Gary Willis Writes on Friend and Foe William F Buckley

Gary Willis writes a delightful little article on WFB in the Atlantic.

Here are a few quotes with some commentary

Bill wrote the way he sailed, taking chances. Once, he called me up to ask about some new papal pronouncement. He had got into trouble with fellow Catholics by criticizing papal encyclicals, and I had become a kind of informal adviser on Catholic matters. The statement at issue that day was obscure.
He wanted to launch an immediate attack on it. I asked why he did not wait to see what impact it would have. “Why not wait? Because I don’t have falsos testes.” He was referring to an earlier discussion, in which he asked whether even papal defenders admit the pontiff can err. I said that medieval commentators claimed that such an error could happen if the pope was given imperfect evidence (propter falsos testes). He asked, “Isn’t testis [testifier] the same word in Latin as testicle?” Yes. That was all the warrant he needed......

LOL

For a while I was Bill’s designated biographer. A shared friend of ours, Neil McCaffrey, commissioned the book for his new publishing venture, Arlington House. Bill approved the idea because, like many celebrities, he was constantly pestered by people wanting to interview him for books or magazines. With me as his chosen scribe, he could turn them down by saying he was already committed. I recorded many hours of tapes with him, his wife, his siblings, and his friends for the project, before giving it up over political disagreements. He was stunningly candid, so much so that I, like many people close to him, came to feel I should protect him from his own reckless truthfulness. He was too trusting of people he liked. He set up a former boat boy in a partnership to buy radio stations, and afterward found that his young partner had bilked him. He argued for the innocence of a prisoner who wrote him winning letters, and worked to have Edgar Smith released, only to see the man convicted again, this time of kidnapping and attempted murder.........

That reckless truthfulness was his one of better assets and downfalls. Sometimes it pays to keep your mouth shut. One wonders really if anyone on the left or the right nowadays could write like that today and get away with it.

Perhaps it was his matchmaking urge that made Bill want to connect people with his church. After he learned as a child that any Christian can baptize a person in need of salvation, he and Trish would unobtrusively rub water on visitors to their home while whispering the baptism formula. In the National Review circle, those who were not Catholics to begin with tended to enter the fold as converts—Bozell, Russell Kirk, Willmoore Kendall, Frank Meyer, William Rusher, Jeffrey Hart, M. Joseph Sobran, Marvin Liebman, Robert Novak, Richard John Neuhaus. The major holdouts were James Burnham, a born Catholic who left the faith and never went back, and Whittaker Chambers, who was drawn to Richard Nixon’s Quakerism. It was always easiest to be a Catholic around Bill. I believe Bill was so nice to me because I am what the Lutheran scholar Martin Marty called me, “incurably Catholic.” There were different concentrations of people at National Review—Yale alumni, ex-communists (Burnham, Meyer, Chambers), ex-CIA members (Bill, Burnham, Kendall, and Priscilla Buckley, another of Bill’s sisters)—but the Catholic contingent outnumbered all others.

I going to make some further observations on WFB's Catholic Faith later. First it should be noted that his wife was not very religious at all. In fact one gets the sense that in his household his main intimates in his Faith was the household staff. I suspect that was painful. But here we get a clue today why National Review has the Catholic ethos it does even to this day. If it maintains that we shall see. I found it was interesting about how many Catholic converts came out of this. More later.

By the time of his death, even Bill’s earlier critics admitted that he had done much to make conservatism respectable by purging it of racist and fanatical traits earlier embedded in it. He distanced his followers from the southern prejudices of George Wallace, the anti-Semitism of the Liberty Lobby, the fanaticism of the John Birch Society, the glorification of selfishness by Ayn Rand (famously excoriated in National Review by Whittaker Chambers), the paranoia and conspiratorialism of the neocons. In each of these cases, some right-wingers tried to cut off donations to National Review, but Bill stood his ground. In doing so, he elevated the discourse of American politics, making civil debate possible between responsible liberals and conservatives.

And among Conservative themselves I should add.

Bill was heatedly attacked by Catholic liberals when he dismissed papal criticism of capitalism. He dismissed John XXIII’s encyclical Mater et Magistra for its challenge to the free market. I joked that his attitude was “Mater sí, Magistra no,” playing on a slogan of the time, “Cuba sí, Castro no.” He printed the quip in the magazine and was attacked on the assumption that the saying was his own. He questioned me about church teachings. He felt insecure because his Catholic education was so exiguous—it amounted to one year at a Jesuit prep school in England. I had been entirely educated in Catholic schools before entering graduate school at Yale, and he exaggerated what knowledge that had given me.

It should be noted that Buckley came under attack at times by Catholic Conservatives at times too. But the bold above is what I find interesting. One cannot read too many articles on WFB by friend and foe alike how much he liked being around people. His dinner parties were legend. WFB has a very devout and simple faith. Simple in the best sense of the word. I do wonder if Buckley that has insecurities about his Catholic education had so many Catholics on National Review partly because he wanted to engage them.

Anyway it is a very interesting article and in the end you see a very very kind man.