'Bill Buckley: Pied Piper of the Establishment'

Fifty years ago, conservatism meant opposition to big government in all its manifestations and a belief in a non-interventionist foreign policy. Today, most people associate it with preserving the legacy of Harry Truman, Martin Luther King Jr., and Hubert Humphrey, while supporting American cultural, economic, and political hegemony across the globe. What conservativism means today is at odds for what it used to stand for. What is the reason? John Birch Society president, John F. McManus, puts the blame squarely on William F. Buckley in his excellent new book, William F. Buckley Jr., Pied Piper for the Establishment.

McManus tells the story of a talented and intelligent man born into privilege. His father, James Buckley, was an exemplar of the Old Right – a staunch opponent of Roosevelt’s New Deal and drive towards war. Buckley followed in his father’s footsteps and was outspoken in his politics, but somewhere he went astray.

McManus seems to blame his shift on his left-wing professor, Wilmoore Kendall, and his membership in the Skull and Bones club, but neither of these explanations seems to give a concrete answer. By McManus’ own account, Buckley, seemed to have just as much or more influence on Kendall than vice versa. All McManus manages to say about the Skull and Bones Society is that many powerful people have been members (what would you expect of a group that picks the most promising Yale students) and they allegedly have some weird initiation practices (none of which seem any weirder than what goes on at any college fraternity).

In 1952 Buckley wrote a very telling article for the Catholic Weekly, The Commonweal, where he stated,

…we have to accept Big Government for the duration – for neither an offensive nor defensive war can be waged given our present government skills, except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores…

And if they deem Soviet power a menace to our freedom (as I happen to), they will have to support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant of centralization of power in Washington – Even with Truman at the reins of it all.

McManus sees this article as the root to Buckley’s ideology: fighting communism with internationalism and socialism.

Despite his break from much of the values of the Old Right, Buckley gained popularity among conservatives with the publication of two books, God and Men at Yale in 1951 and McCarthy and his Enemies in 1954. McManus takes a close look at these books and sees them as hardly conservative. While he generally supports the message of God and Men at Yale, he finds it disconcerting that Buckley’s main concern about the atheism and socialism taught at Yale is that the Alumni don’t support that agenda, rather than it being immoral. This criticism is somewhat unfair. Buckley did not say that there were no other reasons to oppose those beliefs. The book was designed to be an appeal to Yale Alumni, and wished for them to assert power with their pocketbooks.

McManus notes that McCarthy and his Enemies is a rather reserved defense of the maligned Senator. He finds 63 criticisms of Tailgunner Joe in the book, and notes that now Buckley blames anything in the book that can be construed as pro-McCarthy on his late coauthor Brent Bozell.

He goes on to detail Buckley’s dealings in the CIA. He shows how the agency was intentionally filled with various Trotskyites and other anti-Stalinist leftists, and believes this may have influenced Buckley’s views. He then provides evidence to suggest that National Review was in fact funded by the CIA.

National Review was staffed almost exclusively by ex-communists, many of whom were Buckley’s CIA colleagues. He gives a critical look at many of the early contributors such as James Burnham, Frank Meyer, Willi Schlamm, Whitaker Chambers, and Max Eastman. McManus describes the paradox of the situation,

Those who dominated National Review at its inception… were ex-Communists, Trotskyites, socialists, and CIA stalwarts who deplored the excesses of Communism but who had no objection to steering America away from personal freedom and national independence. Yet this was the magazine that was supposed to provide pivotal opposition to America’s increasingly dominant Eastern Establishment, whose elitists had long been laboring to undermine our nation’s independence and erode the people’s freedom!

He explains how Buckley then became one of the biggest apologists for the establishment in all its manifestations. Whenever it seemed that the conservative grassroots were ready to turn on the Council on Foreign Relations, Henry Kissinger, the United Nations, The Trilateral Commission, Richard Nixon, or the Rockerfellers, Bill Buckley always managed to defend the hated institutions. In addition to quelling the masses, it allows the establishment to say "Even Bill Buckley believes…" to make any critic of them seem like extremists. The book also explains how Buckley invited the neocons into the conservative movement and helped propel them to its leadership. It also details several leftist positions that Buckley has taken in recent years such as support for legalized abortion, a Martin Luther King Holiday, and special privileges for homosexuals.

Looking at Buckley’s legacy, McManus writes,

Buckley is now in the twilight of his life. He has done most of the damage he could ever hope to do. Yet the counterfeit conservatism he has minted is now being circulated by others, including William Bennett, Rush Limbaugh, William Kristol, and George W. Bush. The stakes in the struggle haven’t changed, even though many of the participants have. Many years ago, in his Commonweal article, Buckley recommended "a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores… and the attendant centralization of power in Washington" as the means to fight Communism during the Cold War. Today’s neoconservatives are calling for police state powers at home and a coalition of nations under the UN in order to win the war against terrorism. As the French say: "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."

While this book does an excellent job of exposing Bill Buckley for the fraud that he is, it fails to fully explain the Right’s transformation. McManus puts a great deal of emphasis on Buckley’s famous Commonweal article from 1952. But while libertarians such as Murray Rothbard and Frank Chodorov condemned it as socialist and statist as soon as the article came out, by McManus’ own account, Robert Welch didn’t say a single critical word about Buckley until National Review turned its guns on the John Birch Society. Why is this? Perhaps it is because Welch overestimated the Soviet threat, and underestimated the importance of an isolationist foreign policy. While the John Birch Society and Robert Welch had reservations about America’s entry foreign wars, they usually gave the same National Review line about how to finish the job.

At the same time, McManus fails to detail how far Buckley and National Review have strayed from their original views since the early 60s. Other than a few differences over conspiracy theories and strategy, the John Birch Society and National Review pretty much saw eye to eye forty years ago. Today they have absolutely nothing in common. Buckley’s membership in the Skull and Bones Club can’t totally account for the change. Perhaps the problem all goes down to foreign policy. Buckley saw the Soviet Union as a great threat that had to be countered by the United States military. To do this he was willing to align himself with liberal anticommunists, but not with conservative non-interventionists. By trying to please these liberal anticommunists, who had much more power and prestige than he, he eventually ended mimicking them.

Despite these few flaws, this book is still a great expose of the establishment’s favorite conservative and essential reading for any person interested in the history of the conservative movement.

September 4, 2002

Marcus Epstein [send him mail] is an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA, where he is president of the college libertarians and editor of the conservative newspaper, The Remnant. A selection of his articles can be seen here.

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