Old Right Guard

In Spy magazine in July 1989, Bob Mack, a former editorial assistant at National Review*





*And longtime/long-suffering rock journalist, as his unforgettable "Crossfire-on-crack-esque confrontation" with Ted "The Nuge" Nugent, "perhaps the funniest and most hostile interview ever conducted", suggests. 


with whom I as a contributor three years earlier had shared a phone call, published his kiss-off-and-tell, "The Boys Who Would Be Buckley" (tip: Ben Adler). Blogger Michael Happy in his post on The "Charm" of William F. Buckley, says that

[Mack's article] makes clear that by the 1980s, during the Reagan ascendancy when his influence should have been at its peak, Buckley was a fading cult figure whose diminishing influence was sustained mostly by his belligerent self-regard and the slowing momentum of his glory years in the 1950s and 60s. 

This paragraph from "The Boys Who Would Be Buckley" has always stayed with me. It captures the fraying noblesse oblige of Buckley's National Review, whose offices, on author Bob Mack's account, seemed to emit the geriatric odor of whiskey and gingivitis:

Still, [new editor John] O'Sullivan faces a daunting task: the deadwood. . .is thick; the atmosphere is musty, quaint and lazy, and a tone of genteel racism endures. This attitude is usually expressed in a third-floor conference room, at the bi-weekly editorial meetings and the usual end-of-the-day cocktail hours that are held there. "There's this insularity," says one former NR editorial assistant about the events that occurred in that room, "where you feel among friends who all think the same way you do. You can even express your true feelings about something that, in another situation, you would be more guarded about. This was especially true when Bill was away." On which subjects have true feelings been expressed? Well, senior editors Sobran and Jeffery Hart have swapped jokes about crematoriums and gas chambers. Race relations is also a popular subject. In November 1986 NR ran a cover story, "Blacks and the GOP: Just Called to Say I Love You," that outlined possible GOP strategies for attracting black voters. Presiding over the traditional post-issue recap, Buckley quipped, "Maybe it should have been titled, 'Just Called to Say I Love You, Niggah.'" During another editorial meeting, Jeffery Hart reflected wistfully that "under a real government, Bishop [Desmond] Tutu would be a cake of soap." 

Charming.

Though the nerd amplitude among movement conservatives, as among all movements, from the alimentary to the advanced, formed round tight-arsed utopian doctrine (libertarians, Communists, advocates of Deep Ecology/human extinction, "Objectiv"ists, "Scient"ologists, proctologists) is proverbial, subject to underestimation only at your own peril, and cries so far in vain for its Trollope, each instance bears its own snowflake distinction, as in this passage from Mack's sidebar on a Heritage Foundation function for movement juniors he attended, itemized to highlight such signature features as

Guys Who Made Strange Announcements. A large, hairy, overbearing man asked of everyone in the lobby, "Is it just me, or does anyone else watch Masterpiece Theatre?" Nobody responded. Later, a Mister Rogers look-alike announced, "I'm going to go kick some more liberal butt, but I just thought you should know that if you wave an American flag in front of Communists on Capitol Hill, you could get arrested. If you think this is harebrained, you can get your own brain transplant sometime."

In the magazine's October 1989 number, a reader from Toronto and "SPY-reading Randoid who is neither a too-rich self-made tycoon nor a picked-on computer nerd"** "took exception to ... Mack's snipe at Ayn Rand" and described the rightward subjects of Mack's article as "Bible-thumping bigoted pig-dogs".

Meanwhile, NR senior editor and Dartmouth English professor Jeffrey Hart, darkly skewered by Mack over his less-than-conservative habits in and out of the NR conference room, wrote in

to protest Bob Mack's vile calumny that I am now on the wagon. 

Because of this smear, 14 bartenders and several former friends are no longer speaking to me. In addition, Mortimer's has closed (editors' note: only for two weeks in August).

Another reader from Toronto, after name-checking both Ayn Rand and Gertrude Stein as presumed punch-pleased Spy readers among the dead, surmised that in light of his drubbing by Mack,

Good old boy Billy Buckley will hopefully be seen in light of the remarks made in the "Boys Who Would Be Buckley" article and maybe most of his tight-sphinctered ideology will be dismissed as the slimethought it is. So when will we get news on the retired Cowboy of the Deregulation Apocalypse, Ronald McReagan? Would that take up a whole issue? 

Two months later, in the magazine's December 1989 issue, another former editorial assistant at NR, Jeff Nelligan, whose budding Beltway career would take him as of 2011 to the ranks of press secretary to Kay Bailey Hutchison (R), senior senator for the state of Texas, as well as and more to the point, the senior ranks among Caddyshack scholars, accused Mack of, as it were, making a truck out of a tricycle in panting hot after disgruntled revenge.

In early 1985, while my unsolicited review of George Steiner: A Reader tore off its number while standing in NR's deli line of articles accepted for future issues, I stopped in at the magazine's Manhattan offices en route to lunch with its wild-horse-breaking Wyomingite literary editor, met Buckley's sister Priscilla, and fielded a standing invitation late the following year** to attend its biweekly editorial meetings, one of whose potential results, so it is said, would have taken the form of a swimming invitation later still to attend its jet-setting editor's bi-something skinny dips at his compound in nearby Stamford, which, I hear, are the stuff of pasty-legged legend. "Chairman Bill", I gather, seemed to have recovered after a time and after a fashion from my non-attendance at his blue-pencil pow-wows and floppy-dicked aquabashes, though to the extent I may therefore be said to have amplified his bibulous proclivities, already the stuff from which great Rushmores are with red proboscis cast, the guilt I must needs now with heavy heart bear may last me the rest of my blog post. 

**Borrowing Mack's own stylings, in a sidebar devoted to Ayn Rand, of generic fans of the novelist, whose celebrity fans then apparently included future Fox and Friends personality Gretchen Carlson, who Mack describes, oddly, as "Miss America 1988": still Miss Minnesota 1989 when Mack published his article in July, Carlson actually went on to win the Miss America title two months later in September, in Atlantic City, the pageant's venue through 2004.

***As a result of an essay in cultural history of mine then making the backstage rounds at NR; through NR's literary editor, with whom I conferred by post and by long-distance telephone from my lodgings in England while drafting my essay in early 1986,  Buckley instructed me to re-cast my essay in straight discursive form rather than in my provisional form of a Wildean dialogue after "The Critic as Artist", a patriarchal intervention that, all told, was probably for the best. As publication approached in the fall, senior editor Jeffrey Hart was reported to have turned red in face if not in politics by some of my literary judgments,**** while Hart's fellow senior editor Rick Brookhiser, who had published his first article in NR in 1970 at the age of fourteen, was, on the phone with me after my return to Connecticut, rather warmly disposed by contrast, admitting to an expanded mind regarding the subjects I had addressed, though had our talk taken place a few years later, that mind expansion might have been his medical marijuana talking. In a Brookhiser twist, I was at the time, and possibly ever since, the youngest writer in the magazine's history to have published a quarterly longform feature essay for its once-fabled "Books, Arts, & Manners" section, whose aboriginal fabulists during its (relative) Camelot days included Joan Didion, Garry Wills, John Leonard, Hugh Kenner, John Simon, Arlene Croce and Guy Davenport. 


Now that the magazine has in the years since been rendered wholly safe for such among the ranks of the Crybaby Tribalist Right as Jay Nordlinger, Jonah Goldberg, Michelle Malkin, Mark Levin, Andrew McCarthy, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Roger Kimball and assorted other Dittoheads and Freeprobates suckling at the teat of the wounded-virgin victim-shtick that latter-day wingnuts in their long twilit siege warfare against the "lamestream media" have made their own ("Red-Baiting For A New American Century": they have my permission to adopt), NR's role at its back-of-the-book margins as a farm team for fresh literary talent has shriveled in turn into an annex for general-issue culture warriors drafted largely from Beltway think tanks and the bow-tied NYC neocon-aesthete mafia, a function of the times if not the Times.

Cf. also the one poison-pen letter, rather touching, I thought, in its "unwitty" pathos, I received from a fellow NR literary contributor in the otherwise bloodless aftermath of my appearance in the Christmas 1986 number, SDI-hawking cover article much "after" Dickens (d. 1870, after all) and all, of National Review.

****Hart was easy enough to so inflame, and not just by me: here he is, per Mack, after having been mocked in a syndicated column on the decline of National Review by the then-ubiquitous young right-wing apparatchik and hawkish policy geek Gregory Fossedal (who reportedly passed his wedding eve discussing the Strategic Defense Initiative with Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham), a made man of that Dartmouth Review mafia that numbered among its other life capos Dinesh D'Souza (or "Distort D'Newza", a waggish moniker its target once claimed, falsely, as of his own device) and Hart's son Ben: 


"In a rage, Jeffrey Hart wrote hysterical letters to several conservatives, including Fossedal, who promptly apologized to Hart and wrote a follow-up column praising the professor's many virtues."