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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
In September 1946, when William F. Buckley Jr., 20 years old and freshly discharged from the U.S. Army, arrived in New Haven, he entered a university undergoing a profound transformation. Owing to the G.I. Bill, the Class of 1950 was by far the largest in Yale history, its 1,800 members more than double the prewar average. The Old Campus, built to accommodate 850 people, now held 1,200. Others bunked as far away as Allingtown, three miles from New Haven. Vestiges of wartime “processing” remained. Buckley and his classmates stood for hours on registration lines and began the term eating meatless meals because of job actions by strikers and meatpackers and delays from the Office of Price Administration in Washington. These were inconveniences, not hardships. Most members of the Class of 1950 had put up with a great deal more. Two-thirds were veterans; hundreds had seen action in Europe or the Pacific. “They were men,” recalled Raymond Price Jr. '51, the future presidential speechwriter who came to Yale in 1947, at age 17, and observed the vets with awe. “They were serious. They had a purpose.” None more so than Buckley. “He was the most impressive figure, most visible figure in [our] class,” remembered the almost equally driven Tom Guinzburg '50, one of Buckley's closest college friends—his co-editor on the Daily News, fellow Bonesman, later his occasional book publisher. “There were some very strong and visible, successful undergraduates. But Bill was someone to be reckoned with immediately. He was taking initiatives as soon as he got to Yale. He arrived in full stride.” Or full sprint. Others had ambitions. Buckley came with a mission: to advance the conservative ideology he had grown up with and taken with him to boarding school in Millbrook, New York, and then to the army. On the surface, Yale was not in need of conservative indoctrination. Fully 50 percent of its undergraduates identified themselves as Republicans in a campus poll published in Buckley's sophomore year, as opposed to 17 percent Democrats and 3 percent Socialists. But to Buckley, majority views, expressed passively in a poll, mattered less than the tenor of ideological debate, and there liberals and even the few campus leftists seemed to hold the advantage. “The so-called conservative, uncomfortably disdainful of controversy, seldom has the energy to fight his battles, while the radical, so often a member of the minority, exerts disproportionate influence because of his dedication to his cause,” he would observe in God and Man at Yale, the book that stands today as the founding text of the modern conservative movement. It was a movement whose contradictory impulses (libertarian yet authoritarian, populist yet elitist) reflected Buckley’s own, for he was himself a kind of radical, in his own way at war with Yale’s most hallowed conventions. Outwardly he exhibited many familiar attributes of Old Blue: the family fortune supported by Wall Street; the Yale-educated kin (three of his brothers); the country estate (Great Elm, forty-seven rolling acres in the Berkshire foothills, with stables, tennis courts, and a swimming pool). But Buckley’s Irish and Swiss roots, his Catholicism, his family’s new money, his diploma from an upstart Dutchess County prep school placed him firmly outside Yale’s inner circle of upper-class, high-Protestant privilege. Publicly, Buckley defended the institution’s “right” to practice discrimination in admissions (by unwritten policy, Catholics and Jews were limited alike to 13 percent of each incoming class) and in its social clubs. But privately he combated prejudice. When Guinzburg was passed over by the Fence Club “because they didn’t like the sound of my name”—that is, because Guinzburg was Jewish —Buckley pressured the club to change its rules. “There were guys in the Fence Club who never ate a meal in the dining hall their entire undergraduate lives,” Guinzburg remembered. “They had allowances, trust funds.” They lived just as their fathers, also Yalies, had done 20 and 30 years before. But not Buckley. Like so many others, he coveted social success and diligently pursued campus prizes: chairmanship of the News, admittance to Bones. (He won the place of honor in his year, as the last man tapped.) But he did so in the belief that he represented something new at Yale, an emerging meritocracy. While branded a “black reactionary,” opposed to liberalism in all its forms, he was most intent on battling “liberal orthodoxy,” the presumption that liberal ideas were inherently superior to conservative ones and liberal attitudes intrinsically virtuous. There are undertones of Everyman protest in Buckley’s unmasking, in God and Man at Yale, of “one of the most extraordinary incongruities of our time: the institution that derives its moral and financial support from Christian individualists and then addresses itself to the task of persuading the sons of those supporters to be atheistic socialists.” During the 1948 presidential race Yale, like other campuses, had an active contingent of students drawn to the third-party candidacy of Henry A. Wallace, who was mounting an insurgent campaign that pressed for conciliation with the Soviet Union. The complication was that Wallace’s movement drew heavily on remnants of the Communist Party USA. What might this say about the handful of Wallace supporters at Yale? One answer came when a conservative professor, the political scientist Willmoore Kendall, accused a law student, in a radio debate, of effectively supporting the Soviet Union through his enthusiasm for Wallace. Kendall had been forced to retract his remarks under threat of a slander suit. “It is tragic to witness an attempt to humiliate a universally respected scholar by the use of legalistic chicanery on the part of individuals who know just when to get righteous,” Buckley wrote in the News, in defense of Kendall. Sounding like a civil libertarian, Buckley warned “that in the future all political discussions must be carried out in courts of law.” Consumed with the Wallace candidacy, Buckley and his debate partner (and eventual brother-in-law), L. Brent Bozell Jr. '50, '53LLB, assembled a dossier on the national election committee and published a lengthy expose in the News under Bozell’s byline, including a list of prominent Wallace-ites with Communist associations. Not that Wallace stood any chance of becoming president. Four days before the election, Buckley and another News editor discussed the elections on “Connecticut Forum of the Air,” both predicting victory for the odds-on favorite, Thomas Dewey. The next evening Buckley, Bozell, and a third member of the Yale team, Arthur Hadley '49, thrashed a trio of Harvard debaters who affirmed a resolution endorsing Harry Truman. A News poll of 400 students, published on election eve, gave Dewey a massive victory: 63 percent, to Truman’s 21. Wallace got 1 percent. Buckley listened to the election returns by radio at the Fence Club and then went over to the Yale Law School, which had a television. He watched as the late rural returns came, lifting Truman over the top, the greatest election surprise of the twentieth century. The next day he fidgeted as his economics professor, Charles Lindblom, held forth on the marvels of democracy. “After half an hour I got up and left,” Buckley later said. His disillusionment assumed phantasmagoric shape in the only short story he wrote at Yale, an assignment in his Daily Themes class. “The People vs. Edgar deMilne" imagines the despair of a paragon of the Old Right, an elderly industrialist (almost identical in age to Buckley’s ultra-conservative father), whose grief for his dead wife is fused inchoately with his hatred of Franklin D. Roosevelt, “the Dutchess County blueblood who always talked about the Common Man but never interested himself in anything but the vote.” DeMilne stays up through the night, listening to the returns and drinking hard, first exulting and then filled with fury. At four in the morning he drains his last half glass of Scotch and collapses—slain, quite literally, by Truman’s victory. Buckley later said he intended no irony in his portrait of deMilne. Yet the old man is plainly a relic, with his archaic stiff collar and stilted speech, his brusque handling of his servants, his intemperate outbursts at the Union League Club. He is, ultimately, Buckley’s projection of his own possible fate: the defiant champion of rearguard actions, locked in minority positions, besting his opponents in formal debate or in the pages of the News, but doomed to larger defeats. The story’s unacknowledged source text is Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “Miniver Cheevy,” whose deluded hero pines for the era of chivalry and regrets that he was born too late: “Miniver coughed, and called it fate, / And kept on drinking.” Later, when Buckley needed a Skull and Bones nickname, he chose “Cheevy.” His next casus belli was the accusation, published in the Harvard Crimson in June 1949, that Yale administrators were secretly purging the faculty of suspected Communists, with as many as eight FBI agents paying daily calls on provost Edgar Furniss to deliver reports on suspect faculty. Stung by the charges, President Charles Seymour '08 assured Yale alumni that the university would “permit no hysterical witch hunt,” nor “impose an oath of loyalty upon our faculty.” But the rumors persisted, and when classes resumed in September, administrators quietly encouraged Buckley to challenge the Crimson’s reports in the pages of the News. Typically, Buckley went further, arranging for the Bureau’s assistant director, Louis B. Nichols, to appear at Yale for questioning by student and faculty “interrogators.” Held in the Law School auditorium, the event drew a standing-room-only audience. Buckley, in the role of moderator, directed questions to the genial and avuncular Nichols, who assured the audience the FBI was mindful of civil liberties. But when an audience member challenged Nichols to explain why law professor Thomas Emerson '28, '31LLB, an outspoken critic of the House Committee on Un-American Activities and an active Wallace supporter in 1948, had been dropped from the panel, Buckley swiftly intervened. “I’ll never forget this,” one audience member remembered half a century later: “Bill said, 'The decision about inviting participants was made by the Yale Daily News, not the FBI.' Those were his exact words or pretty close. He was so superior, so commanding. It was all we talked about afterward. He was an impresario. We never saw anything like it.” Thus the recollection of an 18-year-old law student, Robert B. Silvers '51, who later helped found The New York Review of Books. The administration was delighted with the event. “My heart is so full of thanks and appreciation … for the splendid way in which your Board has met the challenge of the Harvard Crimson blast,” wrote Harry B. Fisher, Yale’s liaison to the FBI. It would be many years before Buckley discovered that almost every allegation in the Crimson articles was true, and that the FBI had opened a file on Buckley himself. These were some of the costs of political zeal. There were others as well. When the members of the 1950 News board convened to choose officers, Buckley feared he might be denied the chairmanship. “If I’m not elected,” his sister Patricia (Tish) remembered her brother saying, “It will be a personal insult because I’m obviously qualified.” In the end Buckley was elected unanimously, to his relief and surprise. Jubilant, he phoned Tish at Vassar. “I’m in! Come up!” -- for the traditional celebration at the Hadden building. “I found a way there,” Tish recalled much later. “He was so happy. He was on the floor, drinking so much beer and strumming the guitar, singing out of tune.” The beer was an afterthought. Beforehand the new board members had chugged martinis by the pitcherful at Mory’s. It was not only the prestige of the News chairmanship that Buckley craved. It was the platform it afforded, the editorial he wrote each day, the keys of his portable Royal clacking furiously as he sent forth a fresh shaft into the center of Yale’s soft liberal heart. “Everyone read them, and everyone had a strong reaction,” the 1950 Yale Banner would note of Buckley’s provocations. “Some will always think of Bill as an arrogant, reactionary bigot. Others will always admire his courage, integrity, and sincerity.” You could draw either conclusion from his frontal assault on sociologist Raymond Kennedy '28, a very popular teacher whose course Buckley had taken as a freshman. An ardent supporter of civil rights, Kennedy had stirred the campus in 1947 with a public lecture, “Race Relations: Colonial and American,” that condemned colonialism and white supremacy. But to Buckley he was a corrupter of youth whose indisputable “brilliance of oratory,” along with his “bawdy and slapstick humor” had the ill-disguised purpose of making “a cult of anti-religion.” Kennedy’s mocking accounts of his skirmishes with religious zealots were “funny, without a doubt,” Buckley granted. And Kennedy of course was entitled to his atheism. “The question,” Buckley asked, “is whether this sort of business, blatantly unintellectual, biased, and unobjective, in some cases harmful, is proper business for a University lecturer.” In a follow-up editorial Buckley compared Kennedy’s influence over unformed student minds to the hypnotic spell “Nazi oratory” had cast over naïve Germans, though of course Buckley rejected any “comparison between Mr. Kennedy and a Nazi.” There was immediate protest—from faculty, students, even from Buckley’s News colleagues, who called an emergency meeting. Buckley considered resigning but instead agreed to publish a note explaining that the Kennedy editorials, like all the others, “represent ultimately the view of one man. The responsibility is the Chairman's.” But Buckley wasn’t entirely alone in his views. Private letters of support came from several faculty, not to mention from grateful clergy. And Buckley’s first Kennedy editorial, “For a Fair Approach” was reprinted in The Catholic World. One month into his chairmanship, Buckley had found the theme, the unacknowledged biases of liberal orthodoxy, that would inform God and Man at Yale, as well as conservative ideology for half a century to come. Buckley's extracurricular hyperactivity was possible because he accomplished so much with mystifying ease. Some News colleagues put in ten hours a day at the paper—“gave up our education,” as Guinzburg, the managing editor, later said. But Buckley was often on the premises no more than three hours a day and seldom more than five, and this included the time he spent writing his daily editorials. More remarkable still, he succeeded in the classroom. Classmates I interviewed half a century later were dumbfounded to learn that his four-year average in those pre-grade-inflation years was 85. His abilities were apparent from the start. While many freshmen spent long nights in Sterling Library, struggling to adjust to the demands of the Yale curriculum, Buckley coasted until exam time and then, drawing on his bottomless reserves of disciplined energy, sped to the tape: 90 in English (close reading of prose and poetry); 90 in Classical Civilization (the Greeks in translation); 85 in Sociology (study of comparative cultures), and a prodigious 96 in fourth-year Spanish. This last wasn’t surprising. He'd learned Spanish in childhood, from Mexican house servants. His command of the language was so great that, owing to the faculty shortage amid the massive influx of veterans, Buckley was hired as an instructor in Yale’s Spanish department—a salaried position he held during his entire time on campus. None of this meant he was a natural scholar. On the contrary, Buckley was a painfully slow reader, who found even routine assignments hard to complete and compensated by listening closely to lectures and taking careful notes (helped by his mastery of speed-writing). In some classes, he got by on wit rather than learning. In his “preface” to a three-part paper on “various aspects of Christianity,” Buckley warned his philosophy professor, Paul Weiss, that he was “vastly unread” in the subjects under consideration and would “strive to make no references whatsoever to other works or thoughts of other men.” After fumbling for 34 pages through free will, teleological design, and good and evil, among other immensities, Buckley at last conceded he had no idea what he was talking about: “I yearn to understand, to make intelligible the great confusion of our world and to accommodate every phenomenon into the God-created, God-supervised world which I have been taught to believe in and which, after reflection and torment, I choose to continue to believe in.” Just what he meant by “torment” he did not say, though it did not send him to Aquinas, Hume, Kant, or any of the other giants who had illuminated the very subjects of his essay. It scarcely mattered. The lucid force of his prose, duly noted by Weiss, compensated for the unexamined ideas. In his early 20s Buckley was on the verge of a mature literary style. He was later to master the art of polemical argument, wielding a show-off’s vocabulary larded with borrowings from logic and rhetoric -- “maieutic,” “sylleptic,” “soritical,” “enthymeme,” “apodictic.” As a student, his success rested more firmly on a gift for well-paced idiomatic prose with a pleasingly light touch. “My first product was, it seems, a flop,” he wrote in another of his “prefaces,” this one to a paper on Thomas Macaulay written for Lewis Perry Curtis’s English History course. “Mr. Curtis, I grieve to admit, knows more about Macaulay than I do, which is to say, at this writing, that Mr. Curtis, Macaulay’s Mother, and I know him best. … Perhaps by narrowing my scope, I can narrow the scope of my critics.” In other words, he hadn’t read past Chapter Ten of Macaulay’s History of England. In January 1950, Buckley’s News editorship came to an end, though its legend endured for many years. In 1966, when Garry Wills '61PhD was writing a profile of Buckley for Esquire, he asked Francis Donahue, the man Friday who since 1922 had groomed a succession of News chairmen, if Buckley had been the best of the lot. “Were there others?” the tart-tongued Donahue replied. “Well, if I had to choose, I would rank the first three: Bill, then Potter Stewart, then Sargent Shriver.” He added, “That doesn’t matter -- being best chairman. More important, if I had my choice of all men—including the Pope—and could pick just one to be my brother, I’d take Bill. I never worked with a more considerate or fairer man. He would cut anything out of the News to make room for arguments against him.” Buckley had one last assignment, organizing the News's annual banquet. The guest of honor was to be President Seymour, who had announced his retirement the previous spring. Buckley, with his instinct for political drama, lured a glittering roster of university presidents who all promised to speak: James Conant of Harvard, Harold Dodds of Princeton, James Killian of MIT, Dwight Eisenhower of Columbia, and Harold Stassen of the University of Pennsylvania. The last two were potential candidates for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination. Their presence attracted reporters from the national press, including the New York Times and Life magazine. Speaking after these eminences, Buckley made the evening’s boldest statement. He attacked Yale for betraying its conservative tradition, pointedly directing his comments at the six university presidents in the room. “In the name of freedom of inquiry, American colleges, more interested in topical interpretations of liberalism than in affirming the truths to which they pay lip service, hire renowned scholars who proceed to devote their time to advancing their own theories about Christianity, which at best they epitomize as sociologically useful, at worst as superstition and fraud.” But if Christianity was fraudulent, then “so is our civilization. So are our standards. So are our morals which become nothing more than useful adjustments to an exacting environment, valueless except insofar as adherence to them may better our positions in this world, which is itself the end of our experience.” “I don’t see eye to eye with you on some pretty important matters, specifically your anti-democratic authoritarianism,” Theodore Greene, the master of Silliman College and a self-described liberal Protestant, wrote Buckley the next morning. “But I do want to tell you that you did a superb job last night. You managed to state your convictions, on an occasion that must have seemed to many of your listeners very inappropriate for such a pronouncement, with great directness, sincerity, and humility.” Thus encouraged, Buckley decided to make his case even more strongly two weeks hence at the annual Alumni Day celebration, an event that this year would include the dedication of memorial tablets in Woolsey Hall to Yale men killed in World War II. Two of the speakers were Edward Greene Jr. '24S, chairman of the Alumni Fund, and Stuart Symington '23, secretary of the Air Force. For the third, Seymour selected Buckley. It might have seemed a curious choice, given Buckley’s history of provocative utterances. But “he was an excellent speaker,” Seymour later explained, “and although he had been critical of Yale and other institutions his attitude seemed to spring from an idealistic urge.” Two days before the ceremony, Buckley handed a draft of his remarks to the director of the University News Bureau, who asked, “What are you saying in it? Nothing, I hope.” In fact, Buckley had chosen this occasion to make his most direct assault yet on “the University where extremes of thought are presented.” Up till now, his criticisms had been confined to generalities —to the overall climate of education at Yale. But this time he was directly accusatory, drawing perhaps on the example of a new political sensation, Senator Joseph McCarthy, who two weeks before had alleged that the U.S. State Department had been massively penetrated by Communists. Buckley, too, now seemed intent on naming names. He sharpened his critique into barbs aimed at specific instructors: the historian Ralph E. Turner, “a professional anti-Christian,” and Charles Lindblom, “who urges modified socialism upon his students.” Seymour was alarmed. Buckley’s text, an all-out “indictment of the administration,” would give alumni the false impression that Yale was “communistic.” Buckley offered to change a few paragraphs but not the substance. He also offered not to speak at all—even, he recalled later, to write a speech of the “‘good old Yale’ variety.” No, he was told. Yale had singled him out; it was an honor and would not be revoked. Buckley sent a note to Seymour, justifying his remarks, and was invited to the president’s office. Seymour told him he now accepted Buckley’s offer to withdraw. He could, if he wished, speak on another theme. But his attack on Yale was inappropriate to the memorial service for “our Yale dead.” Buckley declined, but warned the administration he wasn’t done: “I shall naturally continue to agitate for reform along the lines I mentioned; it is the only course open to a person who sincerely believes adoption of his views stands to benefit Yale.” Buckley savored the final months of college—the last meals at Davenport and the Normandy café, the last Sundays and Thursdays at Bones, the last ideological skirmishes in the News, where he appeared as a kind of emeritus agitator. Communists were not a dangerous presence at Yale, he conceded in a letter. Liberals “pose a far graver threat.” As graduation neared, he applied to Yale’s law school and its graduate department of government for the MA program. He might be Yale’s most insistent student critic, but no one could accuse him of disloyalty. And Yale was loyal in turn. Buckley was accepted to both schools. (His scores on the Law School Admissions Test and Graduate Record Exam were unexceptional: LSAT, 567; GRE, 580 verbal, 490 quantitative, 590 government. Many years later, when the battle over racial preferences in college admissions raged, Buckley would not be among those conservatives who placed their faith in standardized testing.) Buckley said no to government, yes to law, but was enthusiastic for neither. He had another idea altogether, brewing since the Alumni Day dispute: to write a book about Yale and contemporary liberal education. In September, Buckley and his bride, Patricia Austin Taylor (whom he had married in July in Vancouver) rented a house in Hamden, near Yale, where Buckley had a one-year appointment teaching introductory Spanish for $120 a week. Routine work of the kind he'd been doing for four years, it left him free in the afternoons and evenings to work on his first book. The idea, simple enough, was to expand the argument he'd been making in various forums since his junior year but had been kept from making on Alumni Day: Yale had abdicated its historic purpose of transmitting Christian values and discarded the principles of economic “individualism.” By mid-January he'd completed enough of the manuscript to show it to Willmoore Kendall, who covered the pages in green ink, honing its assertions, polishing its sentences, and deftly shaping what would become the book’s most celebrated formulation. “I myself believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.” But the strength of the book, the author’s instinct for controversy, came wholly from himself. On its face his subject seemed fatally narrow. Who outside the rarefied world of pedagogy really cared what opinions Yale professors held or what textbooks they assigned? Yet Buckley translated this dry stuff into an exciting polemic, a kind of breathless news report whose true topic was a revolution that had occurred at the Olympian reaches of American society. Buckley’s critique of Yale showed how the political program of the last generation, the New Deal and its aftermath, had been enshrined as intellectual and cultural dogma. “Sonorous pretensions notwithstanding, Yale (and my guess is most other colleges and universities) does subscribe to an orthodoxy,” Buckley wrote. “There are limits within which its faculty members must keep their opinions if they wish to be ‘tolerated.’” The brilliantly ironic subtitle, “The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom,’” implied a further irony: at the midpoint of the twentieth century, “conservatives, as the minority, are the new radicals.” And Buckley’s prose resonated with the energy of new protest. When he inveighed against “the power of the machine and techniques that are so readily available to the academic ‘liberals’ for immediate use against anyone meddlesome enough to find fault with existing policy,” he prefigured the next decade’s campus radicals, who would likewise deplore the “machine” of large universities and their power to crush dissent. Buckley wrote with the full-throated passion of the agitator. The elevated vocabulary fused with a slashing, debater’s style that seemed borrowed from Red-hunting inquisitions: the naming of names, the quick, mocking characterizations, the trotting out of ideological résumés—all of it was perfectly attuned to the accusatory mood of the moment. There were defects. Like so many first books this one was, to some extent, an anthology of its author’s juvenilia. Buckley recycled his first Kennedy editorial in full and, finding a forum at last, stuck the Alumni Day speech in an appendix. Kendall and his other advance reader, Brent Bozell, urged Buckley to drop the most radical part of the book, its short last chapter, which proposed that alumni assert their sovereignty over hiring and curriculum, a novel solution to Yale’s program of liberal indoctrination. But Buckley was adamant about keeping the pages in. It was integral to the larger drama of which the book formed only a part—his radical purpose to “agitate for reform" at Yale. Outraging liberals did only half the job. Conservatives needed a plan of action. Buckley knew from his fund-raising appearances that Yale’s coffers were nearly empty, because of the drain of the G.I. Bill enrollments. An uprising among alumni “and friends”—and clearly the administration feared one; why else had Seymour barred Buckley from the podium on Alumni Day? —would send a powerful shock through Woodbridge Hall. In the spring, Buckley sent the manuscript to Henry Regnery, a wealthy Chicago conservative who had founded a new publishing house. Regnery and his colleagues were enthusiastic. One pronounced Buckley a “genius.” Regnery wanted to bring it out in the fall when Yale would be celebrating its 250th anniversary. Buckley worked rapidly on revisions to meet the deadlines the publisher set, and the book was published in time to be read as a dissent from all the fanfare. The novelty of God and Man at Yale was plain from the dust jacket: the boyish author gazed from the back of the book with aristocratic hauteur, just above the summary of campus triumphs: honors graduate, Daily News chairman, champion debater, class orator, plus “the Fence Club, Elizabethan Club, Torch Honor Society, and Skull and Bones.” Buckley, who wrote the copy himself, had some misgivings about mentioning Bones—“nothing more than snob-appeal”—but saw it clinched what in a later day would be called the “high concept” that Regnery wanted to emphasize: this was an attack on the citadel mounted from within. The effect was to lend the book something of the glamour of a titillating expose, in the vein of the U.S.A. Confidential series then topping best-seller lists. Here was the “inside” story of an Ivy League campus. It all worked. Not since Friedrich Hayek’s The Road To Serfdom, published in 1944, did a conservative polemic excite such response. That Buckley was so young heightened the interest, for he sprang into celebrity at the same moment that Time magazine, in a deft exercise in trend-spotting, had identified a new “silent generation” of docile college-age men and women, content with things as they were, their ambitions reaching no further than a Wall Street job and a kitchen full of sparkling appliances. Yet skepticism was now coming from a “rebel in reverse” (said Time) who resembled (said Life), “the brat who comes to the party and tells the guests that their birthday boy is secretly a dope addict.” The furor translated into brisk sales. The first printing sold out in a week; the next three went almost as quickly—enough to put God and Man at Yale on the Herald Tribune best-seller list. By December it had sold nearly 23,000 copies, an astonishing success. More important, Buckley had fused long-standing grievances, political and cultural, into the basis of a single unified rebellion. No longer would the right limit itself to rants about taxation and “too much damn government in business” and wait patiently for better days. Instead it would surge up against those who seemed to be deciding the direction postwar America would take: the Washington mandarins and Ivy League professors, the intellectuals and journalists. God and Man at Yale was more than a brilliant performance by a very young man. It contained the seeds of a modern movement. Ultimately, the university Buckley had battled so strenuously embraced him as its own. And Bill Buckley, for his part, remained steadfast in his devotion to Yale. He returned to the campus many times over the years. He also recruited bright young graduates to help him research his books or to join the staff of National Review. And until his health declined, he placed an annual ad in the News inviting young men with sailing experience to crew on his sloop, Patito. A few months before he died Bill Buckley asked me to return the scrapbook, bound in Moroccan leather, that he had carefully assembled during his Yale years. Before I sent it off I cautioned him that the album had been a research tool for me and was somewhat worse for wear: photos, letters, awards, commendations, News editorials, and sundry other documents had become unglued from the crumbling black pages. I patched it all together as best I could. Buckley didn’t say why he needed the book, but I didn’t have to ask. His last days were passed in considerable pain and anguish. He was struggling mightily with emphysema and diabetes and also feeling the loss of so much that had mattered to him—particularly the loss of his wife, Pat, who died in April 2007, after 57 years of marriage. To page through his Yale album was to recover the warm glow of a happy time, quite possibly the happiest in a long, singular life. The scrapbook will soon
be shipped to the Sterling Library, where it belongs. It is the priceless
record of one of Yale’s most refulgent stars—the class of 1950's
“Bright Young Man,” as the class historian noted at the time. He
added: “We had none to match him.” |
Related David Frum offers a new interpretation of Buckley’s legacy—one that would have surprised the man himself. History professor Gaddis Smith recounts the Yale administration’s attempts to contain the fallout from Buckley’s God and Man at Yale. Excerpts from God and Man at Yale. Buckley taught a writing seminar at Yale in 1997 and wrote about it for the magazine. Join the discussion about William F. Buckley Jr. Send us your comments and memories and read what others have to say. |
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©1992–2012, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905, USA. yam@yale.edu |
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