The Unmaking of a Mayor. William F. Buckley Jr.
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high-decibel, low-information event, and I had no ready answer when Bill asked me later, “Remind me why we did that, would you?”
On another occasion, Bill and I found ourselves the only whites in a large room packed with angry black voters. They were angered by what they perceived to be Bill’s unthinking support for a racist police force, the NYPD. Needless to say, the game was on.
Back and forth they went. Bill and his audience talked about crime. Black crime. Black-on-white crime. Black-on-black crime. And they talked about leadership. Community leadership and moral leadership. It was a long, hot ninety minutes, and Bill sweated through his preppy, blue button-down, the stains spreading down his flanks. Discount this judgment for sycophancy if you like, but he was magnificent. By the end of the meeting, something had changed.
There remained not a single person in that room who thought Bill’s views on race and crime were unthinking. He was deeply informed and maintained an intellectual clarity throughout the raucous colloquy. His audience listened to him, and they gave him their respect, if not their support.
For his part, Bill became a changed candidate. As a polemicist for a little magazine, he had been poking Liberal shibboleths through the bars of a cage. As a candidate on the big stage, he was poking those shibboleths from inside the cage. There was no place to hide now. He was fighting for his public life.
There were two other changes that day. The first occurred within and around our security detail. Now, I can’t say with any confidence whether it happened that day or a month earlier or a month later, but I can say with absolute certainty that in the summer of 1965 the NYPD fell in love with Bill Buckley. I don’t mean just the Irish and Italians, either, but the black, Hispanic, and Asian cops, too. Bill was stating their case with eloquence and verve and doing so at a time when few other public figures would stand with them. (Not unlike today, in 1965 there were reputable people and reputable publications that claimed to believe that one of the principal causes of urban crime was police misconduct. Not unlike today, those claims were evidence-free and ideologically powered.)
The cops’ support for Buckley for Mayor, which soon spread to the firemen, and to some of the building trades, had two effects, one long term and the other proximate. To my eye, which is by now experienced if still unscholarly, the long-term effect of the NYPD-WFB alliance ran in an almost unbroken psephological line through the blue-collar support for Johnson and Nixon during the Vietnam War, thence to the Reagan Democrats of the early eighties and, ultimately, to the “values voters” of today—the people who vote not with their class or race or gender but with their patriotic hearts. A significant development, that.
The proximate effect of NYPD support seemed more important. As some of you will remember about the sixties, and the rest of you will have read, the public square could be a dangerous place. Political figures who stirred dissent beyond the edge of consensus could, and not infrequently did, excite gunfire. John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, George Wallace, Robert Kennedy, and others less well known were all gunned down at or near public events. Bang, you’re down.
When Bill Buckley died peacefully at his Connecticut home in 2008, the news of his passing was met by an outpouring of admiration and unfeigned affection. By that time, manifestly, he had become America’s favorite Conservative, beloved by his many followers and respected by his few public foes. Times change, happily. When he ran for mayor in 1965, Bill was not yet Mr. Nice Guy. He was, rather, a right-wing insurgent marching against the citadel of self-satisfied liberalism . . . and the denizens of the citadel were not amused. To put the matter carefully, Bill was a controversial figure.
(There is an apostrophic point that must be made here. It should be remembered that Bill Buckley was conservative long before conservatism was cool. In 1965, he was not seen to be the charming, white-shoe Yalie that retrospective analyses have portrayed. He was, in the contemporaneous view, a black-shoe cop-lover, fronting for dark forces that the elite media professed to fear: he was the “tip of the spear” of a reactionary Right. So let us pause here to salute those who joined our cause in the early days, when the historical outcome could not be known and the risk to professional reputation was palpable. Let us pause to salute Jim Buckley, who played flawlessly the role he was born to play—older and wiser brother of the candidate—and Don Pemberton (our indispensable man in Brooklyn) and Art Andersen (who kept our books almost balanced) and Aggie Schmidt (Bill’s tireless amanuensis) and Phil Nicolaides and Geoff Kelly (our ad-making Mad Men) and Kieran O’Doherty (the Conservative Party stalwart who worked himself to the very cliff of cardiac incident) and Marvin Liebman (who produced our rallies and carbonated our staff meetings) and the sturdiest warrior of them all, William Rusher (he of the Princeton and Harvard pedigree who gave his aging mother palpitations by departing a Wall Street law firm for a little magazine with only a tenuous grip on respectability). These were the winter soldiers of our revolution. Times change, happily. Only a few years later, by which time Bill had become the toast of the town and his wife, Pat, began to adorn the Best Dressed lists, it had become de rigueur to embrace the advice Nixon had famously abjured and do the easy and popular thing, which was to make your way briskly into the fabulous social circle of Bill and Pat Buckley.)
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise for us to review the thickening file of threats made against Bill. It shouldn’t have, but it did, anyway. The reports were hair-curling. The stone canyons of New York City seemed to be crawling with bloody-minded crazies, many of them on a mission from one higher power or another. (I note for the record that I was more rattled by these reports than was our imperturbable candidate. To borrow Ben Bradlee’s description of one of his notably intrepid reporters, Bill clanked when he walked.)
What lifted our spirits (and lowered staff blood pressure) was a follow-on briefing by an emissary from the NYPD. The cops were all in, thoroughly prepared to take fast, discrete, professional action in whatever contingencies might arise. Nobody was likely to mess with a single hair on the head of their man Buckley. File closed. As was his habit, the best summary line came from Bill Rusher, who sat in on one of the threat meetings. Said Rusher of the crazies, “I’m beginning to feel sorry for these poor bastards.” By Labor Day, everything was copacetic. We had come to feel that the safest place in all of New York City, safer even than Grand Central Station at straight-up noon, was to be standing next to Bill Buckley at a campaign event.
There was another change. It took place, asymptotically as Bill might have described it, among our regular press corps, some of whose members were grumpy about their assignments to our campaign. (Campaign coverage in those days was assumed to be a ticket to a regular gig at City Hall, with the winning candidate pulling in his own beat reporters. There may have been a conflict of interest in there somewhere.)
Early on, the press was of one mind, with their impressions of the principal candidates frozen in presupposition. John Lindsay? He was tall (agreed), he was liberal (do tell), he was mahvelous (until he opened his mouth), and he was destined to win (yeah, probably). Abe Beame? He was a colorless bureaucrat and a machine Democrat (no argument there). Short in stature and shorter still on charisma (nor there), he had a fighting chance, at least if the unions got in gear (conceivably, I supposed). Bill Buckley? He was a Creature from the Hard Right Lagoon, his chances pegged between slim and none and doubtless closer to the latter (WFB concurring, alas). Presuppositions are a durable barrier against improved understanding. They died hard.
But while our regular press gaggle may have come for the gotcha patrol—that cold-stare vigil for the verbal slips that could be inflated into categorical slurs against women, gays, blacks, Jews, Latinos, Asians, fat people, short people, or variously challenged people, not to mention commonsense-impaired people—they stayed for the bons mots that Bill sprinkled around promiscuously, as if they were bead necklaces tossed from a Mardi Gras float. Bill was good copy. And it didn’t hurt that he was running against Beame, five feet five inches of banality, and Lindsay, six feet three inches of vapidity. (Beame and Lindsay seemed to be quotable only when quoting Bill, usually in high, theatrical dudgeon.) The press couldn’t help themselves. They liked Bill. Some of them even became his pals. (It was during the campaign that Bill became lifelong friends with the great Murray Kempton, who, while he wrote for a down-market lefty rag, seemed to reserve