The Politics of Peter Pan

HE PULLS all-nighters writing under a tight deadline, he stages pranks with an adolescent frivolity, he sails spontaneously, he bullshits for hours, he writes long letters to friends everywhere. Years after graduating from Yale, William F. Buckley, Jr., still reveals the same collegiate drive that propelled him to the center of the American conservative movement with the publication of his critique of alma mater, God and Man at Yale. His accomplishments would make the most energetic resume suffer blanche: editor and founder of his own conservative magazine (Reagan's announced favorite), television talk show host, syndicated newspaper columnist, lecture circuit fixture at $4,000 a fix, United Nations delegate under Nixon, and guru to conservatives everywhere.

In Overdrive, he describes a typical week in his life--a week that epitomizes why Buckley remains simultaneously one of American conservatism's greatest proponents and one of its greatest liabilities. At his best, he is the intellectual dean of American conservatives--articulate, witty, brilliant and often dazzling. It is this Buckley who hosts a special on Brideshead Revisited, writes a thrice weekly conservative column, publishes essays everywhere. This is the Buckley that historian Theodore H. White called "the rarest American conservative." This Buckley tells a Crimson editor that his "hope" for a Harvard debate with John Kenneth Galbraith "is that my knowledge of economics should trickle down to Professor Galbraith...."

But alongside this winning Buckley lurks Buckley the Patrician--heir to a family fortune, yachtsman, product of British prep schools and America's second best university. This Buckley sails and skis for fun, goes to ballets with the President's son, substitutes U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick when Vice-President George Bush can't lunch with him. At a time when Republicans and conservatives suffer most from allegations of unfairness and snobbery, this Buckley is the mortal enemy of Republican election hopes.

In an often quoted interview before Overdrive, Buckley told television critic Gene Shalit that he could simply point to any story in the Times and write a column on it. "Yes," Shalit replied, "I think I've read that one." Are we reading an expanded version of that now? To some extent, yes, this is an ego trip with Buckley showing he can write out even his life's most trivial details and still (best) sell them. But even with its incessant name-dropping ("it would be unusual if I hadn't seen a great deal of Ronald Reagan")--Overdrive offers a rare glimpse into the mind and values of one of America's most influential conservatives.

Unfortunately, the picture he paints of this life embarrassingly resembles a Fairfield Porter or F. Scott Fitzgerald universe, where every man had a yacht and every girl a debutante ball. Buckley says of his personal estate, "We desired a house by the sea and didn't see any particular reason why, if the whole Southern tier of Connecticut squats down on the sea, why we shouldn't be among those who squatted down in that part of Connecticut."

Buckley could clearly use a commuter train to reality, but that simply wouldn't do. Whining about the scaling down of the latest model Cadillac limos, Buckley writes. "This simply would not do: I use the car constantly, require the room, privacy, and my own temperature gauge (for the back seat beyond the glass partition.)" But not to stop there, he goes on to detail the "usual market solution" in the form of a company in Texas that chops normal Cadillacs in half, stuffing them with new space and elegance. This "usual market solution" may enthrall the Polo shirt and Godiva chocolate set, but it's highly unlikely to draw new Republicans into the ranks.

ALL THESE DETAILS on his latest luxuries just may make Buckley a classier Stephen King in the product name-dropping department. But as with Stephen King, it raises the most serious objections to his work: isn't this man capable of something more than this? Certainly Buckley can be charming, analytical, brilliant; certainly he can consider something more than limo conversions or the history of his family estate. After a while, you question the civic sobriety of a Bill Buckley discussing the housing problems of New York bag ladies after whining on about his family estate going condo.

To some degree, all of this literary boasting invokes the familiar Archie Bunker syndrome. Many of Buckley's fans drive mere Mercedes instead of limos but somehow reap vicarious prestige by knowing (even if only through a book) the rich kid on the political block. "How true, Bill," they might think, "getting good limos is a problem I hope to face someday."

But the limos and family estates have never made Buckley a stuffy Puritan-style conservative. On the contrary, Buckley defines the Peter Pan syndrome of politics, forever lost in the dodges that spell success in prep school, now substituting serious political essays on supply side economics for explications of Victorian poetry. In his first spy novel, Buckley had his obviously autobiographically based Yalie Blackford Oakes finish his mission Saving the Queen with a final climax in the private royal chambers. The real life Buckley probably wouldn't go that far outside his imagination but the pranks still go on. At a swearing-in session for a friend, Buckley finished his remarks with a video clip of the newly installed diplomat reflecting on the nature of government service. "Don't you understand, Dick," the friend says," most of the people in Washington are assholes."

That diplomat probably returned to work with those "assholes" for the same reasons Buckley writes: a sense of obligation as a citizen and a fear of boredom. "I do not like to write," Buckley says, "for the simple reason that writing is extremely hard work, and I do not 'like' hard work." Rather he may write to escape boredom or serve his cause or maybe not. "It is easier to stay up late working for hours," Buckley reasons, "than to take one-tenth the time to inquire into the question whether the work is worth performing."

ON THE SURFACE, this unquestioning workaholism has certainly made Bill Buckley a highly successful and, indeed, profoundly happy man. In a review of an earlier Buckley book featured prominently on the jacket cover, Kurt Vonnegut says"... whenever I see Mr. Buckley I think this...: 'There is a man who has won the decathlon of human existence.'" The irony, however, is that in many ways Buckley, like many of us, never entered the race. Certainly running around boarding schools involves no sprinting, leaping at nearly every conventional conservative ideal no high jump, sailing and skiing no discus throw, and inheriting a large cache from his oil baron father no hurdle race. No matter what his elegant prose, no matter how frequent his careful evidence citations, no matter what his wit and charm, I cannot but recall registering to vote with my close friend. "Listen, C. J.," he told me, "let's register Republican: that means you want to keep your pool and I want to keep my Porsche."

In his political essays, by and large, Buckley advances logic and evidence to support his arguments. Such is the intellectual Buckley. In Overdrive, this Buckley yields far too often to the patrician Buckley. For years when Buckley ran support for the outcast Republican right, one could still laugh at his jokes, marvel at his elegance (some say arrogance) and appreciate his steadfast defense of conventional conservatism. Sometimes it could appear almost comical, the notion as he presents it, that a naturally egalitarian society could better itself by arbitrarily endowing some minority with excess wealth. But the patrician Buckley, by fueling liberal notions of conservative insensitivity and snobbery-could make the most brilliant of his arguments impotent. For some that would be the biggest joke of all.