William Buckley: Little Left to Say, But Said So Well   

Happy Days Were Here Again: Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist
By William F. Buckley Jr.
Random House

Happy Days Were Here Again: Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist
By William F. Buckley Jr.
Random House
474 pages; $25

Politics played a cruel trick on William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1980s, delivering a conservative ascendancy that robbed the right wing's magisterial mouthpiece of his fattest targets: moderates and liberals with power. Always at his scathing best dishing out ridicule from the sidelines, Buckley couldn't very well turn his polysyllabic potshots on the Reagan-Bush crowd, and so he was marginalized into lame essays blasting Angela Davis and Robert Mapplethorpe and eclipsed as crown philosopher by that Tory-come-lately George Will.

Not that he slowed down, as this collection of his work over the past decade attests. But reading dozens of Buckley pieces at one time produces an unexpected reaction: The man who once almost singlehandedly exemplified conservative intellectualism has surprisingly little new of substance to impart.

Seldom does he even deign to engage issues or document his views. Instead, he comments ex cathedra, asserting positions from on high rather than defending them on merit.

The very arrangement of his book illustrates the point. It begins with a section called "Assailing" and makes its way through "Commenting," "Reflecting," "Celebrating" and even "Playing." One lone segment is labeled "Analyzing."

Often, he simply sideswipes the key issues. On abortion, for example: "Is a mortal assault on a fetus something on the order of assault and battery? Or is it no different from stuffing a tomato in a blender? These perplexities may continue to confound us."

This lack of engagement is disappointing because Buckley clearly possesses a lofty intellect and considerable charm as a writer and thinker. But it is his method, more than his message, that mesmerizes us today: the playful rhetorical taunting and toying, the verbal showboating that strews his copy with words like lucubrations, miscible, brummagem and latitudinarianism.

Given his abiding affection for the overdog, Buckley has become pretty predictable. He fumes about multiculturalism and affirmative action, makes fun of Jesse Jackson and Ted Kennedy, and lauds Clarence Thomas and Clare Boothe Luce.

On many issues he remains incorrigibly unreconstructed.

On Richard Nixon: "..a man who made a relatively trivial mistake in judgment but saw it magnified into a cosmic event."

On feminism: "Because we know that women should be educated and should vote and should exercise their capacity to lead does not dissipate that tropism that assigns to the woman primary responsibility for the care of the child, and to the man, primary responsibility for the care of the woman."

I wished for more examples of the Buckley who occasionally so deftly surprises and stimulates:

On social ills: "Whatever else is responsible for the breakup of the family, it is inescapably the case that the official prejudice against religion in education has played a large, perhaps even a decisive role."

On legalizing drugs: "Social hostility to the abuse of drugs..should continue, with the question left open whether more damage — or less — would be done under legalization."

He can also be a compelling logician. One of the best pieces here — "Is It Worth Joey's Life?" — is an exquisite analysis of the value of an American GI dying for a cause in the Persian Gulf:

"Would I trade the life of my dear one in exchange for a return to eighteen-dollar oil... Was it reasonable for Patrick Henry to say, 'Give me liberty or give me death'?.. It is calculations of that order that arm us for the casualty figures ahead, and it doesn't mean that the death of Joey won't be heartbreaking to those who love him."

Buckley the arch-aristocrat can even be warm, in recalling New Yorker Editor William Shawn, for instance, or sharing a whimsical vignette about encountering a carpenter who loves reading Emerson.

But at bottom, his writing seems self-conscious and personality driven, and Buckley thrives on playing, if not parodying, himself. "I have never seen a professional baseball game," he writes at one point, "an episode of Dallas, or of Roseanne, or of Geraldo, or of the black lady who is alternately fat and thin, I forget her name. So? So I waste my time and take my pleasures in other ways."

Less and less does he seem to take his pleasure in cutting-edge conservatism. Strip away his patrician proclamations and signature sesquipedelianisms, and it turns out the emperor has little left to say. Which is sad, because he says it so well.

Stepp, an AJR senior editor, teaches at the University of Maryland College of Journalism.

Briefly
Herblock: A Cartoonist's Life, by Herbert Block (Macmillan, 372 pages, $24). He's a mild-mannered octogenarian named Herb, for Pete's sake, who grew up normally in the Midwest, did his time in the Army, and found his way to Washington, where he drew for the Post by day and loved partying by night with the likes of Marlene Dietrich and Robert Frost. Yet the privately unpretentious Herblock (his father suggested the nom de plume when young Herb began submitting to a Chicago Tribune contributors' column) has sustained a public artistic fury for two-thirds of a century, lacerating everyone from Mussolini to Milosevic with his shaded, charcoal style and frontal directness. As Lyndon Johnson once said of him, "Oh, he'll come over and eat your cookies, but then he'll go back a draw a cartoon giving you hell the next day." Here, he's written an affectionate memoir full of memorable editorial cartoons.

Contested Closets: The Politics and Ethics of Outing, by Larry Gross (University of Minnesota Press, 348 pages, $16.95). A thorough examination (naming names and reprinting controversial articles) of "the deliberate revelation by lesbian and gay people of the hidden homosexuality of prominent people." Gross, a University of Pennsylvania communications professor, generally approves of outing but explores it from all sides. For journalists who dismiss outing as simple invasion of privacy, Gross raises unsettling questions about "the obligation to tell the truth," journalists who "collude in disinformation," and the hypocrisy of "singling out this one area in which to protect a right to privacy that is routinely trampled in the interest of the public's 'right to know' everything." — C.S.S.