Putting the Pied Piper in perspective: tapped by the Establishment to lead the conservative movement astray, William F. Buckley, Jr. has enjoyed undeserved status as the political Right's leading apostle. (Book Review).

William F. Buckley, Jr.: Pied Piper for the Establishment, by John F. McManus, Appleton, Wisconsin: The John Birch Society, 2002, 259 pages, hardcover, $24.95. Available from American Opinion Book Services, P.O. Box 8040, Appleton, WI 54912 (add $7.50 for shipping and handling); by phone at 920-749-3783; or online at www.aobs-store.com.

There are two kinds of commentaries on public affairs -- those written to truthfully inform and those to deceive. The first must be painstakingly accurate, while the second must be intentionally obfuscating. John F. McManus, President of the John Birch Society, has given us a splendid book of the first kind, written about a practitioner of the second kind.

William F. Buckley, Jr.: Pied Piper for the Establishment is a book that had to be written. Radically revisionist, highly informative, and deeply disturbing -- it is all of these things. But essentially it is the story of a famous life lived untrue to itself. For far too long Buckley has masqueraded as the political Right's leading apostle. Celebrated as the epitome of conservatism and the scourge of liberals, Buckley has long been esteemed as the pre-eminent spokesman for the anti-statist cause. Plaudits such as "conservatism's most eloquent, tireless and entertaining voice" have been repeated for decades, right up to Buckley's recent "elevation to sainthood" as "the founder of modern American conservatism and the prime articulator of its philosophy." On both sides of the political divide, Buckley's name has become a household word on a par with those of presidents and Hollywood stars.

Admittedly, this is an astonishing achievement. Yet sadly this is only a stage image, a fantasy, perhaps genuine in Buckley's youth but long since betrayed. The record behind the fame, meticulously researched by McManus, reveals that Bill Buckley's record contradicts his conservative public persona. Carefully and honestly, McManus examines the causes and consequences of the strange metamorphosis of William F. Buckley, Jr. In search of the real Buckley, McManus has crafted a wide-ranging account of the political history of the past 50 years and Buckley's fateful role in it.

McManus states in the introduction:

This book has been written to present evidence that William F. Buckley, Jr. is one of America's slyest deceivers, a clever but supremely duplicitous frontman for a behind-the-scenes cabal whose operatives have been laboring for generations to steer America into their contrived "new world order."

Next come 13 penetrating chapters, each focusing on a significant aspect of Buckley's public life with solid evidence supporting the book's thesis. Each chapter is so comprehensive, so chock full of information, that each could stand alone as a self-contained treatise. When McManus discusses Buckley's role in or relationship to a certain topic, he covers the entire subject -- naming names, pulling in long-forgotten relevant facts, quoting prophetic words from the past that he has somehow retrieved from obscurity. For instance, his chapter on Buckley and the Establishment reads like a primer on the Council on Foreign Relations, while his chapter on neoconservatism could be used as a research resource on Trotskyism. A few of the many additional subjects which expand upon and give background to the main story are: Senator Joseph McCarthy; Skull and Bones, the elite secret society at Yale University to which Buckley belongs; Henry Kissinger; Robert Welch; Nelson Rockefeller; Irving Kristol; the CIA; John T. Flynn ; the John Birch Society; the Bilderbergers; Fidel Castro; Martin Luther King; China; and an arresting account of McManus' personal journey from Buckleyism to Birchism.

The book traces Buckley's life from birth through his home schooling, student days at Yale, first baneful influences, first book and rising fame, CIA connections, transition to neoconservatism, National Review, Establishment membership, close association with top CFR elites, undermining morality, targeting the John Birch Society and its founder Robert Welch, and much more, including a summary of Buckley's harmful legacy. Needless to say, this is a prodigious book, dispelling for all time the myth of Buckley as a conservative.

Conservative Beginnings

Blessed beyond ordinary mortals, Bill Buckley was born into a remarkable family in 1 925 in Sharon, Connecticut, as the sixth of 10 children just as his father was on the verge of making his second fortune in the oil business, having lost his first in Mexico attempting to lead a coup against the Marxist government. This startling episode gives us the full flavor and direction of Bill's unusual upbringing for the next 18 years. Disdaining schools, William Sr. hired tutors, music teachers, Mexican nannies, and English and French governesses to assure that his children would be intellectually advanced and fluent in several languages. When his business interests took him to Venezuela or Europe, the children went with him, so that Bill spent many of his formative years abroad.

Most importantly, William Sr. instilled in his offspring a keen understanding of his own philosophy of government, which McManus describes as "the dominant canons of the "Old Right," meaning "nonintervention in the affairs of other nations ... and strict limitations on federal power as set forth in the U.S. Constitution." Bill absorbed true conservatism literally at the knee of his father. In 1940, when Charles Lindbergh was electrifying Americans with his "stay out of the war" eloquence, the 15-year-old Bill and his siblings formed their own America First committee and published a small local paper passionately supporting nonintervention.

From 1940 through 1943 Bill attended Millbrook Academy in New York state where he "promptly developed a reputation for combativeness about nearly everything." After serving less than a year as an Army lieutenant (saved by the war's end), Bill entered Yale University in 1946 armed with the self-confidence of intensely held conservative beliefs. At Yale he lost no time becoming the most notorious right winger on campus while his audacious writings for the Yale Daily News and his skill as a debater polarized the student body. Bill Buckley seemed to have everything: Wealth, breeding, intelligence, charm, wit, and a superior talent for expressing the beautiful logic of the freedom philosophy.

But it is here that the picture begins to falter, as in a Greek tragedy where goodness and excellence succumb to a fatal flaw. McManus describes the first odd note as Bill's close relationship with Professor Willmoore Kendall, a Rhodes Scholar and devoted Trotskyite socialist who during the war had served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which later became the CIA. Although it seems bizarre that Bill Buckley should have been attracted to such a person, the fact remains that Kendall exerted a profound influence over him. During this same period, Bill was tapped for Skull and Bones, Yale's elite secret society, where he became aware that the society could open doors for him to prestigious positions, including top government posts.

Bill graduated in 1950 with the prospect of the Army recalling him for the Korean war; at Kendall's urging, Bill joined the CIA as an alternative. However, he asked for a delay in order to finish writing a book started during his senior year as a speech he had been forbidden to give, because it excoriated the Yale faculty and practically everything taught at Yale. This book, God and Man at Yale, burst on the American scene at a time when the literature exposing higher education's post-war swing to socialism and atheism was in its infancy. Leading the assault, Buckley became an overnight national sensation. Conservatives everywhere rejoiced, this writer among them.

CIA Connection

Close on the heels of Buckley's success as a writer came a cloudy area that might explain much if we knew more about it -- Bill's connection with the CIA. He himself has admitted he was stationed in the CIA in Mexico for about a year as a "deep cover" agent. What he did there is still unknown, although "deep cover" suggests something of substance. Various writers have suggested he remains an agent. If so, this might account for some of Bill's subsequent apostasy, although possibly his only present connection is through his spy novels, which contain bona-fide CIA background material as well as plenty of illicit sex.

Either way, McManus sees the CIA connection as highly significant because of the roles and influence of Bill's unsavory friends -- Willmoore Kendall, James Burnham and Howard Hunt, all ex-CIA operatives. Kendall and Burnham were Trotskyite socialists as well, while Hunt ended up in prison in connection with the Watergate scandal. Kendall and Burnham became founding editors of National Review, taking their far-left views with them, and were staff writers for many years as the magazine subtly misled its readers away from traditional conservative tenets.

Readers and ex-readers of National Review will surely be surprised when McManus discusses the possible role of the CIA in establishing the magazine, quoting columnist Gary Wills, formerly a close friend of Bill's, asking if National Review is a "CIA operation." In a chapter that tells an enormous amount about the CIA, McManus wonders if the covert organization could possibly have funded the magazine, especially since nobody has ever explained how Buckley paid off a $19 million debt in the early years. McManus rightly asks:

To whom does the youthful owner of an upstart new magazine turn to make up such a sizable shortfall? And even more to the point, how could anyone in Buckley's position incur such losses without knowing in advance that the astronomical deficits would be covered by others? And would he not then be beholden to such benefactors? ...

It certainly would have made sense for an Establishment-controlled entity to provide the millions to keep National Review functioning. So the question must be asked: Did National Review's money tree grow in the CIA's orchard? We may never know, but CIA money did finance other publications, so the suggestion is eminently plausible.

Beholden or not, Buckley at this point in time initially did a considerable amount of good. Offering a "welcome life-preserver to young Americans on college campuses who were being swamped by a rising tide of liberalism," Buckley strongly opposed Communism, supported congressional anti-Communist investigative committees, and exposed much of the malfeasance of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. But McManus agrees with Dr. Medford Evans' insightful observation that because Buckley had initially done so much good, he had positioned himself to do a great deal of harm. This, says McManus, is "the tactic of gaining credibility in order to betray the cause one feigns to advocate."

Subtly and gradually, neoconservative duplicity crept into Buckley's pronouncements. If you have ever wondered what neoconservatism is, you will find out in McManus' detailed chapter on the subject. With the prefix neo- (from Greek) meaning a new and different form of something already existing, it turns out that neoconservatism is a deceptive, misleading hodgepodge of Right and Left, lacking in consistency and, most notably, in reasoning from principle. Thus Buckley stridently opposed the Soviet Union but ignored the fact that the U.S. was keeping its tyrants in power with vast shipments of equipment, technology, food, money, and credit. Buckley blasted the damaging, counterproductive policies of U.S. leaders but blamed them on error and stupidity. He flayed American liberals but never mentioned that so-called conservatives were promoting and funding them. He supported NAFTA, GATT, and NATO without mentioning that they were eroding our national sovereignty.

All neocons call themselves Republicans simply because their raison d'etre is to infiltrate conservative Republican ranks. Irving Kristol, godfather of the neocon "intellectual trend," calls his brainchild a "conservative welfare state," a concept somewhat difficult to grasp. At a 1991 conference sponsored by Bill Buckley, Kristol named then-President George H.W. Bush as the leader of the overall conservative movement, including neoconservativism, within the GOP.

McManus sees this deplorable leftward shift as largely the result of Buckley's efforts to water down and emasculate conservatism's traditional meaning, providing an opening for the theft of the conservative label. Its importance lies in how it has influenced the thinking within the Republican Party, which has redefined how "vast numbers of Americans view their economy, their polity, and their society." In short, the Old Right has been co-opted by the deft connivance of the party's leading "conservative."

In a powerful summary, McManus lists Buckley's "achievements" that have earned him the plaudits of the Establishment but merit the condemnation of principled Americans. In brief, these are:

1. He has led many Americans away from timeless constitutional principles, thereby making it easier for our leaders to disregard the Constitution.

2. He has spent a lifetime working to accomplish the Establishment's very first and most important goal: Widespread belief that an overall conspiratorial plan does not exist.

3. He has supplied dignity and conservative cover to the Council on Foreign Relations by publicly joining it.

4. He produced a stream of lies, distortions, and ridicule about Robert Welch and the John Birch Society to keep Americans from gaining truthful knowledge about world affairs.

5. He sought to provide conservative legitimacy for individuals such as Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon as well as for policies such as the Panama Canal giveaway, the UN's Genocide Convention, the UN itself, South Africa's communist African National Congress, anti-gun legislation, national service, and aid to the USSR.

6. He has contributed to the undermining of the nation's morality by dignifying various forms of immoral behavior.

7. He has captivated many Americans with his intellectualism and extraordinary hauteur, leading them into complacency and away from becoming active in the true cause of liberty.

Moral or Immoral?

If Buckley's obfuscation on political issues is distressing, his stance on moral ones is even more so. Here we have a public figure frequently referring to his Catholicism, thus giving the impression that on moral issues at least, Buckley is truly conservative. In what is probably the most disillusioning chapter in the book, McManus tells us otherwise.

Although Buckley claims in speech and writing that he champions strict moral values, he slips away from the subject without ever defining what these values are or should be. He does this of necessity. Otherwise, he would expose himself as the most blatant of hypocrites. For instance, as McManus notes, our precipitous moral decline of recent decades has been accompanied by (or partially caused by'?) a flood of prurient magazines such as Playboy and Penthouse which degrade women and preach "liberation from puritanical morality." Yet Buckley has written numerous articles for these purveyors of filth, for which he has been handsomely paid. In addition, Buckley has repeatedly gone out of his way to matter-of-factly call favorable attention to his connection with Playboy, even while being honored at some conservative function. This may have sent a confusing message to some, but the intent surely has been to enhance the image of this base publication.

By contrast, McManus tells of how in the 1960s Playboy offered Robert Welch a princely sum for an interview. Without hesitation, Welch refused.

Buckley's National Review has long been sympathetic to homosexuality, providing an aura of acceptance as "mainstream." Its pages have been open to arguments pushing "gay rights;" that is, demanding laws granting equal rights to homosexuals (marriage, adoption). In 1992, Buckley personally called for special laws protecting homosexuals by granting "security" in all public, and in almost all private, employment, thus using government to coerce employers to hire or retain homosexuals. Buckley has also come out strongly against our nation's centuries-old prohibition against homosexuals in the military.

Most inexplicably of all, Buckley has come out publicly in support of abortion, calling on the Catholic Church to reconsider its position. This was too much for his own family members to swallow; many of them castigated Bill for turning his back on traditional morality.

Buckley's 1997 book, Nearer, My God:

An Autobiography of Faith, seemed to promise some accounting of Buckley's beliefs. However, Buckley again adroitly slipped out of revealing any of his own relationship to God and relates only those of others. As McManus notes:

It was ... yet another exercise in anecdotal posturing and name-dropping. Buckley gushed about his affinity for Catholicism, but repeatedly turned to others for their attitudes about fundamental points of Catholic doctrine, avoiding confessions of his own.

McManus also cites Buckley's preposterous support for Martin Luther King Jr., whom Buckley praises in Nearer My God as having had a "specifically Christian commitment." Yet Buckley himself in the 1960s published evidence that King had linked himself with known Communists, championed the cause of the Viet Cong, compared the U.S. government to Hitler, and had traveled so far into the Communist orbit that the FBI bugged his office, hotel rooms, and telephone. The resulting evidence (filling 14 file cabinets) was so damning it was ordered sealed in the national archives for 50 years.

Yet, in 1987, Buckley incredibly threw his valuable support behind making King's birthday a national holiday. In Nearer My God, Buckley called for King's "sanctification" and claims that "his utterances sprang from Christian dogma."

In 1990, when Bill Buckley stepped down after 35 years as National Review's editor, the Washington Post reported:

In looking back, Buckley believes that the magazine's most important accomplishment was "the absolute exclusion of anything ... kooky" from the conservative movement. One of National Review's most notable battles was waged against the John Birch Society.

Shameful and repugnant as Buckley's story is, the haunting question of why he chose to betray his heritage has still to be answered. The brilliant writer Dr. Medford Evans, who quit National Review in disillusionment and became one of American Opinion's most celebrated contributors, had a try at the answer in 1985:

The reluctant conclusion I have reached is that William F. Buckley Jr. is and has been driven by vanity, ambition, and greed to seek a place in the Establishment which he professes -- or once professed -- to oppose.

Probably this is as close as anyone can come to analyzing what happened to Bill Buckley at Yale. As McManus illustrates, the seductive path to fame opened before him. Choosing it meant he could almost certainly become a member of the top echelon of the power structure -- celebrated, sought after, feted, honored, even idolized. This was Bill Buckley's fatal flaw -- hubris, as the Greeks called it. Succumbing to conceit, he abandoned heritage, integrity, and honor itself. For all his brilliance, Buckley's lack of character has forevermore listed his name on the wrong side of the ledger of man's perpetual struggle for freedom.