The Unmaking of a Mayor. William F. Buckley Jr.
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A. No.
Q. Why haven’t you availed yourself of the two-party system in New York and fought your fight with John Lindsay in the primaries?
A. Because if I had entered the Republican primary and lost to John Lindsay I’d have felt obliged to support him in the election. Party loyalty demands that sort of thing. Since I could not in good conscience have endorsed Mr. Lindsay, I could not in good conscience have accepted the implicit discipline of a Primary contest. To avoid this dilemma, I am running as a Republican but on the Conservative ticket, whose platform is wholly congruent with the Republican National Platform of 1964.
Q. If the Republican Party in New York City is oriented toward Democratic principles, then isn’t that because New York Republicans wish it to be so, and don’t New York Republicans have the right to shape the character of their own Party?
A. (1) John Lindsay got 135,000 votes in New York in 1964, having repudiated the national candidacy of Barry Goldwater. (2) Barry Goldwater, in 1964, got 800,000 votes in New York City. Granted that Lindsay ran only in a single Congressional District. But grant, also, that he won a lot of Democratic votes. If there are 800,000 people in New York City willing to vote for Barry Goldwater, you have to assume that the Republican Party, understood as a party reflecting an alternative view of government to that of the Democratic Party, isn’t dead in New York. The question, then, is whether the Republican Party should have tried, by evangelizing the Republican faith, to double that 800,000 votes, sufficient to win an election, or do as John Lindsay is doing, which is to unsex the Republican Party and flit off with the Democratic majority—which effort would ultimately convince the voters that the Republican Party, as commonly understood, offers no genuine alternative.
Q. Isn’t John Lindsay engaged in revitalizing the Republican Party?
A. No, he is engaged in devitalizing the Republican Party. A party thrives on its distinctiveness. John Lindsay’s decision, made years ago, to bestow himself upon the nation as a Republican rather than as a Democrat was clearly based on personal convenience rather than on a respect for the two-party system, let alone a respect for the Republican alternative. The two-party system, if it is meaningful, presupposes an adversary relationship between the parties. John Lindsay’s voting record, and his general political pronouncements, put him left of the center of the Democratic Party. As such he is an embarrassment to the two-party system.
Q. Does the Conservative Party’s position in New York bear on the struggle for power within the Republican National Committee?
A. It appears to me obvious that it does. Mr. Bliss, understandably hungry for any victory by anyone who, off the record, concedes a formal affiliation with the Republican Party, has shown enthusiasm for Mr. Lindsay’s campaign. That enthusiasm is not shared by an important wing of the Party, probably the dominant wing of the Party, some of whose spokesmen have directly encouraged me to run for office and thereby uphold nationally authorized Republican principles.
Q. Granted John Lindsay is running for Mayor of New York alongside a Democrat and a Liberal. He has said that the problems of New York require a fusion approach. What do you think of that?
A. It is a relief when John Lindsay rises from banality, if only to arrive at fatuity. In this case—it was on Meet the Press, I remember—he rose to the occasion. If Gracie Mansion ought to be above factionalism, why not also the White House? And anyway, fusion in behalf of what? Who can predict what would be the differences, in the life of New York, if Lindsay were to become Mayor, or Mr. Screvane, or Beame, or O’Dwyer, or Ryan? By soliciting the endorsement of the Liberal Party and the companionship of Milton Mollen, Mr. Lindsay has promised New York only a single thing: that, if elected, not the most sensitive seismograph in the country will detect the slightest interruption in the disintegration of New York City.
Q. Are you saying it makes no difference whether Lindsay or a Democrat wins in New York?
A. I am saying it makes no difference to New Yorkers at large. It makes a lot of difference to John Lindsay, and his entourage, and to Mr. Screvane, or Mr. Beame, and theirs. And it makes a lot of difference to people outside New York, both Democrats and Republicans.
Q. Oh?
A. Democrats around the country, if we are to believe Democratic dogma, believe in the two-party system. The two-party system would be damaged by the election to a very prominent position of an ambitious gentleman whose policies are left-Democratic but whose affiliation is Republican. As far as Republicans are concerned, out over the country, they may very well not care at all what kind of government New York gets. But they should care very much if a Republican running in New York, who refused to support the Republican presidential candidate, now gladly supports New York socialists and is supported by them, hoping to graduate into eminence in the national Republican Party. There was weeping and gnashing of teeth only a year ago among the Democrats when George Wallace piled up huge votes in Democratic primaries in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland. Shouldn’t Republicans also worry about interlopers?
Q. Then you believe that your primary duty is to beat Lindsay?
A. Stop putting words into my mouth. My primary ambition is to breathe a little hope into New York, for the benefit of those who want to escape some of the dilemmas group politics has imposed on us. And to breed a little fear in the political nabobs who believe they can fool all the people all the time.
Q. What does Barry Goldwater think of all this?
A. Ask him. But I can tell you what it is reasonable that he should think. It is reasonable that he should think it time that responsible elements in New York City organize to liberate New York from the one-party system.
Q. Have you heard from Senator Goldwater directly?
A. Yes.
Q. What did he say?
A. He said watch out for prying reporters.
A Preliminary Experience A Preliminary Experience
ISUPPOSE A CONTROVERSIALIST reaches the point, or goes mad, where he simply ignores criticism that is genuinely unjust. I have learned, but incompletely. Give the benefit of every doubt to the critic; but what do you do—should you do?—can you do?—when there aren’t any doubts that he is factually incorrect? The orderly stages of redress are (a) a letter to the misrepresenter; (b) a letter (where relevant) to his editor; and (c) a lawsuit. Almost immediately after my first book (about Yale) was published, circumstances forced me to meditate on the textbook recourses. In those days I felt a fierce indignation whenever I ran across what I deemed not merely unfair criticism but positively indefensible criticism—i.e., of the kind that misstated the facts, or that gratuitously advanced nonexistent motives. (I knew less than I do now about perspectives of controversy.) In the first category I remember an exchange in the Atlantic with McGeorge Bundy, who flatly misstated (no doubt innocently) a set of facts integral to my analysis concerning which it happened that I was, very simply, correct. We slugged out an exchange in the Atlantic, from which I came to know, for the first time, how horribly inconclusive such exchanges are and learned something about the necessity of being fatalistic (some would say cynical)11 about the chances of historical justification. For one thing, one is not history, and history doesn’t care very much about one. For another, history is highly tendentious. For another, it is simply more than one can as a practical matter hope to do, to retain the interest, or to capture the attention, of the truth-minded concerning the rectification of factual inaccuracies which do not bear on the movements of the sun or the planets. I was greatly intrigued, when I first saw Simone Weil’s essay The Need for Roots, by her fervent, ingenuous statement that the service of the truth is everything—so much so, she said, that she would support