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Title: William F. Buckley, Jr.: Pied Piper for the Establishment by John F. McManus ISBN: 1-881919-06-4 Publisher: John Birch Society Pub. Date: 15 July, 2002 Format: Hardcover List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.67 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Totalitarian conservative?
Comment: In his introduction, John McManus quotes from a 1952 essay by William F. Buckley, Jr. published in the Catholic magazine Commonweal. Buckley wrote:
"...we have got to accept Big Government for the duration -- for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged, given our present government skills, except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores..."
I had seen this infamous quote before I read McManus' book, but reading the book motivated me to check the original source in the local university library: McManus is quoting accurately and the quote is not taken out of context.
So, why would a writer, such as Buckley, who has made a career claiming to be an opponent of Big Government and a defender of traditional values and individual rights, endorse a "totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores"?
This is the question which McManus' book aims to answer.
McManus is President of the right-wing John Birch society, but, although I myself differ from McManus and his group on a host of issues (ranging from abortion and the Drug War to China policy), I found his book to be well-documented, accurate, and chockful of relevant facts.
Part of McManus' explanation rests on the fact, publicly acknowledged by Buckley, that Buckley was at one time a CIA operative; some of Buckley's closest political associates (e.g., James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall) were also CIA operatives. The CIA's penchant for clandestinely funneling money to useful intellectuals is now a matter of public record (see, e.g., Saunders' "The Cultural Cold War"). For example, the famous "Congress for Cultural Freedom," which published the internationally renowned intellectual journal "Encounter," was eventually admitted by all concerned to be a CIA front. McManus points out that it is more than credible -- given the CIA's admitted record with the CCF, "Encounter," etc. -- that Buckley, along with his flagship operation, the magazine "The National Review," was a CIA front.
To what purpose? Prior to Buckley, American conservatives had been anti-war and anti-militarist: the right-wing had opposed American involvement in both World War II and Korea.
Buckley changed all that.
Regardless of the possible CIA connection, the Buckley re-definition of conservatism served broader goals of the governing establishment. As McManus points out, Buckley's strategy consisted of "portraying the Red menace as nearly invincible. Americans could then be persuaded to accept higher taxation, increasingly onerous controls, and an array of international alliances leading to world government, all under the guise of opposing the external Soviet threat."
The military draft, the Great Society, federal control of scientific research and higher education, etc. -- to use Buckley's phrase, "a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores," all justified by the need to confront and out-compete the Soviet Union.
To anyone who suggests that this was not simply a ruse aimed at maintaining political power, McManus points out that the Buckleyites even "red-baited" McManus' own far-right, rabidly anti-Communist John Birch Society! In October 1965, Buckley's "National Review" accused the Birchers' founder, Robert Welch, of following the "pacifist-Commie line" because Welch had expressed some well-founded doubts about the ill-fated U.S. adventure in Vietnam.
What were Buckley's personal motivations? McManus quotes an early Buckley associate, Medford Evans: "The reluctant conclusion that I have reached is that William F. Buckley Jr. is and has been driven by vanity, ambition, and greed to seek a place in the Establishment which he professes -- or once professed -- to oppose."
McManus also quotes the populist Kevin Phillips who more colorfully hints that Buckley's actions were due to personal status insecurity (the Buckleys were "New Money," not old wealth):
"There was, of course, a time when Bill Buckley was anti-establishment -- back in the long-ago days when he was an Irish nouveau-riche cheer leader for Joe McCarthy. But since then he's primed his magazine with cast-off Hapsburg royalty, Englishmen who part their names in the middle, and others calculated to put real lace on Buckley's Celtic curtains."
Certainly, Buckley's little magazine has, since its inception, reeked of a certain pseudo-sophisticated air that falsely suggested to its readers that the magazine could elevate them to a higher realm of elite taste and intellectual sophistication.
So Bill Buckley is not a real conservative but merely a willing tool of the anti-conservative establishment. Does it matter? Buckley is, after all, now in his dotage -- the influential conservatives nowadays are Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, etc.
The answer is that Buckley, for good or ill, succeeded in shaping the American conservative movement in his own image. If they are not quite Buckley's clones, Limbaugh, Hannity, and Coulter are nonetheless his ideological descendants. Buckley himself will doubtless soon be dead, but his influence lives on.
Furthermore, just as Buckley and his cohorts found the Cold War to be a useful excuse for creating a "totaliatrain bureacracy within our shores," so now a newer generation of faux conservatives is using the threat of Islamic terrorism to squelch any authentic anti-establishment, Constitutionalist elements on the Right and to re-establish a Buckleyite "totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores." History does repeat itself.
For further discussions, from varying perspectives different from McManus', of Buckley's dominating influence on the American conservative movement, I recommend Raimondo's "Reclaiming the American Right," Nash's "The Conservative Intellectual Movement in American Since 1945," and Gottfried's "The Conservative Movement."
Rating: 1
Summary: Bizarre Book Bashes Buckley
Comment: In one of the most bizarre books I have ever read, John Birch Society honcho John F. McManus puts forth the wackiest conspiracy theory imaginable--that the renowned conservative polemicist William F. Buckley has for more than fifty years served as an agent for a cabal that aims to set up a Communist world state.
This cabal, which he dubs "the Establishment," is run by a group of influential conspirators whom he calls "insiders." A number of organizations including the the United States Central Intelligence Agency, the Council on Foreign Relations--an influential think tank--and even college fraternities such as Yale University's Skull and Bones Society are also part of the Establishment. McManus contends that the conspirators recruited Buckley and then assigned him the mission of taking over the conservative movement so as to lead it astray, and that for more than five decades, Buckley has faithfully served the Establishment by enthusiastically carrying out this assignment.
While his book is well-written and readable, the evidence McManus presents to back up these sensational charges is rather wanting. Most of it comes from secondary sources, many of which are publications of the John Birch Society itself. Sometimes he uses no evidence at all, as when he asserts, without an iota of proof, that the Central Intelligence Agency must have financed National Review, the opinion journal which Buckley helped to start.
McManus' use of facts is also highly selective. For example, in trying to portray the Skull and Bones Society as an arm of the conspiracy, he cites the names of a number of "Bonesmen" who, he asserts, are doing the conspiracy's work. However, he fails to mention that Senator Robert A. Taft (R-Ohio), a leading conservative whom he regards as a hero, as well as President William Howard Taft--not exactly a lion of the Left--were also members.
McManus also flays Buckley's longtime associate, James Burnham, for having once been a Trotskyist--although he had long since repudiated Trotskyism and had become a noted anti-communist by the time he teamed up with Buckley--and condemns Burnham's book, The Web of Subversion, a bestseller in 1954, for not having hewed to the Birch party line. However, McManus fails to note that for several years, the John Birch Society itself published and distributed this very same book! Perhaps being a Bircher, like being a liberal, means never having to say you're sorry.
And so it goes. Although McManus is a skilled communicator who can write slick prose, he presents a highly distorted portrait of William F. Buckley that is simply not true to life. While his book is of some usefulness in that it presents some of the Old Right's criticisms of Buckley's style of conservatism, McManus' flawed analysis and his selective use of facts to fit his bizarre conspiracy theory diminish its value. McManus may have come out swinging, but he failed to land a glove on William F. Buckley.
Rating: 5
Summary: Who knew Buckley was that far to the left?
Comment: Though I too was once under the sway of William F. Buckley, the litany of left-wing positions Buckley took over the years has killed off any admiration I could ever have for him. And it has ruined any chance of his obtaining a sizeable following from anyone younger than the blue-haired crowd. His wit is gone, his columns are now virtually unreadable, and he increasingly bears both a physical as well as philosophical resemblance to Teddy Kennedy.
Buckley began to champion an increasing number of far left causes in his syndicated columns in the 1980s and 1990s: foreign aid to Russia, federal gun control measures, legalized prostitution, legalized drugs, support for "gay rights" legislation, etc. An old saying relates that if you have a reputation for arriving at work early, you can show up as late as you want. Buckley acquired a reputation for being conservative and has subsequently been as liberal as he wants. Which is to say, shockingly liberal. Buckley is in fact to the left of much of the Democratic Party.
McManus has dug up many more leftist positions from Buckley than even I had seen, including even some early positions Buckley took in favor of legalized abortion. No longtime conservative reading McManus' book would fail to be amazed at the sheer volume of left-wing positions Buckley has been taken. And more than a few would doubt the veracity of the book, if not for the fact that it is painstakingly documented with footnotes.
I believe the most damning Buckley position McManus cites is an article he wrote for Commonweal magazine in 1952, claiming that "we have got to accept big government for the duration" of the cold war.
Buckley subsequently created his National Review magazine in 1955 with a coterie of ex-Trotskyite leftists and friends from Buckley's work in the CIA.
Perhaps the most important part of this book is that McManus makes a credible case that National Review was never a publication of the right, although National Review nevertheless published a number of excellent essays in the 1950s and 1960s. National Review with William F. Buckley at the helm did more to harm and split up the right than any other publication.
The only criticism of this book that could be made is that the subject of this biography, William F. Buckley, Jr., is no longer worth the attention given by this book. Buckley's luster with the conservative movement began to evaporate during the 1970s, which was about the time he started to write for Playboy and Penthouse magazines.
It's ironic that the author of this book was once a big fan of William F. Buckley. Buckley's National Review even published a letter to the editor from John F. McManus, in which the author attacked the John Birch Society he is now president of. How times have changed, both with McManus and with the ever leftward moving William F. Buckley.
By way of disclosure, I should add that I am a former employee of the John Birch Society and that this book begins with a long quotation of one of my columns in The New American magazine (a JBS-affiliated publication for which I still occasionally write).
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