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Buy the Book
Father and Sons
Christopher Buckley and Richard Brookhiser tell us how they regard William F. Buckley Jr.
Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir
By Christopher Buckley
(Twelve, 251 pages, $24.99)
Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr.
and the Conservative Movement
By Richard Brookhiser
(Basic Books, 243 pages, $27.50)
As long as I’ve known of him, Christopher Buckley has struck me as an odd piece of work. In early 1981, shortly after I joined this magazine, Bob Tyrrell received a letter from him. Christopher was very upset. Much as he had liked The American Spectator, he would no longer be able to recommend it to friends or purchase gift subscriptions. Bob’s sin? He’d apparently made light of former Beatle John Lennon’s death (“historic expiration” were, I believe, the offending words).
Some time later I came across Buckley’s first (and most memorable) book, Steaming to Bamboola, about the post-college year he spent working on a tramp freighter. (Imagine if Somali pirates had tried to kidnap him!) It was during this adventure that he had had “FUCK YOU” tattooed onto his saluting hand. It wasn’t intended for Gore Vidal, and as such it greatly irritated Christopher’s father, who begged and begged him to have it removed. It would be years before he grudgingly did so.
In early 2001 he served as a master of ceremonies at the Media Research Center’s farewell to the Clinton era. He gave a command performance: suave, eloquent, and bitingly funny and even partisan. It was a rare occasion that Christopher ever displayed his conservative bona fides. Indeed, the open suspicion was that he’d made his literary career by mocking his own side—including someone he’d worked for, Vice President Bush—for liberal consumption. His coming out for Barack Obama last fall was simply a return to form. Now, with the highly publicized release of Losing Mum and Pup, his memoir of his famous and glamorous parents’ deaths and life, the controversy and mischief he has enjoyed engendering reach new heights.
Who knows why individuals act the way they do. By all accounts, Christopher Buckley is as wonderfully— regally—polite, kind, generous, and warm as those Buckleys I have met over the years, not just his father, Bill, but also his uncle Reid and aunts Priscilla and Trish. Yet he seems insecure enough in his princeliness to blurt out, about his parents, “They had—how to put it?—class.” But having class means never having to talk about it. Sadly, there is much in this memoir that isn’t classy at all.
For most of the book, Buckley plays up having been orphaned, a conceit planted in his mind by his “old pal” Leon Wieseltier. But an orphan is a child that loses its parents, not a 55-year-old adult. Late in the game Buckley suddenly concedes his “prattling” on this score has been “pathetic,” compared to the “sense of orphaning” that the young children who lost parents on 9/11 must feel. This is characteristic of Buckley’s having it both ways.
As he gets set to describe what reviewers are calling his parents’ “flaws,” “warts and all,” he lets on, “my sins are manifold and blushful,” though he hopes “callousness and arrogance” aren’t among them. (Not to worry, they are.) Or in recalling another of his countless contretemps with his father, he begins, “But being a devious little shit, I…” So that’s all the cover he needs? But the topper comes when he informs us that in bidding farewell to his comatose mother, he whispered to her, “I forgive you.” It reminded me of a recent CBS interview with Patti Davis in which she was asked if she had “forgiven” her mother, Nancy Reagan. It wasn’t clear for what, though one can imagine. Being raised by the mother who married her no-goodnik father must have been endlessly traumatic. But that can’t be Buckley’s excuse.
Having introduced his own mother to readers on her deathbed, at her most defenseless, he subsequently explains her monstrous side. She told whoppers. She embarrassed Buckley’s daughter and humiliated her best friend, a Kennedy (yes, of those Kennedys). He remembered a huge lie from when he only six years old (“my introduction to a lifetime of mendacity”). She never finished college. She didn’t read books. A third of the time she wasn’t on speaking terms with her husband. Some of the time she and son weren’t speaking either. Once you know all that, Buckley for all intents will say, Never mind! Or in his words: “Thinking back on it now, I’m filled with a sort of perverse pride in her.” A good many purring anecdotes ensue.
Besides, he has a bigger fish to fry. That would be Pup. Why such lingering grievances? Religion and maybe sex, for starters. Pup simply could not accept that Christopher was agnostic (“his inner Savonarola was released at the merest hint of…impiety”) and non-practicing. When Christopher was in boarding school, in response to one of his pranks, Pup asked the headmaster to inquire whether Christopher was involved in “an amorous dalliance” with another boy. But a larger cause seems to have been nothing more than a precocious Boomer’s resentment of a father who supposedly hadn’t offered him enough time and affection during those critical formative years. Amid his account of his father’s difficult, illness-racked final year, he observes, “It is contra naturam (to use a WFB term) to say no to someone who has raised you, clothed you, fed you from day one—well, even if, in Pup’s case, these duties were elaborately subcontracted.” You’d think he was turned over to gypsies to be raised.
To his everlasting credit, Buckley did spend a great deal of the 10 months that separated his parents’ deaths caring for his father. And though he provides more grisly detail than decency requires— and not once expresses gratitude to his parents for anything, or asks their forgiveness for, say, bringing an out-of-wedlock child into the world (not that readers are told about the boy either, a strange omission in “an honest book,” as he has called it)—by mid-book he is calling off the dogs and displaying a filial affection toward his father that can only be described as genuine and moving. This allows him to grapple with the real source of his permanent frustrations: his father’s greatness, brilliance, and individuality, with which he never could quite compete, as if anyone else could. But as the only son of a giant, he might have been too close to the man to understand that, however much he also wanted to distance himself from him.
If the reader will carry one lasting good feeling from the book—and whatever else might be said about it, the writing is splendid—it is when Christopher recounts moments he now treasures, usually involving just him and his father together, at sea, in Mexico, over a meal. And he doesn’t even complain there were too few of them. But in the end, how could there not be?
ONE WILL NOTICE THAT in the New York Times Magazine’s splashy excerpt from Losing Mum and Pup, the words “National Review” do not appear. They hardly appear in the book itself. Clearly, as some of Christopher’s friends might put it, the flagship magazine of the conservative movement has never been where his head is at.
That can’t be said about Richard Brookhiser, a longtime National Review editor and writer once assumed to be heir apparent to William F. Buckley at the magazine. Then for some reason, by the early 1990s, although he continued to write for NR, he drifted away to become an independent (and respected ) author and contributor to mainstream publications.
One assumed the decision was his. But we learn it wasn’t. In a sense, Rick (he used to write for us a lot) is another Buckley son taking advantage of Bill’s death to settle a long-standing score with him. Yet despite everything, his heart was and remains forever National Review’s. How can that be? As he recounts in Right Time, Right Place, Rick was NR’s famous prodigy—prominently published by the magazine while still in high school and brought on full-time after his graduation from Yale.
About the Author
Wlady Pleszczynski is editorial director of The American Spectator and the editor of AmSpec Online.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (37) | Leave a comment
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Mrs. Jackson| 6.8.09 @ 8:22AM
Mr. Pleszczynski, your insight has answered some unanswered questions.
Many thanks.
Red Phillips | 6.8.09 @ 9:27AM
Richard Brookhiser is, in addition to being a pompous jackass, an arch-Federalist/nationalist. This explains his choice of subjects for his Founders biographies. Thus he fits in well with certain elements at Nationalist Review, but it puts him outside the decentralist and regionalist strain of authentic American conservatism.
Note his contempt for Ron Paul and Paul's supporters in the last campaign.
http://etherzone.com/2007/phill100807.shtml
Teflon93 | 6.8.09 @ 9:44AM
Brookhiser and Buckley the Dumber are snobs.
Worse, they have done little to earn their snobbery.
Certainly they are not in WFB's league, which is why they can only sling mud at his memory knowing it will inevitably overshadow theirs.
Unfortunately, of National Review's current roster only Mark Steyn comes close to the Old Man's legacy and he's more of a humorist than an ideologue.
NR has far too many vipers of the Buckley/Brookhiser stripe looking to jump ship just as soon as Strange New Respect becomes available. You can tell them by their attempts to find "common ground" with the Obama Administration---they are the next David Frums, Rod Drehers, etc.
It's a shame Buckley the Elder didn't choose more wisely in picking his successor. Rich Lowry lacks the ideological underpinnings and willingness to be the bad guy necessary to preserve NR's status as conservative flagship. As a result, NR's largely just a place for neocons to cash a check these days.
Perhaps the colors ought to be struck at NR and raised at The American Spectator.
George| 6.8.09 @ 11:05AM
My God, you do snipe at one another. It's so precious. I can sure see why Christopher didn't want to dive into the middle of the writhing worms of pomposity at NR. Didn't Christopher mention in his memoir "Upmanship?" That seems to be the name of the game with you literary types.
Tim| 6.8.09 @ 11:42AM
Seems like family and personal intrigues afflict the elites as they do the rest of us. I miss Mr. Buckley and he had a singular talent, but I do not expect, nor do I demand that his son become him to make me feel better.
NR has seemed to succeed in transitioning from a family business into a going concern. That's a good thing.
Mary| 6.8.09 @ 12:15PM
I’ve not read any of WFB’s books. I was a fan of Firing Line, and a fan and subscriber of National Review.
I just started reading Kirk’s The Conservative Mind and reading this review evoked a sense that Losing Mum and Pup is a fitting end to a particular conservative mood. Jonathan’s story is the final act. May God raise him to super both his grandfather and his father: to love them, though they did not love him.
Since we’re talking about books, I’d like to recommend Sándor Márai’s Embers
Red Phillips | 6.8.09 @ 2:12PM
Teflon93, I agree that both C. Buckley and Brookhiser are snobs. Buckley especially. I believe his snobbery is one of the main reasons he endorsed Obama and distanced himself from movement conservatism. Like the elitist circles he runs in, he considers the GOP base to be witless, unsophisticated yahoos. Brookhiser is still friendly with the mainstream conservative base, but he is quick to distance himself from elements outside that mainstream, such as Paul supporters.
I would not say they have no reason to be snobbish (other than snobbishness is bad manners and uncivil.) Both are accomplished authors. Brookhiser is just on the wrong side of a great divide, nationalist centralizers vs. regionalist and localist decentralizers.
Lowry, does not lack “ideological underpinnings.” He has been thoroughly ideologized by the movement he is entirely a product of. The problem is he lacks knowledge and understanding of the long conservative tradition that pre-dates the movement.
Also, some of us hashed this out in another thread, but it is a mistake to lump Dreher and Frum together. They are both critics of the current conservative movement, but their criticisms are for far different reasons. Frum is a moderate counseling moderation (except on foreign policy), and Dreher is a “Crunchy Con” battling modernity. I am not crazy about Dreher’s style because I think it allows him to be mischaracterized as a Frumesque moderate, but Dreher actually does have an understanding of the older conservative traditions that I said Lowry lacks.
Tim| 6.8.09 @ 2:39PM
"Frumesque " let's hope that doesn't catch on...
barbara anderson| 6.8.09 @ 9:01PM
Read 'Losing Mum and Pup and was appalled. Chris Buckley said that his parents had class. Too bad he didn't inherit any of it. His absolute egotism in telling us that he forgave his mother was disgusting. Someone with class may have done that at a parents deathbed but would certainly not have informed the world about it. Mr. Buckley was a very successful man, but like Ronald Reagan, seems to have failed in rearing his child. He only produced an ungrateful brat who writes well. Thank you, Wlady, for also pointing that out.
Roy| 6.8.09 @ 9:31PM
Re:Phillips:
I know what you mean about Dreher, but I really think that anybody where that was their real priority would not come anywhere near even thinking about dreaming about cozying up to the Left the way he does. Somebody whose real goal was the preservation of tradition would understand that while the Right may be problematic from that point of view the Left is its unalterable, thoroughgoing enemy.
That's my biggest problem with intra-Right squabbles - they may have a point, but it should never be forgotten that the Left is always worse, and that can never be pointed out too often.
Alan Brooks| 6.8.09 @ 10:08PM
Brookhiser did me a big favor by pointing out Tofflerism is "Marxism for computer geeks", so even if he is a Federalist and a [fill in a tinhat epithet] he himself is nobody's chimp and nobody's chump.
Just because it fooled Newt doesn't mean the rest of us have to be fooled.
Alan Brooks| 6.8.09 @ 10:17PM
I was a futurist from 1976 - 2006;
if I'd listened to Brookhiser in '95, 12 years could have been reduced from the original 30 year sentence.
JUDGE: Prisoner roped-and-doped, I hereby reduce your futurist sentence to time served.
PCP Smoker| 6.8.09 @ 10:35PM
Good piece. I'm sure WFB was not an easy man to live with, but these biographies seem unbecoming.
Hunter Baker| 6.8.09 @ 10:37PM
Fantastic piece, Wlady. Your knowledge of the game and players makes these pieces on the movement highly worthwhile.
Red Phillips | 6.8.09 @ 11:28PM
"tinhat epithet"
That's right. Instead of challenging the substance just call names. That Brookhiser is everything I said he is is a verifiable fact. Do you disagree? Why the name calling? Just defend his positions if you support them.
I have been calling Gingrich a futurist and not a conservative since he was my rep in GA. If Brookhiser recognized the inherent non-conservatism of Toffler then good for him.
CC Ryder| 6.9.09 @ 12:53AM
I detest people who air their dirty laundry in public. Christopher Buckley may have money and position, but he is a piker just the same.
He'll never be his father and that's what galls him. Shame on him for his petty, callous treatment of his mother.
He's a disgrace. I hope the tell-all books his children write someday will even the score.
Creep.
Teflon93 | 6.9.09 @ 8:41AM
Red-
When I said that Lowry lacks "ideological underpinnings", your point is exactly what I was getting at: he is not grounded in the Burkean roots of modern conservatism.
A good litmus test for me regarding whether one is a conservative or not is this thought experiment: were the French Revolution underway today, how would one react and why?
Burke's denunciation of it (and his support for the American Revolution---within limits)---illuminates true conservatism and exposes faux conservatism. It is the difference between the man guarding the wellsprings of liberty and the ancien regime toady. Both oppose Robespierre, but for very different reasons.
Frum and Dreher simply do not oppose liberals---to the extent they do AT ALL---for the same reason that Buckley, Reagan, and other true conservatives did. Their interest is not in maximizing liberty but in codifying their particular eccentricities through the handiest vehicle around.
Lowry is like a boy wearing his father's suit. Even to the extent that he pulls it off, he has little concept of why it works. It is a very shallow understanding he displays and NR drifts accordingly.
Frum wants to win but doesn't know why---this is the disease which struck the Republicans post-1994. Dreher wants to be validated in his Ludditism-by-convenience---he's no Russell Kirk.
Conservatives play for much higher stakes---we wish to preserve, protect, and promulgate liberty. True liberty---not mere libertinism.
Even now, as Obama readies Madame Guillotine for physicians, financiers, soldiers, and other Old Regime bulwarks, even as the Powells and the Noonans and the weaker Buckleys and the Douthats and the rest wonder if "liberte, egalite, and fraternite" is ALL that bad, conservatives sharpen their swords and prepare to put an end to the bloody spectacle once and for all.
Red Phillips | 6.9.09 @ 9:06AM
Teflon93, but in the perspective of the French Revolution, which is indeed the litmus test, conservatism is not about "maximizing liberty." "Liberte" was the cry of the left. Now they certainly aren't doing a good job of protecting it these days except when it comes to the right to kill your baby or marry your boy friend, but the mess that is modern liberalism is a direct result of the spirit that was unleashed by the French Revolutionaries. Conservatism is about natural sustainable order, inherent authority (such as the Church), tradition, family and community, etc. Conservatism is not about atomistic individual liberty. Dreher, too some degree, does understand this, even if his style is sometimes off-putting.
Teflon93 | 6.9.09 @ 1:27PM
Red, I think you're confusing "liberty"---the obsession of conservatives---with "libertinism".
If you consult Edmund Burke's seminal document "On the Revolution in France" you'll see what is meant.
The same principle is of course codified in the Declaration of Independence. It was Burke who first showed how a conservative properly embraces the American Revolution but condemns the French. This was before the worst excesses of the Terror (although Burke wasn't really surprised).
Conservatism is not communitarian---rights are individual rights, not group rights.
The trouble is that to be a conservative, one must understand rights to be God-given, not man-made. This is at the heart of Burke's disgust with the French Revolution, and at the heart of Thomas Paine's error. The French presumed to be granting citoyens new rights; the Founders merely sought to protect the natural rights the colonists had always enjoyed and do so in perpetuity.
Dreher's merely switching whip hands in support of his own preference. Kirk's embrace of the more natural life was quite different and far less confused than Dreher's.
Conservatives do indeed embrace order, but order of the sort recognizable to De Tocqueville---self-organized rather than imposed by elites, and American conservatives in particular do not confound "natural" with "ancient" in the sense that we have not been saddled with all the "great chain of being" class nonsense our British counterparts endure.
The trouble with Buckley the Dumber, Frum et al is that they have replaced time-honored conservative principle with a desire to be the ruling elite. They are motivated by a lust for power and influence---to be embraced by the "right" people, not the Right people.
And thus nobody in flyover country gives a fig what they say.
Daisy| 6.9.09 @ 4:11PM
Teflon, good post!! Too many Americans want the rights without the attendant responsibilities. I believe true freedom is a combination of rights and responsibilities. Yes?
Alan Brooks| 6.9.09 @ 8:05PM
Red,
States rights means so little in 2009 it's quixotic.
We wish.
BTW killing a baby is wrong, but marrying the boyfriend is okay--
where do you think the baby comes from ;-)
John Lennon Owns Your Ass| 6.10.09 @ 12:30AM
Bob’s sin? He’d apparently made light of former Beatle John Lennon’s death (“historic expiration” were, I believe, the offending words).
Ya geez, people tend to get pissed when brainless peons make fun of the death of a genius musician beloved by millions . You can hardly blame the guy. Fucktard.
Teflon93 | 6.10.09 @ 7:51AM
Daisy-
I think you're right on the money: the conservative view of liberty must take into account duties as well as freedoms.
We see it in the Founders' willingness to risk life and limb to support the Declaration. They saw no essential conflict between the freedom they sought and the obligations they honored.
I'd guess Red would agree. In this age of radical individual libertinism---of eschewing all obligations but for the obligation to be politically correct at all times---Red rightly notes that conservatives do not stand for anarchy.
The difference is one of voluntary association. George Washington was not a draftee, however bound by duty he may have been to lead the Continental Army. He could have chosen the path of Coriolanus rather than Cincinnatus.
The Frums, the Drehers, the Powells et al simply do not understand liberty in the sense conservatives have for time immemorial: as the priceless gift of our ancestors which must be protected, preserverd, and promulgated unto posterity. They view it rather as the moneyed child views his trust fund---as something to be squandered over time to secure personal comforts.
Thus Frum will concede all notion of the duties and benefits of citizenship---just so long as Republicans can hope for that elusive Hispanic vote to keep them in power. Dreher will concede the prosperity-killing climate and energy policies of the Left---so long as the right mantra is chanted regarding "stewardship" and "sustainability". Powell will gladly toss aside our Israeli allies onto the irradiated dustbin of history so long as Democrats not be too naked in their anti-Semitism in so doing. And all would counsel loading the Supreme Court with Bill Ayers-approved radicals---wouldn't want to have ugly debate in the Senate, would we? Too divisive.
The trouble of course is that a coalition of people who adopt the social, economic, and foreign policy principles of the Democrat Party already exists: it's called the Democrat Party.
ron| 6.10.09 @ 8:22PM
Overreacting much?
It's amusing to read the sniping and carping in the comments criticizing the sniping and carping of these two authors.
My favorite is the one who decided to incoherently degrade the author of the article because he poked fun at John Lennon.
I think the point of this article is simple. A guy can have tremendous talent, ability and excellence, but it doesn't mean he's not human.
I am happy to hear that Brookhiser reconciled with his father. I had a similar experience. It seems that a man needs to admire his dad above all other men. And yet he needs to not just make his own mark but to even supersede his father.
A curious dilemma we all face.
vouchercodes | 1.6.11 @ 8:56AM
I really agree with you