Remember that Bill Buckley was a household name, ran for office and had a national platform on both print and TV.
He was a household name with a national platform before he ever thought about running for office---remember,
he'd written two books before he created
National Review in 1955; he published two more books (
Up from
Liberalism and his first anthology,
Rumbles Left and Right) by 1963, which was about the time he was
first offered his syndicated column. And there were those who regarded Buckley much the way many regard
Red State: uncredentialed interloper.
Firing Line didn't launch until months after the 1965 New York
mayoral election in which Buckley ran;' he'd been a sought-after guest on television yakfests, and a known
public debater, but until
Firing Line he didn't have his own television platform.
And there were plenty in his pre-mayoral years who argued as you did, namely, where did
thisbarely-credentialed upstart get off spanking pols and politics and government without once daring to throw his
own ass into the arena?
And even his running for mayor of New York came about almost by mistake, as Buckley himself wrote in the
appropriate chapter of
The Unmaking of a Mayor:
At a staff meeting of National Review a few days after the column was written, the routine
question was raised, as it is every fortnight just before the final deadline for the magazine's cover
copy, what to emblazon on the top-left diagonal yellow streamer designed to attract the attention
of newsstand buyers. We happened that week to be short of usable titles not already mortgaged
on the colour form, which is locked in several days earlier. After a half hour's paralysis, my
sister Priscilla Buckley [NR managing editor---EA.], who cannot resist a self-deprecatory
whirl, suggested, "Why not, 'Buckley for Mayor'?" Having, after all, vouchsafed a pardigmatic
platform, theoretically useful in any large-size American city, I yielded to the argument that the
metaphor "Buckley for Mayor" would be instantly understood; that no reader in his right mind
would be likely to infer from the streamer that Buckley was actually announcing that he would
run for Mayor and that this was his trial balloon. It was not, as a matter of fact, until a fortnight
after the event that I was informed, to my astonishment, that in fact I was legally qualified to
run for Mayor of New York, notwithstanding that I was a resident and registered Republican
voter in Stamford, Connecticut. But my sister, as it happened, had been quite correct. Not a
soul mistook the yellow streamer for a Freudian revelation; not even I.
Buckley was in fact planning to ask
National Review publisher William Rusher if
he would
consider running for Mayor on the New York Conservative Party ticket. Only when Rusher said
no did Buckley, in the middle of planning a public speech expanding on the original column's
proposal, visit with Conservative Party chairman and co-founder Dan Mahoney and, spontaneously,
ask if he, Mahoney, would ponder Buckley running. He would, and Buckley did, in perhaps
one of the least premeditated political office campaigns in my lifetime. From that campaign
sprang the exchange that's since sailed into Bartlett's waters: asked his first official act if
elected, Buckley replied without skipping a beat, "Demand a recount."
(Buckley didn't exactly write from butt-hurt about Barry Goldwater; in fact, he wrote a few
thoughtful postmortems on Goldwater's defeat, as did his
National Review senior
editor Frank Meyer. You can find Meyer's in his subsequent anthology,
The Conservative
Mainstream. But they were among the few enough on the right who didn't fume, rant,
and rave over Goldwater's defeat, even if the candidate himself didn't go rhetorically postal
likewise.)
