November 19, 1955: National Review Is First Published

November 19, 1955: The weekly magazine National Review is first published by its editor, William F. Buckley Jr.

Modern American conservatism, from Senator Joseph R. McCarthy onward, has been based on lies and hysterics. Buckley tried to change that. But, as is so often the case, telling the truth got him into just as much trouble.

Even his name wasn't originally correct: When born on November 24, 1925 -- 4 days after an eventual ideological opponent, Robert F. Kennedy -- in Manhattan, it was with the name William Francis Buckley. At some point, it was changed to William Frank Buckley Jr.

William Frank Buckley Sr. was a lawyer and an oil developer, whose work took him and his family to Mexico, and when it was time to send his son to his first school, it was a boarding school in Paris. Thus, he spoke Spanish first, French second, and English third. Which seems odd for someone who became so skilled with the English language, and seemed to have such a "patrician" accent.

"Bill" Buckley was an officer in the U.S. Army during World War II, but was never transferred off U.S. soil. He attended Yale University, where both its joys and its frustrations would serve him well. He served 2 years in the early CIA, which helped to inspire his later spy novels. His character Blackford Oakes was, basically, an upper-class American ripoff of James Bond.

Buckley married Patricia Taylor, and settled on an estate (they called it a "farm," perhaps for tax purposes, as rich people sometimes do) in Sharon, Connecticut, far enough from Midtown Manhattan (100 miles) to be isolated, but close enough to be near the corridors of power. Despite being an old-style Catholic and 1 of 10 siblings, he had only 1 child, a son named Christopher, who also became an acclaimed author.

In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote his 1st book, God and Man at Yale -- known thereafter to the conservative movement by its initials, GAMAY. He attacked several officials and professors at the school as "leftists," including McGeorge Bundy, who would go on to become National Security Adviser to 2 Democratic Presidents.

In a review titled "The Attack on Yale" for the November 1951 issue of The Atlantic, Bundy wrote: "In the end Mr. Buckley's indictment of Yale's economics texts turns out to be a self-indictment. This chapter shows him to be a twisted and ignorant young man whose personal views of economics would have seemed reactionary to Mark Hanna." (Hanna was the Senator from Ohio who managed the conservative Republican campaigns of President William McKinley, who died half a century earlier.) This was in Part I of Bundy's review. Part II began with "The worst is yet to come."

In 1955, with several fellow reactionaries -- including L. Brent Bozell Jr. (who had married Bill's sister, Patricia Buckley, and whose son, L. Brent Bozell III, had just been born, and would later write for the magazine), Russell Kirk (who had published the anthology The Conservative Mind 2 years earlier), Revilo P. Oliver (the noted historian's name is a palindrome, reading the same forwards and backwards), and Whittaker Chambers (the ex-Communist ex-editor for Time magazine, whose testimony had sent Alger Hiss to prison) -- Buckley founded National Review.

(Its 1st drama critic was 23-year-old Garry Wills, who became one of America's greatest historians, and not so conservative. A biographer of multiple Presidents, his books about Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were highly critical.)

Buckley's introductory essay made the magazine's mission clear:

Let's face it: Unlike Vienna, it seems altogether possible that did National Review not exist, no one would have invented it. The launching of a conservative weekly journal of opinion in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks like a work of supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist weekly within the walls of Buckingham Palace. It is not that, of course; if National Review is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.

National Review is out of place, in the sense that the United Nations and the League of Women Voters and the New York Times and Henry Steele Commager are in place. It is out of place because, in its maturity, literate America rejected conservatism in favor of radical social experimentation.

Of course, there was a reason for this: Conservatism caused the stock market Crash of 1929, just 26 years earlier, and the subsequent Great Depression of the 1930s, which led to the political backlash that caused the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as president, and his Administration's radical social experimentation, which saved the nation's economy and perhaps worldwide capitalism itself. Unlike conservatives following the economic downturns of 1973-76, 1990-93, 2001-04, 2007-09, and 2020-21, Buckley was not asking people to forget that the Depression happened on conservatives' watch.

Rather, he was asking people to accept his position, which was that the time for radical social experimentation ended once the immediate economic emergency ended, and that a return to the kind of conservatism that brought the economic prosperity of the 1920s was what was needed today (1955). Of course, as I said, that kind of conservatism caused the Depression.

Buckley once wrote, "I want discretion in the sense that I want intelligence, and no crackpottery. But I want some positively unsettling vigor, a sense of abandon, and joy, and cocksureness that may, indeed, be interpreted by some as indiscretion." In 1957, he published a nasty review that Chambers wrote for Ayn Rand's right-wing novel Atlas Shrugged.

Nevertheless, in 1958, Oliver left the magazine, and joined candy executive Robert W. Welch Jr. to become one of the founders of the John Birch Society, which seemed to encourage crackpots, to the point where, in 1963, both Bob Dylan and the Chad Mitchell Trio wrote songs making them look like paranoid psychotics. (The Trio's song included the line, "There's no one left but thee and we, and we aren't sure of thee!")

And yet, in 1957, 3 years after Brown v. Board, 1 year after the Southern Manifesto, and a few weeks before the Little Rock Crisis, Buckley published an editorial titled "Why the South Must Prevail":

The central question that emerges... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.

NR did improve its record on race -- somewhat. It denounced the 1968, 1972 and 1976 Presidential campaigns of Governor George Wallace of Alabama. But it has also, perennially, called for the end of affirmative action. In 1965, at Oxford University in England, Buckley himself infamously took the segregationist side in a debate with black writer James Baldwin.

In the 1980s, NR opposed sanctions against the apartheid government of South Africa, because that government was anti-Communist -- and, like all white-supremacy governments, including in the Southern U.S., it falsely took the official tack that civil rights activists were motivated by Communism.

The Spanish Fascist leader Francisco Franco was a hero in the Buckley household, celebrated as a conservative and Catholic bulwark against the officially atheist worldwide Communist movement, known to its opponents as "the Red Menace." In 1957, Buckley declared in his magazine, "General Franco is an authentic national hero." NR writer James Burnham echoed this sentiment in a 1975 obituary declaring "Francisco Franco was our century's most successful ruler."

(He wasn't. Within 3 years, Spain had a free election, and the voters chose a liberal government. Spanish voters have chosen conservative governments since, but never again a Fascist one.)

In his 1997 book Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith, Buckley condemned the 1960s rulings that he viewed as "the Supreme Court's war against religion in the public school," and argued that Christian faith was being replaced by "another God... multiculturalism." He disapproved of the liturgical reforms following the Second Vatican Council of 1962-66.

On April 4, 1966, the program Firing Line, hosted by Buckley, premiered on NET, and continued on its successor network, PBS, until 1999. In addition to the various NR writers, and conservative activists -- Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Phyllis Schlafly, and so on -- Buckley invited people no one would have expected, like liberal activists Saul Alinsky, Julian Bond and Noam Chomsky; Watergate-busting reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein; Democratic political candidates like Jimmy Carter (not yet President), Jesse Jackson and John Kerry; and even figures from the 1960s "left," like Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary and Huey Newton.

In August 1968, ABC News invited Buckley and Gore Vidal, a liberal-leaning author and, like Ginsberg, one of the few openly gay celebrities of the time, to debate each other during the controversy-strewn Democratic Convention in Chicago. Even people who would normally have agreed with Vidal politically found themselves sympathizing with Buckley, because Vidal was completely rude, even telling Buckley, "Shut up a minute!"

Buckley compared New Left youths carrying pro–Viet Cong flags to pro-Nazis, which is ridiculous, because the Nazis, as Fascists, were a right-wing movement, not a left-wing one. Vidal responded by saying, "As far as I'm concerned, the only sort of pro- or crypto-Nazi that I can think of is yourself."

This set Buckley off: Remembering his gay-baiting pre-Vatican II Catholicism, and his service in World War II against the Nazis, he said, "Now, listen, you queer: Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in the goddamned face, and you'll stay plastered!" (And by "plastered," he didn't mean "drunk.") And ABC either didn't have a seven-second delay to "bleep out" any profanities, or didn't use it, and Buckley's use of the word "goddamned" stayed on the broadcast -- to this day, a rarity on American television, at any hour of the day.

Buckley and Vidal were the same age, the former born just 9 days before the latter, so there was no age advantage. And, with his Army and CIA training, if there had been a fight, it would have seemed like Buckley would be heavily favored. But someone who knew Buckley mentioned that he had recently broken his left arm, and he could be seen on the videotape tucking that arm in, using his right hand to keep his earpiece in. He might not have won a fight on that occasion.

After Watergate, Buckley rallied the conservative movement behind Ronald Reagan, and was very pleased with how the Reagan Administration turned out. In that Administration's time, and also later in its wake, there would be copies of Buckley's work.

Debuting on NBC in 1982, The McLaughlin Group was a more freewheeling, if host-controlled, version of Firing Line. The American Spectator was founded in 1972, as more of a gut-punching magazine, and by the time Bill Clinton began his successful run for President in 1992, it was willing to embrace any conspiracy theory against him and other liberals, no matter how ridiculous. The Weekly Standard was founded in 1996, as a cheekier, less Ivy-ish version of National Review. Debuting the same year, Fox News Channel made Firing Line seem very quaint by comparison.

I used to read National Review, even though I agreed with very little in it, because it was so well-written, and, probably upon Buckley's insistence, the sense of humor was still there. And it wasn't a mean, bullying, frat-boy sense of humor, either, like The American Spectator had.

In 1995, on PBS, Michael Kinsley of the liberal-leaning magazine The New Republic moderated a Firing Line-sponsored debate on the subject of religion in public life. As captain of one side, favoring more of it, was Buckley. As captain of the other side, favoring less of it but otherwise a conservative, was controversial lawyer Alan Dershowitz.

During his opening remarks, Kinsley told the theater audience, "I should warn you: Some of these panelists are under the delusion that they have a special pipeline to God." Several people, including Buckley, laughed. Kinsley continued: "And some of these panelists are under the delusion that they are God." More people laughed. Buckley was one of them. Dershowitz was not.

But age and ill health caught up with Buckley. He retired Firing Line in 1999. And he gave up editorial control of National Review in 2005. Without him to hold it back, it totally embraced the insanity -- the "crackpottery," as Buckley once put it -- of the Republican Party in the 21st Century.

William F. Buckley Jr. died on February 27, 2008, at the age of 82. Surprising no one who knew him, his death came less than a year after his wife's.

Buckley's son, Christopher Buckley, became a novelist, and was chief of staff to George H.W. Bush while he was Reagan's Vice President.

Firing Line was revived in 2018, again on PBS, hosted by Margaret Hoover, a former Fox News correspondent, and a great-granddaughter of President Herbert Hoover.