A Civil Action
a review by James Como (December 2016)
Heather Hendershot, Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on The Firing Line.
Broadside Books, 2016. 357pp. $28.99.
Basing her work on archival research, interviews (by the way, as the long-time managing editor of National Review, Linda Bridges was hardly undifferentiated “staff”), correspondence, transcriptions and a wagon-load of secondary matter, Hendershot, a well-published professor of film and media at M.I.T., provides three-hundred-and eight notes and a rich index of seventeen pages preceded by a Preface (“The Making of William F. Buckley, Jr.”), an Introduction (“The Making of Firing Line”), six chapters (each on a Big Topic), and a Conclusion (“In Praise of Honest Intellectual Combat”). I saw a few hundred of the 1500+ Firing Line episodes (the last coming in 1999),[1] so I can report that Hendershot covers representative ground and is largely even-handed (notwithstanding a few trots on hobby horses with Firing Line as a prop).
These are the chapters: 1/ Forging a New image for the Right [Conservatism], 2/ Apodictic All the Way Through [Communism], 3/ From “We Shall Overcome” to “Shoot, Don’t Loot” [Black Power], 4/ Chivalrous Pugilism [Women’s Lib], 5/ Tripping Over Tricky Dick [Nixon], and 6/ From the Mashed Potato Circuit to the Oval Office [Ronald Reagan]. Along the way Hendershot gives full faith and credit to Buckley’s arguments (on the rising national debt under Reagan, for example) and is often impatient with liberal potshots (for example, from Michael Kinsley). Buckley is what he is, a complex, watch-like, precision axel that allows this new wheel to roll fluently through fresh television territory – ideological, polemical, political, religious, even personal – no matter the variety or number of spokes attached.
Although not all of Buckley’s guests were of the Left, the preponderance were, and Buckley held no truck with low hanging fruit, for as Hendershot makes clear over and again he craved (not too strong a word) substantive debate: a clash of ideas forcefully, intelligently, and adroitly engaged. So on the firing line were the likes of Noam Chomsky, Eldridge Cleaver, Germaine Greer, Norman Thomas, Betty Friedan, Christopher Hitchens, Ed Koch, Helen Pilpel (the most frequent female guest) and Allard Lowenstein (a favorite and a friend), as well as interrogators such as Jeff Greenfield (who virtually grew up on the show) and Michael Kinsley (whom Hendershot, like Buckley, somehow does not find insufferable), along with Phyllis Shlafley, Barry Goldwater, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and others on the Right. Hendershot brings alive, not only their moment – reminding those of us old enough to remember those days just what was at stake (while those not old enough get a history lesson rich in detail and analysis) – but their presence too: these were consequential people who fired back. They and their ideas mattered, and most of them had . . . style. In short, we encounter them in full.
Hendershot quotes amply from the transcripts, often contextualizing, analyzing and opining along the way. Buckley enjoyed the labor reporter (who was blinded by the mob) Victor Riesel, who reminisced about an airline strike, “we had a ball, Bill. We would get on a train . . . [and have] and extra drink or two” – at each stop along the way to Los Angeles. Four drinks at the Pump Room? Said Buckley, “every time I think of George Meany that’s exactly what I’m driven to.” Hendershot clearly enjoys describing Buckley’s defense of Daniel Ellsberg against the theft of his private psychiatric records and, in describing Buckley’s objections to certain FBI activities, quotes Buckley as saying (with respect to wire-tapping Martin Luther King, Jr.), “I think this is really shocking, the notion that the president of the United States has the right to know about the sex life of anybody.” Hendershot spends much time on Buckley and civil rights, emphasizing that Black Power advocates got a very fair shake on the program. She especially enjoys the thoughtful and very funny Godfrey Cambridge, who “offered a brilliant less-is-more performance” (in contrast to the fatuous Jesse Jackson).
Alas, both the viewing and live audiences would peter out, but over the long run my high anticipation for that first episode was fully vindicated. In her Conclusion Hendershot reviews TV talk programming preceding Firing Line, finding that, even in a better age than our cable one, Buckley stood way out. She ends the book with a quotation from Mortimer Adler (1983): “understanding comes first. People who disagree with what they don’t understand are impertinent, and people who agree with what they don’t understand are inane. . . . inanity and impertinence rule the roost most of the time. . . .” A fine way to end, but for my own I prefer to go back to Hendershot’s beginning.
And she delights in displaying Buckley’s favoring rich conversation, as when she describes his visit with the left-wing Christopher Hitchins and R. Emmett Tyrrell, a conservative neo-lion. The young man couldn’t keep up, finally being ignored by Buckley. It was Hitchens who would visit the show five times. She gives a special place of honor to Buckley’s reversal programs: he would invite liberals – Ed Koch, Jeff Greenfield, Morton Kondracke and others – to grill him. When Kondracke moved to The McLaughlin Group, he called that show “the beginning of the end of civil discourse . . . if not the beginning of the end of Western Civilization.”
St. James does admonish that “the tongue is also a fire.” Alas, as a society we have forgotten that and Lord Moulton’s Domain of Manners, which lies between the absolutely free and the absolutely regulated. It is the domain requiring “obedience to the unenforceable.” It is the domain that reminds us that our Logos – that which separates us from all other animals – is a gift. That is why I intensely share in the lament that ends Hendershot’s Preface: “There seems to be very little space for political opponents to sit down and talk” – the tip of the iceberg only, in my view – “Restoring genteel notions of civility to TV will not provide a magic cure for all that ails us politically today,” not least because (I believe) there is scarcely any “mainstream media,” and that because there is scarcely a main stream. Hendershot adds, “but Firing Line offers a model for what smart political TV once was”: refreshing and welcome, and the reason this timely and irresistibly engaging book matters.
[1] For perspective: Gunsmoke aired 635 episodes, Law and Order 456. Firing Line remains the longest running public affairs show with a single host in the history of American televsion.
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James Como is the author, most recently, of The Tongue is Also a Fire: essays on conversation, rhetoric and the transmission of culture . . . and on C. S. Lewis (New English Review Press, 2015).
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