Despite his reputation as a fearsome debater, Buckley was considerably less than that: he was a professional subject changer, indistinguishable in his mode of argument from noisier descendants like Bill O’Reilly and Tucker Carlson.īy the end of the discussion, Buckley’s fabled civility had failed him yet again, as he offered to sock Chomsky, too, in the face. Instead of letting Chomsky make his argument and responding to it, Buckley keeps peppering him with irrelevancies, quibbling with every sentence fragment that Chomsky utters as if the fragment represented Chomsky’s entire case. nor an aberration from the normal lines of American foreign policy, Buckley simply doesn’t let him finish a sentence. As Chomsky tries to make the case that the war in Vietnam was neither an example of good intentions on the part of the U.S. I had never seen the debate before, but here was the Buckley I remembered. Remembering that this outburst is widely regarded as uncharacteristic of him, I looked at another video: a Firing Line debate between Buckley and Noam Chomsky in 1969. After Vidal thoughtfully called Buckley a crypto-Nazi, Buckley replied, “Now listen, you queer, you stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”
One of the first conversations that came up was his famous exchange with Gore Vidal, when they were both employed by one of the television networks to comment on the 1968 conventions. To refresh my memories, I went to YouTube and looked up a few of his conversations. But then again, I hadn’t really paid much attention to him since the early 1970s, when, as a teenager, I used to watch Firing Line. Jeet Heer wrote of Buckley’s “basic decency” and of his “life-long capacity to change, adapt and learn.” Hendrik Hertzberg wrote that Buckley “could not have been happy with the vulgarity of the movement he did so much to spawn.” Rick Perlstein described him as “a good and decent man” who “did the honor of respecting his ideological adversaries, without covering up the adversarial nature of the relationship in false bonhomie.” The testimonials from the right were predictable more interesting was the praise that came from serious, thoughtful progressives. Buckley, Jr., died last month, the eulogies came from both sides of the aisle.
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