Martin Schneider writes:
When I pondered William Buckley with reference to The New Yorker, my first thought was that someone so conservative must surely have scorned such a bastion of liberal sentiment. The Complete New Yorker archive shows such a supposition to be hostage to more recent Rove-ian (and not just Rove-ian) categories of political discourse. Buckley was a creature of a no less heated but perhaps a less doctrinaire age; his byline appeared in The New Yorker no fewer than 11 times.
His work for The New Yorker fell into two broad categories: articles about sailing and journal-like accounts of his daily lot. As Buckley in National Review possessed a vessel for his own political opinions, it likely never occurred to him to rail against the welfare state in the pages of The New Yorker.
I confess that to me, Buckley was a figure out of Doonesbury cartoons and Woody Allen movies from the 1970s. I don’t remember Firing Line. I have caught him on old episodes of The Dick Cavett Show, and I can tell that he must have been a delicious object of abhorrence for the East Coast liberals of the day. Next to Rove he looks positively benign; judging from his views on Iraq he was closer to the Upper West Side liberal of today than either side of that dyad ever would have imagined.
Buckley’s first contribution, a two-parter from 1971 billed in the Complete New Yorker as an account of his “activities in November,” looks especially interesting. Go check it out.
Update: On his blog, Hendrik Hertzberg posts this fond reminiscence of his encounter with the preeminent conservative. Elsewhere on the site, Ben Greenman directs us to a YouTube clip of Buckley and Gore Vidal being nasty to one another (these clips of Buckley debating Noam Chomsky are almost as compelling).