TV Review: The Incomparable Mr. Buckley, a documentary for American Masters, directed by Barak Goodman (2024)

Novelist, magazine editor, talk show host, harpsichordist and all-around multi-hyphenate William F. Buckley, Jr.

William F. Buckley on the set of his television show Firing Line. 

I do not share much political ideology with William F. Buckley, but I find him to be a fascinating figure. Part of this is due to Buckley’s personal style: who wouldn’t be in awe of a man who pounded out newspaper columns in thirty minutes, keys clacking on his portable typewriter as he sat in the back of his chauffeured limousine, surrounded by his Cavalier King Charles spaniels? A man who played Bach on the harpsichord, ran a magazine, had his own television show, went skiing in Switzerland, and wrote novels in the gap between skiing and dinner? Regardless of what you think of William F. Buckley, there is no denying that the man was possessed of an immense amount of style.  

The Incomparable Mr. Buckley is a new documentary for PBS’ American Masters series, produced and directed by Barak Goodman, a veteran documentary filmmaker. The film examines Buckley’s life and his influence on American politics. There is a treasure trove of film clips, including home movies from Buckley’s youth, the 1965 Cambridge debate between Buckley and James Baldwin, Buckley threatening to punch Gore Vidal, and many episodes of Firing Line. The Incomparable Mr. Buckley also makes the intelligent decision to forgo footage of talking head commentators—instead we merely hear them speak over footage of Buckley.  

Buckley was renowned as an author and the founder and editor of the conservative magazine National Review, before his television talk show Firing Line took his fame to a new level in 1966. As brilliant as Buckley was on the page, television revealed a new side of his appeal. 

Buckley on television was simply fascinating to watch: the slouched posture, the crossed legs, the pen, the clipboard, the raised eyebrows, the toothy grin, the tongue flicking at the corner of his mouth, the sparkling blue eyes. Photographs of Buckley reveal a handsome man, but it is only in action, before the camera, that his unique charisma fully surfaces. You simply can’t stop looking at him. And then there was that voice. Where on earth was William F. Buckley from? His mellifluous tone was a mixture of East Coast establishment, learning English after he’d already learned Spanish, a hint of a Southern drawl from his mother’s side of the family, and spending several years as a teenager at boarding school in England. Buckley’s voice was an instrument that he wielded like a virtuoso. Similar to the actor James Mason, Buckley’s voice was pure honey to listen to, and it could lull you to sleep, seduce you, or mock you with biting, sarcastic humor. 

When Buckley started National Review in 1955, American conservative thought was regarded as an afterthought at best. After all, Republicans had lost 5 Presidential elections in a row from 1932-1948. One of the defining moments of the nascent conservative movement was when archconservative Barry Goldwater defeated the liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller for the 1964 Republican Presidential nomination. This was a huge step to the right for the Republican party. Goldwater was crushed by LBJ in the general election, but out of the ashes of this defeat came an unexpected silver lining. A Hollywood actor had delivered a powerful 30-minute speech on Goldwater’s behalf during the last week of the campaign. The speech did nothing to help Goldwater’s imminent defeat, but it launched the political career of the actor who gave the speech: Ronald Reagan. Immediately, movers and shakers in the Republican party in California began thinking of Reagan as a possible candidate for Governor in 1966.  

Ronald Reagan became the ultimate conservative Republican: he had the charisma that Richard Nixon so conspicuously lacked, and Reagan was more wedded to conservative ideology than the more pragmatic Nixon. Buckley was never a huge fan of Nixon, and according to the documentary, William pressured his brother James, then a Senator from New York, to call on Nixon to resign. James Buckley gave a speech in March of 1974 calling for Nixon’s resignation, and he became the first conservative Republican to call on the president to resign. (Speaking of James Buckley, who passed away in 2023 at the age of 100, he would be a fascinating documentary subject.)  

Much like the conservative movement itself, the documentary loses a bit of steam once the Cold War comes to a peaceful conclusion. As the Republican party shifted ever rightward, Buckley wasn’t always perfectly in step with it. His 1993 book Happy Days Were Here Again was subtitled Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist. I find it significant that Buckley used “libertarian” to describe himself rather than “conservative.”  

The documentary ends with footage of Trump and the January 6th rioters, and we see what American “conservatism” has degenerated into. Several articles about the documentary have focused on what Buckley’s son, the acclaimed satirist and novelist Christopher says at the end, regarding his father and Donald Trump: “He might just have said, ‘Demand a recount!’” What I take this to mean is not that Buckley would have supported Trump’s claim about the 2020 election being fraudulent, but rather that Buckley would have said we should recount the 2016 election to see if there was some way we could avoid the crisis of having Trump be president in the first place. The more relevant part of Christopher Buckley’s quote that reviewers have ignored is what he says before the final line: “I’ve been asked a thousand times ‘What would your father have made of Donald Trump?’ Well, look, he’s left us 50 books, 1,500 episodes of Firing Line, 6,000 columns. You figure out what he would’ve made of Donald Trump.” The answer should be glaringly obvious to anyone who has any familiarity with the works of William F. Buckley: he would have despised Donald Trump, as Buckley would have recognized what an idiot and buffoon Trump is. Buckley unknowingly came up with the perfect metaphor for Donald Trump when he wrote in his 1976 book Airborne: "The key to a serene relationship with sharks is simply this: Bear it in mind that they are so dumb, you can neither anticipate nor outwit them." (p.133) 

Despite the downbeat ending, The Incomparable Mr. Buckley is a fascinating and engaging look at one of the twentieth century’s most interesting public intellectuals.  

Book Review: Cruising Speed: A Documentary, by William F. Buckley (1971)

My well-worn paperback copy of Cruising Speed, by William F. Buckley, 1971. Yes, that's my shelf of books by William Buckley and his son Christopher. (Photo by Mark Taylor.)

William F. Buckley at his desk.

On December 5, 1970, while at a nightclub with Truman Capote, William F. Buckley decided to write a journal covering one week in his life. This experiment ultimately resulted in the highly entertaining book Cruising Speed: A Documentary, published in September, 1971. Buckley would later revisit this same formula in his excellent 1983 book Overdrive, which I previously reviewed here. 

Cruising Speed covers the week of November 30^th to December 6^th, 1970. This was an exciting time for Buckley, as the previous month his older brother James was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York. Buckley was a uniquely busy man, as he was writing a nationally syndicated newspaper column three times a week, hosting Firing Line, a weekly television show about current events, and editing the bi-weekly magazine that he had founded, National Review.  

Buckley encounters many different people throughout the course of the week, from former heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney, who “has been a very old friend and supporter of NR,” (p.27) to Otto Von Hapsburg, heir to the thrones of Austria and Hungary, who asks Buckley “whether I would join a very small organization that meets two or three times a year, in Europe usually, but sometimes in America, to discuss deeply, and off the record, public policies affecting the future of the West.” (p.150) William F. Buckley led a remarkable life, and the nine page index at the end of Cruising Speed gives some idea of his varied pursuits and interests. Someone should really write annotated versions of Cruising Speed and Overdrive, so future readers will know who all of these people Buckley interacts with were, instead of having to constantly look them up on Wikipedia. 

One of the more interesting tidbits that came up in the course of Buckley’s week is a letter from Edgar Eisenhower, Dwight’s older brother, concerning the foundation of John T. Gaty. Gaty was a businessman from Wichita, Kansas, who bequeathed a significant part of his estate to a foundation that would support conservative organizations. The trustees that Gaty named to the foundation included Buckley, J. Edgar Hoover, Edgar Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater, John Tower, and other prominent conservatives. Incredibly, all of these men met in Wichita once a year for ten years to distribute money from the foundation. (Hoover never attended, sending an alternate in his place.) Someone should really write a book about the Gaty trust, as a fascinating footnote to the nascent conservative movement. 

Buckley’s excellent sense of humor is on display throughout the book, and perhaps my favorite humorous anecdote from Cruising Speed is the story that Buckley tells about a friend of his who was entertaining guests from France. Buckley’s friend turned on Firing Line, as Buckley was interviewing Hugh Hefner. There was a problem with the sound on the TV, so everyone watched in silence. When the sound came on, the French visitors were shocked as they had concluded from the body language of the two men that Buckley was the libertine publisher of Playboy magazine, and Hugh Hefner was the conservative Republican writer. (p.53)

Throughout both Cruising Speed and Overdrive you see how much William F. Buckley enjoyed his life. At the very end of Cruising Speed Buckley writes that his friend John Kenneth Galbraith, the liberal economist, urged Buckley to give up his newspaper column, Firing Line, and National Review, to enter academia and write books. (p.229) Unsurprisingly, Buckley turns down Galbraith’s suggestion. It’s clear that Buckley loved all of the different things that he did, and if he had just focused on one thing, he probably wouldn’t have been happy. I suspect that Buckley enjoyed the challenge of keeping all of those balls up in the air. 

I wish that we saw more of how Buckley wrote, but he was able to write so quickly that maybe he didn’t have much to say about his writing process. On the Wednesday covered in Cruising Speed, Buckley is late delivering his column, so he has to go to the offices of his syndicate, which he only does when the column must be written immediately. He writes it in half an hour. There are many excellent passages throughout Cruising Speed, and one concerns dealing with writers and artists as editor of National Review, “…what it comes down to is this-that concerning certain things, everyone is inaccessible to reason, and the trick is to find out what those things are, and simply accept the given in the situation.” (p.6) That’s a great piece of advice, and not just for editors. 

After Cruising Speed was published an interviewer asked Buckley “Don’t you think it a bit much to write an entire book devoted to the events of a single week?” Buckley’s tongue in cheek response was “I don’t know. John Keats devoted an entire ode to a single Grecian urn.” (Quote from Overdrive, by William F. Buckley, p.154)I wish more people would write books like Cruising Speed, as I would be fascinated to read what a week in the life of other public figures is like. I suppose that now, in the never-ending news cycles of 2015, one might encounter more resistance to the idea, and get more flack for being so supremely solipsistic. The interesting thing about both Cruising Speed and Overdrive is that while they both look into Buckley’s life, they are not overly confessional. Although Buckley does catalog some personal faults, as he writes, "I do not know why my memory is so bad, or for that matter why I read so slowly." (p.57) I find it difficult to believe that William F. Buckley did anything slowly, but there you have it. Buckley tell us that book critic Isabel Paterson thinks these problems stem from him not learning to read until the age of 6 or 7, which is also when he began speaking English, his first language having been Spanish. 

 Cruising Speed humanizes Buckley. Even if you disagree with his politics you get to see his incredible work ethic and the humanity that animated his work. As Malcolm Muggeridge once said of Buckley “What Buckley has is a sort of sparkle and grace, equally in his speaking, writing, and television appearances. It is not just a question of agreeing with Buckley. Rather, it is that in our time free minds are desperately rare and precious, and in him I detect one.”