Buckley Part 2

2,025 words ^[1]

Part 1 ^[2]

And so now we move on to the index, that dark, revelatory underbelly where we find who’s been put in and who’s been left out of the story Tanenhaus and company want to tell us. After 15 years of research, writing, interviewing, and re-fact-checking, the book must have first emerged as a draft twice the size of the present doorstop. Great hunks of material had to be excised. Maybe they concerned minor figures who only briefly intersected with the Bill Buckley career trajectory. Or they were personalities in some of the painfully protracted lawsuits that Bill dragged on for years in the 1970s and 80s. Or they were colorful anecdotes that were thought a bit too unsavory, in the opinion of Tanenhaus or another party (most probably Chris Buckley, his quasi-patron).

As an example of the last, I think in particular of an event that appeared in John P. Judis’s 1988 biography of Buckley[1] ^[3], on which Tanenhaus often leans. It is 1975, and Bill and son Chris and other crew members of Bill’s yacht Cyrano have docked in the Bahamas, preparatory to sailing across the Atlantic to Marbella. (This is the voyage Bill wrote about in the memoir Airborne.) Surprising them on the dock is none other than Bill’s old friend Roy Cohn, wearing a bikini bottom and a t-shirt that says SUPER JEW. Roy has a muscled young man with him, whom Chris guesses to be a rough-trade pickup. The Buckleys and crew huddle and deliberate at length: “How can we avoid having dinner with those two?”

That story does not appear in the Tanenhaus bio, though there is plenty of Roy Cohn elsewhere in the book, particularly back during the McCarthy era. With Tanenhaus, the mid-1970s pass in a storm of financial woes followed by a blessed, steady windfall from bestselling novels. Bill begins to write his Blackford Oakes spy-thriller series (Saving the Queen, Stained Glass) and all is thereafter smooth sailing. There is no room here to discuss the 1975 voyage of the Cyrano, or Roy Cohn’s colorful lifestyle. But Tanenhaus usually finds plenty of time and space to talk about men who may or may not be light in the loafers. Apropos of nothing, he suddenly informs us that National Review publisher Bill Rusher was gay (a longstanding rumor, true or not); and tells us how NR editor Marvin Liebman, never firmly closeted anyway, publicly outed himself toward the end, after Bill proposed that HIV+ gay men get themselves tattooed prominently with that useful disclosure.[2] ^[4] And of course he tells us about the number of gay men in the Buckley’s social circle (not to be unexpected, given that Pat Buckley was society’s top A-lister); and reminds us of how Gore Vidal would continually insinuate that Bill was a closet queer. Finally he asks Bill’s old school friend from the Millbrook Academy, Alistair Horne, if Bill had ever showed any predilections that way. (No, not at all; repelled by the idea.) I’m surprised nosy-parker Tanenhaus didn’t cast any aspersions on son Chris—though of course if he did, they surely wouldn’t show up in the published edition.

With all this fluttering around, an anecdote about Roy Cohn at dockside with his bikini trunks and rent boy might have seemed a bit excessive. Or it could be Tanenhaus just didn’t like Cohn’s t-shirt.

But as to the index; I was going to talk about the index, wasn’t I? My first port-of-call in the index was Professor Revilo P. Oliver (or RPO, as we say). I’d known for years, via connections of the first degree, that RPO was a treasured old family friend, one whose cordial allegiance survived his departure, early 1960s, from the masthead of the National Review magazine.[3] ^[5]

But I had a specific question about RPO that is trivial and playful: was he or was he not Best Man at Bill Buckley’s wedding? Ancient history here: it’s July 6, 1950, and Bill weds the wealthy, regal, immensely tall Patricia Aylden Austin Taylor in Vancouver BC, in what is said to be the largest (outdoor) wedding ever staged in that part of the world. Now, I’d heard and read this “best man” factoid a few times. It’s been attributed to, or blamed on, Paul Gottfried, but no one’s ever nailed it down. The story seems plausible enough on its face. Long before National Review was launched, with Prof. Oliver as one of its “conservative” leading lights, he had been a close friend of Buckley’s Yale mentor and friend, Prof. Willmoore Kendall. The two profs been grad students in the early 1930s at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. So Prof. Kendall would almost certainly be at the wedding. And RPO too? Well, I can’t find it documented in writing. But tantalizingly, in a home movie of the event, one can spot a large gentleman with slicked-back black hair and mustache—the only visible mustache in this 1950 crowd.[4] ^[6]

Prof. Oliver here, if indeed it is he, would be just turning 42, and looks rather like a taller, younger, jollier version of Louis Calhern, the movie actor. (Whom you undoubtedly remember from one of that year’s finest motion pictures, The Asphalt Jungle.)

However I can now confirm, with a modicum of confidence, that RPO was not Bill Buckley’s best man. At least not according to the marriage notices prominently placed in the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times the following day, July 7, 1950. Under the slugline “Special to the New York Times” (newspaperese for “an outsider wrote this one”), we read that Buckley’s best man was in fact elder brother James L. Buckley, who later was U.S. Senator from New York, 1971-1977. The many ushers include Bill’s two other brothers and some brothers-in-law, including college chum and sometime writing colleague (McCarthy and His Enemies) L. Brent Bozell. There’s also that prep-school roommate and future bestselling author Alistair (aka “Allan”) Horne. Then we have all the bride’s sisters, friends, in-laws counted among Pat’s attendants. Just listing these names in the wedding party takes up over three inches of column space. But nowhere do we see the names of Professors Revilo P. Oliver or Willmoore Kendall. No matter; as a rule, only family and members of the official wedding party, get listed in these newspaper notices.

In the end we have several possibilities: a) RPO wasn’t there at all, therefore he’s not Mustache Man or Best Man. b) But perhaps he was at the wedding, and stood in for Jim Buckley because of some last-minute problem. Maybe Jim was ill, or missed his flight; and so, come wedding morn, hopeful eyes turned to Prof. Kendall as a backup, but Kendall too was nowhere in sight. And so, RPO gladly stood in, and the “Best Man” story got carried forth via oral tradition (never mind what the wedding notice said). Unfortunately all the principals are now dead and I cannot ring one of them up and ask. So finally, we are left with my own safe guess: c) Mustache Man is indeed RPO, but he wasn’t best man. That’s just some old rumor that’s been kicking around.

As it happens, there is no discussion of this “best man” question in the Tanenhaus book. In fact, there is almost no mention of RPO at all. In passing he’s called an “NR contributor…friend of Willmoore Kendall, and a fanatical racist and anti-Semite.” (p. 363, Kindle edition) That’s ungenerous, and smacks of incuriosity. John P. Judis had a lot more to say about RPO in his 1988 Buckley biography. But RPO was still alive then, and harder to ignore or lose down the memory hole. So, snip-snip, sayonara, RPO!

Considering other notorious scamps from the early NR days who might have been blue-penciled to near-nothingness, I lighted upon George Lincoln Rockwell. And wouldn’t you know it, he’s gone missing entirely. His name appears once, as a slur, when Edward Bennett Williams[5] ^[3] gives a college speech and calls Buckley “the Ivy League George Lincoln Rockwell.” Buckley threatened to sue Williams over that. It was a dumb thing to say, not only because cheap and nasty, but because the real Ivy League George Lincoln Rockwell was none other than that selfsame Brown University alumnus, George Lincoln Rockwell. (Edward Bennett Williams, it must be said, went to Holy Cross.)

Rockwell, a sometime ad-man and magazine publisher, was briefly hired by Buckley in NR‘s early days to develop a subscription-marketing campaign aimed at college and university students. Afterwards the two men corresponded occasionally, with snipes and insults. Buckley dismissed Rockwell’s new American Nazi Party kick as mental derangement. Finally, rather unctuously, he sent over a priest-psychologist to talk to Commander Rockwell and see if Rockwell could be talked down from his “mania.” Answer: no.[6] ^[4]

This missing Rockwell in the index leads us, free-associatively, to another omission that must be deliberate: Willis A. Carto. In the early days of Carto’s Liberty Lobby (late 1950s), he and Buckley maintained cordial, if distant, relations; much as Buckley remained friendly with members of the John Birch Society (for which Carto himself worked for about a year). But they inevitably became enemies, occupying as they did two polarities of the Right-wing universe: Buckley the prudent sailor, tacking close to the winds of bien-pensant opinion, vs. Carto the publisher-explorer of farther shores, contemptuous of “respectable” opinion and prospecting for pay dirt among the “kooks.” As though to spite Buckley, in the 1960s Carto acquired the American Mercury, the occasionally racialist and Jew-critical magazine that Buckley ordered NR writers to keep away from in the 1950s.

Buckley himself almost never mentioned Carto in print. But in September 1971, NR published a takedown of him and his various publishing and lobbying operations.[7] ^[5] Following that, Buckley and Carto spitballed at each other for many years in petty, pointless libel suits, usually leading to nominal damage awards. In the most prolonged of these, a 14-year action decided in 1985, Buckley sued Liberty Lobby for claiming (in The Spotlight newspaper) that Rockwell and Buckley had had a “close working relationship” in the early days of Buckley’s magazine. The court eventually found for Buckley (the “working relationship” wasn’t that close), awarding token damages. Another suit against Carto appeared to be a proxy action spurred by Buckley. An ex-spook who worked for Carto claimed in The Spotlight that Buckley’s old CIA friend E. Howard Hunt, the “Watergate Burglar,” was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. The Spotlight even ran the famous photo of Hunt (or his lookalike), dressed as a tramp in Dallas on assassination day. Hunt is unlikely to have seen this article on his own, so presumably Buckley encouraged him to file suit. Which Hunt did, but without success.

Notes

[1] ^[8] John P. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr., Patron Saint of the Conservatives. 1988.

[2] ^[9] This passage about the management of Young Americans for Freedom is particularly choice: “[Bill] entrusted YAF management to Marvin Liebman and Bill Rusher. Both were delighted to be in charge—not least because both were gay and never happier than when in the presence of young men.” Like most of the principals in this tale, Liebman and Rusher were safely dead long before this book made it to galleys.

[3] ^[10] Prof. Oliver was a founding member, spokesman and writer for the John Birch Society, 1958-1966, a period when editor William F. Buckley, Jr. politely eased his way from what he considered Right-wing and libertarian “crank” groups, including among others the JBS, Liberty Lobby, Ayn Rand’s Objectivists, and Russell Maguire’s American Mercury magazine.

[4] ^[11] A clip appeared most recently in the 2024 PBS documentary, The Incomparable Mr. Buckley.

[5] ^[8] Williams was a celebrity lawyer whose clients included mob bosses and flamboyant Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell. For a year or so in the late 1950s, Buckley and NR were obsessed with Powell.

[6] ^[9] Buckley disclosed this long acquaintance after Rockwell’s 1967 assassination, in a column collected in The Jeweler’s Eye (1969).

[7] ^[10] Bylined C. A. Simonds (Chris Simonds, a rock-music writer whom Buckley had brought over to his magazine to celebrate and comment upon youth culture), the article covered far more detail than even an intrepid young investigative reporter could dig up on his own. It was clearly assembled from dirt files that some helpful outside agencies had available.