The Magnetic Field of William F. Buckley Jr.

In 1945 the hot war turned cold. The perception of Soviet threats to American interests abroad and at home led in quick succession to the Truman Doctrine of 1947 (to contain Russia), the National Security Act of 1947 (to restructure American military and intelligence agencies) and the Marshall Plan of 1948 (to bankroll Europe). Into this second ‘red scare’, the radical right-wing William F. Buckley entered with such energy and panache that within a few years he had become the leading conservative intellectual anti-Communist and subsequently, as a publicist and advocate, a cultural influence in the nation.

Through his magazine National Review, his TV series ‘Firing Line’, his lecturing, his syndicated journalism and many books, he preached against world communism and communist subversion at home. He also struck tirelessly at his favourite target: liberals, whom he perceived as abusing academic freedom and being wrong on civil rights, Vietnam and social protest. Buckley helped reshape the Republican Party, not through exercising direct political power, but by shaping the cultural conversation of this new national security state. He defended and befriended a number of dangerously disgruntled figures from Joseph McCarthy to
E. Howard Hunt, while promoting such right-Republicans as Nixon, Goldwater, Bush and his favourite, Ronald Reagan. As far as friends, allies and tolerant opponents were concerned, Buckley acted as a magnetic field (a metaphor he himself used for Norman Mailer’s influence), attracting partly by his personal charm and generosity.

In a piece in 1952, Dwight Macdonald, a liberal friend, wrote perceptively of him: ‘Bill Buckley combines opportunism and ...