A Torch Kept Lit

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Monster government came, coupled with protracted war. WFB supported the war as vital to the Cold War struggle against Soviet expansionism, but he faulted Johnson, as in 1968, for pressing an escalatory exercise, writing: “Our participation in the Vietnam war is justified only if Vietnam is the contemporary salient of the world enterprise, however loosely organized, that aims ultimately at the security of United States….If that is not what Vietnam is all about, then we should get the hell out.”

  The first piece below appeared in December 1968, a kind of political obituary ruminating on why such a gifted tactician should have left the White House so widely condemned; the second was a proper eulogy but one that did not mince words.

  “LBJ Packs Up”

  Syndicated column, December 12, 1968.

  We read these days about Lyndon Johnson’s staggered good-byes to his many staffs. The other day it was the gardeners at the White House, then the secret service men, then the telephone operators, and so on. Truly he is sorry to go and desires to extract as much ceremony as he can out of the painful act of separation, like John McCormack, who made something like six world tours in order adequately to bid his fans adieu.

  It is more than punctilio that moves the president. Nor is he by nature given to preoccupation with those little attentions to which an altogether different kind of man is given. Lyndon Johnson’s favors are conceived on a far grander scale, and it is no doubt supremely galling to him that he leaves office lonely, unloved, and discredited, after giving us the Great Society, which he defined in a speech in 1964 as society concerned more for the quality of its goals than for the quality of its goods.

  There never was a man, in all of history, who conferred such prodigious favors on his subjects. I beg you to be patient as I catalog the programs passed during Mr. Johnson’s reign, because although like any list it is tedious, still, it is hard to grasp the appetite of the government under Mr. Johnson to look after us unless one plows through it. The whole of it is costing $25 billion per year, which is two and one-half times as much as Ike was spending at the end there, and more than twice as much as JFK was spending.

  Under LBJ we got antipoverty programs, mass transportation bills, model cities help, rent supplements, crime control, antisegregation acts, voting acts, housing acts, a communication relations act, acts on water and air pollution, on waste, roads, recreation and parks, on meat and poultry and fabrics and farm prices, on truth in lending, on fair packaging, on electronic radiation, on traffic; aid for elementary schools, for higher education, for teacher corps, aid to the poor, adult education, job opportunity training, the job corps, business aid, aid for Appalachia, an increase in the minimum wage, Medicare for the elderly, Medicaid for the nonelderly, doctors’ training, nurses’ training, mental health, immunization, health centers, and child health.

  A few questions suggest themselves:

  (1) How is it that the people are so dissatisfied? I mean those among the people who are critical of the government for not spending more? Is it as easy as this, that if one can find a single poor family, or a derelict building, or a contaminated creek, or an illiterate child, the government has not spent as much money as it ought to have spent?

  (2) Why is it that so many observers of government have chosen this moment to disavow government spending as an efficacious means of bringing about a socially desirable end, such as the diminution of poverty? Was it Johnson’s handling of the money; or is the problem inherent in government spending?

  And (3) Do the people feel as much better off—as much more secure—as one would expect that they should, as beneficiaries of goods and services valued at approximately $1,250 per family? Granted, the wiser among them realize that the money Johnson gave them was the same money Johnson took away from them; still, were there enough people who calculated that after all is said and done, they managed not only to get their own back, but also a little of their neighbor’s?

  If not, (4) Could it be that under Johnson we came finally to the end of the period exultantly memorialized by Harry Hopkins, who thought he had the perpetual key to political success when he announced: Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect?

  All of which, in Mr. Johnson’s case, reduced him, at the prime of his life, to ceremonial leavetakings at the White House, whose staff probably value more highly the little bauble the president left them, than all these splendors of the Great Society which left America cold.

  “Lyndon Johnson, R.I.P.”

  Syndicated column, January 27, 1973.

  [ellipses in original]

  SAN ANTONIO—The lady is middle-aged, shrewd, politically active, impeccably kind, civic-minded, born in Texas and raised here, and she spoke as if she were facing such a problem for the very first time in her life. Well, obviously not the first time: when acknowledged monsters like Hitler and Stalin died, people did not, for the most part, scratch about to find something redeeming to say about them. LBJ was clearly of another category, but the lady now remarked, “What am I supposed to say? I didn’t like what I knew about him personally. I didn’t admire his domestic programs. And I thought his foreign policy was a mess. So what am I supposed to say?”

  I counseled her to say nothing, absolutely nothing at all. Having done so, I regretfully acknowledge that my advice is only one part discretion, nine parts funk. Accordingly, into the breach….

  Even if history justifies Lyndon Johnson’s determination to stand by South Vietnam, it is very difficult to believe that history will applaud his conduct of the war. We set out, in Vietnam, to make a resonant point. We did not make it resonantly. In international affairs as in domestic affairs, crime is deterred by the predictability of decisive and conclusive retaliation. The Soviet Union knows that it can count on a dozen years between separatist uprisings in its empire because when it moves, it moves conclusively. If the Soviet Union had sent a few battalions into Hungary, and a dozen years later into Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union would not have made its point.

  Johnson, reminiscing in the White House a year before he was evicted, told two reporters that there was no way he might have avoided a showdown in Indochina, that not only John Kennedy (who told him shortly before leaving for Dallas that he intended to make a stand there) but Dwight Eisenhower (who told him in the early sixties that Southeast Asia would be the principal challenge of the presidency) agreed on the strategic point. But what, one wonders, has been achieved under the circumstances?

  To begin with, nobody can predict that, a year or two from now, South Vietnam will still be free. But of greater importance than that, no one in his right mind will predict that the United States, facing a comparable challenge a year or two from now, would respond with military decisiveness. If, in that part of the world, the decision is to gobble up Thailand, what are we going to do about it? Exactly. And if, in another part of the world, they decide to go after Yugoslavia, or even Greece—what would we do about it?

  It was the strangest aspect of this strange man that, once having decided on a course of action, he did not pursue it characteristically—i.e., with exclusive concern for its success. By his failure to do so, he undermined the very purpose of the intervention. And if the great communist superpowers exercise restraint at this point, it will not be because they have learned the lesson of Vietnam, in the way that Stalin learned the lesson of Greece and Iran. It will be merely because of the coincidence of their mutual hostility and their desire for American economic aid.

  So what of his great domestic accomplishments? What great domestic accomplishments? He sought a Great Society. He ushered in bitterness and resentment. He sought to educate all the population of America, and he bred a swaggering illiteracy, and a cultural bias in favor of a college education so adamant and so preposterous that if John Milton applied for a job with Chock Full o’Nuts, they would demand first to see his college diploma. The rhetoric of LBJ was in the disastrous tradition of JFK—encouraging the popular superstition that the state could change the quality, no less, of American l
ife. This led necessarily to disappointment, and the more presumptuous the rhetoric, the more bitter the disappointment.

  The Great Society did not lead us into eudaemonia. It led us into frustration—and to the lowest recorded confidence-vote in the basic institutions of this country since the birth of George Gallup. But: He was a patriot, who cared for his country, who was unsparing of himself, and who acquired at least a certain public dignity which lifted him from buffoonery, into tragedy. And he was the object of probably the greatest sustained vituperation in American political history. He paid a very high price for the office he discharged. And his detractors, as it happened, are America’s worst friends, if that was any consolation.

  No president—no public figure—vexed WFB the way Richard Nixon did. During Buckley’s rise to fame and peak celebrity, Nixon was the preeminent Man of the Right; indeed, the “Age of Nixon” that Senator Bob Dole tearfully proclaimed at Nixon’s funeral was also the Age of Bill Buckley, as evidenced by the frequent arm’s-length references to WFB on the Nixon tapes. As a self-proclaimed “pragmatic conservative,” RN saw Buckley not as just another commentator but as the leader of a faction, an Interest Group unto himself—and thus a force to be reckoned with. In October 1966, as Nixon launched his comeback, he told Robert Novak that “the Buckleyites” were more dangerous to the GOP than the John Birch Society. “What Nixon meant,” Novak explained on Firing Line,

  was that the Buckleyites are very persuasive, they’re very able, they have an outlet in the National Review and other publications, they are extremely intelligent…that the Buckleyites are to the right of the mainstream of the Republican Party and because they do have this forensic and persuasive ability…that they represent a greater threat.

  Appearing on Firing Line the next year, RN courted a new generation of conservatives who were forgetful of the Hiss case and enchanted with California governor Ronald Reagan. “Naturally I’m a prejudiced witness,” Nixon said in his lawyerly way,

  but I believe that as this campaign in 1968 unfolds, that the nation will see that the new Republican Party is one which advocates change, but advocates change in a different way from the “irresponsibles.” And I mean by that that in changing those things that are wrong in America, we must not destroy the things that are right. That to me is the essence of true conservatism.

  Nixon was the first POTUS to whom WFB enjoyed direct access. Nixon attempted co-option: appealing to Buckley’s vanity with symbolic appointments. WFB told Playboy in 1970:

  I have discovered a new sensual treat, which, appropriately, the readers of Playboy should be the first to know about. It is to have the president of the United States take notes while you are speaking to him….

  In the Nixon White House conservatives were bound to be disappointed: He was a Californian who understood the tribulations of small business owners but who could expand, as president, the regulatory state; a hawkish anticommunist who could cozy up to Red China; a law and order man who could become ensnared in a criminal conspiracy in the Oval Office. By late 1971, WFB had moved from defending RN, as in the famous column “Is Nixon One of Us?” (“Did anyone really expect that Richard Nixon would dismantle the welfare state?”), to declaring a “suspension” of support for the president.

  In his long friendship with E. Howard Hunt, WFB had a personal connection to Watergate, and he bristled in his column when Nixon and his men could be heard on the tapes cynically plotting to exploit that friendship. Below are two postmortems.

  “Richard Nixon, RIP”

  National Review, May 16, 1994.

  [ellipses in original]

  Clare Booth Luce once remarked that all public figures come to be associated with a single achievement, never mind how complex their career. And, true, we can say about Lincoln that he won the Civil War, about Edison that he harnessed electricity, about FDR that he created the New Deal. But with what achievement will Richard Nixon be associated, a generation from now? A negative achievement: he is the only American president in history to be kicked out of office. Even so, in America and in much of the world, he was the dominant political figure. It can happen only to a man who takes very large strides in history, that he could win reelection with a runaway majority, and in less than two years leave the White House in greater ignominy than was ever before suffered by a departing American president.

  His excommunication from public life was so decisive, his subsequent return has to be credited to him alone, the most spectacular reopening in contemporary political history. Remarkable not only because he came back, so to speak, into power, but that he did so notwithstanding the implacability of those who were hostile to him. In the darkest days of August 1974, it looked unlikely that a single member of the press corps could be persuaded to be civil to Richard Nixon. Ten years later, after he addressed their convention in Washington, he was given a standing ovation.

  It is an important part of his singular story that, really, he disposed of no spectacular personal talent. He was not a great orator, nor a great writer. His one professional skill he was formally disbarred from using. He had only the force of his extraordinary personality, his unswerving determination to succeed, and his mastery of the political craft. He competed during his career in forty state political primaries. He lost one.

  Alexander Haig was his chief of staff when Nixon left the White House. “As you’d have guessed,” General Haig reminisced a few years ago, “when Nixon got to Casa Pacifica in California late that afternoon in August, his White House line was still connected. He was in a daze: President of the United States until noon; one minute later—nothing. He was master of a villa which, without a president to preside over it, was simply a big house on the Pacific Ocean. But when Nixon got there, he used the telephone to the White House exactly as he’d been doing for six years. He must have called ten, fifteen times a day, and of course the White House operators didn’t want to be responsible for breaking the trance, so they’d put him straight through to me, as though I were still his chief of staff.”

  How did he get the message that it was all over?

  “On the fifth day I recognized that reality had to get to him. So when he called the next morning, I told the operator to put him on hold….It had the magical effect, the necessary effect. Suddenly he realized he wasn’t president.”

  But Mr. Nixon didn’t abandon his sense of priorities, the first being to tell his story and to make a living for his family. A day or so later he reached by telephone, in Geneva, Irving Lazar. The exchange was as follows.

  “Mr. Lazar, you are known as the number-one agent in America.”

  “Well, thank you very much, Mr. President. Yes, I suppose I’d have to own up to that reputation.”

  “Well, I’d like to see you tomorrow morning here in California.”

  “Mr. President! I have five days’ appointments backed up here in Europe, appointments made weeks and months ago!”

  “I take it you do not want to handle my memoirs? I have been told by someone who knows his way around in the publishing world that my memoirs may be worth as much as a million dollars….”

  “Of course I’d be glad to handle your memoirs, but there simply is no way I can get to you by tomorrow.”

  “Well, then, make it the day after tomorrow.”

  Irving Lazar finally succeeded, so to speak, in putting President Nixon on hold, but by the time he got to Casa Pacifica a week later, he arrived with contracts for two and one-half million dollars.

  Nixon had begun the return journey. Retirement suited him singularly well. Henry Kissinger, in his own memoirs, remarked on how little Nixon actually enjoyed the life he had struggled so hard to achieve in the White House. He hated meeting with the press, hated state functions. He engaged in much that chiefs of state engage in with a visible detestation of ceremony and light talk.

  That now was all gone, and he had only his tiny staff, his yellow pads, and the publishers, waiting for book after book. He resumed those travels he did enjoy—briefing fo
reigners, being briefed by them; renewing the company of men and women he had met when he was sun-king.

  Gradually the agents of power everywhere in the world acknowledged that Richard Nixon’s prestige did not derive exclusively from the office of president. He had a feeling for the American political scene invaluable to those who needed a confident grasp of it. And although meetings with Mr. Nixon would (except for two, perhaps three of his closest friends) never be confused with going down to the club and having a drink with old Tricky Dick, his company was thought rewarding by the men and women who ran the affairs of Europe, the Soviet Union, and Asia. He did not deceive them about what to expect from America, or indeed from Richard Nixon. When most recently he visited Moscow and Yeltsin canceled an appointment, indignant because Nixon had given interviews to Russian rivals, the sympathy was immediately with Nixon, rather than with his host: Nixon was being Nixon, and that, after all, was why he continued to be so eminent a figure. It did not surprise the diplomatic community that Yeltsin backed down, and that one of the earliest tributes logged by the hospital in New York, bidding Nixon adieu, was from Boris Yeltsin.

  —

  In America, Nixon was always thought of as a towering figure of the conservative camp, yet this was so only when the perspectives were narrowly confined. At the earliest conspicuous moment in his career, he had been spotted as the man who believed Whittaker Chambers, and disbelieved Alger Hiss. During the Fifties, the anti-Communists mobilized against the anti-anti-Communists, and when Eisenhower permitted himself to reveal that he had not yet decided whether to put Nixon back on the ticket in 1956, the American Right spoke threateningly to General Eisenhower, who had learned all about force majeure at West Point; and Nixon stayed on. During the Goldwater upheaval, Nixon was the loyalist, but he had learned in 1962, in California, the lesson he never forgot. He was driving through Central Park in 1967 after a television program and told his companion, “I learned in 1962 that you can’t do without the support of conservatives. But I learned also that you can’t win with just the conservatives.”