When William F. Buckley Jr. Met James Baldwin

In February 1965, three months after Barry Goldwater had been trounced by Lyndon B. Johnson in the presidential election, one of the Republican candidate’s most forceful advocates, William F. Buckley Jr., had an important event on his calendar. Taking a break from his annual ski vacation in Switzerland with his wife, Pat, he made his way to England for a debate at the Cambridge Union with one of the most celebrated writers alive, the novelist, memoirist, critic, and essayist James Baldwin. Buckley had been paying attention to Baldwin. He had read and admired his novel Another Country, which subtly explored complex gay and racial themes. But he disliked Baldwin’s journalism and his profuse commentary on race. Baldwin, he had written, “celebrates his bitterness against the white community mostly in journals of the far political left,” which suggested complicity—or was it cowardice?—on the part of guilt-ridden white editors.

Baldwin’s presence in England was itself an event. He was there to promote the paperback edition of Another Country and to discuss a screenplay with a filmmaker. He also made himself available to journalists and students. And there was the debate with Buckley at the Cambridge Union—a debate on the subject of race in America.

Baldwin’s numerous venues were not, as it happened, limited to those of the left. His arguments, moreover, were original and unorthodox, and at times even paralleled Buckley’s own. Baldwin, too, was skeptical of liberal programs and the meliorist principles they rested on. When he observed that the “mountain of sociological investigations, committee reports, and plans for recreational centers have failed to change the face of Harlem,” a conservative could agree.

The difference came in the conclusions Baldwin drew. The true lessons of race in America, he argued, began in what had been revealed about its white population. “The interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man,” he wrote as early as 1953; “it has created a new white man, too.” This was a year before the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing segregation in public schools, and two years before the Montgomery bus boycott. Yet Baldwin understood that the white monopoly on racial discourse was already weakening. What that new white man seemed unable to understand, much less accept, was that “this world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.”

It would never be so, because “white power has been broken,” Baldwin had said in a debate with Malcolm X in 1961. “And this means, among other things, that it is no longer possible for an Englishman to describe an African and make the African believe it. It’s no longer possible for a white man in this country to tell a Negro who he is, and make the Negro believe this.”

In the 1964 election, Johnson, the incumbent, had tagged Goldwater as an extremist, and had coasted to one of the most overwhelming victories in history, winning 44 states and the District of Columbia. And the extremist charge had a sound basis. Goldwater had been one of only six Republicans to vote against the landmark Civil Rights Act when the Senate passed it in June 1964. At the GOP’s nominating convention in San Francisco a month later, a desperate attempt by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller to add an anti-extremism plank to the party platform had been thunderously rejected. Five of the six states that Goldwater won in November—all but his own Arizona—were in the Deep South. The journalist Robert Novak observed that Goldwater and his allies had completed their makeover of the GOP into “the White Man’s Party.”

And a primary shaper of that new party was Bill Buckley. In the pages of National Review, the political fortnightly he had founded in 1955 and still edited, he and his colleagues continued to support segregation in the South, a decade after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown. In his writing, he referred to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the civil-rights movement as lawbreakers and agitators.

Buckley had become, at age 39, the right’s undisputed intellectual leader, who as a speaker, a columnist, and an author made his case with remarkable fluency and wit. Goldwater “has near him at least one man who can think,” the novelist and Syracuse University professor George P. Elliott had warned. Commenting on an address Buckley had given to a college audience, Elliott judged him “an all-or-none theocratic zealot of the most dangerous kind,” partly because “his criticism of the faults of the liberal rulers of the nation was incisive and accurate; his forensic power and control were by far the greatest I have heard in an American speaker.” Now, as Republican strategists struggled to move forward, Buckley’s forensic talents were among the few assets they could count on.

For years, Buckley had wanted to debate Baldwin. He was all the more eager to do so after the publication of Baldwin’s polemic The Fire Next Time, in 1963. With this small, powerful book, Baldwin became a different writer: no longer a witness to racial injustice but a prophet of racial reckoning.

Most of the book had been first published as a long article in The New Yorker in November 1962, and Buckley had read it during his preparation for a two-week visit to South Africa and Mozambique as a guest of their respective governments. Buckley was especially impressed by South Africa’s prime minister, Hendrik Verwoerd, the principal creator of apartheid in 1948. To Buckley, apartheid—literally racial “separatehood” in Afrikaans—was more than defensible. It was a kind of ideal system in a caste-divided society, what Jim Crow might have become if only its architects had been more systematic in their thinking and had embraced the concept of fully developed separate nations, Black and white.

Despite Verwoerd’s valiant efforts, Buckley reported in National Review, South Africa was beset with peril. The threat came from the “beady eyes of the Communist propaganda machine,” which was cynically stirring the embers of “black racism.” In Buckley’s view, this left Verwoerd only one sensible option: cracking down on dissidents. For “in such an eutectic situation it is necessary to maintain very firm control. Relentless vigilance” and “relentless order” were required “because the eudaemonic era has not yet come to Africa.” Eutectic, eudaemonic : Buckley had a weakness for arcane words, which he deployed as weapons. The more fragile his argument, the more syllables he used: “preemptive obfuscations,” as one of his protégés, the novelist and critic John Leonard, called them. But in this instance, the tongue twisters could not obscure raw facts; 70 percent of South Africa’s population was Black, and eventually that majority would assert itself and challenge white dominance—just what was happening in the American South.

Baldwin also had things to say about South Africa and Verwoerd. The Fire Next Time included a bold assertion about the origins of radical evil over the past two millennia. “Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves,” Baldwin wrote.

White Christians have also forgotten several elementary historical details. They have forgotten that the religion that is now identified with their virtue and their power—“God is on our side,” says Dr. Verwoerd—came out of a rocky piece of ground in what is now known as the Middle East before color was invented, and that in order for the Christian church to be established, Christ had to be put to death, by Rome, and that the real architect of the Christian church was not the disreputable, sun-baked Hebrew who gave it his name but the mercilessly fanatical and self-righteous St. Paul.

Baldwin did not pause to analyze. He did not allow the emotion to cool. He saw in Paul a zealous convert and proselytizer, and he also saw the intolerance, extremism, prejudice, and persecution that would come in the name of faith. The Christian world, he wrote, “has revealed itself as morally bankrupt and politically unstable.” With the Church’s long history of anti-Semitism in the background, he stated bluntly: “The fact of the Third Reich alone makes obsolete forever any question of Christian superiority.” The Holocaust—the most radical instance of modern evil—was thus not truly surprising to him and other Black Americans. Just as Christians had monstrously mistreated Jews, so “white men in America do not behave toward black men the way they behave toward each other. When a white man faces a black man, especially if the black man is helpless, terrible things are revealed.”

Buckley had been affronted by the line Baldwin drew from Saint Paul to the gas chambers. But he was also well aware that Baldwin was steeped in Church history and teaching, and knew scripture far better than Buckley himself. The stepson of a Pentecostal minister, Baldwin had been a teenage preacher before abandoning what his book called “the church racket”—the phrase all but calculated to stir the wellspring of Buckley rage. Nothing defined Buckley so fully as his Catholicism. He had been raised in the Church and as a teenager had talked of joining the priesthood. As recently as 1961, he had told an admirer, “If I am ever persuaded that my attachment to conservatism gets in the way of my attachment to the Catholic Church, I shall promptly forsake the former.” At the same time, Buckley knew how deft Baldwin’s glancing reference to Verwoerd had been. During the Second World War, Verwoerd had been enthusiastic in his support for Nazi Germany, and openly anti-Semitic.

But Buckley was, among many other things, a first-rate editor. He recognized that Baldwin had written a major statement and must be met on his own ground. One National Review contributor had the intellectual and literary gifts to do it, a young critic whom Buckley esteemed above all others—Garry Wills.

In 1958, when Wills had applied to Harvard’s Ph.D. program in classics after a summer working at NR, Buckley had written a recommendation saying, “There simply is no doubt in my mind that twenty-five years hence he will be conceded one of the nation’s top critics and literary craftsmen.” (Wills had gone instead to Yale, which offered a better fellowship.) He was now teaching at Johns Hopkins and writing prolifically for NR. He could handle almost any subject—history, literature, philosophy, politics, religion. Better still, he had spent six years preparing for the priesthood, as a Jesuit, before being released from his vows so he could enjoy a secular life of marriage and family and pursue a literary career. Up to now, Wills had written very little on race, but what he had written was less ideological than most other NR commentary on the subject. Wills made no defense of segregation and was dismissive (like Buckley) of white racists who argued for their own biological superiority.

What Buckley did not know was how formative race had been for Wills. He had grown up in the Midwest, but his family came from the South and were typical white southerners of the time. Once, “on a family visit to Louisville,” Wills later recalled, “my grandmother took me to Sunday Mass and a Black priest came out from the sacristy. My grandmother snatched me by the hand and hauled me outside. When I asked her why, she—who would never go without Mass on Sunday—said she could not stand to see a ‘nigger’ at the altar. I observed that she had Black women help her bake loaves of bread for sale in her kitchen, but she answered: ‘A nigger does not deserve the dignity of the priesthood.’ ”

At Wills’s Jesuit seminary near St. Louis, his training included orderly service in a hospital. Most of the patients were Black. He and other seminarians “gave the men their baths, rubbed cream on to prevent bedsores, and washed the bodies of those who died.” Wills’s best friend in the seminary was Black and “told me of the obstacles the order had put in the way of his joining—he was bluntly told that Southerners in the novitiate would resent his presence.”

This resistance was one reason, Wills believed, that meeting “the demands (even legitimate demands) of some” to outlaw segregation might “bend the permanent structure of our society permanently out of shape” and “sacrifice the peace of all of us.” To that extent, Wills could sympathize with white southerners. But they must also respond humanely. This was the test being failed time and again.

The permanent structure of society was Baldwin’s theme too, only he was making the opposite case: The structure itself was rotten and awaited the match that would set it ablaze. Here Wills was ready to meet Baldwin. Unlike Buckley, who read just enough of books he disliked to collect ammunition for disparaging them, Wills brought Jesuitical thoroughness and precision to his reading. He read not only The Fire Next Time, but just about everything else Baldwin had published, and he was overwhelmed by its artistry and power.

Wills had agonized over the assignment, he told Buckley in the winter of 1963. “But after tearing up many attempts at the thing, I send this off immediately, before I decide to tear it up.” He still was afraid he had not risen to the task, because refuting Baldwin required “new arguments for civilization”—and, Wills confessed, “I don’t know any.” There were only the old arguments, and under the pressure of Baldwin’s impassioned language, they seemed to wilt. “There is virtuosity, even a dark gaiety in his anger,” Wills wrote in his article. Baldwin, he went on, had an “uncanny way of writing to a background music that somehow gets transmitted along with the words.”

And his account of America’s racial history was accurate. “We have been cruel to the Negro,” Wills wrote. “We have, more than we know; more than we want to know.” But Baldwin did not limit his attack to white America alone. He condemned the system of belief from which the entirety of Western civilization arose. “He does not attack us for not living up to our ideals, for lapsing, for sinning, for being bad Christians,” Wills went on. “He says we do not have any ideals: we do not believe in any of the things our religion, our civilization, our country stand for. It is all an elaborate lie whose sole and original function is to fortify privilege.”

Baldwin’s sweeping denunciation ignored the saving virtues of the Western tradition—its humanism, its ideas of justice and human dignity, its embrace of charity as a defining principle—the same ideals that informed his own writing. Yet reviewers seemed uninterested in pointing out this rather obvious omission. Why? This was the question Wills’s essay asked and tried to answer. What looked like sympathy for Baldwin, he concluded, was in reality a condescending refusal to take him seriously—arrant hypocrisy that Baldwin himself exposed by “attacking all our so-called beliefs, then standing back and observing that no one defends them. In fact, everyone rushes to defend him.”

Instead, Wills wrote,

somebody should take Baldwin’s charges seriously enough to ask, not whether they are moving, or beautiful, or important, or sincerely meant—they are obviously all these, and there has been enough repetition of the obvious—but whether they are true.

In depicting white evil in absolute terms, Wills believed, Baldwin foreclosed the possibility of redemption—this despite an evident history of moral growth and improvement. Wills acknowledged the discomfort of defending the existence and importance of ideals so brutally violated by the race to which one belonged, but insisted on its necessity. “We must have the courage to defend the ideals we have, perhaps, not lived up to, but only known to be true. It takes a special courage to bear witness in this way; to be wrong, yet defend what was right; to be what one is, yet continue to fight for what one should have been; to oppose a better man than oneself in the service of a better creed than his.”

Nothing like this had ever been published in National Review. Even as Wills disagreed with Baldwin, he ceded him high authority as an artist and praised in exalted terms what the magazine’s chief political theorist, James Burnham, in his book Suicide of the West, was soon to call “the abusive writings of a disoriented Negro homosexual.” Another respected NR elder—its books editor Frank Meyer, Wills’s mentor at the magazine—pleaded with Buckley not to publish the essay. But Buckley was captivated. What Wills had written was quite possibly National Review’s “finest hour,” he later said.

Overruling Meyer, Buckley edited the essay himself; printed it at eight full pages under the title Wills had chosen, “What Color Is God?”; and made it the cover story. It appeared in May 1963 just after the historic civil-rights protest in Birmingham, Alabama. Americans watched televised footage of firefighters as they aimed fire hoses at children who were then slammed to the pavement, the pressure of the hoses turned so high, The New York Times reported, that the spray “skinned bark off trees.”

At the time, Buckley also efficiently drew on Wills’s argument in his own writing about Baldwin. One column restated the argument so closely that it “suggests some interesting reflections on your conception of editing and/or plagiarism,” Wills protested. But Buckley also honed Wills’s nuanced words into the sharp blade of accusation. The Fire Next Time, Buckley wrote, was a violently racist tract—“A Call to Lynch the White God.”

None of this deterred Baldwin from agreeing to debate Buckley in early 1965. “It will be a tough one,” Buckley wrote to a friend. And he had made it no easier by taunting Baldwin in a column only weeks beforehand, calling him the “Number-1 America-hater.”

Buckley had no idea what to expect from the audience he would face at the Cambridge Union. For a recent d

Sam Tanenhausمصدر