An Implausible Mr. Buckley

A new PBS documentary whitewashes the conservative founder of National Review.

BY RICK PERLSTEIN APRIL 17, 2024

It’s a funny thing, this sideline of mine as a talking head in history documentaries. The work can be incredibly fulfilling. (Like when, explaining how a majority of Americans said the students shot dead at Kent State had it coming, often with lusty relish, I almost cried.) It can be fun, especially when the person in line to sit for the cameras after you is Henry Rollins, or the guy whose arrest set off the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.

But it is also hard work, preparing, sitting still while they set up the shot—that can take as long as an hour—then racking your brain to boil down your points to elegant sound bites, in the hopes you might win more screen time. So it’s frustrating when the thing finally comes out and … well, it kind of sucks.

I had to wait 30 months after my interview for the American Masters documentary The Incomparable Mr. Buckley before it came out last Friday. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy some of what I saw; Newsday called it “highly watchable,” and it is. (Hell, watching the man navigate a steep slope of moguls on skinny, stiff 1970s skis was almost worth the time alone.) My frustration is that this exact same program could have come out in 1996—well before the movement Buckley is said to have founded ended up producing Donald Trump. Many dedicated historians have done serious work during the Trump era uncovering facts that have radically revised the scholarly understanding of William F. Buckley and his work. That new scholarship suggests that Trump’s rise was not a reversal of what Buckley was up to, but in many ways, its apotheosis. This, the producers determinedly contrived to ignore.

SNIP: Historian and journalist Jeet Heer demonstrated as far back as 2015 how National Review habitually minimized the Holocaust. And any claim that Buckley forswore antisemitism was surely put to bed back in 2007 by what biographer Sam Tanenhaus learned in an interview with an unapologetic George Will, the magazine’s longtime Washington correspondent: He and Buckley agreed that a Jew could not be allowed to replace him as editor. (At the time, rumors were that Jews David Frum and David Brooks were under consideration. Sorry, Davids!)


https://prospect.org/politics/2024-04-17-an-implausible-mr-buckley/