The Unmaking of a Mayor. William F. Buckley Jr.
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OUR TEXT TODAY is a pair of classic Buckley quips from the great 1965 vintage. People who remember nothing else about William F. Buckley, Jr.’s, brief foray into elective politics recall his reply when asked what he would do if elected Mayor of New York. He would “demand a recount.” And they remember, as well, his response when asked how he felt as he emerged from a meeting with the editorial board of The New York Times. He felt as if he had “just passed through the Berlin Wall.”
Somewhere in my attic is a photograph of Bill’s introductory press conference. He is grinning wolfishly, and I am wincing in pain. He has just been asked what he would do as his first act of office, and we both know what’s coming next. He had come up with the “recount” crack a few weeks earlier, and I had urged him not to use it in public. It was a Buckley-grade witticism, to be sure, but it was not likely to be good for unit morale. But Bill was a writer and not a politician, which is to say that he was constitutionally incapable of letting a great line go unused. He thus proceeded to roll it across the pressroom with perfect timing and to predictable effect. Merriment bounced off all four walls.
As we all have come to learn, painfully or otherwise, japes have consequences. Before even the first news cycle had expired, a press narrative had begun to take shape: namely, that Bill’s campaign was something of a lark, some elaborate form of self-entertainment. In the dismissive parlance of the day, Bill’s was “not a serious campaign,” whatever that might be. Our fundraising receipts, never torrential, slowed to a dribble and the volunteer effort flagged. The Buckley for Mayor campaign was off and limping.
What turned it around, I would like to report, was the incandescent performance of our candidate; ingenious stratagems devised by management; and a flawless, five-borough ground game executed by our vaunted field operation. It would be more accurate to say, however, that what turned the campaign around was a scheduling quirk.
In the early days, before we had learned a thing or two about crowd management, we felt free to expose Bill to large groups of self-selected citizens. Most of these exchanges were high-minded, even civic-virtuous in tone. But when an ideological match touched dry tinder, a raging rhetorical fire could break out. One meeting with