| Buckley's legacy, 10 years later. William F. Buckley, Jr. died 10 years ago today, so here's some worthwhile #content from the TWS archives you should read to remember the late great conservative heavyweight. The first item is Andrew Ferguson's On the 'Firing Line': I came to him when I was still a teenager, through television. You might be surprised at how many people found him this way. He published millions of words of commentary and rumination, on a startling range of subjects, in high-circulation newspapers and the slickest magazines. He pulled off a dozen widely publicized stunts--running for mayor of New York, deep-sea diving to the remains of the Titanic, playing Bach with the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra. Over a span of 30 years he let loose a stream of novels, many of them bestsellers. Yet what really made him famous--what made him the butt of impersonators like David Frye and Robin Williams, set him up for the cover of Time and the bold-face celebrity treatment in the gossip columns--was a TV show. Firing Line debuted in 1966, when all that America's TV-starved youth had to choose from were the three networks, maybe a local station or two, and an outlet for what was still called "educational television." By the time of Firing Line's final episode, in 1999, the whiskers were showing. The original running time of one hour had been reduced by half. As viewership fell and "pick-up"--the number of local PBS stations that aired the show--declined, producers tried a number of gimmicks to freshen it up and revive interest, without much success. Various interlocutors, among them the TV journalist Jeff Greenfield and the leftwing politician Mark Green, were brought in, to serve as quasi-hosts. For a time, the pundit Michael Kinsley anchored the show and reduced Buckley to the role of mere interviewer. When your liveliest gimmick involves Michael Kinsley, the end is near. Read the whole thing. Next up is the late Christopher Hitchens's A Man of Incessant Labor: He was in so many ways the man to beat. Facing him, one confronted somebody who had striven to take the "cold" out of the phrase "Cold War"; who had backed Joseph McCarthy, praised General Franco, opposed the Civil Rights Act, advocated rather than merely supported the intervention in Vietnam, and seemed meanwhile to embody a character hovering somewhere between Skull-and-Bones and his former CIA boss Howard Hunt. On the other hand, this was the same man who had picked an open fight with the John Birch Society, taken on the fringe anti-Semites and weirdo isolationists of the old Right, and helped to condition the Republican comeback of 1980. Was he really, as he had once claimed, yelling "stop" at the locomotive of history, or was he a closet "progressive"? The Roman Catholicism that was always so central might seem to have offered a clue here, but this element also dissolved into ambiguities and approximations. "Faith" surely helped explain his solidarity with the Sovietized "captive nations" like Poland and Hungary and Latvia and Croatia, and even his sympathy for McCarthy and for the Diem family regime in Saigon (the last two allegiances being among the few that he shared with the Kennedy family). Yet it was in the liberal Catholic journal Commonweal that he also declared in 1952 that he was in favor of "Big Government for the duration" of the struggle against communism, and in favor of this, moreover, even if it meant Democratic party stewardship. There were times when National Review seemed almost to be published by some legate of the Spellman archdiocese (one of James Burnham's successors as chief Cold War columnist, I remember, was actually named Crozier). But then, you never knew when you might be surprised. Buckley once teamed up with Clare Booth Luce to opine that dogmatic opposition to contraception ran the risk of discrediting moral abhorrence of abortion. Today on the Daily Standard Podcast (with host Charlie Sykes), our new managing editor Christine Rosen and I discuss (read: guess) what Buckley may have made of today's political reality. Also, would he have tweeted? A twin marriage?! As regular readers may know, I am a somewhat new father of twins. In Twinsburg, Ohio, near where I grew up, there is an annual twins festival, and apparently two sets of identical twins have fallen in love and plan to wed. Apparently there is a lot I have to learn about #TwinCulture, but am glad I know what to look out for. Billy Graham to lie in honor at the Capitol. Capitol funerals are a somber, serious occasion. And since they're so rare, they're immediately a historic moment. During my stint on the Hill, senators Robert C. Byrd and Edward M. Kennedy both died. Byrd's coffin was actually on the Senate floor, and you could pay your respect as an employee of the Senate. (Despite our political differences, respects were indeed paid.) Not a whole lot of non-elected officials get to lie in honor (as opposed to in state), and Billy Graham will be the fourth private citizen to do so. Previously, Rosa Parks and two U.S. Capitol Police officers (John Gibson and Jacob Chestnut) who died in the line of duty got the honor. If you're interested in the elected officials who have been honored at the Capitol after their deaths, here's a handy list. What's in this week's issue? Get a preview of our articles and features in this video from editor in chief Stephen F. Hayes:
Check out the video here. Save the date! Join us at the 2018 Weekly Standard Summit. This May 17-20 at the historic Broadmoor resort in Colorado Springs, join Stephen F. Hayes, Fred Barnes, and Michael Warren and special guests Bret Baier and A.B. Stoddard as they discuss the future of American politics. Book your tickets now. —Jim Swift, Deputy Online Editor Please feel free to send us comments, thoughts and links to [email protected]. -30- |
