The modern history of the Republican Party is very much the story of a battle between East Coast Moderates/Liberals (who essentially accepted the New Deal, Internationalism, and later the Sexual Revolution) and Southern, Western, and Midwestern Conservatives (who maintained their opposition to government aggrandizement of power in the domestic, international and moral spheres).  The Establishment repeatedly managed to foist such milquetoasty candidates as Wendell Wilkie, Thomas Dewey and Dwight D. Eisenhower upon the Party--luckily, Ike turned out to be much more conservative than anyone anticipated.  Then in 1964, when the Right Wing finally managed to get their standard bearer nominated, Barry Goldwater had the bad fortune to run in the wake of JFK's martyrdom.  When Goldwater went down in flames and took much of the Party with him, the Easterners seized on this episode as evidence that the Party had to repudiate conservatism and hew more closely to the politics of the Democratic Party.  The fair haired boy of this movement was John V. Lindsay and his campaign for mayor of New York City was widely seen as a stepping stone on a path that might lead Republicans back to the White House.  It is against this backdrop that we must view the quixotic 1965 mayoral run of William F. Buckley and, given this context, it is not too much to say that Buckley's campaign, though nearly forgotten now, was one of the seminal events in modern political history.

When it became clear that Lindsay would be the nominee of both the Republican and Liberal Parties, and furthermore, thanks to incumbent Robert Wagner's scandal ridden term, that Lindsay would likely win, Buckley began to write pieces asserting that it was important that someone who actually represented Republican views enter the race, simply to guarantee that there would be an honest debate on the issues.  When leaders of the recently formed Conservative Party approached Buckley and asked him to take on the race, he agreed, on the understanding that he would not campaign full time and would continue to fulfill his obligations to the several jobs he held.  He made his reasons for running clear in his announcement speech:

    The two-party system presupposes an adversary relationship between the two parties.  That there is
    no such relationship in New York Mr. Lindsay makes especially clear when he proposes as running
    mates members of the Liberal and Democratic Parties.  Mr. Lindsay's Republican Party is a sort of
    personal accessory, unbound to the national party's candidates, unconcerned with the views of the
    Republican leadership in Congress, indifferent to the historic role of the Republican Party as
    standing in opposition to those trends of our time that are championed by the collectivist elements
    of the Democratic Party.  Mr. Lindsay, described by The New York Times as being "as liberal as a
    man can be," qualifies for the support of the Liberal Party and the Republican Party only if one
    supposes that there are no substantial differences between the Republican Party and the Liberal
    Party.  That there should be is my contention.

It was clearly understood by all concerned that he would basically play the role of a gadfly in the race.  Indeed, any doubts that he reckoned how little chance he had of being elected were cleared up at his first press conference, when to the consternation of staff and Party officials he gave the following answers to questions:

    Q: Do you think you have any chance of winning?

    WFB: No

    Q: How many votes do you expect to get, conservatively speaking?

    WFB: Conservatively speaking, one.

In the campaign that followed, Buckley, freed from the restraints that bind a politician who thinks he may win, proceeded to run one of the most ideological, honest and entertaining campaigns that anyone had ever seen.  He quickly became a media phenomenon, although they were almost uniformly hostile to him and his views, they loved covering him.  And when the cities newspapers went on strike the race came to center around television and Buckley was able to totally outclass his opponents, Lindsay and Abe Beam.

Besides his natural facility with the fairly new medium, Buckley's political platform turned out to be more popular than anyone expected.  Indeed, his proposals were twenty or thirty years ahead of their time, including Education reform, Welfare reform, beefed up law enforcement, tax cuts, balanced budgets, an end to school bussing, abolition of rent control, and so on.  as a result, when the first polls came out, not only was Beame beating Lindsay, Buckley was polling over 20% and doing particularly well with Blue Collar Democrats.  Suddenly everyone, including he, had to take his candidacy seriously.

From that point on Lindsay and Beame and their cohorts trotted out all the trusty anti-conservative canards--tarring him as a racist, an anti-Semite, anti-Protestant and, somehow, even an anti-Catholic.  Buckley ended up spending so much time defending himself that he lost the momentum he had gained by being a purveyor of brash new ideas.  He acknowledges that his political inexperience was a major handicap as he allowed himself to drift off message and into a defensive posture.

When the votes were finally counted, Lindsay won, but with just 45%, Beame tallied 41%  and Buckley polled an impressive 13%.  In the process, he had carved up Lindsay to the point where no one seriously considered him to have a future in Republican politics and indeed Lindsay eventually left the party for his natural home with the Democrats.  But more importantly, Buckley demonstrated that there was a significant segment of the democratic Party that was just waiting to be wooed by a conservative Republican message.  These folks--largely middle or working class, White, ethnic and Catholic--would later form the backbone of Nixon's "Silent Majority" and would come to be called Reagan Democrats, but it was the 1965 New York mayoral race that really showed that conservatism had an inherent appeal to this population.  For this, as for so much else, the Republican Party is indebted to William F. Buckley.

This book, his account of these events, is one of the funniest political stories ever written.  He looks back not in anger but in bewilderment at the neophyte mistakes he made, at the shoddy media coverage he received, at the character assassination he was subjected to and at the entire chaotic process of running for office, especially in New York City.  It's a real shame that the book is out of print (though easy to find used, see the link above); it is almost frightening how much of the story remains topical and pertinent today.  In particular, and somewhat ironically, I couldn't help thinking how badly the Democratic Party today needs someone like Bill Buckley--someone with wit, grace, style, and actual core convictions who will remind them that they are supposed to represent something more than conservatism with an Oprahesque tone.  As Buckley said in his announcement, the American system presupposes two adversary parties.  Men like Goldwater and Buckley made sure that the republican Party offered "a choice, not an echo"; where is the Democrat who will do the same for his party, who will undertake a similarly quixotic quest, though it prove his own unmaking?  We're waiting.

(Reviewed:14-Jul-00)

Grade: (A+) Orrin C. Judd

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