A look back at the man who launched the modern American conservative movement.

This week on "Firing Line."

You have greatly illuminated the conservative movement on this show.

William F. Buckley Jr.'s influence on our nation and our politics extended far beyond his generation.

There was nobody like him before.

There hasn't been anyone since.

In his new biography, "Buckley, The Life and Revolution That Changed America," Sam Tanenhaus chronicles Buckley's long career as both a public intellectual and an activist.

He was a ubiquitous presence for about 50 years.

Left or right, set the politics aside, Bill Buckley was probably the most famous intellectual in America for that entire span.

Buckley made his mark early with his first book, God and Man at Yale, written just after college.

And he continued to be a force in American politics to the end of his life as editor of National Review and host of "Firing Line," which ran for 33 years.

Over those years, some of his views evolved and some did not.

Here is the second part of my conversation with Buckley biographer, Sam Tanenhaus.

"Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by... Robert Granieri The Tepper Foundation Vanessa and Henry Cornell The Fairweather Foundation The Pritzker Military Foundation Cliff and Laurel Asness And by... >> Sam Tanenhaus, thank you for returning to "Firing Line."

I want to continue our conversation.

>> Margaret, there's so much more to say.

>> I've heard you describe this book as more of a moral drama rather than a biography.

Why?

>> Because -- Well, first of all, I'm not a conventional biographer.

I'm not someone who says, "So-and-so was born in such and such a moment.

Here are all the things he did, and here's when he died."

I mean, you learn all of that, but that's not where the interest lies for me.

For me, I've written two big biographies, first of Whitaker-Chambers... >> Former Soviet spy Whitaker-Chambers... who became the great anti-communist witness during the early Cold War and an early hero to William F. Buckley Jr. >> Your biography on Whitaker-Chambers, Buckley described as an "epical event," and he referred to you as a "major talent."

So, how did that book lead to this book?

>> Well, he liked it, as you've said, and it was really in the course of writing that book that I realized Bill Buckley would be my next subject if he agreed to do it.

And I can tell you as a very young person, even more anonymous than I am right now, I tell people I'm a lot older and the swath of my anonymity is widened, but I'm still pretty much a nobody and I was very much a nobody back then.

And yet he treated me as if I was somebody because I really meant to do this book.

He was the first really famous person I met who treated me as an equal.

And I thought, already there's something different about him.

There's something interesting about him that attracts me to him and that maybe will help me unlock some of the secret of the movement he'd led, which was then at its peak.

This was 1990.

>> With respect to Buckley's revolution, how did Buckley's revolution change America?

>> Well, what it did was to shift the power center from the East Coast, the old-line establishment, which Buckley seemed to come from but actually didn't.

That was a mistake people make with Buckley.

They think he was a patrician.

He was not.

He looked like one and sounded like one.

>> His father was from Texas, his mother from New Orleans.

>> They raised him in Connecticut, but they also raised him in South Carolina.

>> Yeah, the money was new.

They were Catholics in a time when Protestantism dominated the culture.

But also, the establishment politics of the time really came out of the media in New York City and a couple of places -- "Time" Inc., "Time" magazine, "The Herald Tribune," which no longer exists anymore.

Those are the publications that anointed the leaders of the Republican Party.

And Buckley was part of the group that led the revolt against that and shifted the power centers to what one of his disciples, Kevin Phillips, was to call the Sun Belt.

That's the politics of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan of the Bushes, coming from that part of the country, shifting the argument, the debate, and the geography, actually changing the map of American politics, which is something Buckley was very closely involved in.

He was not a guy who moved the pieces on the chessboard.

Other people did that.

He was the one who said, "Let's get that chessboard and this player on it."

He's the impresario.

He was a brilliant impresario, and kind of producer of the movement.

And that was something new in American politics, that somebody who came out of the world of debate, of the Ivy League, of social connections, could actually change the way elections operated.

>> I want to ask you about his journalism and how he saw himself as a member of the press, because you write that Buckley, at age 32, "seemed more prince than counselor, more public actor than conventional journalist."

It was because he was expanding the definition of political journalism, taking it into the stormy waters of advocacy.

And not just for the right.

If you look at a left-wing journalist like Victor Navasky, the longtime editor and publisher of The Nation, really admired Buckley.

He said he was the journalist who just said what he really thought.

He wasn't always trying to sound like his position was the most sensible one.

It was the one he believed in.

Buckley was an advocate, advocacy journalism in the 1960s, all the way up to the present really became a dominant mode.

We see it right now in our journalism.

>> You're not hesitant to criticize his lapses in journalistic integrity or journalistic diligence, I will just say, and ethics.

He took the word of Pinochet that he had murdered thousands of people.

He hid information about Watergate from his audience and from Congress.

Are there echoes of this attitude towards journalism and facts in media today?

I think so.

One of the... Is it specific only to conservative media?

No, I would say not, actually.

I think it's a lesson the left needs to learn as much as the right.

I'll give you an example of that.

I think the year 2020 is one that's going to reverberate in our history for a long time.

It feels to me a little bit like 1968, one of those watershed years of violence and militarism, militancy.

And we know how a lot of liberal publications, including my former publication, The New York Times, treated what were serious uprisings in some of the major cities in this country, rather what they didn't report about them.

>> What didn't they report about them?

>> They didn't report the attacks on shopkeepers, often Black shopkeepers, right, Black Americans owning shops, seeing their businesses destroyed.

There was not a lot of reporting on that.

A notorious phrase that conservatives pick up and you'll probably be familiar with was when The Times described some of the events as mostly peaceful, right?

That phrase has not gone away.

>> Yeah, there were demonstrations across the country that were mostly peaceful.

That's a meaningful phrase.

So, yes, it's the left as much as the right.

That's why I find myself in the position I'm in, because, you know, we've mentioned some concerns conservatives may have with my book, but there are liberals who aren't happy with it either.

What are their gripes?

They think I'm too kind to Buckley.

They think that when I say Buckley was a warmer person than our political leaders and intellectuals are now, and we could use some of that, they think when I say that, I guess that I'm apologizing for his racial views.

It's not what I'm doing.

I'm saying that there's a mode of conduct, of conversation, of discussion and debate that elevates us all, that Buckley understood and promoted.

And yet, I'm surprised how that's brushed aside.

I'm interested in Buckley's political activism, even under the guise of his journalism.

You write extensively about Buckley's really complicated relationship with Watergate.

And it was complicated because for a brief moment in his 20s, Buckley was working for the CIA, and his handler at the CIA is Howard Hunt, who was later involved in the Watergate break-in.

At one point, you say that Hunt told Buckley so much about the crime that he actually made Buckley an accessory after the fact.

After Hunt pled guilty, Buckley brought him on "Firing Line" in 1974.

And I want you to look at this clip of him on "Firing Line" with Hunt being pressed about whether Nixon should be impeached or not.

Take a look.

- Well, do you feel he should be impeached or resigned?

- I don't really think you should answer that.

- I... (audience laughing) - Mr. Buckley.

- Well, you know, he wasn't invited here to answer that.

You can if you want to, but don't feel that you're being impolite if you're not.

- How does that episode exemplify the tightrope that Buckley walked between being a political advocate and a journalist at the same time?

- Well, for one thing, Margaret, it shows you he knows a lot more than he's letting on.

- Yeah.

- That's the first thing you see there, is, and he and Hunt are playing it pretty straight here.

And it's worthwhile remembering, what you just pointed out, they had been, in Hunt's phrase, operational equals in Mexico City, in the CIA, 1951.

And he is speaking to Hunt there as a fellow member of the club.

One aspect of Bill Buckley's life I found fascinating was all the clubs he belonged to, many of them secret.

Skull and Bones in the Bohemian Grove.

Some would say the Catholic Church is a kind of club, but especially CIA.

And National Review was publishing defenses of CIA even when it was clear the agency had broken the law, that they were engaged in domestic spying.

And in fact, when Hunt first was revealed to be one of the ringleaders of the Watergate break-in, Buckley wrote to him and said, "We assume you did this for patriotic reasons, so we're yelping up the pages of National Review for you to describe why you did it."

And Hunt didn't reply.

And then later, after Hunt's wife Dorothy died in a plane crash, ferrying payoff money for the-hush money for the Watergate burglars, Hunt confessed everything to Bill Buckley, including a possible plan to assassinate the journalist Jack Anderson.

So Buckley knew this and didn't tell anybody, including Jack Anderson, when he phoned Buckley not all that much later for a quote.

And it's important to remember here, Margaret, that we're not just talking about shadowy journalists on the right.

What was most striking to me was how many liberal journalists who were Bill Buckley's friends, including Bob Woodward, protected him once they knew the truth.

They continued to protect him.

How did Woodward protect him?

Well, Woodward did an investigation of his own that did show that what Hunt had indicated to Bill Buckley that an assassination attempt was planned on Jack Anderson.

Bob Woodward confirmed that in a long story he wrote for The Washington Post.

He didn't call Bill Buckley.

He didn't call him up and say, "Bill, is this true?

Did Howard say this to you?

What else did Howard tell you?"

>> You describe Buckley as a performing ideologue, and you write about his inability to articulate a grand, unifying, conservative philosophy.

You once said, "The single greatest disappointment in Bill Buckley's intellectual life, letting down himself, friends, and admirers, and, I increasingly feel, the country at large, was his failure to articulate a serious, coherent, conservative philosophy."

Unpack what you mean when you also say that he was an arguer not a thinker.

Bill Buckley lived and thought in the moment.

So if a debate came up, he would almost always have a striking original or at least sesquipedalian answer for you that would catch you off guard.

But if you ask him to step back from that and put all the arguments together, then he really struggled.

It wasn't something he was temperamentally suited for.

And I think you can be a conservative person without having a complicated or sophisticated system of ideas.

I don't think Bill Buckley needed that.

Well, you know, I would also posit that, you know, the movement itself was full of contradictions because it was full of factions that contradicted each other.

So it would be very difficult for him as the convening figure of a movement full of contradictions to actually write a coherent, rational argument, sort of threading them all together.

I mean, this is what Frank Meyer tried to do, of course, in the early days of National Review.

And, you know, it held somewhat.

But basically, people just decided to lay their swords down and row their oars in the same direction.

>> I think that's right.

Look, the greatest liberal president in the modern era was Franklin Roosevelt.

He couldn't have told you what his philosophy was.

He took two people with opposite points of view and said, "Write one piece of paper where you combine them all."

>> You know who could tell somebody what FDR's philosophy was?

Herbert Hoover.

>> Yes, he could very well.

>> Herbert Hoover had a very clear sense of what FDR's overviewing policy was.

Okay.

Buckley is often celebrated for driving the more extreme voices out of the conservative movement, like the anti-Semites, the Birchers, John Birch Society.

In another book about Buckley that Al Felzenberg wrote, "A Man and His Presidents," he said, "He stood guard over the movement he founded and, in what he called his greatest achievement, kept it free where he could, from the extremists, bigots, kooks, anti-Semites, and racists.

You present Buckley's relationship with Welch and the Birchers in two very well-researched chapters as primarily standing up to the Birchers as an act of self-preservation.

Robert Welch, of course.

Right, the founder of the John Birch Society in 1959, leader of the most extreme fringe of the conservative movement.

- Where did Buckley draw the line?

With the extremists he would stand up against and the extremists that he wrapped his arms around, like Joe McCarthy.

- Yeah, it's a very interesting question.

I think as the movement gained in respectability, that respectability was really important to Bill Buckley.

He did not want liberals to ridicule him and his movement.

He was very sensitive about that.

And some of Buckley's closest colleagues thought it was a mistake to read Welch out of the movement, as they said back then.

And Buckley's response then, I think, is very important.

He said, if people think the kooks are leading the movement, we're in trouble.

If they are the ground forces, the foot soldiers, that's okay.

Every movement has kooks.

But if they really think the guys at the top sound like that, then we're going to get ridiculed in the publications Buckley read, first and foremost, which were the New York Times and the New Yorker magazine.

>> Shut up a minute.

>> No, I won't.

>> And some people will -- >> In recounting Buckley's famous feud with the writer Gore Vidal, there is some time you spend on examining the suspicion that Buckley was himself gay.

You return to the subject later, discussing his response to the AIDS crisis, and I wonder why this question of Buckley's sexual orientation was important to be explored.

Because it was important to how he was perceived.

He's a very public figure, and much of the perception of him had to do with this complex, kind of multifaceted sensuality that he had about him.

That's what made him magnetic on television.

>> Gore accused him of being gay.

But did others?

I mean, was there really an overarching sort of suspicion that perhaps Buckley was gay?

Oh, there were many insinuations.

You can see in all the references to Noel Coward as the Noel Coward kind of figure, and you'll see it in the journalism too.

Ultimately, you put this to rest.

I did.

I thought it-that's what I thought part of my contribution was, but I guess some people are offended that I even discussed it.

And you mentioned, I think, that Gore Vidal accused Buckley of being gay, but that was much later.

It wasn't in the debate.

It wasn't during the 19th convention.

But what he did do that's really important, and I think you're getting it, is he insinuated it.

And he knew when he did that, that he was pushing a button.

>> As far as I'm concerned, the only sort of crypto Nazi I can think of is yourself, failing that.

>> That's not at all naive - >> I will only say that we can't have - >> Now listen you queer, >> is the right to assembly.

>> Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi.

>> Let's stop calling names.

>> or I'll sock you in goddamned face and you'll stay plastered.

>> Gentlemen, let's go.

And it was Andrew Sullivan, in a long interview I did with him, who said, "Andrew, we know, is a gay Catholic."

And what Andrew said to me when we discussed this was, he said, "I'm on Buckley's side throughout that."

He said, "Gore was just gaybaiting him.

That's the term he used."

Well, gay baiting, what does that mean?

He's kind of smearing him, just like the term "red baiting," right?

He's insinuating Buckley is gay.

And then when you look at the published accounts after that notorious exchange in Chicago where Vidal called Buckley a Nazi and Buckley called Vidal a queer, the studio executive said, "Well, we need the two sisters on television.

We need the hissing adders on television.

The implication was that that's what these guys were.

And Vidal very cleverly played on that.

And when you see some of the experiences -- >> He knew it would offend Buckley.

>> He knew it would -- >> He got a rise out of it.

>> Yeah.

>> He got a rise out of it.

>> He really did.

A friend of both men told me, someone I know quite well, said Gore thought Bill was getting away with something.

And what he meant by that was you could place Buckley in the line of fanatical or extreme anti-communists who are accusing other people of being subversives in order to conceal their own sexual deviancy in their language.

That's what my guy Whitaker Chambers was accused of and this is a very common thing.

And so and if you add Bill Rusher, the publisher of National Review, who was closeted but known by everyone in that universe to be gay.

With respect to Bill Rusher, you know, some of the critiques of the book, Neil Friedman in particular, who was one of the founders of "Firing Line," actually said, "For Sam Tanenhaus to out Bill Rusher 14 years after his death with no supporting evidence and no narrative purpose is wholly gratuitous."

How do you respond to that?

Did you posthumously out Bill Rusher?

I don't know if you can posthumously out anyone.

>> Well, why not?

I mean, he wasn't -- He didn't live as an openly gay man.

>> This was very well-known.

So, the pretended shock at this is surprising to me.

What happened instead was great pains were taken to pretend Bill Rusher wasn't gay.

And I don't understand why that happened.

When I interviewed Bill Rusher lengthily in San Francisco, what did he do?

He went down long lists of names of people I probably didn't know were gay but actually were.

People in politics, people in government, and anyone, any journalist who's been doing this for a while.

>> Is that detail about their orientation important to Buckley's biography?

It's important in a movement that -- whose main figure suggested gay men have their buttocks tattooed during the AIDS crisis, when some of his closest friends are gay and were shocked that he said it?

Yeah, I'd say it's important.

>> And when his wife, Pat Buckley, was one of the chief fundraisers for AIDS research.

>> That's right.

So the question of homosexuality and gay relations and then also AIDS is hugely important in the history of the modern right.

And if Bill Buckley at the center and apex of that movement is protecting the identities of gay men around him, yet also countenancing attacks on other gay men because their politics are different.

Yeah, we're talking about something that's essential to the modern conservative movement.

-You argue in a recent column that the through line from Buckley, the architect of the modern American conservative movement, to a populist like President Trump is not immediately obvious.

But upon closer inspection, Mr. Trump is heir to Mr. Buckley.

To what extent did Buckley pave the way for MAGA?

That's the imponderable.

He certainly cleared the space for the attack on elites, on the cultural elite, particularly through his first book, "God and Man at Yale," which remains the most influential thing Buckley wrote.

It was 25 when it was published.

It's the most important book to come out of the right in our time, I believe, because it shifted the debate to a cultural one.

He made it about professors and students and ideologies and arguments.

So Buckley opened up that place for saying the problem with America is that the wrong people are in charge, not so much or necessarily that they have ideas that won't work, but they're ideas we don't like and we can sharply criticize them, even if we may not have ideas of our own ready yet to replace them with.

That's what we're seeing now.

It's really a politics of opposition and enmity and Bill Buckley was pretty candid about that.

That's why he couldn't write the big book.

He was very good at saying what he was against, but not so good at saying what he could envision as being a better world.

Does Buckley have responsibility?

I mean, some have claimed that there is an even more direct through line between Buckley and Trump.

Do you see that?

I don't think we needed Bill Buckley to give us Donald Trump.

Donald Trump comes out of different forces, I believe, and that has to do with the complexities of American democracy.

And not to sound pompous or self-aggrandizing, but I think there's a lot about democracy we still don't understand.

And one thing we don't understand is how democracy itself might well give us a Donald Trump.

That doesn't require Bill Buckley to give us that.

Can you see connections?

Yes, absolutely you can.

But that doesn't mean Bill Buckley is responsible for Donald Trump.

And I think that's what some people seem to be saying.

And I think that's unfair.

>> This book was 27 years in the making.

Do you miss him?

>> I miss Bill Buckley every day.

I think about him every day.

And when times are difficult, the way they are now, I think about him a lot.

>> Sam Tanenhaus, thank you for returning to "Firing Line."

>> What a pleasure, Margaret.

I really enjoyed it.

>> You can find the first part of my conversation with Buckley biographer Sam Tanenhaus at pbs.org and listen to an extended version of the interview on the "Firing Line" podcast.

"Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is made possible in part by Robert Grenieri, The Tepper Foundation, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, Pritzker Military Foundation, Cliff and Laurel Asness, and by... [MUSIC PLAYING] >> You're watching PBS.

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