Long Day’s Journey into Night with Jason Robards. I wrote about books for Frank Meyer, the literary editor. Then Bill had the typically wild idea of sending me briefly down to Washington to write about the Senate hearings into Jimmy Hoffa’s mob connections. I said that I knew nothing about la
bor unions. Bill swept my objections aside. “Go see Suzie, she knows all about unions. Then I’ll call Murray Kempton and ask him to give you some information.”
Suzie was Suzanne La Follette, the feminist and libertarian who had edited the Freeman with Bill’s hero Albert Jay Nock. A vinous lunch with her taught me little, so I went over to Kempton’s office at the New York Post. He was working on his column when I arrived, but after Bill had called him he had laid out all his newspaper clip files on Hoffa. He told me to browse through them and we could talk later on. When he finished his column, he invited me to take the train with him to stay the night at his home in Princeton, where he could cook me dinner (his wife was away for the week). After listening to his favorite recording of Don Giovanni, we talked (and drank) late into the night. Among other things, he said he always had trouble criticizing Hoffa because he was the only labor leader he knew who was faithful to his wife.
