Flashback, June 1965: Conservative Bill Buckley Launches Long-Shot NYC Mayoral Bid

The three-way New York City mayoral race among Republic nominee Curtis Sliwa, surprise Democratic primary winner Zohran Mamdani, and incumbent Eric Adams is already shaping up to be one for the ages. But it will be hard to top the 1965 campaign, if only for the independent candidate that year.

Even with no realistic chance to win the race for New York City mayor in the fall, William F. Buckley, Jr. announced that he would campaign as the candidate of the Conservative Party 60 years ago this week.

The National Review editor and newspaper columnist entered the race hoping to deny victory in November to the Republican nominee, John Lindsay. He didn’t achieve that goal, but the 13% he did pull indicated a strong rightward drift in the New York GOP that eventually forced Lindsay to seek reelection as the Liberal Party candidate four years later—and, eventually, to leave the Republican Party altogether.

Buckley also hopped his run would be “fun,” and so it proved, especially for reporters delighted by the copy provided by a candidate never at a loss for words—especially big ones.

It all started with his initial press conference, when his response to a question on what he would do if elected became an instant classic in the annals of campaigning: “Demand a recount.”

A self-styled “radical conservative,” Buckley disagreed with virtually every major liberal initiative of the prior three decades, from the New Deal’s economic measures to civil-rights legislation, and regarded with horror Republican efforts to move to the center to accommodate these.

A prominent campaign of his read, “He has the guts to tell the truth: WILL YOU LISTEN?”

At the end of three terms under Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., not to mention three decades under the increasing control of urban planner and neighbor destroyer Robert Moses, New York was entering a spiral of urban decay that would climax in its bankruptcy crisis in the autumn of 1975. Crime, inner-city unrest, and busing proposals were fueling a white backlash against civil rights.

An initial, positive response from cops encouraged Buckley to run. But his support widened after that to the outer New York boroughs, where residents felt their concerns were ignored. He could be coy in how he exploited such appeals. Though he refused to grant that racial superiority had a biological basis, he had written National Review editorials criticizing federal attempts to end segregation.

During his mayoral campaign, he said whites supporting the candidacy of segregationist Governor George Wallace were not motivated by racism but by dislike of African-American figures like author James Baldwin and activist Bayard Rustin who “despise the American way of life and our civilization,” and “challenge root and branch the American approach to ­free civil order.”

His brilliance lay in how he could press hot-button issues in the coolest possible manner: with polysyllabic vocabulary delivered with a posh, mid-Atlantic pronunciation and coruscating wit, concluding with a sly grin and a flick of his reptilian tongue.

In spite of the liberal leanings of many reporters, even they couldn’t help but chuckle at his best sound bites (e.g., on his two rivals, the tall Republican Lindsay and the short Democrat Abraham Beame: “The differences between Mr. Beame and Mr. Lindsay are biological, not political”).

Not having compiled a record in public office that needed to be defended, Buckley found himself on ground ideally suited to a skill he had cultivated since his Yale days, particularly after a newspaper strike left a print information vacuum for many voters: debates.

Buckley was free to stake out unusual positions on issues. As future biographer Sam Tanenhaus discussed in an October 2000 New York Times Magazine article on “The Buckley Effect,” one of these turned out to be nearly four decades ahead of its time: bicycle paths as an alternative means of transportation throughout the city, similar to what he had seen in major European cities.

Other positions turned out to be a good deal less mainstream—certainly in the context of his time, and even more so now:

* “either lock up teenage felons or make their parents legally responsible for them”;

* cut off welfare for everyone but invalids and mothers "looking after children 14 years or younger"’

*“relocating chronic welfare cases outside the city limits”;

*legalize drugs for adults—but have…

*“great and humane rehabilitation centers” for drug addicts;

*encourage emigration;

Tanenhaus says that Buckley was an arguer rather than a thinker—never able to finish what he hoped would be his magnum opus, The Revolt of the Masses. But arguing, in the form of forensic skills, was indisputably what he had developed as far back as his undergraduate days at Yale.

Just as his much-publicized two faceoffs with African-American novelist and activist James Baldwin served as an appetizer to his mayoral campaign, the latter race led in the following year to the start of a three-decade stint hosting his public television show, Firing Line.

During the campaign, Buckley increasingly absorbed the lesson that he could blunt opponents’ threats better through genial wit than with harsh rhetoric. More than a decade later, he would back a Republican candidate for President with even greater skills of this kind: Ronald Reagan.

In his new biography of Buckley, Tanenhaus notes that, for all their differences in style, it would be a mistake to think that Donald Trump has little in common with the conservative movement that Buckley helped coordinate in the postwar period. In an article last year for The American Prospect, Rick Perlstein seconds that idea, noting that “new scholarship suggests that Trump’s rise was not a reversal of what Buckley was up to, but in many ways, its apotheosis.”

I believe it is more appropriate to believe that the nature of Buckley’s forays into the public arena will never be seen again. He belonged to a group that Mitchell Ross, in a provocative 1978 book, called The Literary Politicians—figures who “practice politics by writing books” rather than continually running for public office.

Whether in newspaper columns, extended television interviews, and especially entire books, Buckley and other figures in the book such as John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger, and Gore Vidal preferred to advocate positions at length.

They did not always fit comfortably into the party orthodoxy of their time and, though they could toss out epigrams with the best of them, their arguments rested on logical propositions rather than 30-second soundbites. The nature of American political discourse is poorer for the absence of the forums where they could appear to best advantage.

Photo of the Day: Getting Around in Central Park, NYC

Yesterday afternoon, while walking on West 57^th Street in Manhattan, I passed a sign outside a bicycle shop that read, “The best way to get around New York is by bike.” Judging by the vastly increased number of these vehicles I’ve seen in Manhattan and Brooklyn over the last decade or so, I’d say that thousands of more people agree with that statement. 

The combined warm temperatures and low humidity yesterday afternoon seemed especially to confirm that. Once I get past the memorial to The Maine at the southwest corner of Central Park, I came across hundreds of bicyclists—and several horse-drawn carriages—out to enjoy the beautiful day.

The presence of so many bikes made me think that New York has been moving, by degrees, to something like the environment conservative leader William F. Buckley Jr. envisioned in his quixotic 1965 mayoral campaign. He proposed constructing an elevated bicycle highway on Second Avenue, stretching from 125^th to 1^st Streets. The idea might be “ultra-reactionary,” he admitted with a grin, but it would also be fun. 

Many today, conservatives and liberals, would certainly agree with that.  

This Day in Conservative History (Buckley, Defender of the Faith, Dies)

Feb. 27, 2008—William F. Buckley Jr., the father of the modern American conservative movement in America, died at age 82 of a heart attack in the study at his Stamford, Conn., home, after months of enduring emphysema, diabetes and the loss of his wife Patricia.

I will leave to others to examine the multiple contributions over a half-century of this columnist, National Review editor, television debater, candidate, and friend even to people whose views he scorned. I don’t share the ideology of this indefatigable literary politician, but as someone vitally interested in history, I owe him more than the kind of cursory treatment of his life and legacy that I could summon at this point.

No, because this blog is, by its essentially essayistic form, personal, I prefer to focus on the aspect of his life with extra resonance for me these last few weeks: how a son copes with the passing of a father of strong, persistent faith.

Christopher Buckley attempted to make sense of his parents’ passing—and his own complicated relationship with them—in his 2009 memoir about their final year, Losing Mum and Pup. Few children have had parents as famous as Bill and Pat, but more than a few suffering bereavement will identify with Christopher’s tangled emotions on their legacy.

After their parents’ deaths, even children who loved them will often wonder how they came to be so different from them. For all their shared humor, love of sailing, and passion for the written words, the differences were especially bothersome for Bill and Christopher. Each said, wrote or did something frequently to peeve the other.

Religious faith proved a particular stumbling block for the Buckleys. Although I am more captivated by Christopher’s contrarian political principles and sharp satiric sense, I am more drawn to the Roman Catholic Church that claimed Bill’s lifelong devotion. 

“People die, God endures,” Bill wrote. That belief, as fundamental to the Anglophile aristocrat as to my working-class Irish father, sadly eluded Christopher. Religious skepticism, particularly the brand favored by his friend, journalist Christopher Hitchens, was more the son’s style. 

But it is moving to see him struggle not to disappoint his father by giving full vent to his feelings about atheism, a subject about which Bill had (surprise!) powerful opinions. “I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world,” Bill wrote in the 1951 polemic that made him the enfant terrible of conservatism, God and Man at Yale. 

In the end, it is profoundly moving to see Christopher struggle not to disappoint his father by restraining his opinions—and to cope ruefully with the ache left by his own lack of belief:

"That night, going to sleep, I looked out the window and the thought invariably came, So, Pup, was it true, after all? Is there a heaven? Are you in it? For all my doubts, I hoped he was. If he was, then at least I stood some chance of being admitted on a technicality, with the host of Firing Line up there arguing my case. I doubt St. Peter was any match for him."

And, as I have been discovering firsthand the past few weeks: “Once they’re both gone, your parents’ house instantly turns into a museum.”

Quote of the Day (Johnny Carson, Imagining 7-Year-Old William F. Buckley Writing Santa)

“December 1932: Dear Mr. Claus, I don't believe I would be disingenuous or resorting to tergiversation if l maintained that I have been a paradigm of meritorious behavior in the past year. I do not wish to expatiate on this entreaty ad nauseam, but I remain sanguine about your decision to accede to my request.—Admiringly, William Buckley.”—Johnny Carson, channeling a certain polysyllabic conservative pundit (pictured) and other future celebrities in “Recently Discovered Childhood Letters to Santa,” in Disquiet, Please!: More Humor Writing from The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick and Henry Finder (2008)

Flashback, November 1955: ‘National Review’ Publishes 1st Issue

Appalled by the march of collectivism and atheism around the world and liberalism holding sway at home, a new magazine of conservative opinion, National Review, released its first issue 60 years ago this month, announcing its intentions unapologetically in its publisher’s statement: “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.”

The name affixed to the bottom of that piece, William F. Buckley, Jr., was entirely superfluous. The hallmarks of the style that had made the magazine’s founder an enfant terrible of conservatism four years before, in his polemic, God and Man at Yale, were all here, too—notably, puckishness (their opponents made them “just about the hottest thing in town”) and polysyllabic vocabulary (“supererogation”).

It is fascinating to contrast “What Would Eisenhower Do?” a tribute in the magazine’s 60^th anniversary issue to the Republican President at the time of Buckley’s broadside, with how the guiding light of NR felt about him at the time. Ike, according to historian Niall Ferguson, writing in 2015, “understood strategy better than almost anyone in his generation.” 

That kind of talk would have been hotly disputed in the Fifties by Buckley, who, when Ike announced his re-election bid in 1956, dismissed the leader of the successful invasion of Normandy a dozen years before as “undaunted by principle, unchained by any coherent ideas about man and society, uncommitted to any estimate of the nature of potential of the enemy.”

If an institution is, as Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed, “the lengthened shadow of a single man,” then it is entirely apropos to examine NR in the context of its founder. The magazine’s 60^th anniversary issue this month makes this practically a necessity, since it contains even more self-congratulation than other journals of opinion, such as The New Republic and The Nation, have resorted to in the last year or so.

The label given Buckley by Lee Edwards of the Heritage Foundation, “The St. Paul of the Modern American Conservative Movement,” captures the reverence with which Buckley is held on the right.

According to The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, Buckley brought three qualities to his fledgling movement: “extraordinary self-belief,” a large and necessary source of funds (his father’s oil business), and wit that not only won over conservative friends but disarmed liberal critics.

Like liberal counterparts The Nation and The New Republic, NR functioned as a kind of internal debating society for its movement. Its editor was ready and willing to isolate what he regarded as fringe elements that could damage the movement, including anti-Semites, isolationists, and the John Birch Society. 

In this, it was generally agreed, he was largely successful, though he was slow to acknowledge the moral necessity of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s until it had achieved its greatest successes.

Buckley, fighting a perception voiced by Columbia University’s Lionel Trilling that conservatism could only be expressed in “in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas,” recruited a host of thinkers from various strands of the movement: ex-Marxists or ex-leftists (such as Whittaker Chambers, William Schlamm, John Dos Passos, Frank Meyer and James Burnham), Catholics (L. Brent Bozell, Harry V. Jaffa and Garry Wills), and libertarians (by his own description, Buckley can be considered a charter member). In turn, the magazine influenced a host of politicians (Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich were regular readers).

A figure of astonishing energy, Buckley propagated the conservative faith in more than 50 books, 6,000 newspaper columns totaling some 4.5 million words, editing NR for 35 years, appearing on his own TV show, Firing Line, running for mayor of New York City in 1965, lecturing on college campuses, and founding Young Americans for Freedom at his Connecticut estate in 1960.

But being in the shadow of such a magnetic figure was a mixed blessing for both his son and a protégé.

In the case of the latter, Richard Brookhiser had been groomed for years to succeed Buckley as editor when, without warning, the conservative literary lion sent him a letter informing him of a change of plans. 

It was one of the quirks of a figure known for never uttering a word out of place on Firing Line that not only could he not deliver bad news to employees face to face but that he also (as in this case) flew out of the country so that the magazine’s publisher would do so in his stead. 

Buckley had an infinitely more complicated relationship with his only son, Christopher, who, in his memoir Losing Mum and Pup, described the death of both his parents in a single year. 

William not only locked horns with his son over the latter’s agnosticism and much of his writing (about his Christopher’s satire Boomsday: "This one didn't work for me. Sorry."), but excluded from his will Christopher’s out-of-wedlock son.  

“I spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, most of my career trying to be something other than William F. Buckley’s son,” Christopher remarked in an interview with Alexandra Wolfe of The Wall Street Journal earlier this month. “But it may just be that…the book that may remain in print 50 years from now is the one about being William F. Buckley’s son.”

What would Buckley think of the state of conservatism today? Unlike the younger, more neo-con, Rupert Murdoch-financed Weekly Standard, NR has held its nose at Donald Trump, and there is a strong possibility Buckley would have loathed the billionaire as a lowlife. 

On the other hand, the 60^th anniversary edition of the magazine included a tribute to Buckley from Rush Limbaugh, who has helped dig the fetid hole in which much of contemporary conservatism finds itself.