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Beneath the St. Christopher Medal and the Brooks Brothers Suit Lurked the Soul of a Sadist
Few public intellectuals infamous for defending McCarthyism and championing right-wing dictators would be popular and recurrent guests on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Few pundits who opposed civil rights for African Americans and South African blacks would be asked to host the longest-running public affairs show in public television history.
William F. Buckley, Jr. was the exception.
Though Buckley was wrong on nearly every important issue of his day—McCarthyism, civil rights, voting rights, segregation, AIDs, Apartheid, the Vietnam War, the Soviet threat to America—many conservatives and liberals look back fondly to those pre-Trumpian days when the suave Yale dandy ruled over conservatism with a mailed fist.
They shouldn’t. Buckley may have been gentlemanly, charming, erudite, urbane and a world class debater, but his ideas were vicious and cold-blooded. Beneath the St. Christopher medal and the Brooks Brothers suit lurked the soul of a sadist.
McCarthyism
At the age of 29, Buckley and his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell penned a ponderous apologia for Joe McCarthy, the paranoid US senator responsible for destroying the careers of more than 2,000 government employees. Book reviewer Dwight Macdonald called McCarthy and His Enemies “a laborious piece of special pleading which gives the effect of a brief by Cadwalader,…