How William F. Buckley, Jr. created modern conservatism
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This is On Point. I'm Magna Chakrabarty. The late William F. Buckley Jr. is often called the architect of the modern American conservative movement.

The erudite and dapper Yale man was a prominent and prolific writer, speaker, and thinker, known for his sharp wit and biting criticism, proudly on display here from a 1965 appearance on Meet the Press. Mr. Buckley, you once called Harry Truman the nation's most conspicuous Bulgarian. You said of General Eisenhower that when he touches a subject, every ray of light, every breath of air is choked out.

As Buckley says, I'd be glad to elaborate, he flashes one of his signature cheeky grins.

While many of the recognizable features that once characterized American conservatism seem to have been trampled underfoot by Trumpism, Buckley nevertheless deserves credit for helping pave the way for the populist stampede led by President Donald Trump.

Now that is one of the many provocative themes explored in Sam Tannenhaus' long-awaited, sweeping new biography of William F. Buckley Jr. It's called Buckley, The Life and the Revolution That Changed America. Sam Tannenhaus is a biographer, historian, and a journalist. He's former editor-in-chief of the New York Times Book Review.

Other books include, excuse me, he's a former editor-in-chief of the New York Times Book Review and currently a contributing writer for the Washington Post. Sam, welcome to On Point.

Great to be here with you, Magdalene. You're going to have to forgive me for having screwed up your other books, but I have it now. It was one of those moments where I wanted to give you credit for your previous writing and didn't have the notes in front of me. But here it is, Whitaker Chambers, a biography and the death of conservatism, a movement and its consequences. So I detect a theme here, Sam. Let me just first start off by asking you, what is it about conservatism?

William F. Buckley Jr., in 2025, that you think was worthy of the 1,000 or so pages that you devote to this new and important biography of him? Well, he was a man of many faces, of many phases, and many personalities that we see

alive today and all the facets of of conservatism. And I sometimes suggest to people that if you want to understand the the landscape we inhabit now, don't look just at President Trump. I know it's hard to take your eyes off him, but there's a surrounding orbit of

of writers, of thinkers, of activists, of provocateurs. We hear and see them on social media. But in many ways, that media landscape was anticipated, pioneered, almost sprang out of the head of William F. Buckley Jr., Bill, as everyone called him, including the people who worked in the mailroom at National Review, the magazine he started in 1955. He was a master of media, and he understood before anything

anyone else that politics had changed from differences of ideology to a kind of ongoing culture war. And he was the leader of that war. Okay. So I'm going to come back to that a little bit later because I'll make the argument to you that there have been prominent conservatives that have really ably used the media even prior to Buckley. But we'll come back to that. I

I think the most interesting, one of the most interesting aspects of your book has to do with Buckley's early life, where people who are familiar with his later work may not know so much about this. So first of all, let's go to a clip of Buckley from 1980. And he was on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. And how are you? How are you? Very good. I think you...

I did not know, frankly, until I read the book, Sam, that Spanish was Buckley's first language.

Yes, he did not learn English until he was seven years old. Really didn't become fluent in it until he was eight or nine. He was raised in large part by Mexican servants in his large and wealthy household. He had a brilliant but absentee father, a lawyer and real estate and especially oil speculator who was away in Latin America much of the time.

And he had a mother who gave birth to nine other children besides William F. Buckley, who came right in the middle. So it went to an almost continuous cycle of childbirth, nursing, recovery. So Bill Buckley and his siblings were raised by Spanish household servants. That was the first language they spoke. OK, so let's talk more about the Buckley family's time in Mexico, right? Because as you said, his

His father was influential, not just in terms of the oil business, but I understand that William F. Buckley Sr. was also quite influential in Mexican politics during the dictatorship of Victoriana Huerta.

He was one of its leading supporters, tried to counsel Woodrow Wilson and his advisor, the famous Texan Colonel House. William F. Buckley Sr. was also from Texas. There's the idea many people have of the Buckleys as a New England aristocratic patricians is totally false. His father was an Irish immigrant via Canada who made

who grew up in South Texas in a rather poor family. His own father had been a sheriff and

And then William F. Buckley Sr. went to Mexico, grew up speaking Spanish, got involved in oil and also in the counter revolution. I was surprised to discover just how deeply involved he had been in gun running, in recruiting guerrillas to fight against the Mexican government. And

And after it became a counter-revolutionary government, before that, in support of its dictator. Yes, Huerta. That's the beginning of Buckley family politics. It's the idea that Bolshevism is rampant. It's global. Mexico's revolution came before Russia's. We sometimes forget 1910 to 1920. And in the eyes of Buckley Sr., they were all the same.

And so that's really the origins of this counterrevolutionary politics that Bill Buckley openly espoused. He called himself both a radical conservative and a counterrevolutionary. OK, so the Buckley family, well, in terms of William F. Buckley Jr.'s father, was more than willing to engage or become deeply involved in the politics of

of another nation. And yet when it came to American politics, he was critical to the America First Committee. I'll let you tell this story, first of all, that was most prominently headlined by Charles Lindbergh.

Yes, the family were all devotees of Charles Lindbergh and William F. Buckley Jr., my guy at the age of 15, was in Madison Square Garden when Lindbergh gave his last famous address to a packed house and thousands in the streets saying,

just before Pearl Harbor. There were isolationists, if anything, that were likelier to support Germany in the war against the allies. And they believed America shouldn't get involved. And they saw that war as the extension, World War II, of Woodrow Wilson's intervention in Mexican affairs. That's how you link them together, Magna, because when-

Buckley senior was supporting the, uh, dictatorship in Mexico. The enemy was coming from the United States. It was Woodrow Wilson who was intervening and he, and Buckley senior was on the side of the dictators. Well, once we got, uh,

Not all that many years later, a generation later, World War II, the Buckley family had the same opinion. What's important is that they were living in a part of the country, the northwest corner, as it's called, of Connecticut, near the Berkshires.

in Massachusetts and Dutchess County, where their neighbor Franklin Roosevelt was from, that was very pro-English and pro-intervention. So the Buckleys, as a large brood of Catholics from the South living in this corner of the world, were very much embattled and

almost a kind of colony of outsiders. Oh, interesting. Okay, so let's listen to a little of Lindbergh. This is not from that Madison Square Garden speech, but it's a speech that he gave in Des Moines, Iowa. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction. If any of these groups, the British, the Jewish, or the administration...

Stop agitating for war. I believe there will be little danger of our involvement. Charles Lindbergh there and the America First Committee. So, Sam, we have to talk about the fact that Lindbergh, I mean, if the Buckleys and William F. Buckley Jr. was very swayed or enamored of Lindbergh and the America First Committee, then they were also swayed and enamored of his anti-Semitism.

Well, they were certainly indulgent of it. Bill Buckley's father was an outright fire-breathing anti-Semite. He hated Jews with a passion you almost can't believe. And it was Bill Buckley's youngest sister, Carol Buckley—

who at one point she was married a few times. One of her husbands was Jewish, who told me this, just how extreme it was. She said any evil thing that Jews were accused of being their father subscribed to. They're communists, but they're also greedy and they're money-grubbing liars, she said. This from a very elegant man, you know, who read Cervantes in Spanish, the father. But when the subject turned to Jews, everything became very different.

So then how did this influence William F. Buckley Jr.? Well, it took him some time to get over it. Another one of the discoveries I made was Bill Buckley himself at Yale had a very close friend, his co-editor really, the number two man on the Yale Daily News, Buckley was number one, who was Jewish. Thomas Ginsburg became a famous publisher of the Viking Press later.

And he fell in love with one of the sisters Buckley was closest to. And Buckley's father told him, break up that romance. And he told him, we don't want a Jew in the family. And I asked Bill Buckley about that later. Okay, well, Sam, now you've got me on tenterhooks. But when you hear that music, when we come back, I want to hear from you what he said about what his father had mentioned. So we'll be right back.

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Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and stick around until the end of this podcast for a sneak preview. Sam, you dangled this story in front of us about what Bill Buckley told you regarding his father's interference with the relationship due to his extreme anti-Semitism. So what did he say? He said it would have been just dumb to have a Jew in the family. And I

That stayed with me because that was how Buckley liked to phrase issues like that.

Almost to pretend as if there were no emotional component to it. That was surely a matter of logic and rationality. And you see this in his writing and debating, too. That's why the moments come when he's up against very shrewd debaters like James Baldwin and Gore Vidal, who are able to push a button in Buckley. Then that mask falls away and he becomes a much more visceral person.

Okay, so his father said it would have just been dumb. Do you see evidence of that sort of pretense of logic in Bill Buckley's own views about certain social issues in the United States, particularly race?

Races were its most profound and surprising. One of the revelations I found in the course of long research was that the Buckleys, although they lived in Connecticut, were really southerners. They had a second home, beautiful antebellum home in Camden, South Carolina.

And while they were there, they were considered, they hired many black neighbors to work for them. That's what the winter colony in Camden, South Carolina did. These were northerners who lived in beautiful estates and the help almost always were black Americans. And the Buckleys treated them exceptionally well. I interviewed someone who'd worked in the Buckley home. At the same time, the family privately funded and managed

Bill Buckley's sister, Priscilla, edited a publication that was pro-segregationist after the Brown decision in 1954 and was part of what was called the massive resistance to the court's legalizing of Jim Crow segregation in schools.

And that was the beginning of the backlash politics that Buckley was a leader of to a far greater extent than anyone had realized, myself included. But so tell me more about that. I mean, why is it that a man who very frequently was openly critical about any ideas of racial equality or even just, you know, integration, it would come as such a surprise to someone like you who knew him so well?

I think it was the extent of it, Magna, that also how much of it was concealed. One of the surprising things when you go back and look at the literature and culture of the 1950s is when Buckley wrote what today seemed to us to

shockingly racist editorials in National Review, his magazine, not always signed, by the way. You had to see the master volumes, that is the original volumes, which I had access to, to see which editorials he wrote. Those views were not reacted to as exceptional in the period, sometimes not even by liberals. In other words, they were not

sources of agreement. People didn't think Buckley was right, but they didn't think he was on the fringe either because the Southern point of view, the white Southern point of view was one that was granted a certain kind of authority in the culture. It takes a long time to get over that for the culture to. So what that means is

Buckley could hold those opinions and you'd think, well, he's just another Southern conservative. What I hadn't realized was the activism the family had engaged in. Oh, that's interesting. OK, so let's listen to Bill Buckley himself in a couple of different moments here. This is from a 2024 PBS documentary entitled.

And in it, it features a clip of Buckley talking about race, although it's not entirely clear what year the clip is from, but here it is. Why are the races unreconciled? Why does poverty persevere? Why are our governors indifferent to us? Why are the young disenchanted? Why do the birds sing so unhappily? It is easy to be carried away, and yet, always, there is a strain of seriousness. Something in the system that warns us, warns us that America...

had better strike out on a different course rather than face another four years of asphyxiation by liberal senators. Okay, now here's another one.

This is from 1971 when the Reverend Jesse Jackson appeared on William F. Buckley's show Firing Line. And Sam, we're going to talk about Firing Line in just a couple of minutes because it's so important to this story. But here is where Jesse Jackson, Reverend Jackson, discusses race and rights for black Americans with Buckley. What is not obvious to me is whether you consider...

that the mobility in America is best suited for the advancement of minorities or whether the mobility in other kinds of societies is better and if so, in which societies? Well, number one, I don't have too much experience in other societies. Now, the issue is whether or not a minority can have mobility in the society at all.

And we have mobility as a people in proportion to the humanity of the majority. For example, we were ready to play baseball before 1947, but the mind of the American white male was not willing to accept us as a person in the athletic arena before 1947. We were ready to sit on the front of a bus

Before 1956. That's the Reverend Jesse Jackson with Bill Buckley in 1971 on the firing line. Now, Sam, two things there that really jump out at me. First is this continuation, as you talked about, about this...

I'm going to say the pretense of cold and cool logic in terms of Buckley's objections to certain things like racial integration. I mean, he definitely was vociferously against the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. But at the same time...

On Firing Line, he had people like Reverend Jackson on, which is something in modern day conservative media we almost do not have at all. You could actually probably make the same accusation of liberal media as well. So can you talk about that?

Well, for one thing, he really liked Jesse Jackson. He met him, Buckley did, in 1969 when the National Urban League invited Buckley to be one of a dozen journalists who toured what were then called the inner city or ghettos of major cities in the United States. And it was a revelation to Buckley. One of the great things about him was he was a tremendous listener and

And he liked smart people who could make sophisticated, clever arguments like his own. And when they stopped on this tour in Chicago, he was absolutely blown away by Jesse Jackson.

And he brought him to New York to go on firing line, as we just heard, and also to meet with colleagues at National Review. And he said, I don't agree with anything he says, but you've just got to listen to this guy. He also liked the entrepreneurial aspect. And that's where Buckley was able to seize onto what was then called black capitalism. He liked Malcolm X better than Dr. Martin Luther King. He liked the self-help aspect.

and even defended black separatism on the grounds that it's no more intrinsically racist for a black person to be separatist, and the parallel will sound interesting, than for a Catholic not to want, say, a Jew in his family. Oh, interesting. Oh, okay. Okay, so let's take a step

back here with all that background. And by the way, folks, this is just skimming the surface because the book goes into just profound detail. But with all that background in mind, Sam, how did William F. Buckley Jr. sort of define what conservatism meant to him?

He almost couldn't do it. He tried over and over again. He wrote a book. His magnum opus that the entire intellectual world was awaiting was William F. Buckley Jr.'s Great Defense of Congress.

conservatism. And I found the 60 pages he wrote and he couldn't even really get started. But here are the basics. His own Catholicism is very deep and abiding Catholic faith, which Magna included charity and philanthropy. You see the word charity often in Buckley's writing. And that meant doing the kindnesses that his family did in the South and

Also, it was really and this is where we get to the core of our modern movement. It was about declaring war on liberals. The presumption is the liberals are in charge. They control. They rule the media. They dominate the universities. They write all the books. They publish the magazines.

Similar to what we hear today. I was like, this is all ringing a bell, Sam. A very loud bell. And so what Buckley thought he could do was if he could isolate the enemy, then he would gather all the different strands of those who felt oppressed.

pressed by them. Similar to what we see now in MAGA. You know, we forget how much, as I said in the program, we were talking a little earlier, you've got intellectuals and websites like Compact and American Greatness. These are people with PhDs who are

ardently in support of Donald Trump, just the way Bill Buckley was ardently a fan of Senator Joseph McCarthy. They find the Populist Tribune who can channel the energies, these populist energies, and the job of the Bill Buckleys is to say,

Here's a higher argument that explains or justifies it. But always the target is the same. It's what he called great, clever phrase, the liberal monopolists of public opinion. Interesting. But this sort of elites versus elites or elites criticizing other elites is

Again, it's not unique to conservatism or the right, but every time I hear it, what troubles me about it is just smacks of hypocrisy, right? Because, you know, these elites are actually running in the same circles, especially the intellectual ones of this country.

And yet the hypocrisy that I smell is one of, well, we're just going to be opposed to these elites because that also rings true with non-elite Americans, which is the vast majority of Americans. It's a tool rather than an authentic political belief. The only...

A caveat I would add to that is that if, for instance, you're Bill Buckley at Yale, 1946 to 1950, when there is a quota on the number of Catholics there.

you could feel yourself to be somewhat of an outsider, even as you're inside. And I use that to help me understand better a JD Vance, Ted Cruz, even Pete Hegseth. These are Ivy league Yahoo's. I call them. They come right out of the heart of the establishment and they're able to use their own sense of estrangement for,

from the surrounding culture to connect with that broader populist group. And so there is a strain of authenticity to it, but it's also highly calculated. And Buckley was well aware of that. Buckley was the single most successful socially

uh, man at Yale in his year. He was the last man tapped for the secret society, skull and bones. Last man tap meant you were the king of the campus because everybody's huddled around. It was a public humiliation ritual. Everyone sees while they're down to the last few, uh,

Who will it be who caps off the Skull and Bones group? And it's Bill Buckley. So I said I made him the uncrowned king of the campus. So what that enabled him to do was to make the argument as a kind of insider, almost a sort of muckraker.

Here's what's really going on in the Ivy League that you don't know about. Here's what they're teaching your kids in the classroom. Almost exactly what we're hearing today, by the way, from wealthy donors and alumni of our great universities. Buckley predicted all of that. Not only did he predict it, he created the playbook for it.

Interesting. Okay, so let's listen to a little bit more of Buckley. This is in 1965. He was on Meet the Press, and at that time he was running for mayor of New York City. Another story. And he was asked what he thought of the American voter.

Well, I think the American voter often has intuitions which are better than those of their own presidents. Presidents tend to, during the recent period, tend to have drawn more strength from the voters than the voters from their presidents. I rejoice.

over the influence of the people over their elected leaders, since by and large I think that they show more wisdom than their leaders or than their intellectuals. I've often been quoted as saying I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.

Sam, I have to say, I'm sitting here in Boston and that, you know, that Boston quip of Buckley's is a double backhanded compliment. But in defense of Bostonians, Buckley's presuming that the first 2000 people in the Boston phone book do not possess the intellectual capacity of the Harvard faculty. And I would argue very much against that. But tell me about what you think about that clip.

Well, actually, it's funny. When he first made those remarks, it was in Garden City, Long Island, which is Queens, the outer boroughs of New York. And what he actually said was, I'd sooner be governed by the first 2000 names in the Garden City phone book. And then after John Kennedy got elected, he switched it over to Boston.

But, you know, but that tells you something, because who is he speaking to? Four thousand people in the outer boroughs of New York. Exactly the people who voted for him in that remarkable campaign for mayor, which rescued the conservative movement after the defeat, the catastrophic defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964.

Well, Sam, let me ask you this. And again, it's about how Buckley shaped what we think of as modern conservatism. Now, by definition...

sort of a brute force definition of small c conservatism, you want to conserve what's in the present, you want to conserve the status quo. So in that sense, perhaps conservatives have never actually had the obligation to define what they are for. And that conservatism at its root is simply being opposed to change. I mean, is that not satisfactory enough?

You would think so, wouldn't you? I struggled with that for a really long time because, Megan, you're absolutely right. If you look at the great thinkers in the construction

conservative annals, Edmund Burke and George Santayana and the Adamses in the United States. They are conservers. This is why Buckley was careful to call himself a radical conservative. And at first I thought that was a phrase no one else used. Then I interviewed his very good friend, Henry Kissinger, and Kissinger

referred in a very casual way to Buckley and company as radical conservatives. And what they meant was if you think the enemy, the liberal enemy has seized hold of the entire civilization, you have to pull it up by the root and then you become a radical conservative. And what you're really involved in is a restoration project, a kind of reactionism. And that's where

the movement really gained force. Okay, so you're listening to Sam Tannenhaus. He's author of the new biography, Buckley, The Life and the Revolution That Changed America. There's much more in just a moment. This is On Point. On Point.

We had been talking about how William F. Buckley defined modern American conservatism in his mind, and it wasn't necessarily for a particular set of values, but perhaps more energetically defined as against the kind of American liberalism that Buckley witnessed in the middle of the 20th century. And here's an example. This is Buckley saying,

on WGBH, the public television station out of Boston, in 1967. And the interviewer called Buckley one of America's greatest dissenters and asked him to describe some of the things he disagreed with. It seemed to me reasonably clear that in the past 40, 50 years, there was a bifurcation between

Politically, people began to do what H.R. Mencken called "substitute political for economic means of self-aggrandizement." That is to say, there was a sort of adorning consciousness of the political instrumentality by which people could vote wealth to themselves, provided somebody got around to creating a surplus. This had the effect

of undoing the sort of generic liberalism, which was probably the most striking event of four or five hundred years earlier. And this seemed to me a centralization, social centralization, which would cut the whole energy circuit of civilizations and keep people from maintaining the kind of self-dependence that results in creativity and in freedom. It's that trend, I think, that conservatism has been very much alert

too. William F. Buckley Jr. in 1967. Sam, we're going to talk about in a few minutes, again, more about how Buckley paved the way for Trumpism. But one of the ways in which the two dramatically depart is put on clear display there. I mean, he really was a man of masterful intellect and his use of language was unique. And the polar opposite, I mean, well, Donald Trump's use of language is rather unique, but it's down at what I think people have analyzed it roughly a fourth grade level.

What's remarkable about Buckley is what's he really saying there? He's saying he hates the New Deal. He hates Medicare. He hates anti-poverty programs that have rescued Medicare, that have rescued millions of Americans. And yet he manages to make it seem as if he's defending some higher value. And it comes back.

through the language, just as you say, um, Buckley was not the best conservative writer or thinker of his time, but he was the most articulate, maybe in person of his time. He spoke so well, so easily. And these are the words that just come to him. When I went to his office, he had several of them, but the main one was a big garage. He had a, uh,

a carriage house in his home in Stamford, Connecticut. And I saw the full edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. I do not mean, I don't mean the two volumes I've got with the magnifying glass. And I picked them up

and the pages were turned. Oh, wow. You could pick a random volume. And remember this, Magna, it was partly because he came to English so late. So we brought a kind of foreigner's kind of connoisseurship about him. One of his many, many literary friends included the great emigre novelist Vladimir Nabokov. They would have lunch every year in Switzerland. Perfect, right? On their vacations. And...

Buckley admired Nabokov because of his mastery of English. He also knew Nabokov had come to English as a second or third language. And Buckley had some of that same quality in the way he spoke. So he almost sounds like a kind of foreigner. What he does that's great, this is what set him apart, was the humor he brings to it.

There's an odd sort of warmth to it. He invites you to laugh along with him. He didn't when he was young, but as he grew more mature, he learned to do that. I mean, he even appeared on shows like Laugh-In. You know what? I was going to go to his Catholicism, but because you said laugh, I've got to play this clip. This is Buckley on Laugh-In in 1970. Willis now is the lovely...

talented, intelligent, erudite, knowledgeable, articulate, charming, delightful, and controversial William F. Buckley. Recently, Mr. Buckley, you did an interview for Playboy magazine. Now you're on our show. Would this indicate you're becoming more hip? Have you decided to loosen up a little bit? You're becoming a swinger, as they say.

Well, I did an interview with Playboy because I decided it was the only way to communicate my views to my son. William F. Buckley, Jr., 1970. I think the modern-day equivalent would be all the broadcasts that we have the vice president doing right now. So I want to turn back to something which is so central to Buckley's life and hear you a little bit more about this.

You have a you quote a letter that he wrote in 1961 to a friend where he talks. He says this. If I am ever persuaded that my attachment to conservatism gets in the way of my attachment to the Catholic Church, I shall promptly forsake the former. He was a Catholic before he was a political conservative.

He was indeed. It's one reason one of the many apostates, as he called them, that is brilliant young people whom he discovered and later broke away from him, the great historian and thinker Gary Wills, to this day, Gary's 91, and he was a real source for this book,

book, always says Buckley was almost a super Catholic in his utter devotion to the church. He never had a moment of doubt, which most believers do. He absolutely believed it was revealed truth. And that's the source of much of his thinking and writing, including his very first and still most influential book, God and Man at Yale. It's really a defense of Catholic belief. Well, let me just jump in here, actually, because I want to refine what I said. He

he is a profoundly conservative Catholic, right? Or a fundamentalist Catholic, because at the same time, I mean, the Catholic Church has long been internally riven between this tension between the fundamental Catholicism and, you know, more liberal branches like liberation Catholicism. So I imagine that that kind of Catholic belief Buckley felt was what? Not actually Catholic? Yeah.

Well, his most famous dispute with the church was a battle with Pope John XXIII over a papal letter, an encyclical that urged a kind of socialism. And Buckley called it a venture in triviality.

and almost had a serious breach with the conservatives who, Catholic conservatives who formed the basis of much of his own constituency and with the church itself. And then he came around and decided he'd been wrong and he should agree with every encyclical that issued from the Vatican. But yes, there was a tension between his position

politics, his Catholic politics and his Catholic beliefs. Right. I mean, that's the tension, right? Because if you believe in the absolute power of the Holy See, you don't get to say, well, this particular pope accepted, right? So but apparently Buckley still liked he preferred the Latin mass Vatican to notwithstanding. Now, I want to go back to Buckley and race for a second, because he even though he had this like, I

Charismatic personality and obviously, you know, major intellect. It was not impossible to get the better of him on things of, you know, questions of morality in this country. And a perfect example comes from February 18th, 1965.

Well, here we are in the debating hall of the Cambridge Union. Hundreds of undergraduates and myself waiting for what could prove one of the most exciting debates in the whole 150 years of the Union history. So at England's Cambridge University, students crammed into a large debate hall, filling the benches and the galleries, even sitting on the floor.

The motion that has drawn this huge crowd tonight is this, that the American dream has been achieved at the expense of the American Negro. Mr. James Baldwin, the well-known American novelist who's achieved a worldwide fame with his novel Another Country. Then opposing the motion will be Mr. William Buckley.

Two undergraduates took the podium first, arguing for and against the motion that the American Dream was achieved at the expense of black Americans. You heard them use different language there. Then it was time for James Baldwin, black writer and civil rights activist. It comes as a great shock around the age of five or six or seven to discover the flag which you have pledged allegiance along with everybody else has not pledged allegiance to you.

It comes as a great shock to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you. It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you. Baldwin spoke for 24 minutes. The harbors and the ports and the railroads of the country...

The economy, especially of the southern states, could not conceivably be what it has become if they had not had, and do not still have indeed, and for so long, for many generations, cheap labor. I am stating very seriously, and this is not an overstatement, that I picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroad under someone else's whips.

For nothing. There's James Baldwin there. He received a standing ovation. Then it was William F. Buckley's turn. Buckley later told you, Sam, that he remembered thinking, boy, tonight is a lost cause. It is impossible in my judgment to deal with the indictment of Mr. Baldwin unless one is prepared to deal with him as a white man. Unless one is prepared to say to him the fact that your skin is black is utterly irrelevant to the arguments that you raise.

The fact that you sit here as is your rhetorical debate and lay the entire weight of the Negro ordeal on your own shoulders is irrelevant to the argument that we are here to discuss. So not really discussing the argument there. Buckley issued mostly ad hominem attacks on Baldwin, and at one point he even commented on Baldwin's manner of speaking.

Many students in the room murmured disapprovingly, and Buckley tried to recover. Mr. Baldwin can write his book, The Fire Next Time, in which he threatens America. He didn't, in writing that book, speak with the British accents that he used exclusively tonight, in which he threatened America with necessity for us to jettison our entire civilization together.

The debate ballots were counted and Buckley lost to James Baldwin. The motion carried 544 to 164. Sam, that's definitely William F. Buckley on the back foot, to put it in a British term.

Baldwin was a brilliant speaker. Buckley knew how talented Baldwin was. And when they debated a second time, he called him one of the most talented writers in the world. He misread the room and he misread the moment. He misread the room because I don't think Buckley, who didn't like the British very much,

realized that England itself was going through a real soul-searching crisis because of the history of colonization and the first efforts at decolonization in that period. The moment he got wrong was that he is attacking James Baldwin at the same time the March on Selma is happening in the deep American South and uniformed state

Police officers, white officers are mercilessly beating and in one case murdered a black person who were asking only for their constitutional right to vote. Yeah.

Well, we've only got a few minutes left, Sam. I do wish sometimes that we were the kind of podcast that we could go for two or three hours, but unfortunately we're not. But I want to get back to this, what we started with. With President Trump, we have a man of the 21st century who masterfully uses what our current media landscape is like, right? Reality TV shows, social media, etc.,

Buckley, as you've written extensively, was similarly a master of, let's call it, mid-century media, starting the National Review, firing line, as we talked about.

But as I was going to as I wanted to argue for, I think conservatism has long known how to harness the media of the moment. I mean, I think back to Father Charles Coughlin back in the 1930s, Catholic priest, populist leader who viciously promoted his anti-Semitism and pro-fascist views on his radio show.

So is Buckley, instead of being more sort of an architect of modern conservatism, was he more sort of an accelerant of a trend that conservatism had already embraced for a long time? Yes, that's a really great point. What I would say is he was a modernizer and a legitimizer. With Father Coughlin, everyone understood he was a rabble rouser.

And Joseph McCarthy was a rabble rouser. Buckley never sounded like a rabble rouser, even when he appealed to the same sentiments. So in that famous campaign for mayor, what he was able to do was to stir what we now think of as Reagan Democrats or MAGA voters with language that sounded sounded thoughtful, refined and seemed to speak to the conscience.

of the electorate. And that's what was magnetic about it, also with wit and style. Now, at the same time, he's also writing a column. And then out of that mayoral campaign came, as you said, firing line. And there you had the idea of debate, of serious argument that Buckley would persuade you. He didn't always do it. He lost to James Baldwin. He lost just as famously to Gore Vidal.

another great debater and antagonist. But what Buckley was able to do, especially in a really bleak time in American history, late 1960s and early 70s, a time of political assassinations and such, was to make us all sound more civilized.

Well, in that sense, he's quite different than the Trumpism we have today. The book is Buckley, The Life and the Revolution That Changed America. Sam Tannenhaus, it's been such a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you so much. Oh, it was absolutely my pleasure, Magda. I really enjoyed it. I'm Magda Chakrabarty. This is On Point. On Point.

Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from BU Questrom School of Business. How should companies balance short-term pressures with long-term interests? In the relentless pursuit of profits in the present, are we sacrificing the future? These are questions posed at a recent panel hosted by BU Questrom School of Business. The full conversation is available on the Is Business Broken podcast. Listen on for a preview.

Just in your mind, what is short-termism? If there's a picture in the dictionary, what's the picture? I'll start with one ugly one. When I was still doing activism as global head of activism and defense, so banker defending corporations, I worked with Toshiba in Japan. And those guys had five different activists, each one of which had a very different idea of what they should do right now, like short-term.

very different perspectives. And unfortunately, under pressure from the shareholders, the company had to go through two different rounds of breaking itself up, selling itself and going for shareholder votes. I mean, that company was effectively broken because the leadership had to yield under the pressure of shareholders who couldn't even agree on

on what's needed in the short term. So to me, that is when this behavioral problem, you're under pressure and you can't think long term, becomes a real, real disaster. Tony, you didn't have a board like that. I mean, the obvious ones, I mean, you look at, there's quarterly earnings, we all know that. You have businesses that

will do everything they can to make a quarterly earning, right? And then we'll get into analysts and what causes that. I'm not even gonna go there. But there's also, there's a lot of pressure on businesses to, if you've got a portfolio of businesses, sell off an element of that portfolio. And as a manager, you say, wait, this is a really good business. Might be down this year, might be, but it's a great business.

Another one is R&D spending. You can cut your R&D spend if you want to, and you can make your numbers for a year or two, but we all know where that's going to lead a company. And you can see those decisions every day, and you can see businesses that don't make that sacrifice. And I think in the long term, they win.

Andy, I'm going to turn to you. Maybe you want to give an example of people complaining about short-termism that you think isn't. I don't really believe it exists. I mean, you know, again, I don't really even understand what it is. But what I hear is we take some stories and then we impose on them this idea that had they behaved differently, thought about the long term, they would have behaved differently. That's not really science.

Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Mehrotra Institute for Business, Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.