The Unmaking of a Mayor. William F. Buckley Jr.
Читать онлайн книгу.
the heads of his proletarian readership.)
There was something else. The press noted and was impressed by Bill’s courage. His courage, that is, in both its physical and moral forms. It was Bill and only Bill who waded into those last-man-standing bouts in halls stuffed with red-faced citizens. While Beame and Lindsay were surrounded by platoons of handlers, who busied themselves clearing voter-free paths for the great men, Bill was lucky if he had me and an off-duty cop in tow. The press noticed.
Again, I can’t tell you which hour of which day it happened, but the press narrative began—finally—to shift. At first a few reporters, and then more, and then at last the full mewling herd began to concede that maybe, just maybe, Bill’s was a serious campaign. One reporter, the legendary McCandlish Phillips of The New York Times, began to toy with another idea. Perhaps Bill’s was the only serious campaign.
Then there was that meeting at the Times, the one behind the Berlin Wall. This was 1965, remember, in a land far away. The Times may have been only one of seven New York daily newspapers (not counting the Wall Street Journal, which was considered a trade publication in those days), but its stature was belied by the blandly taxonomic term primus inter pares. The Times didn’t just open and close Broadway shows and puff up and snuff out political aspirants. It set the agenda for municipal discussion—and then coined the vocabulary in which it would be conducted. In terms of mass mind control, there is nothing in contemporary culture with which to compare the dominance of the sixties-era New York Times.
When Bill Buckley strode into that editorial board meeting, he found himself surrounded not just by the editorial writers who would craft the paper’s endorsement and the executives who would put their chops on it but also by reporters and editors from the principal beats—transportation, education, housing, health care, and the rest. Bill was surrounded, if you will, by contemporary liberalism’s A-Team. The next two hours would prove to be a real education. For them.
This is unsubstantiated surmise on my part, but that meeting may have been the first time in their lives that most of the Times-men had faced an articulate and informed Conservative in close encounter.
In support of that surmise, I offer only this shred of evidence. In 1965, the platform of choice for opinionmongers was neither a cable-news slot nor a radio talk show. It was the syndicated newspaper column. In the mid-sixties, there were hundreds of nationally syndicated features, three of which—three!—that could be fairly described as conservative. There was David Lawrence, the grand old man of US News & World Report, who was by that stage of his career more old than grand. There was James Jackson Kilpatrick, the clarion voice of southern traditionalism. And there was William F. Buckley, Jr., the leader of an emerging national conservatism. Bill Buckley was the new-new thing.
Bill did not, of course, win the endorsement of The New York Times. But he won the argument. And everybody in the room knew it.
I am still contacted from time to time by people who have stumbled upon, and then become fascinated by, the Buckley campaign of 1965. Historians, political scientists, city planners, journos, pols. They sense that something special happened, something heuristic. One conversation with an eager-beaver thesis writer, according to my notes, went this way:
EBTW: Mr. Freeman, can you confirm that the Buckley campaign issued twenty-two policy proposals?
NBF: No, I can’t confirm that, but it sounds ballparkish.
EBTW: Can you confirm that twenty of those proposals were subsequently adopted by New York mayors—many by Giuliani, some by Koch, and the remaining few by Bloomberg?
NBF: No, but you may well be correct.
EBTW: You don’t sound surprised.
NBF: No, not at all.
Well, that’s the essence of our story, isn’t it? Why were we not surprised by the serial successes of the Buckley campaign? We were not surprised, I would submit, because we recognized that what Bill Buckley was preaching in 1965, and what he would practice for the rest of his life, was the politics of reality: the certain knowledge that, over the course of time and under the weight of experience, ideological abstraction will yield ultimately to either the obdurate facts of public finance or the timeless imperatives of the human spirit. One or the other. What Bill Buckley taught us was that there is not only a conservative way to raise the young and care for the old. There is a conservative way to collect the garbage and shovel the snow.
It’s been fifty years now since Bill Buckley demanded a recount. Perhaps we owe him one. So let’s pop the big one—who really won that race back in 1965? The best answer to that question may be another question. Is anybody publishing an anniversary collection of the speeches and papers of John Lindsay or Abe Beame? Anybody? Anybody?
Shortly after Election Day, Bill invited me to a postprandial meeting at the New York Yacht Club. Something was up. Bill held all of his important meetings off-site, as the walls of NR’s warren-office had ears, and the interruptions were incessant.
I had picked up a rumor that Bill would be moving to Switzerland to take on what we had long referred to as the Big Book. For several years past, Bill had been urged by both mentors (Willmoore Kendall and others) and protégés (me and others) to write a serious work of political philosophy, a Big Book that would make Bill’s bones as a heavyweight intellectual. Journalism was fine, we thought, but scholarship was better: a Big Book was exactly what was needed to undergird Bill’s burgeoning career as he reached age 40. We even had a title teed up, The Revolt Against the Masses, with the book intended as a rebuttal-cum-extension to Ortega y Gasset’s classic work The Revolt of the Masses. I was intrigued. Perhaps what I needed as a restorative was a bit of head-clearing, long-form work.
Bill and I had a drink and began to swap campaign stories, at one point laughing so hard that a Club employee was dispatched to restore house decorum. Good luck with that. It was a time for laughing.
As a second drink arrived, Bill turned to business. He reported with enthusiasm that a publisher had offered a handsome advance for a book on the campaign. Bill wanted to do it, both to inscribe the record indelibly and, I suspected, to relitigate some of the campaign spats. He said that I would be “indispensable” to the project and outlined a generous financial arrangement, ski passes very much included.
I don’t know if my heart sank, but my shoulders sagged. The last thing I wanted to do was to wallow in campaign minutiae for another four or five months. I had raccoon eyes and needed to get my teeth fixed and get my license renewed and begin the citywide search for the dry cleaner who was holding my clothes in some undisclosed location. If Bill had offered me the seventy virgins of martyrdom, I would have countered at thirty-five. I needed a break.
I loved Bill, and I hated saying no to him, but this was a mission for which I could find no motivation. So after two years of dawn-to-dinner collaboration, we agreed to go our separate ways, he to do the campaign book and I to develop a television project. The meeting did not end well.
But the story did, almost serendipitously so. While he may have set off to write a quickie campaign book, what Bill came back with was The Unmaking of a Mayor. Here we are a half century later and people who would understand American urbanology or the history of New York City or the beginnings of the modern Conservative movement still feel obliged to read and ponder and come to terms with it. Over the course of his hyperproductive career, Bill wrote fifty-four books—all of them readable, many of them consequential, one of them a classic. Unmaking became, quite inadvertently, Bill’s Big Book and cemented his reputation as a public intellectual of the first rank.
The television project worked out, too. The series debuted in the spring of 1966 as Firing Line, hosted by William F. Buckley, Jr., and it ran for more than thirty years.
NEAL B.FREEMAN
Amelia Island, Florida
April 2015
Postscript
In my personal calculation,