THE MAIN EVENT in the fourth part of Tanenhaus's life of Buckley is the coming of Firing Line, the long-running public affairs talk show in which Buckley interviewed a long and amazing list of newsmakers and opinion leaders. Among the ironies of the show’s run is that Buckley, who made no bones about providing a conservative perspective with his show, gave more airtime to radical leftists (Eldridge Cleaver, Jesse Jackson) than the mainstream media ever did. He was probably hoping to show how extreme and out-of-touch the radical left was, but in the process he produced a show that’s an invaluable archive, a better record of the actual politics of the era than any of its competitors.
Buckley decided to support Nixon rather than Reagan for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, disappointing or infuriating any number of hard-core movement conservatives. Buckley felt Nixon was conservative enough and had a better chance of winning, but there was much gnashing of conservative teeth after Nixon opened up relations with China.
Part Four also provides close-ups of a couple of Buckley’s more embarrassing public moments: (1) his clash with Gore Vidal when the two were providing commentary on ABC of the 1968 nominating conventions, in which Vidal triggered an on-camera meltdown by Buckley, and (2) Buckley’s advocacy for the release of convicted murderer Edgar Smith, of whose innocence Buckley was convinced. It turned out Smith was actually guilty, and a few years after his release nearly killed someone else.
The obvious analogue (which Tanenhaus points out) is Norman Mailer’s advocacy of Jack Abbott, which likewise ended badly. I also thought of Vidal’s sort-of defense of Timothy McVeigh (“The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh,” Vanity Fair, September 2001).
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