It was 25 years ago this week (December 14, 1999) that conservative powerhouse William F. Buckley recorded the final episode of his award-winning talk show, Firing Line. That occasion, as with other important milestones in Buckley’s long and influential career, brought to the surface the liberal media establishment’s hostility toward the retiring host as well as their disdain for the broader conservative movement he helped launch.
“I suspect that there are people who’ve been tuning into Firing Line for years, awed and admiring of Bill Buckley, who for all that, have barely understood a word the man has said,” ABC’s Ted Koppel condescended in a profile of Buckley for that evening’s Nightline. “The problem with William F. Buckley Jr.,” Koppel continued, channeling frustrated liberals, “was that you could dislike him, but could never dismiss him as a crank or a right-wing nut. He has always been a brilliant debater who has taken the trouble to think through his own arguments.”
In the same program, CBS’s Mike Wallace’s soundbite praising Buckley displayed his contempt for other 1950s conservatives: “He legitimized the conservative movement in America because he was the first one of them to make a really interesting, rational case for conservative politics. This was long before Goldwater, long before Ronald Reagan. He was a lonely figure.”
While some journalists might have secretly respected Buckley’s impressive intellect, that doesn’t mean that they liked the conclusions he reached. A 1988 survey of readers of the Washington Journalism Review — mostly Washington and New York-based reporters — found that their “least favorite” columnists were George Will, Robert Novak and William F. Buckley. (The same group tapped ABC’s Sam Donaldson, Peter Jennings and Nightline program as winners.)
In 1993, NBC’s Katie Couric interviewed Buckley on the Today show, where she attempted to ambush him about the conservative Reagan administration policies he endorsed: “When you talk about leaving a deposit, many people say that the Reagan-Bush administration, people on the other side of the political spectrum, did leave a negative deposit, or really, the opposite of a deposit. The federal budget quadrupled under that administration. They might say that greed and materialism was the norm then, and that social ills were largely ignored, and therefore only worsened as a result of that neglect.”
Four years later, Couric’s onetime co-host Bryant Gumbel used the infamous O. J. Simpson trial to impugn Buckley and other conservatives as racist. He told the Los Angles Times Magazine: “If O. J. killed his first wife, Marguerite [who is black], and her friend, then do I think George Will and William F. Buckley would have written about it? No way. Not on God’s green earth. They wouldn’t have even noticed.”
In 2004, Buckley stepped down from National Review, the influential conservative magazine he founded in 1955. The New York Times Magazine’s Deborah Solomon interviewed Buckley; her questions were, to say the least, antagonistic.
“You have made so many offensive comments over the years. Do you regret any of them?” Solomon scolded. Later: “You seem indifferent to suffering. Have you ever suffered yourself?”
Buckley passed away on February 27, 2008 at the age of 82, prompting obituaries on all three broadcast evening newscasts. Then-NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams chose to amplify criticisms that even the other liberal newscasts avoided: “Buckley paid dearly for some of his words: His defense of Senator Joe McCarthy, his early views on race and remarks he made about AIDS, saying those with AIDS should be tattooed to prevent its spread.”
In his own remembrance that same day, Time magazine critic Richard Corliss cast Buckley as merely a conservative showman, rather than the intellectual force that he was: “Buckley soon set up shop at PBS, of all places, hosting the primordial political chat show Firing Line. From that, and from Buckley’s blithe, castrating wit, a horde of right-wing radio spielers and Fox News ideologues, not to mention the Manichean shouters on The McLaughlin Report and many a Sunday panel show. Buckley must have known he cut an eccentric figure on TV, as peculiar as Truman Capote or Tiny Tim....His manner suggested that he was 100% right — right as in correct — and all who opposed him were fools or brigands. It’s an old debater’s trick, and he was the master debater....”
The New York Times Magazine thought it was somehow appropriate to seek out Buckley’s 1960s sparring partner, liberal author Gore Vidal. “In 1968, during the Nixon-Humphrey race, you became the voice of liberalism in a series of televised debates with William Buckley,” Deborah Solomon asked Vidal. “How did you feel when you heard that Buckley died this year?”
“I thought Hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred,” Vidal viciously replied.
Since then, liberal journalists have tried to use Buckley as a means to bash today’s conservatives. “One of the great contributions Bill Buckley made to conservatism was to move it toward the center,” New York Times Week in Review editor Sam Tanenhaus told CNBC’s John Harwood on MSNBC in August 2009. “And one way he did that was to repudiate in a very forceful way what was then called the lunatic fringe.”
“I don’t see right now anybody cutting off that extreme view all that much,” Harwood fretted.
“There’s been a long and venerable tradition of conservatism in this country. You can go back at least to Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, all of that sort of intellectual conservatism that lasted about 30 years,” then-ABC host Christiane Amanpour similarly insisted on This Week during the 2010 campaign. “People are saying that right now, it’s really gone to the extreme. People are looking at the Tea Party and saying this is not conservatism as we knew it but it’s extreme.”
“Which is exactly what they said about Bill Buckley,” panelist George Will shot back, “and Bill Buckley’s candidate, Barry Goldwater, who was supposedly representing the paranoid style in American politics.”
Reviewing a 2015 documentary about Buckley and Vidal, former Time magazine correspondent Nina Burleigh took potshots at the conservative: “Casually cruel, entitled to his privilege, jaw locked, Buckley was also a caricature of the New York-Connecticut snob, scooting around Manhattan on a Vespa, yachting to Cozumel instead of doing his homework.”
This spring, taxpayer-subsidized PBS — which for decades reaped the benefits of hosting Buckley’s Firing Line — twisted the Buckley story for an American Masters profile. “Buckley understood that it was part of his role to keep a lid on the dark energies that fueled the conservative movement, but not to repress them entirely, because it was those kind of resentments that he was drawing on that gave conservatism its power as a movement,” historian Geoffrey Kabaservice charged.
Conservatives know and treasure the leading role William F. Buckley played in promoting intelligent conservative ideas. Liberals know his value, too — which is why they alternate between bashing Buckley and complaining that today’s conservatives are unworthy of his impressive legacy.
For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.
