Hitchens and Buckley
Orwell said, “…any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” Christopher Hitchens’ piece about Buckley doesn’t mince words about Buckley’s many poor judgments, but gives the man his due.
Buckley’s return to a version of rightist isolationism in the matter of Iraq in the last few years [can be seen as]…skepticism if not indeed pessimism about large state-sponsored or state-sponsoring schemes. (I recall teasing him about his famous 1968 debate with Gore Vidal, and pointing out that this angry joust was actually between two former young enthusiasts for Charles Lindbergh and “America First.”…
Hitchens’ slipping in the America Firsters and the dubious Lindbergh is a necessary antidote to romanticizing Buckley. But reading the accounts of those who knew him, you come to understand that Buckley had the complexity of any evolved human being.
The baggy human character, with all its unresolved internal battles, is summoned to the fore in this description of Buckley by Hitchens:
Scott Fitzgerald’s old observation, about the need to be able to manage contradiction within oneself, is obviously germane here. One of the most startling discoveries to be made—it occurs in John Judis’s excellent early biography of Buckley—is that Whittaker Chambers himself beseeched Buckley to have nothing to do with Senator McCarthy. In spite of such advice, and from such a source, Buckley went ahead and published McCarthy and His Enemies, a book that by no means erred on the critical side.
To take another example from a quite different point of the compass, Buckley was willing to be immensely friendly with figures from the gay Right, like the doomed congressman Bob Bauman of Maryland or the flamboyant Marvin Liebman, but nonetheless wrote a column in the early 1980s saying that promiscuous homosexuals with AIDS should be tattooed on the buttocks as a sort of health-warning…
Buckley, with all his failings, reportedly had great personal generosity and an evident public charm, an honorable work ethic, a lack of insecurity — looking for talent and appreciating attainment — reflecting a character that was uniquely American in its eccentricities. Buckley reshaped conservatism, making it a respectable, robust alternative.
