Playboy Interview: William F. Buckley, Jr.

a candid conversation with the acidulous columnist, polemicist, editor and articulate exemplar of conservatism

"Hello, my learned friend. How goes the empire?" Recently returned from a fact-finding trip to Vietnam and in the midst of one of the several speaking tours he makes each year to spread the conservative word, William F. Buckley, Jr., is on the long-distance line with Henry Kissinger, President Nixon's top foreign-policy advisor. The call is chatty, but Buckley assures him--by way of preamble to a debriefing session that will take place later in Washington--that "all the indices are good" over in Saigon. "As usual," he adds, "I think I've found the keys to the universe."

"As usual" is right. When he was six years old, Buckley wrote the king of England that it was high lime for that country to get serious about repaying its World War One debt. At prep school, he crashed a faculty meeting to denounce a teacher for refusing to allow him to express his political views in class. And within 48 hours of his arrival at a San Antonio Army base in 1946, he had written the commanding general that the post was mismanaged. An intermediary intercepted that letter--one of the few times cooler heads have prevented Buckley from expressing himself. "To the extent that one has confidence in one's intuitions," Buckley told an interviewer some years ago, "one wants to share them. I have great confidence in mine." During the past two decades, he has used every propaganda device except the teach-in to broadcast those intuitions and, in so doing, has found himself characterized as "an unprincipled, egocentric intellectual exhibitionist," "the most dangerous undergraduate Yale has seen in years" and "an urbane front man for the most primitive and vicious emotions in the land." But Buckley has also been called "a true liberal in the old, traditional sense of the word," "a brilliant journalist" and--by his friend John Kenneth Galbraith--"the only reactionary I ever met with a sense of humor." In an insightful essay, "God's Right Hand," for last May's Playboy, George F. Gilder captured the prevalent Middle American attitude toward his subject: "'He's so brilliant he frightens me,'" an unidentified middle-aged woman gushed. "'But I love it.'"

The man and the political philosophy responsible for these heated judgments grew and flourished in the patrician, intellectually competitive atmosphere of the family estate in rural Connecticut. Buckley is the sixth of ten children of a Texas-born lawyer-turned-millionaire-oilman who studiously inculcated in his children the rightness of Catholicism, yesterday's America, the free-enterprise system and the rugged, individualistic pursuit of excellence--faiths that none of them is known ever to have questioned, let alone abandoned. Two measures of William, Jr.'s success as his father's son are that he earned the sobriquet "the young mahster" from his siblings, and that his father was constrained to admonish Bill when he was 15 to "learn to be more moderate in the expression of your views and try to express them in a way that would give as little offense as possible to your friends."

Buckley got his first big chance to give real offense at Yale, which he entered after his Army service. There he learned how to fly, was tapped for the best clubs and accepted--while still an undergraduate--as a faculty member in the Spanish department. But all this was peripheral to his polemics: As a debater and chairman of the Yale Daily News, he gave notice that at least one member of the Fifties' Silent Generation wasn't going to be. In 1951, the year after his graduation, Buckley leaped from the status of local irritant to national notoriety as the bête noire of liberal education with "God and Man at Yale"--a book that anticipated, in spades, the faculty critiques that so many of today's militant student bodies produce for themselves. Buttressed with quotes from lectures and assigned texts, and predicated on Buckley's own inimitable definition of academic freedom, the book accused Yale's departments of religion and economics, especially, of promoting both atheism and collectivism. "God and Man" drew fire: "As a believer in God, a Republican and a Yale graduate," McGeorge Bundy wrote when it was published, "I find that the book is dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory and a discredit to its author."

But the deepest and most bitter liberal animosity toward Buckley dates from the appearance of "McCarthy and His Enemies," which Buckley and his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell wrote in 1954. The two writers acknowledged some of the Wisconsin Senator's excesses--Buckley would insist that they acknowledged all of them--but maintained that "as long as McCarthyism fixes its goal with its present precision, it is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks." Among the least outraged of the book's reviewers was William S. White, who wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "What is urged is not only that the end justifies the means but that a moral end justifies immoral means."

Following the publication of "McCarthy and His Enemies," Buckley poured his energies--and his money--into National Review, America's only substantial right-of-center political journal. In the first issue of the magazine--which appeared in 1955 ten days before his 30th birthday--Buckley announced that its purpose was to "stand athwart history yelling 'Stop!' at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who urge it." In 1962, he began writing his syndicated newspaper column "On the Right," and in 1966, launched his television show "Firing Line." Both ventures undoubtedly have greater impact than the magazine--the column is the second most popular in the country (number one is Washington columnist Jack Anderson) and the show is seen in 86 cities and towns--but it is as the editor of National Review that Buckley seems to define himself. It was in the pages of NR that he did battle with Ayn Rand and the John Birch Society ("For all I know, Robert Welch thinks I'm a Communist plot," Buckley was quoted as saying at the height of that controversy), called for the nuclear destruction of Red China's atom-bomb potential and published such well-known conservative thinkers as Whittaker Chambers, Russell Kirk and James Burnham.

And it was in his magazine that Buckley refined his contempt for liberal Republicanism to the point where he felt obliged to oppose its most glamorous embodiment, John V. Lindsay, in New York's 1965 mayoral campaign. That adventure failed to get Buckley elected--which neither he nor anyone else ever considered a real possibility--and failed also in its major purpose of wresting victory from Lindsay, whom Buckley delights in dismissing as "destiny's tot." But Buckley's presence in the campaign infused it with a candor and wit that hadn't been seen in U. S. electoral politics since Adlai Stevenson's first campaign and would not be seen again until Norman Mailer ran for the same post four years later. (Mailer is, in fact, a frequent Buckley platform rival--and personal friend.) The mayoral campaign also produced "The Unmaking of a Mayor," which Buckley considers his best book. Many critics do, too. "His sense of comedy rode triumphantly through a process which turns most men into sodden lumps," liberal columnist Murray Kempton wrote of the memoir. "His understanding that comedy must be serious provides us with many cranky but unexpectedly useful reflections on the New York ordeal."

Buckley kept his cool through the campaign: He eschewed sidewalk politicking altogether, and the closest he got to venom was the crack "which fact should be obvious," in response to his Democratic opponent's boast of having been educated by the city of New York. But the famous Buckley sang-froid vanished in a flash three summers later, when he exchanged insults with fellow commentator Gore Vidal on ABC-TV during the course of the roughest night of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. "Not since George Sanders divorced Zsa Zsa Gabor has so much talent been wasted on such a nasty spat," Newsweek said of the encounter, its subsequent magazine amplifications and resultant law suits.

More recent--and more characteristic--Buckley activities include his appointment by President Nixon to the five-member Advisory Commission of the USIA and work on four Buckley-authored or -inspired books that will appear this year. "Odyssey of a Friend"--a collection of Whittaker Chambers letters received and now edited by Buckley--was published in January. "Quotations from Chairman Bill" appeared on April 30; "Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?" will be published at the end of this month for general audiences and in December as a textbook under the title "American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century." And "The Governor Listeth"--like "The Jeweler's Eye" (1968), a compilation of Buckley's favorite columns and magazine articles--is scheduled for publication late next month.

Associate Editor David Butler, who conducted this interview with Buckley in locales as far-flung as Stockton, California, and Rougemont, Switzerland--Buckley's winter retreat--writes of his subject: "He exudes a personal charm that comes across in neither his lectures nor his writing and seldom in his television appearances. In a hotel, for example, the bellboys who bring him the several pots of coffee he drinks a day are treated to the kind of smiles and small talk that can issue only from a man who genuinely likes people, and the strangers who stop him on the street to say they watch 'Firing Line' every week are answered with a 'Nice to meet you' and a toothy smile that would shame Nelson Rockefeller.

"The second remarkable thing about the man is his energy. 'God, I had a great day last week,' he told me when I arrived in Switzerland. 'I did a column on the train to Geneva in the morning, gave a talk there, came back here and skied all afternoon, went to a marvelous chamber-music concert that night and then got in a couple of hours' painting.' In New York, we talked one night until 2:30. Buckley then felt like singing, so we took our cognac and cigars into the living room for a half hour of Cole Porter songs--Buckley is an accomplished pianist--and, finally, he insisted on driving me to my hotel on his Honda. When I arrived at his apartment later that same day, his gracious, almost equally energetic wife, Patricia, told me he had been up, making the day's first phone calls, at seven. Despite the pace, when Buckley folded himself into a chair for a taping session, it was as if no one else in the world had a claim on his time. His voice was less sonorous than it is in public, but his answers were as erudite and intricately phrased as his writing. My first meeting with Buckley took place in mid-December, and it was with the imminent end of the decade that the questioning began."

[Q] Playboy: It's already a cliché to say that the Sixties were a remarkable decade. Looking back, what event or development stands out in your mind as most important?

[A] Buckley: The philosophical acceptance of coexistence by the West.

[Q] Playboy: Why "philosophical"?

[A] Buckley: Because a military acceptance of coexistence is one thing; that I understand. But since America is, for good reasons and bad, a moralistic power, the philosophical acceptance of coexistence ends us up in hot pursuit of reasons for that acceptance. We continue to find excuses for being cordial to the Soviet Union; our denunciations of that country's periodic barbarisms--as in Czechoslovakia--become purely perfunctory. This is a callousing experience; it is a lesion of our moral conscience, the historical effects of which cannot be calculated, but they will be bad.

[Q] Playboy: Among the reasons cited for a détente with the Soviet Union is the fact that the money spent on continuing hot and cold wars with the Communist bloc would be better spent for domestic programs. With the 150 billion dollars we've spent in Vietnam since 1965, according to some estimates, we could have eliminated pollution throughout the country and rebuilt 24 major cities into what New York's Mayor Lindsay has said would be "paradises." Do you think our priorities are out of order?

[A] Buckley: When I find myself entertaining that possibility, I dismiss my thinking as puerile. But first let me register my objection to your figures: It's superficial to say that the Vietnam war has cost us 150 billion dollars. It has cost us X dollars in excess of what we would have spent on military or paramilitary enterprises even if there had been no war. That sum I have seen estimated at between 18 and 22 billion dollars a year. Now, suppose I were to tell you that if Kerenski had prevailed in Russia in 1917, we would at this point have a budget excess sufficient to create the city of Oz in Harlem and everywhere else. The correct response to such a statement, for grownups, is twofold. First, we are not--unfortunately--in a position to dictate the activity of the enemy; we cannot ask him please to let down because we need money for Harlem. Second, there are no grounds for assuming that the American people would have consented to spending the kind of money we're spending on the Vietnam war for general welfare projects. They might have said, "No, we'd rather keep the money and do what we want with it." I suspect they would have said just that, and with justification: The bulk of the progress that has been made in America has been made by the private sector.

[Q] Playboy: With reference to the first part of your answer: At the strategic-arms-limitations talks, aren't we actually asking the Russians to let down their guard if we let ours down?

[A] Buckley: Yes, we are. And, ideally, there would be massive, universal disarmament. But we don't live in an ideal world. The fact is that the Soviet Union is prepared to make remarkable sacrifices at home in order to maintain its military muscle abroad. It is prepared to do so in a world that has seen the United States pull out from dozens of opportunities to imperialize. We have walked out of 21 countries--I think that's the accepted figure--that we've occupied in the past 30 years. The Soviet Union has walked only out of Austria, for very complicated reasons. Under the circumstances, one must assume that the arrant armament expenditures by the Soviet Union--for instance, 20 billion dollars to develop its ABM system and its MIRVs--have to do with the attraction of a first-strike capability. There is only one known explanation, for instance, for the known "footprint"--the configuration--of the MIRVs the Soviet Union has been practicing with. Those missiles are exactly patterned after our Minuteman installations. If the Soviets intended their MIRVs only as a deterrent to an American first strike, they would aim those missiles at American cities. But they aren't being fashioned that way. Now, I don't think the collective leadership of Russia would dream of making a first strike for so long as we are in a position to inflict insupportable damage in a second strike, whatever the urgings of their Dr. Strangeloves, who are not without influence. But, manifestly, America is not preparing for a first strike. If we were, we would be aiming our weapons not at Russia's population centers but at her military installations--and we're not.

[Q] Playboy: The best information available--from hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at which Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard appeared--is that we are well ahead of the Soviet Union in the development of MIRVs, and it's generally conceded that we conceived the system. Doesn't this suggest both that the threat posed by the Russian MIRVs is less than you imply and that their MIRVs may have been developed as a defense against ours?

[A] Buckley: The question of who conceived the system is immaterial. Who makes it operational is what matters. It is only a happy coincidence that Jules Verne was a non-Communist. On the question of whose MIRVs are more advanced, a) your information is, unhappily, incorrect and b) it is irrelevant to the question of whether MIRVs are designed for offensive or defensive purposes.

[Q] Playboy: MIT professor Leo Sartori, writing in The Saturday Review, implies that some of our ICBMs are aimed at Russia's missiles rather than at her cities. Doesn't this indicate that the U. S. is prepared--to the point of overkill--for a massive first strike against the Soviet Union?

[A] Buckley: Look. The intellectual, attempting to evaluate the military situation, tends to fasten on a frozen position. He says, "Assuming apocalypse were tomorrow, how would the two sides stand?" But it is the responsibility of the military to understand how military confrontations actually work--which means that you cannot prepare for Tuesday by being absolutely prepared for Monday. In a world in which it takes between four and eight years to develop what is actually intended as a first-strike defensive system, you may, in the course of preparing for that system, find yourself temporarily with a first-strike superiority. A caricature of what I'm talking about is the sudden apprehension by Darryl Zanuck when he was filming The Longest Day--on the Normandy invasion--that he actually found himself in command of the third largest military force in the world. Presumably, he would not have used it even to attack Otto Preminger. You need to ask yourself the subjective question: Do I know people in the United States whose hands are on the trigger, who are actually conspiring to opportunize on the temporary military advantage? It seems plain to me that the recent history of the United States ought to be sufficient to appease the doubts of the doubters. In fact, we have had such superiority even at moments when the enemy was at its most provocative--and yet we haven't used it.

[Q] Playboy: Hasn't it been authoritatively asserted that U. S. superiority is overwhelmingly beyond the defensive or offensive necessity of any conceivable threat from another nuclear power?

[A] Buckley: That's a military judgment and I don't feel qualified to pronounce about it. I feel confident only to make an elementary philosophical point. I tend to believe that what the lawyers call "an excess of caution" is not something we should penalize the military for. I want an excess of caution, because I understand a mistake in that direction to be apocalyptic in its consequences. Now, if you say, "I can establish that we are spending money to develop a redundant weapon," my answer is: Go ahead and establish it. Meanwhile, I would rather side with the cautious, the prudent people. And here I find myself wondering how it is that Robert McNamara--who, for some reason, tends to be rather beloved by the liberals--how come he didn't object to the technological-military evolution that nowadays strikes so many people as untoward. And, again, why have we so drastically reversed our attitudes concerning what was for so long considered the liberal thing to do? During the Fifties, the great accent was on defense. The military-industrial complex--as you know--used to be called the "Arsenal of Democracy." Now, all of a sudden, when you talk about ABMs, the same people who encouraged us to spend 50 billion dollars--yes, 50 billion dollars--on defense during the Fifties object to spending an extra five billion dollars on defense in the Sixties.

[Q] Playboy: You seem to delight in reminding people that liberals are capable of changing their minds in the light of changing circumstances. Why?

[A] Buckley: Quite apart from the fact that delightful pursuits are delightful, it is important for any ideological grouping to confront historical experience. For one thing, it makes the ideologists less arrogant; or it should. That ought to be a national objective, after we eliminate poverty.

[Q] Playboy: Ten years ago, wasn't there more reason than there is now to believe that the Russians wanted to bury us, militarily as well as ideologically?

[A] Buckley: That is an exercise in ideological self-indulgence. How do you account for the anomalies? Such as the crash program the Soviet Union has developed in ABMs and MIRVs.

[Q] Playboy: One can only repeat that the U. S. is developing these systems as furiously as Russia is; and many observers feel that the Soviets have, therefore, just as much reason to suspect our intentions as we do theirs. But we'd like to return to your observation that the United States has walked out of 21 countries in the past 30 years and ask this: Doesn't the fact that we've also walked into Vietnam and Santo Domingo, tried to walk into Cuba at the Bay of Pigs and attempted to control many other countries through quasi-military, CIA-type operations leave us open to the charge of imperialism you impute to the U. S. S. R.?

[A] Buckley: Of course. But we are always at the mercy of the naïve. Imperialism suggests the domination of a country for the commercial or glorious benefit of oneself. The Soviet Union began its experience in imperialism not merely by jailing and executing people who disagreed with it but by systematic despoliation. In Czechoslovakia, for instance, they took one, two, three billion dollars' worth of capital goods and removed them physically to the Soviet Union. Far from doing anything of the sort, we did exactly the contrary; we sent our own capital goods to places like France and England and Spain and Latin America. I can't think of any country that we've "dominated" or "imperialized"--in the sense in which you use those words--that is worse off as a result of its experience with America than it would have been had we not entered into a temporary relationship with it.

[Q] Playboy: One could argue that South Vietnam is such a country.

[A] Buckley: South Vietnam? My God! Above all, not South Vietnam. Not unless one is willing to say that South Vietnam would be better off satellized by North Vietnam--and derivatively by Asian communism--and consigned to perpetual tyranny. Put it this way: I will assent to the proposition that South Vietnam has been harmed by America's efforts during the past five years only to somebody who would say that France was harmed by the efforts of the Allied armies to liberate it during the Second World War.

[Q] Playboy: We won't say that, but we will agree with the increasingly popular opinion that our adventure there has been a disaster--to us, as well as to South and North Vietnam--from the beginning. Yet you said recently that "the indices in Vietnam are good," which is something even McNamara and Westmoreland stopped saying three years ago. Why?

[A] Buckley: Because the indices are good, right down the line: First, there is the prestige of Thieu and our increased identification with him. A week or so after the 1968 Tet offensive, Professor J. Kenneth Galbraith gave it as the conventional wisdom that Thieu's government would fall within a matter of weeks. I predict that in the next election, he will get a significantly greater vote than he got the last time. Second, there is a lower rate of infiltration from the North. Third, the area controlled by the good guys is now much greater than it has ever been. The fourth positive index is the introduction in South Vietnam of a nonregular army, the equivalent of a militia, which makes it possible for people simultaneously to till their land during the day and yet be part of a large constabulary. Still another indication is the relative rise in South Vietnamese casualties and decrease in American casualties, which shows that they are beginning to shoulder even more of the human burden of the war.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about Thieu's suppression of dissent among his political opposition--even moderate Buddhists and Catholics who have done nothing more subversive than suggest consideration of a postwar coalition government?

[A] Buckley: I am not in a position to judge whether Thieu suppresses more or fewer people than he should suppress in order to achieve his goals. I know that my own countrymen were prepared to take tens of thousands of innocent Japanese and throw them in jail during World War Two. And I know that moral-political revulsion over that act didn't come until years later--when we recognized that what we had done to the nisei was, in fact, historically unnecessary. But it remains that a man who was tempered by four centuries of parliamentary experience--Franklin D. Roosevelt--thought it an altogether appropriate thing to do. I am not, under the circumstances, confident that I can authoritatively advise Thieu what is the right kind of suppression to engage in during a civil war.

[Q] Playboy: Then it is a civil war and not a case of Communist expansionism exported from Russia and China?

[A] Buckley: Yes, it is a civil war, provided one is prepared to define any war as a civil war if one finds a significant number of collaborationists within the indigenous population. There are South Vietnamese Communists, even as there were Norwegian quislings, Northern Copperheads and French appeasers. General Pétain was sentenced to death for obliging the Nazis less effusively than the Viet Cong have done the northern imperialists. If the "civil" insurrection in Vietnam had depended on its own resources, it would have lasted about as long as the insurrection of the Huks in the Philippines.

[Q] Playboy: You frequently use the fact that Thieu has fired 1200 civil servants to demonstrate what you consider his opposition to corruption. But weren't many of those firings really intended to get rid of his political opponents?

[A] Buckley: I didn't think to ask Thieu when I was over there. I assume it is because they were corrupt--at least the ones I'm talking about. I don't know how many he has fired for opposing his policies. I don't know how many officials Lyndon Johnson fired because they opposed his policies, or exactly how many F. D. R. did--plenty, I assume. Incidentally, I thought John Roche made a rather good point when he said that the critics of Thieu fail to account for the fact that he moves about without any difficulty at all--without bodyguards or any other protection--throughout South Vietnam. And they fail to point out that he has done something no tyrant ever does, which is to arm the citizenry. The very first thing he did, when he became president, was to ask Westmoreland to increase the arming of the people. In Cuba, if you're caught with an unlicensed rifle, you're liable to be executed.

[Q] Playboy: Your satisfaction with the relative rise in South Vietnamese casualties indicates that you believe in Vietnamization. If, as Presidents Johnson and Nixon have claimed, we have a moral and legal commitment to defend the South Vietnamese, why are we now disengaging?

[A] Buckley: We're not disengaging. We have a moral and legal commitment to give aid to the South Vietnamese in resisting aggression, pursuant to the protocol that extended the SEATO treaty to that area. We did not specify in SEATO the nature of the aid we would give. It is Nixon's strategy to arrive at a realistic formula: indigenous manpower and external material aid, precisely the way the Soviet Union and China have been handling the situation in behalf of North Vietnam. I advocated such a formula five years ago. Allowing for the cultural lag, it is time for its adoption.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel it was wrong, then, to send our troops in the first place?

[A] Buckley: No, we had to. The South Vietnamese were not prepared to defend themselves.

[Q] Playboy: In other words, though it was right to send them in when we did, it's right to withdraw them now. Are you saying that everything we've done there has been correct?

[A] Buckley: Not at all--there are plenty of things we've done wrong. We shouldn't have stopped the bombing of the North and put the restrictions on it that we did. And, above all, I continue to believe that Japan is the key to that part of the world and that we may very well wish, before this decade is up, that she had the defensive nuclear weapons the nonproliferation treaty denies her.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think that if America remains steadfast in Vietnam--with or without the support of our allies in Asia or Western Europe--the Communists will be less likely to test our commitments elsewhere in the world?

[A] Buckley: It's hard to say. In order to answer that question, you have to ask yourself: What is the point of view of the enemy? I have always maintained that the Soviet Union has been delighted over our experience in South Vietnam. It has cost them very little. But, at the same time, the Soviet Union has to reckon with the psychological realities. The psychological realities in the case of Vietnam are that America isn't prepared to do this sort of thing two or three times a decade. We did it in Korea and we're doing it in South Vietnam. If the Soviet Union decides to mount a challenge--let's say in the Mideast--it will probably have to reckon with the fact of a shortened American temper. The shortened American temper could result in one of two things. It could result in isolationism, which would please the Soviet Union dearly and encourage it; or that shortened American temper could result in our saying, "Since we cannot afford protracted, graduated South Vietnam-type resistances, we're going to go back to another kind of resistance. We're going to knock the hell out of you."

[Q] Playboy: Do you think that bellicose attitude will develop--and can you imagine it resulting in a nuclear strike by the U. S., say, over Berlin or in the Mideast?

[A] Buckley: Only if the Soviet Union is capable of a miscalculation on an order that is unimaginable, on the basis of our historical experience with a society that on the one hand is ideologically rabid but on the other appears to have a positively Rotarian instinct for survival.

[Q] Playboy: Critics of the war point to the alleged massacre at My Lai to prove our indifference to the lives of Vietnamese civilians. How do you react to that incident, as it has emerged in the press?

[A] Buckley: If, indeed, there were no extenuating circumstances in the case--if everything that Captain Medina has said is proved wrong, for instance--then either we have a case of collective hysteria or we face the appalling alternative that what happened there expresses a trend within America. I find it extremely difficult to indulge that conclusion, for the reason that if it were so, we would have had many more such incidents.

[Q] Playboy: In January 1967, ten Marines were court-martialed on charges resulting from the murders of a farmer, his mother, his sister, his three-year-old son and five-year-old niece and the gang-rape of his wife. From the beginning of 1966 through October 1969, 27 soldiers were convicted by U. S. courts-martial of murdering Vietnamese civilians; and since March 1965, 21 sailors and Marines have been so convicted. The speculation is that most such crimes by U. S. military personnel against civilians in Vietnam go unreported. So it would seem that there have been many other such incidents, though perhaps on a smaller scale.

[A] Buckley: They are either so routine as to go unremarked--like, say, the incremental murder in Manhattan--or so spectacular as to be unbelievable. It took the most extraordinary coordination of ineptitudes to fail to bring the My Lai incident to light. Here we have a Pulitzer Prize-winning story--I predict that it will get the Pulitzer Prize--and yet the two newspaper people who had the story couldn't interest anybody in it for months. Editors wouldn't buy it precisely because they couldn't believe that kind of thing could have been committed on such a scale.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think there should be or will be extensive war-crimes trials of American Servicemen and policy makers, conducted either by the United Nations or by us?

[A] Buckley: No. There shouldn't be and there won't be. The whole Nuremberg Doctrine, I continue to believe, is an elaboration of the crime of losing wars. It was, for one thing, obviously and intrinsically contaminated by the presence on the tribunal, in the capacity of judges, of the principal massacre-maker of the 20th Century, namely, the representatives of Stalin. America is not about to invite the United Nations to preside over trials of American soldiers. Those people who have been guilty will be punished, most of them, by America. I grant that we have a technical problem of how to reach out and get some of those individuals who apparently ought to be defendants, but my guess is we're going to crack that problem.

[Q] Playboy: Do you see a moral difference between what is alleged to have happened at My Lai and the aerial bombardment of free-fire zones where, it's generally granted, some civilians almost always get killed?

[A] Buckley: Of course. It's a difference explicitly recognized in Thomistic doctrine, where the whole definition of a just war was arrived at. If, in order to achieve a military objective, someone gets killed, that is on one scale of morality--on the permissible scale in warfare. If, however, someone is killed simply for the sake of killing him, unrelated to any military objective, that's different. Nobody would have thought twice about My Lai if there had been a machine-gun nest there and we had plastered the village from the air, resulting in an identical loss of life.

[Q] Playboy: But, of course, there wasn't a machine-gun nest there. Most critics of the war put little trust in those who decide which villages and which other targets are legitimate military objectives. Do you?

[A] Buckley: I trust that somewhere along the line there is a constant monitoring of the criteria that are used by people who have that kind of authority. In the specific case of Lyndon Johnson, I am informed that only he personally could authorize the bombing of certain targets where considerable civilian carnage might have resulted. I believe that he took that kind of meticulous concern not merely out of political considerations but because he was always very sensitive to the notion that he was an indiscriminate killer.

[A] Let me digress at this point: A few months ago, in Hawaii, a professor informed my audience that we had dropped one and a half times as many bombs on a very small area of Vietnam as were dropped on Germany throughout World War Two. That statistic, he claimed, proves that we are committing genocide in Vietnam. I read the figures differently. It seems to me that if we have dropped that many bombs and killed as few people as we have--there are an awful lot of live Vietnamese left, no matter how you look at it--it must mean that an enormous effort is being made to drop bombs where people aren't.

[Q] Playboy: According to official sources, several hundred thousand North and South Vietnamese civilians have been killed by American bombing raids. In view of those statistics, do you think the bombing has been justified?

[A] Buckley: It depends on whether there was an alternative, less bloody means of achieving the military objective. How many of those dead would be alive today if the North Vietnamese had desisted from infiltration as their principal technique? And if historical contexts interest you, bear in mind that we killed about as many German civilians in the course of a couple of raids over Dresden as we have killed Vietnamese in the five years in Vietnam.

[Q] Playboy: For all our bombing--precise or indiscriminate--we have not yet won the war. Do you think North Vietnam could successfully have resisted the most powerful military nation on earth for this long if it didn't have the support of most Vietnamese, North and South?

[A] Buckley: There are both extensive and succinct ways to answer that. The succinct way is for me to ask you: Could Nazi Germany have triumphed over France without the overwhelming support of the French? My answer is--obviously--yes, Germany could, and did. The South Vietnamese situation is one in which the critical weapon was terror. I have great admiration for my countrymen, but I haven't the least idea whether or not we would have the stamina to resist an enemy that had strung up an equivalent number of our elite in the public squares. Roughly speaking, what the South Vietnamese suffered during the high period of terror from 1959 to 1963 would be the equivalent of, say, 3,000,000 of our politicians, teachers, doctors, engineers and civil servants being executed. How we would behave under the circumstances I don't know. I tend to reject the ethnocentrically arrogant assumption that we Americans are uniquely valiant. I think it's not at all impossible that years from now, people will think of the South Vietnamese resistance through this entire period as one of the truly heroic historical efforts.

[Q] Playboy: Weren't many of the South Vietnamese elite, during this same period, jailed or killed by the Diem regime?

[A] Buckley: What you're saying is: Did Diem and the rest of them go to lengths they needn't have gone in order to effect what they wanted to effect, which was the independence of Vietnam? My answer is--I don't know. A very good argument may be made that they didn't go to great enough lengths. In fact, such an argument could appropriately be engraved on Diem's tombstone.

[Q] Playboy: That sounds like an endorsement of political imprisonment and assassination.

[A] Buckley: In time of war? Of course. The detection and shooting down of Admiral Yamamoto was one of the triumphs of American intelligence during the Second World War, and it gets described at least once every ten years in the Reader's Digest. You do remember, don't you, how Walter Pidgeon almost assassinated Hitler at Berchtesgaden? Do you remember the political prosecutions during the Second World War, when the New Deal decided that [pro-Nazi authors] George Sylvester Viereck and Lawrence Dennis should be put behind bars, so that we could get on with the War? I think we overdid it. I hope the South Vietnamese aren't as jumpy as we were.

[Q] Playboy: Is your claim that the leaders of South Vietnam have been motivated by a desire for independence consistent with their near-total reliance on the U. S.?

[A] Buckley: Of course they've depended on us. They are waging war not against an autarchic aggressor that is satisfied to use its own resources but against an aggressor that--from the very beginning--has been armed by great powers, namely, Red China and the Soviet Union. The South Vietnamese didn't have a rifle factory in 1954. As far as I know, neither do they now. And neither did the North Vietnamese.

[Q] Playboy: Since you applaud the fact that we rushed to the assistance of the besieged South Vietnamese government, do you also think we should oppose any war of national liberation that happens to have Communist support?

[A] Buckley: No, I wouldn't be willing to make that generality. I'd want to know where it was, what the surrounding situation was, how important it was to either Russia or China at the moment--in short, what the consequences might be. I would like to note that neither of those countries has ever supported a real war of national liberation--in lower-case letters--that is, a war in which the objective really was national liberation. When the Communist powers get involved, the point is never national liberation, always satellization. Now, it seems to me that the United States position ought to be to support whatever elements in a particular country are heading in the better of the apparently available directions. John Stuart Mill says that despotism is excused as a temporary arrangement, provided the purpose of that despotism is to maximize rather than minimize freedom.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't the idea of despotism maximizing freedom a contradiction in terms--at least in practice?

[A] Buckley: No. Lincoln put it well when he argued that it could not have been the intention of the framers of the Constitution to sacrifice all future prospects for freedom in order to celebrate constitutional punctilio.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't it true that most indigenous Communist movements in Southeast Asia are motivated more by nationalism or by economic needs than by ideological communism?

[A] Buckley: No, it isn't. Most troops simply do what they are told. Intermediaries interpret the formulation that will most inspire a particular group of soldiers to act enthusiastically in obedience to orders--whether that's a matter of telling them that their kamikaze raids will instantly elevate them into the heavenly spheres, to live forever after in glory, or that they will become large landholders, or whatever. But the people who are directing the drives in that part of the world are, in my opinion, genuinely committed to a Communist vision. The general Western assumption has been that time erodes that vision; but it is, nevertheless, true that there is a fundamentalist Marxism-communism rampant in China today. It may be inevitable that time will overcome that ideological pretension, but that is not the kind of thing around which one writes a foreign policy for the here and now.

[Q] Playboy: It is also part of liberal orthodoxy--based on his long-standing animosity toward China--that Ho Chi Minh would probably have reached a Titoist accommodation with Peking had he succeeded throughout Vietnam. Do you think that might have happened?

[A] Buckley: I have no doubt that Ho Chi Minh would have preferred to be the master of Vietnam rather than merely the surrogate in that area for Mao Tsetung. But we have to recognize that Ho Chi Minh is dead and that it was foreseeable even six or seven years ago that he would be dead in due course, since he was an old man even then. The usefulness of Ho to Mao had to do with the veneration of Ho as an individual figure, which veneration would not and did not flow to his successor. In Chinese, Vietnam means "farther South," a fact that suggests the ancient Chinese attitude toward the area: that it was never really licensed as a separate territory--the same feeling they have toward Tibet.

[Q] Playboy: Considering your hard-line view of China, how do you feel about Nixon's recent diplomatic overtures to Peking?

[A] Buckley: I don't really see why our attitude toward Red China ought to be different from our attitude toward the Soviet Union. The principal international leverage we have at this particular moment has to do with the Russian-Chinese feud. It strikes me as supremely intelligent to constantly advertise to the Soviet Union that, just as we were prepared to side with the Soviet Union in order to effect a victory over Hitler, so are we prepared to understand the potential desirability of a flirtation with Red China in order to contain the Soviet Union. Or the other way around. This strikes me as simply a return to traditional diplomacy.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think that we should--and will--recognize Red China?

[A] Buckley: I think we should not recognize her--and that it is unlikely that we will. For one thing, it becomes increasingly apparent that all of the old arguments for recognition of Red China are meaningless. The old arguments were, first, "You can't ignore a nation of 800,000,000 people." But it has gradually become manifest that we are hardly ignoring a country by failing to recognize it. As a matter of fact, we are sort of super recognizing it. The easy thing to do is to recognize; if you don't recognize, you're giving it very special attention. Point two: The notion that if we recognize Red China, we would then be able to transact some differences with her--to talk about them--has been discredited by experience. We've had hundreds of meetings with Red China; we are probably having one tonight. So we go ahead and have the meetings anyway. Number three: We have discovered from the British experience that the mere fact of having an active consulate or an ambassador in Red China has no effect at all in terms of a thaw. The English have not been able to show that they've accomplished a single thing--even concerning the protection of their own citizens--that they might not have accomplished if they hadn't had their people there. Number four, and finally: It was Lyndon Johnson who said that he would agree to give passports to Americans who wanted to visit Red China--journalists and so on. What then happened, of course, was that Red China refused to grant visas. So that we are therefore left with no adverse practical consequences of a diplomatic nature having to do with the recognition of Red China, but purely with symbolic consequences. And those consequences, in my judgment, argue against recognition.

[Q] Playboy: So far, you haven't disagreed with any aspect of President Nixon's foreign policy. One critic has suggested that you may feel a sense of obligation to him for appointing you to the advisory commission of the USIA.

[A] Buckley: Oh, for God's sake. The point is that when I look around the world today and ask myself what it is that I truly care about in international affairs that Nixon has let me down on, I don't come up with anything. On the other hand, I acknowledge that there may be a feeling of restraint deriving not from my appointment to the commission but from the fact that I have seen him once or twice privately. I have discovered a new sensual treat, which, appropriately, the readers of Playboy should be the first to know about. It is to have the President of the United States take notes while you are speaking to him, even though you run the risk that he is scribbling, "Get this bore out of here." It's always a little bit more difficult to be rhetorically ruthless with somebody with whom you spend time. For example, I find it more difficult to be verbally ruthless with Hugh Hefner after meeting him as my guest on Firing Line and seeing him on a couple of other occasions. Beyond that, if I'm kind to Nixon, it's also because I think he needs to be protected from that part of the right whose emphasis is unbalanced in the direction of the paradigm.

[Q] Playboy: Is Nixon conservative enough for you?

[A] Buckley: My ideal conservative President would be one who would strike out for certain radical reforms that, in my judgment, would greatly benefit America and augment human freedom. But such a President cannot be elected--at this time--and couldn't get his programs through Congress. It is also true, I think, that the paramount need of this highly divided society at this particular moment is for conciliation; and Nixon--who is making gradual progress while attempting to fortify the bonds of common affection--is a good President from the conservative point of view.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think that Vice-President Agnew served the purpose of conciliation when he referred to the leaders of last October's Moratorium as "an effete corps of impudent snobs"?

[A] Buckley: No, he served other purposes. There are other purposes to be served, such as isolating the sources of discontent and the agitators and merchants of it. Some Presidents do that kind of thing adroitly, some don't. At a moment when we needed reconciliation after Pearl Harbor, I think it was wrong for F. D. R. to call those who were against the War "the New Copperheads." But history appears to have forgiven him.

[Q] Playboy: To many liberals, Agnew's attacks on the media late last fall brought to mind the Chinese emperors who executed messengers bringing bad news. Do you think that the press is as objective as it professes to be?

[A] Buckley: When Mr. Nixon in November said that North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States, only Americans can do that, he meant that if the American people refuse to back an enterprise that--in the judgment of the men they elected to write their foreign policies--is essential to the good health of this country and of this century, then one must face two alternative explanations for their failure to do so. One is that they have run out of stamina. The other is that they have been constantly hectored into taking an erroneous position because they are insufficiently aware of the dimensions of the problem. He would obviously prefer the latter explanation to the former, as would I. He tends to feel that the majority of morally alert people in America have, for the most part, heard only a single side on the Vietnam issue--in the universities as well as in the press. He is absolutely correct. It is almost impossible, you know, to work your way through Yale or Harvard or Princeton and hear a pro-Vietnam speech. This is a pure caricature of academic freedom.

[Q] Playboy: Aren't campus conservatives free to speak--and don't they, often and at length?

[A] Buckley: Well, you must mean students, because there are very few conservative professors. At Princeton, for example, 65 percent of the faculty voted for Humphrey in 1968, seven percent for Dick Gregory and seven percent for Nixon. And it's the professors I'm talking about; their capacity, at a college, is to instruct.

[Q] Playboy: Then you're suggesting that the faculty allows its political bias to creep into every course.

[A] Buckley: Constantly. In any course in the humanities or social sciences. And not only in their teaching but in the books they assign. It seems to me that the entire academic community collaborated in the demonstration of academic bias when Walt Rostow and Dean Rusk went around looking for an academic post after they left Lyndon Johnson. What kind of a demonstration do you need beyond that? Here are two people whose academic credentials are absolutely first-rate. But all of a sudden, you find MIT--that paragon of academic freedom and scientific devotion--saying that they assumed Walt Rostow had "forgotten" what he knew about economics as the result of his stay in Government. That was one reason given by a senior faculty member; even James Reston made fun of it. You will notice nobody at Harvard went around saying that Galbraith "forgot" what he knew about economics as the result of his service for John Kennedy. Though I don't know. Maybe they hoped he had.

[A] I think the health of any university is damaged by this monopoly of opinion. I spoke at the University of Minnesota a few months ago. A professor--a very distinguished historian--stood up and said that there are 50 professors of history at the university and one Republican, himself; that is, the ratio is 50 to one. Now, how much real political dialog is the typical student at the University of Minnesota going to be exposed to, under the circumstances? And if he is not subjected to a true dialog, then he tends to think dialog is unnecessary, that what you need is asseveration. Placard justice: "Hey, hey, L. B. J.--how many kids did you kill today?"

[Q] Playboy: Don't you think most students get the pro-Vietnam argument from their fathers?

[A] Buckley: That's unrealistic. Students are terrific snobs. I was one myself, though I had no right to be with my own father. The fact is that unless your father is right up with the academic vernacular--unless he's read Douglas Pike as recently as last week--you tend to feel that he's not equipped to discuss serious intellectual matters with you. In any case, I think that this hegemony of thought within the colleges is something that--perhaps without even knowing it--Agnew is scratching up against.

[Q] Playboy: In his speech on TV news, the Vice-President's avowals of distaste for censorship, coupled with his allusions to the power of the FCC to withhold broadcasting licenses, struck many liberals as hypocrisy. How do you feel about it?

[A] Buckley: I think they were entitled to think of it as at least potentially hypocritical. I find absolutely mysterious the way in which the debate was ultimately joined. My devoted friend Frank Stanton, who emerged as the spokesman for the victims of this pogrom--or intended pogrom--didn't, for instance, pause to remark that Congress has already with held total freedom from the industry. The whole equal-time provision is an effort by the Congress of the United States to say to the networks and television and radio stations, "Certain freedoms you don't have." The FCC finds as much in the fairness doctrine every year as the Supreme Court finds in the First Amendment.

[Q] Playboy: So it was really unnecessary for Agnew to refer to licensing?

[A] Buckley: It may be that Agnew's speech will serve some sort of a maieutic function--that it will tease out of the system a public policy concerning the tendentious limits to which an individual station owner may go. Such a policy would be a refinement of the fairness doctrine, which was not only accepted but applauded by liberals as recently as four or five years ago. In any case, I would like to say: Let any radio or TV station owner do what he wants. If he wants to put only Benjamin Spock on from midnight to midnight, let him do it. But make it as hard as possible for him to achieve monopoly status--by licensing pay-TV, which is precisely the way to wed the individual eccentric with his individual network or station.

[Q] Playboy: What was your reaction to the Vice-President's blast at the liberal Washington Post and New York Times?

[A] Buckley: If the press is so easily intimidated as to feel threatened by three speeches by the Vice-President of the United States--if all those effete snobs are moral pygmies after all--then I ought to be even more worried about the press than I am. Mr. Agnew is not Mussolini; for better or worse, he cannot close down The New York Times. To sum up: I think what Mr. Agnew was attempting to say to the American people was that, particularly in New York, the networks and the commentators tend to reflect a single point of view--they look and act like the Rockettes--and that it is necessary for people to escape from the assumption that that is the only point of view. I think he has done an extremely useful service. Of course, it isn't just Mr. Agnew who came to such a conclusion: The identical conclusion was arrived at a few weeks earlier by Theodore White, who is a renowned liberal, on my television program. Agnew was simply accenting the obvious; and the obvious, when it has been taboo to state it, tends to hurt. Ce n'est que la vérité qui blesse, as Mr. Agnew would put it.

[Q] Playboy: How would you feel if Agnew were to become President?

[A] Buckley: I have been persuaded for several years that the office of the President is so staggeringly complicated that nobody can, by conventional measurement, be "a good President." That is to say that nobody can conceivably oversee the range of activities that, technically, the President is responsible for overseeing. Under the circumstances, whereas it is widely supposed that the President needs to be a man of more and more complicated attainments, I tend to feel that he needs to be less and less a man of complicated attainments. A hundred years ago, a President really had to run the Post Office, among other things. Today, what one needs most from a President is good will, a working intelligence and sound character. The people who praise Harry Truman were willing to point this out at the time, incidentally, but were not willing to remember the thought when it looked as though Goldwater might be nominated by the Republican Party. Second, I do think that when a man becomes President, a transmogrification takes place; that which was theretofore inconceivable becomes somehow conceivable. Nobody could really imagine Harry Truman--even himself, as he subsequently confessed--as President, until all of a sudden, he was President. Allan Drury dwells on this in one of his books. On Monday, the man is just that vicious, sniping, polemical, Nixonite Vice-President; on Tuesday, he's inaugurated and suddenly things happen not only to his critics and to the people but also to him. In short, Agnew wouldn't sound like Agnew if he were President--and, in a sense, properly so.

[Q] Playboy: When you list good will, a working intelligence and sound character as what we need most from a President, do you mean regardless of ideology?

[A] Buckley: A man can't have a working intelligence, as distinguished from an abstract intelligence, without a reasonably sound "ideology"--a word I don't use much.

[Q] Playboy: By reasonably sound, you mean reasonably conservative.

[A] Buckley: Yes. Conservatism is the politics of reality.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think the Administration is using Agnew in an attempt to wrest away some of the support for George Wallace in the South?

[A] Buckley: I hope so. Anybody who can take the 9,000,000 votes that went to George Wallace, baptize them and rededicate them to a hygienic conservatism certainly has my best wishes. It would be as though Adlai Stevenson had addressed the Communist Party and urged them to desert and follow the Democratic Party.

[Q] Playboy: Kevin Phillips, in The Emerging Republican Majority, argues that Republicans can strengthen their current national advantage by building an alliance of heretofore solid Democratic voters in the South, already conservative citizens in the traditionally Republican heartland states, and middle-class whites everywhere who are disenchanted with costly Democratic social engineering. Do you think this so-called Southern strategy is a correct one for the Republican Party?

[A] Buckley: Any strategy is correct that isn't practiced in such a way as to persecute the people who do not acquiesce in the goals of the winning party. Kevin Phillips is saying that a single politics, in fact, can, given the foreseeable future, appeal to the majority of the American people. If it follows that that particular appeal is at the expense--indeed, has as its intention the persecution--of people who do not agree with it, then one would have to renounce it. But in all the criticism I have seen of Mr. Phillips' book, I have never seen that made plain. Of course, I start on the heretical assumption that Southerners are people and that, under the circumstances, it is not immoral to appeal to somebody merely because he is a Southerner. If you're going to appeal to Southerners by promising to re-enslave the black people, then I consider that to be immoral, but I don't see any suggestion of this in Mr. Phillips' book. I think, actually, that the horror Mr. Phillips has inspired in such people as George McGovern derives not from any moral abhorrence of the thesis but out of a recognition by a very shrewd professional--which Senator McGovern is--that Mr. Phillips has the clue to how to stitch together a winning majority. Franklin D. Roosevelt, McGovern's patron saint, found such a clue, which remained operative for an entire generation.

[Q] Playboy: Whatever the intention of Phillips' Southern strategy--which you seem to be endorsing, with some qualifications--its effect is clearly to exclude blacks from "the emerging Republican majority." And we note that in citing the West's acceptance of coexistence as the most significant development of the Sixties, you apparently downgrade the importance of the black revolution, which many consider the milestone of the decade. Why?

[A] Buckley: I think that the important philosophical fight in the area of American black-white relations was won by Abraham Lincoln, who insisted on the metaphysical fact of human equality. This was the great achievement of the American 19th Century. The next milestone, as far as the Negroes are concerned, will come when whites turn to--and seek out--Negroes as a result of their individual achievements. This has come in some places and will come in others, but it is going to take time. It is certainly open to speculation whether all of the activities of the past 15 years have significantly accelerated that emancipation.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think the black struggle in the past 15 years has retarded that emancipation?

[A] Buckley: America has, lately, given herself over to the promulgation of unrealizable goals, which dooms her to frustration, if not to despair. Voegelin calls it the immanentization of the eschaton--broadly speaking, consigning that which properly belongs to the end of life to the temporal order. That can lead only to grave dissatisfactions. The very idea of "Freedom now" was an invitation to frustration. Now means something or it means nothing. When months and then years went by and the kind of dream that Martin Luther King spoke about in 1963 in Washington didn't come true, a totally predictable frustration set in. It is one thing to engage in great ventures in amelioration; it is another to engage in great ventures in utopianization.

[Q] Playboy: Couldn't it be argued that the career of Martin Luther King--even if it didn't create freedom--inspired a sense of dignity in the masses of black people?

[A] Buckley: It could. It could also be argued that the dignity was already there. What Dr. King inspired was more nearly self-assertion, which sometimes is and sometimes isn't the same as dignity.

[Q] Playboy: Your belief that black Americans had dignity before the appearance of King strikes us as less important than the fact that millions of blacks themselves didn't think so.

[A] Buckley: Look. There was anti-black discrimination pre-King, there is anti-black discrimination post-King. If dignity is something that comes to you only after you succeed in putting an end to discrimination, then the blacks didn't have dignity then and don't have it now. If dignity is something that comes to you by transcending discrimination, then I say they had it then even as they have it now. What some blacks--and a lot of whites--now have, which is distinctive, is a greater tendency to self-assertion. I am trying to insist that that isn't the same as dignity.

[Q] Playboy: In an Atlantic magazine interview on the occasion of your unsuccessful candidacy for membership in the Yale Corporation two years ago, you made the unluckily timed crack: "It was only a very few years ago that official Yale conferred a doctor of laws on Martin Luther King, who more clearly qualifies as a doctor of lawbreaking." A few weeks later, Dr. King was assassinated. Did you regret the publication of your quote? And do you think of Martin Luther King as a pernicious force in American history?

[A] Buckley: I regret but am philosophical (continued on page 180)Playboy Interview(continued from page 88) about the fact that there is a lead time in journalism, so that you sometimes find yourself reading something that is inappropriate the day you read it, which, however, was altogether appropriate the day you wrote it. Look magazine's cover, after J. F. K.'s assassination, had on it, "Kennedy Could Lose." As regards what I wrote, I think it was correct. I wrote it a couple of days after Dr. King threatened massive civil disobedience if the forthcoming demands of his poverty marchers were not met. I don't want to answer your question about whether he will be seen as a good or a bad force in history, because I don't know. He was clearly a bad force on the matter of obeying the law. His attempt to sanctify civil disobedience is at least one of his legacies; if it emerges as his principal legacy, then he should certainly be remembered as a bad force. If, on the other hand, his principal legacy emerges--the wrinkles having been ironed out by the passage of time--as a spiritual leader of an oppressed people whom he urged on to great endeavors, then he will be a great historical force.

[Q] Playboy: Could you yourself ever justify breaking a law?

[A] Buckley: Yes. I would justify the breaking of a law that, by more or less settled agreement on the separation of powers since the time of Christ, is ontologically outside the state's jurisdiction. For instance, when the government of Mexico, beginning a government or two after the overthrow of Díaz, forbade Mexicans to attend church, hundreds of thousands of them did so anyway, in underground churches. It seems to me that this is an excellent example of justified breaking of the law, against which there could be no reasonable recrimination.

[Q] Playboy: Then it depends on the individual's idea of the character of the government as well as of the laws.

[A] Buckley: No, it doesn't. I didn't say the individual's idea and I didn't say the character of the government. I said the settled idea of the separation of powers and I said the character of the law, not of the government. Scholars, secular and religious, have agreed for 2000 years that the state has no business interfering in the traffic between man and his God; any attempt to do so breaks the legal bond that the government has over the individual. I assume, of course, that we are talking about free or relatively free societies. If we're talking about totalitarian societies, the essential relationship of the subject to the slavemaster ought to be mutinous.

[Q] Playboy: Since you have referred to the religious justification for lawbreaking: Do you think a young man has the right to use the Fifth Commandment--thou shalt not kill--as justification for refusing induction into the Armed Forces?

[A] Buckley: The Fifth Commandment obviously is not a proscription against taking another man's life under any circumstances. Moses led a pretty robust army even after he came down from Mt. Sinai. The rendering should have been, "Thou shalt not murder." I am not correcting God--He had it right. The imprecision was King James'.

[Q] Playboy: You said that the essential relationship of subject to slavemaster ought to be mutinous in totalitarian societies. Aren't there degrees of unfreedom--and isn't there a point at which the erosion of freedom must be resisted, perhaps by civil disobedience?

[A] Buckley: There is a point at which an individual citizen rejects his society. He has at that point several options. One is to leave. The society ought not to hinder his doing so. A second is to agitate for reform. The society ought to protect his right to do so. A third is to drop out. The society ought to let him alone, to the extent it is possible to disengage reciprocating gears. A fourth is to disobey the laws or to revolutionize. In that event, the society ought to imprison, exile or execute him.

[Q] Playboy: You've identified what you consider the utopianism of Martin Luther King's call for "Freedom now" as a negative aspect of the civil rights revolution. Do you see any positive aspects to that revolution?

[A] Buckley: Yes, several. I supported Dr. King in Montgomery. I very much believe in voluntary boycotts. If Woolworth isn't going to let you sit down and buy a Coca-Cola, then, goddamn it, don't patronize Woolworth. I certainly believe in equal access to public accommodations and I have always opposed the denial to anyone of any constitutionally specified right, by reason of race, color or creed.

[Q] Playboy: Including the right to vote?

[A] Buckley: Yes.

[Q] Playboy: But you have argued, haven't you, for limiting the franchise?

[A] Buckley: Yes. I think too many people are voting.

[Q] Playboy: Whom would you exclude?

[A] Buckley: A while ago, George Gallup discovered that 25 percent or so of the American people had never heard of the United Nations. I think if we could find that 25 percent, they'd be reasonable candidates for temporary disfranchisement.

[Q] Playboy: How would you find them?

[A] Buckley: Ask the Ford Foundation where they are. Incidentally, there's an interesting paradox here. I think that as power is centralized, one can make less of a case for extending the vote. In the ideal world, where power is decentralized--in my kind of a world--one wouldn't have to know what the United Nations was in order to assess intelligently the local situation and express yourself on it.

[Q] Playboy: You didn't include the school-desegregation decision of the Supreme Court in your list of the beneficent results of the civil rights movement. Why?

[A] Buckley: When Brown vs. Board of Education was passed, we at National Review called it "bad law and bad sociology." I continue to think it was lousy law, historically and analytically. There are, unfortunately, increased grounds for believing that it was also bad sociology. Coerced massive integration is simply not working at primary and secondary school levels, and I notice that, for instance in Harlem, the voters don't list integrated schooling as among their principal demands. What they want, and should have, is better education. The superstition that this automatically happens by checkerboarding the classroom is increasingly apparent to blacks as well as to whites. Meanwhile, in the total situation, you are taking very grave risks in jeopardizing the good nature of the white majority.

[Q] Playboy: Could your concern for the good nature of the white majority be interpreted as acquiescence to their prejudice?

[A] Buckley: The word prejudice becomes a little strained, used in that way. Look, 95 percent of the white people who live in Washington are Democrats, political liberals who give speeches in favor of integration and vote for politicians who favor integration--and then take their children out of the public schools when Negroes enter those schools. If you call them prejudiced, they reply that that isn't it, but that they want for their children a better education than they will get at the public schools in Washington.

[Q] Playboy: If every school in the country were integrated by law in the next two years, wouldn't you have a generation 20 years from now that was relatively free of race prejudice?

[A] Buckley: I fear not. There is still anti-Italian prejudice in Jewish sections of New York and anti-Jewish prejudice in Italian sections of New York, and they've been going to school together for more than 20 years. It may be, ages hence, when the final sociological report is stapled and submitted, that we will discover that it all had something to do with numbers. It may be that a school that has ten percent Negroes will be successful and a school that has 30 or 40 percent Negroes won't make it; either the whites will pull out or racial antagonisms will disrupt the school. Meanwhile, the things to stress and restress are better education and better job opportunities for Negroes.

[Q] Playboy: How should black demands for better education be met--or do you think they shouldn't be met?

[A] Buckley: The discussion so far has been within the context of the existing system. I have always been attracted to the twin notions that what we need are many more private schools and that public schools ought to approximate private schools as closely as possible, which means that public schools ought to have the same rights as private schools. These are among the reasons why I am so strongly attracted to the so-called voucher plan, which would work this way: A parent would be given a voucher for $500--or whatever it costs to educate a child--which the parent would then take to any school, public or private, close to home or distant, where he wanted to matriculate that child. The school would get its money by cashing in these vouchers. The virtues of the plan are the virtues of the free-enterprise system--concerning which, incidentally, you are strangely uncurious. Specifically, it gives freedom of choice to the parent, whether he's rich or poor. Under the voucher plan, schools would become more competitive; they would strive to serve their customers--namely, the students.

[Q] Playboy: How much do you think remains to be done to improve black job opportunities?

[A] Buckley: Plenty. I am convinced that the truly important way for the Negro to advance is economically. We should, first, deprive labor unions of their monopolistic privileges. In fact, I'd do that anyway, even if no Negroes existed. But when we know that those privileges are being exercised in part to prevent Negroes from getting jobs in certain industries, the very least the Government ought to do is act in those cases. Second, we should encourage preferential hiring in situations where there isn't unemployment. It's unrealistic to think that you can refuse to hire a white in order to make room for a Negro if there is wide unemployment. Point three: A revival of the whole apprenticeship idea would be extremely useful at this point. It would involve, among other things, modifying--and preferably repealing--many of the minimum-wage laws. I digress to say that the minimum-wage laws are, of course, the great enemy, especially of teenage Negroes. Professor Milton Friedman has shown that there was approximately a 100 percent relative rise in Negro teenage unemployment after the last increase in the minimum wage. Further, I would like to see somebody draw up a sophisticated table of tax deductions given to individuals who hire Negroes as apprentices, the idea being to teach them a profitable trade--in construction, in electricity, in plumbing, in newspaper offices, wherever.

[Q] Playboy: Beyond increasing job opportunities, what else can be done to eliminate poverty in America? Specifically, are you in favor of President Nixon's welfare-reform proposals?

[A] Buckley: We are eliminating poverty in this country faster than any society ever has. There is a downward-bound graph that begins with about 50 percent of the population poor at the turn of the century and dips to the present, where there are about nine percent poor, using the same indices. So my first comment is that I don't want anything to interfere with the direction of that graph, which the overhead costs and economic strategy of many social-welfare programs tend to do. Now, it may be that the curve is asymptotic, that it will never quite close. The residual poor will, of course, have to have some kind of a relief program, even as they do now. I myself would buy the Moynihan plan, or the Nixon plan, or the New Federalism--whatever you call it--as a substitute for all existing measures. It may well come down to a matter of American know-how moving in on a congeries of welfare systems to make welfarism both more manageable and an instrument that itself might break the so-called vicious cycle that everybody agrees has discredited the existing system.

[Q] Playboy: What son of program--if any--do you favor for eliminating hunger?

[A] Buckley: I'm attracted to the notion of giving out four basic food materials, free, to anybody who wants them. The cost, according to one economist, would come to about a billion dollars a year. The idea is that these ingredients would be available at food stores to anybody--you, me, Nelson Rockefeller--because it simply wouldn't be worth while trying to catch anyone who was taking the free food and didn't need it. With such a plan, you could officially and confidently say that the residual hunger in America was simply the result of people not knowing how to utilize these materials.

[Q] Playboy: What are they?

[A] Buckley: Powdered skim milk, bulgur wheat, soybeans and a kind of lard. You can make very good bread out of them, for instance. This bulgur wheat, incidentally--which is a staple in the Mideast--is not much liked by Americans and yet Alice Roosevelt Longworth loves it, considers it a delicacy.

[Q] Playboy: Do you agree with those analysts who feel that--in part because of the black revolution and because of Federal "handout" programs--the general electorate is moving to the right?

[A] Buckley: There are all sorts of conflicting indices. The Moynihan plan that we just talked about is left by orthodox conservative standards; if it had been proposed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933, it might have gotten even him impeached--and yet the people seem willing to accept it. But looking at the broad indications, I do feel that there is a move to the right. I've always believed that conservatism is, as I said a while ago, the politics of reality and that reality ultimately asserts itself, in a reasonably free society, in behalf of the conservative position. An excellent example was the race riots of the mid-Sixties. Even the participants discovered that those Gadarene experiments were futile.

[Q] Playboy: Mayor Daley's celebrated order to the Chicago police to maim looters in the rioting that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King confirmed the feeling of many young people--black and white--that American society places a higher value on property than on human life. Do you think looters should be shot?

[A] Buckley: I reject the notion that a property right is other than a human right--that is, it's not an animal right or a vegetable right. The commitment of the state to the individual is to protect the individual's freedom and property, property being one of the things that materialize from the exercise of freedom and, therefore, in many senses, are the fruits of freedom. So I elect a mayor to protect me and my property effectively, with graduated responses to various conditions. If theft is an aberration--as it is, for instance, in the Scandinavian countries--I would consider a mayor who orders his men to shoot thieves to be absolutely barbaric. But if theft reaches near-epidemic conditions, a different response is indicated. I wish there were something in between simply shouting, "Hey! Come back!" and shooting somebody in the leg. Unfortunately, I fear that when that in-between thing is discovered, liberals are going to come up with elaborate reasons for not using it--Mace being an excellent example.

[Q] Playboy: Mayor Daley's shoot-to-maim order, and his handling of demonstrators at the Democratic Convention that same summer, struck many observers as proof of an authoritarian and ugly aspect of America's turn to the right. If you had been mayor of Chicago, would you have handled the protesters as he did?

[A] Buckley: No. I've been pretty well satisfied that it was a basic mistake not to open up Lincoln Park. You simply can't require people to evaporate--incorporealization not being a typical human skill. But with the exception of his ruling on the use of the park, and the workaday tactical errors, I think Daley's resoluteness was justified. Obviously, the excesses of his police were not justified, but a lot of Americans were glad the demonstrators got beaten up. They were glad for the commonplace reason--there's a little sadism in all of us--but they were also glad because they knew goddamn well that the chances of the demonstrators' breaking the law with impunity were overwhelming. It was sort of a return to posse justice. If you knew absolutely that Abbie Hoffman and the boys were never going to spend a night in jail--which was a good guess at the time--then people figured, "What the hell, beat 'em up. At least get that satisfaction out of it."

[Q] Playboy: Is that the way you felt?

[A] Buckley: No. But I understand the feeling.

[Q] Playboy: Liberals Carl Stokes and John Lindsay were both re-elected mayor last year. Do these elections contradict your general thesis of a move to the right?

[A] Buckley: No, they don't. Lindsay's re-election is certainly a special case. A perfectly reasonable assumption is that if there had been a runoff between him and Procaccino, even Procaccino might have beaten him. I don't think one can conclude very much of an ideological nature from the event in New York City. In the matter of Stokes, it seems to me that there are a great number of people who practice, for reasons that I applaud, an inverse racism; many Cleveland whites voted for Mr. Stokes precisely because he is a Negro. The idea is that, among other things, it is a good investment in conserving America to remind a population that is always being urged toward cynicism that it is possible to rise up the ladder. But I think that Stokes is one of the four or five truly brilliant politicians I've ever run up against, so I'm prejudiced in his favor.

[Q] Playboy: Would you practice this kind of inverse racism?

[A] Buckley: Yes. I think there's a very good argument for voting for a Negro because he's a Negro--until such time as it becomes simply redundant to make such a demonstration. I wouldn't vote for a Jew because he was a Jew, because it seems to me that the time has long since passed when it was necessary to demonstrate that a Jew can rise as high as he wants to. This is not the case with the Negro.

[Q] Playboy: Haven't you used this argument to suggest that America should have a black President?

[A] Buckley: Yes, I have. I would take great pleasure in the pride that would come to the black community if there were a Negro in the White House. I think it's worth working for.

[Q] Playboy: The possibility of a black American President seems remote in a decade that is opening with a widespread crackdown on such militant black groups as the Black Panthers. Do you think there is a campaign to exterminate the Panthers?

[A] Buckley: No. But I think there should be. I mean, obviously, to exterminate the movement, even as I favor the extermination of Ku Klux Klanism, though not necessarily Ku Kluxers.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Buckley: Because I am persuaded that the Panthers have solemnly registered their basic goals, which are to rob people, by category, of their rights to life, to liberty, to freedom; and because they are arming themselves for that purpose. Any organization caught--as the Panthers have been caught time and time again--with caches of machine guns and grenades and Molotov cocktails is presumptively guilty of non-Platonic ambitions. Every state in the Union forbids that sort of stockpiling of arms.

[Q] Playboy: Where have the Panthers indicated that their basic goal is to rob people of their rights?

[A] Buckley: In their literature. Read it. I don't carry it around. It is as thoroughly impregnated with genocidal anti-white racism as ever the Nazis' was with anti-Semitism. And it makes no difference to the Panthers where on the left-right spectrum the white politician stands. On the death of Bobby Kennedy, the Black Panthers' national newspaper ran a photograph of him lying in a pool of his own blood in the Ambassador Hotel with the head of a pig replacing the head of Mr. Kennedy. The rhetorical totalism suggested here, combined with the doctrinal genocidal passions, suggest to me that whatever was the appropriate attitude toward Goebbels in, say 1930, is appropriate, in 1970, toward the Black Panthers.

[Q] Playboy: Doesn't the publication of such a picture, however repugnant, come under the protection of the First Amendment?

[A] Buckley: It does, formalistically; which is why I included actions--the Panthers' stockpiling of weapons--among the reasons why I think their extermination as a movement is desirable. But I would like to note that it is a naïve liberal assumption to think that the Bill of Rights protects every manner of written or spoken dissent. In the heyday of McCarthyism, Professor Samuel Stouffer from Harvard did one of those Travels with Charley bits around the country to discover the extent to which the Bill of Rights was an article of practical faith held by the American people. He found out that something like 75 percent of us didn't believe that members of the Communist Party should enjoy any rights. Needless to say, he wrote a horrified book about his findings. Now, it is extremely easy for people with an ideologized knowledge of American history to suppose that this is something new, let alone that it is impossible to compose a theoretical defense of it. But it is apparent to me that the profoundest studies of what, for instance, Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln meant by freedom was a freedom that was severely limited, even theoretically, in the right it absolutely granted to anyone to call for the persecution, let alone the liquidation, of others. When Jefferson said, "Those who wish to dissolve the Union or to change the republican form of government should stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it," I am convinced by such scholars as Harry Jaffa that he meant not that we should grant freedom to the enemies of freedom because they are entitled to it but that we should grant freedom to the enemies of freedom because we can afford to indulge them that freedom. Accordingly, it becomes a practical rather than a theoretical consideration whether, at any given moment in American history, a particular group of dissenters whose dissent is based on the desire to rob other people of their freedom ought to be tolerated.

[Q] Playboy: Are we at such a moment in history--when we can't afford that freedom to a few hundred out of 200,000,000 Americans?

[A] Buckley: Quite possibly. I don't think the Panthers are in a position to take over the country, any more than the Klan was. But the Klan deprived particular people in particular places of their effective freedom. So have the Panthers, by the use of the same weapons: intimidation and, it is now alleged by one or two grand juries, both murder and conspiracy to murder. So I say: Let's do to them what I wish we had done to the Klan 50 years ago.

[Q] Playboy: When you say that we should not tolerate a group of dissenters such as the Panthers, what do you propose we do about them?

[A] Buckley: Society has three sanctions available for dealing with dissenters of this kind. There is the whole family of social sanctions; if they don't work, we then have legal sanctions; if the legal sanctions don't work, we are forced to use military sanctions. As an example of the social sanctions, I give you what has happened to Gerald L. K. Smith, the fierce anti-Semite. Would Smith be invited to join the sponsoring group of the Lincoln Center? If he gave a $1000 contribution to the President's Club, would he be admitted as a member? No. Gerald L. K. Smith has been effectively isolated in America, and I'm glad that he has been. After such an experience as we have seen in the 20th Century of what happens--or what can happen--when people call for genocidal persecutions of other people, we have got to use whatever is the minimal resource available to society to keep that sort of thing from growing. If the social sanctions work, then you have the Jeffersonian situation, in which libertarian rodomontade is onanistically satisfying--a society in which the least possible force is the effective agent of that society's cohesiveness. I would like to see people like Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver treated at least as badly as Gerald L. K. Smith has been. But no: They get applauded, they get invited to college campuses, they get listened to attentatively on radio and on television--they are invited to Leonard Bernstein's salons--all of which makes rather glamorous a position that, in my judgment, ought to be execrated.

[Q] Playboy: They also get jailed, exiled and even shot.

[A] Buckley: Cleaver was jailed for committing rape, which Gerald L. K. Smith hasn't done, so far as I know. And he was wounded after a shoot-out with Oakland police. Huey Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter. A gang of them are up now for murder and conspiracy to terrorize. Now, I'll grant you this: I have not been satisfied that the killing of Cleaver's buddy in that particular battle in Oakland--the young man who walked out of the house in his shorts and T-shirt--was justified. The policeman who killed him may have panicked, as others of us have done, with less tragic consequences, to be sure. But he wasn't acting on orders from J. Edgar Hoover, whose sins, if there are any, are explicit rather than implicit. But to return to my point, if I may, about the attention lavished on such people: The same, to a certain extent, was true of George Lincoln Rockwell, who got an extensive ventilation of his views in this magazine. For as long as that kind of thing happens, you encourage people to consider as tenable a position that in my judgment ought to be universally rejected as untenable. The whole idea of civilization is little by little to discard certain points of view as uncivilized; it is impossible to discover truths without discovering that their opposites are error. In a John Stuart Mill--type society--in which any view, for so long as it is held by so much as a single person, is considered as not yet confuted--you have total intellectual and social anarchy.

[Q] Playboy: On the other hand, by publishing an interview with a George Lincoln Rockwell, one might encourage him to expose the untenability of his views and thus help discredit both himself and his philosophy, even among those who might previously have been sympathizers.

[A] Buckley: I acknowledge the abstract appeal of the argument, but I remind you that it can be used as an argument for evangelizing people in Nazism, racism or cannibalism, in order to fortify one's opposition to such doctrines. The trouble is that false doctrines do appeal to people. In my judgment, it would be a better world where nobody advocated tyranny; better than a world in which tyranny is advocated as an academic exercise intended to fortify the heroic little antibodies to tyranny.

[Q] Playboy: If the evils of a particular doctrine are so apparent, what harm is there in allowing someone to preach that doctrine?

[A] Buckley: What is apparent to one man is not necessarily apparent to the majority. Hitler came to power democratically. It's a 19th Century myth to confide totally in the notion that the people won't be attracted to the wrong guy. George Wallace, not Nixon or Humphrey, got the highest TV ratings. Take, once more, the Panthers. There are, I am sure, hundreds of thousands of Americans who would like to hear a speech by Eldridge Cleaver. One reason they would like to do so is because they like the excitement. Another is that they like to show off. People like to show their audacity, their cavalier toleration of iconoclasm--it's the same kind of thing, in a way, as shouting, "F ------ Mayor Daley" in a loud voice in the middle of a park in Chicago. Moreover, the views expressed by Eldridge Cleaver, et al., have not been proscribed by settled intellectual opinion, because, thank God, we have not experienced in America the kind of holocaust that Caucasians visited against the Jews in Germany. I contend that it is a responsibility of the intellectual community to anticipate Dachau rather than to deplore it. The primary responsibility of people who fancy themselves morally sophisticated is to do what they can to exhibit their impatience with those who are prepared to welcome the assassination of Bobby Kennedy because that meant one less pig. Their failure to do that is, in my judgment, a sign of moral disintegration. If you have moral disintegration, you don't have left a case against Dachau. If you don't have that, what do you have? Make love not war? Why?

[Q] Playboy: Do you dunk that a more concerted police attack should be launched against the Panthers?

[A] Buckley: I would support a full legal attack, with the passage of new laws, if necessary, as we have done in other areas. For instance, I don't think we have enough legal weapons against people who push heroin. People who are practiced in the profession of trying to halt the flow of heroin see themselves as engaged in a losing fight--primarily because by the time the agent can gain entry to the home or apartment where he suspects there is a stash of heroin, it has been flushed down the toilet. The so-called no-knock provision of the President's new crime bill was written precisely to overcome that problem. Now, I know--everybody knows--that that provision is capable of abuse. But I think a libertarian ought always to ask himself: What is the way to maximize liberty?

[Q] Playboy: In what way does the no-knock law maximize liberty?

[A] Buckley: Directly. In Manchild in the Promised Land, Claude Brown identifies heroin as the principal problem in Harlem--not housing, not education, not discrimination, not the absence of economic opportunity. Heroin. If the heroin traffic in Harlem were brought under control, we would see--in his judgment--a dramatic drop in crime and a lessening of those restrictions on freedom that accompany a high crime rate.

[Q] Playboy: Would you disagree with former Attorney General Ramsey Clark's contention that eliminating poverty is the key to reducing crime?

[A] Buckley: I would. Drug abuse and crime both have to do with the state of the ethos; and the ethos is not a function of poverty. Consider Portugal or Ireland: Poor people don't necessarily commit crimes.

[Q] Playboy: A few minutes ago, you referred to the moral disintegration of some Americans. Would you make that a general indictment--applicable not only to those who tolerate the Panthers but to most Americans?

[A] Buckley: Yes. The most conspicuous attribute of the 20th Century American is his self-indulgence. In a marvelous book called The Odyssey of the Self-Centered Self, Robert Fitch traces the principal concerns of civilization through the past 200 or 300 years; our concerns were, he says, first predominantly religious, then predominantly scientific, then humanistic--and today are essentially egocentric. I think that ours is an egocentric society. The popular notion is that there is no reciprocal obligation by the individual to the society, that one can accept whatever the patrimony gives us without any sense of obligation to replenish the common patrimony--that is, without doing what we can to advance the common good. This, I think, is what makes not only Americans but most Western peoples weak. It comforts me that that also was the finding of Ortega y Gasset.

[Q] Playboy: How does the increasing social awareness and involvement of young people fit into your thesis?

[A] Buckley: I don't say that somebody who spends the summer in Mississippi trying to bring rights to black people is primarily self-centered, although such a case could be made concerning some young people and by using less intricate psychological arguments than, for instance, the liberals fling around to prove that we are all racist. I'm talking about the general disease of anomie, which is the result of people's, by and large, having become deracinated, suspended from any relationship to the supernatural and prescinded from the historical situation. A lot of them retreat and think about themselves, even exclusively about themselves--the drug people--the dropouts, formal and informal. Certain others venture into utopianism, which, as I've said, necessarily and obviously breeds frustration and despair, conditions that some of them prefer even to drugs. But the lot of them, I think, fail to come to terms with the world, fail to come to terms with the end of life. They have absolutely no eschatological vision, except a rhetorical sort of secular utopianism. A related phenomenon: When I was last on the Johnny Carson show, he announced to his mass audience, "Well, after all, the reason the Soviet Union arms is because we arm," the implicit axiom being that there is obviously no difference between them and us. What makes it possible for the man who has the largest regular audience of anybody in the United States--not excluding the President--to say blandly something like that is wave after wave in the intellectual offensive against epistemological optimism, against the notion that some things are better than others and that we can know what those things are.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think this moral relativism is at least partially a consequence of the decline in religious belief?

[A] Buckley: Yes. In orthodox religious belief. It's a commonplace that there is no such thing as an irreligious society. The need for religion being a part of the nature of man, people will continue to seek religion. You see the Beatles rushing off to listen to the platitudinous homilies of that Indian quack, Maharishi-what's-his-name, but they'd rather be caught dead than reading Saint Paul. Young people who have active minds tend to be dissatisfied with the ersatz religions they pick up, and yet so formal is the contemporary commitment to agnosticism--or even to atheism--that they absolutely refuse to plumb Christianity's extraordinary reservoirs of rationality. I doubt if you could get one of these kids, however desperately in search of religion--who will go to any guru, who will even talk to Joan Baez and attempt to get religion from her--to read Orthodoxy by Chesterton or any book by C. S. Lewis.

[Q] Playboy: Perhaps orthodoxy--lower case--is at fault. Many young people would say they think Christ was a great man; they might even know a good deal about Him. But they are appalled by Saint Paul's horror of the body and of sex.

[A] Buckley: I'm sure that among the vast majority of students, the knowledge of Christ is superficial and that the only thing they know about Saint Paul is that he was "anti-sex." In fact, Saint Paul's anti-sexuality was, I think, a mode by which he expressed the joys of asceticism, the transcendent pleasure of the mortification of the flesh. By no means is this distinctive to Christianity. In fact, Christianity in its formal renunciation of Manichaeism took a position concerning the flesh that is far more joyful than, for instance, that of the Buddhists or of a number of other religions.

[Q] Playboy: One of the reasons many people have difficulty accepting your religion, Roman Catholicism, is that they have been convinced by experts that there are soon going to be more people on the globe than the earth can support, yet the Church does its not-inconsiderable best to prevent the spread of birth-control information. Do you also take a serious view of the population problem?

[A] Buckley: Yes, I do. I think it is the second most important problem in the world, after ideological communism.

[Q] Playboy: Then the Church's position on birth control distresses you?

[A] Buckley: No. It is not established by any means that the influence of the Church is very direct on the matter of the increase in population. It happens that the birth rate is the greatest where the Church has no influence: India, for instance, or Nigeria. It is impossible to establish a correlation between the birth rate in Latin America and the prevailing religion on that continent. The Catholic position on birth control is, therefore, something against which we agonize rather more theoretically than practically.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think we can do, then, to keep the population down?

[A] Buckley: Get people to stop reading Playboy.

[Q] Playboy: What's the real answer?

[A] Buckley: Well, the real answer is to make sure that people who don't want more children and who have no religious scruples against the use of abortifacients or prophylactics are aware of how they can get and use them. My own assumption is that we are moving toward the discovery of a chemical that will prevent conception, that will be generally dispensed--perhaps in the water supply--and can be readily neutralized by any woman who desires to do so.

[Q] Playboy: Should the U. S. volunteer birth-control information and devices to such overpopulated nations as India?

[A] Buckley: They don't need any more information. They can get it from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. As to giving them the pill--sure, if they ask for it.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have any other sexual opinions that might shock your bishop?

[A] Buckley: I didn't give you a "sexual" opinion. I don't know that giving free pills to India is heretical. Would American rabbis object to free pork for India? Heresy? I don't think so. I happen, for example, to favor the legalization of private homosexual acts committed between consenting adults and of prostitution. The second is the more important. Legalizing prostitution would provide a ready outlet for pubescent lust and greatly facilitate the hygienic problem, pending the domination of the appetite and the restoration of morality. Also, it would cut down the profits and power of the Mafia, the existence of which enrages me.

[Q] Playboy: How else would you combat the Mafia?

[A] Buckley: By making gambling--but not gambling debts--legal.

[Q] Playboy: Advocating the legalization of gambling, prostitution and homosexual acts between adults puts you in agreement with most liberals. Do you also agree with them in the area of censorship? Would you defend the right of the state to, say, stop performances by Lenny Bruce?

[A] Buckley: I'm troubled by that problem. By the way, do, please, try to remember that the conservative opposes unnecessary legislation. I've written about the censorship dilemma. Obviously, a perfectly consistent, schematic libertarianism would give you an easy answer--let anybody do anything. Including cocaine vending machines. But a libertarianism written without reference to social universals isn't terribly useful. Here, I think, is where the science of sociology becomes useful. If sociology suggests that societies don't survive without the observance of certain common bonds, certain taboos, then we can maintain that in the long run, we diminish rather than increase freedom by protecting people who violate those taboos. Having said that, let me add that I'm perfectly well aware that this particular argument can be abused by people who want a narrow conformity. But once again, let's reach for an example: When Salvation, the rock musical, was produced in New York City, the reviewer for Time magazine listed the things that it takes to make a successful rock musical nowadays. It has to be dirty, anti-American and anti-religious. Under the last category, he said: It will no longer do to attack Protestantism, because Protestantism has become so etiolated as to have no potential for shock. You can't shock anybody by making fun of the dogma of the Bishop of Woolwich. Second, it can't be anti-Jewish, because the playgoing community on Broadway tends to be heavily Jewish and the Jewish people hold that certain things should be held in reverence. For instance, no jokes about Dachau or Buchenwald can be made in New York City. Therefore--attack the Catholics!

[A] There's still a certain amount of awe in the Catholic religion, but the Catholics are a politically unorganized group in New York City and you can get away with ridiculing them. So, the writer gives the audience the iconoclast's thrill, but safely: They're not going to lose at the box office. Now--should society in general defer to the specially pious concerns of significant groups within that society? We extend certain protections against public affronts. For instance, the courts recognize a limit to what a storekeeper displays in his window. But what about his shelf? Or the stage? Is it right to have laws forbidding, let us say, a comedy based on what happened at Dachau? I know all the theoretical arguments against it, but there's a tug inside me that says that a society perhaps has to maintain the right to declare certain kinds of aggressions against the venerated beliefs of the people as taboo. This is a codification of grace, of mutual respect.

[Q] Playboy: Would you admit that the tug inside you to ban certain kinds of irreverence may be irrational?

[A] Buckley: Yes--absolutely. But there is a place for irrationality. Many of the conventions of any society are irrational. The obsequies shown to the queen of England, for example, are utterly irrational. Oakeshott [Michael J., a British economist and political theorist] has made the demonstration once and for all that rationalism in politics--which may be defined as trying to make politics as the crow flies--is the kind of thing that leads almost always and almost necessarily to tyranny.

[Q] Playboy: Can you give us a specific way in which society might suffer from a comedy--however tasteless and debased--about what happened at Dachau?

[A] Buckley: Yes. You can hurt a people's feelings. A people whose feelings are hurt withdraw from a sense of kinship, which is what makes societies cohere. Moreover, a society so calloused as not to care about the feelings of its members becomes practiced in the kind of indifference that makes people, and the society they live in, unlovely.

[Q] Playboy: But if a taboo has to be maintained by force of law, is it still a taboo?

[A] Buckley: It depends. Some taboos are codified, some aren't. Some laws protect what isn't any longer taboo. I don't think Lenny Bruce would be arrested today in New York, the movement having been in the direction of permissiveness in the past four or five years. The question really is: Do we--or do I, I guess--approve of the trend, and I'm not so sure that I do. A society that abandons all of its taboos abandons reverence.

[Q] Playboy: Doesn't society abandon something even more precious by attempting to preserve that reverence by force?

[A] Buckley: Again, it depends on the situation. If you have a society that is corporately bent on a prolonged debauch--determined to wage iconoclasm à outrance--then you've got a society that you can't effectively repress. I mean, you have a prohibitive situation. But if you have a society--as I think we still do--in which the overwhelming majority of the people respect their own and others' taboos, the kind of society that, say, forbids a lawyer from referring to Judge Marshall as a nigger, or Judge Hoffman as a kike, then it isn't much of an exertion on the commonweal to implement such laws as have been on the books in New York for generations. My final answer to your entire line of questioning is ambiguous: If you ask simply: Does the individual have the absolute right to do anything he wants in private contract with another party? then my answer is: No, only the presumptive right. A sadist cannot contract to kill a masochist. John Stuart Mill reduces the matter of sovereignty to the individual's right over himself. The state hasn't the right to protect you against yourself--which is a good argument against my being required to wear a helmet when I ride my Honda.

[Q] Playboy: Doesn't Mill's dictum against the state's right to protect you from yourself also argue for the abolition of most drug laws?

[A] Buckley: Does it? Take heroin. Except under totally contrived circumstances, there is no such thing in America as a person inflicting purely on himself the consequences of taking heroin. If a man goes that route, he deserts his family--if he has any; he becomes an energumen who will ravish society to sustain the habit, and so on. Most important--as far as I'm concerned--he becomes a Typhoid Mary of sorts. I know that I'm using a metaphor, but I can defend the use of this particular metaphor. We know from serious studies that heroin users desire to communicate the habit to other people and often succeed in doing so.

[Q] Playboy: Do the same arguments apply to marijuana?

[A] Buckley: Not really, or not so severely. The first and most obvious thing to say about marijuana is that the penalties for using it are preposterous. But I don't believe that it ought to be legalized yet; the consequences of its use have not been sufficiently studied. It seems crazy to me that in an age when the Federal Government has outlawed Tab, we are wondering whether we ought to legalize marijuana. Now, it may be that marijuana is harmless, although at this moment, I am persuaded by those scientists who emphatically believe the contrary. It may be that we would be much better off persuading everybody who now drinks whiskey to turn on instead. But we don't know. Some scientists say that middle-aged people who take marijuana risk special dangers because they have gradually concatenated their own quirks, latent and active, into a moderately well-adjusted human being. Psychotropic drugs can shatter that delicate equilibrium. Conversely, it is speculated that marijuana can keep some young people from making the individual adjustments they need to make. Some scientists claim that prolonged use of marijuana wages a kind of war against your psyche, the final results of which are not easy to trace.

[Q] Playboy: Your attitude toward grass typifies your agreement with middle-class Americans on some issues. Are there any contemporary American middle-class values that you dislike?

[A] Buckley: You'd have to make me a list of them. If ostentatious forms of material achievement are a middle-class value, I don't much like them, though I wouldn't go out of my way to evangelize against them; we all have our little vanities. I am told that in certain big corporations, it is unseemly for the junior V. P. to own a more expensive car than the senior V. P., and absolutely verboten for his wife to have a mink coat if the wife of the senior V. P. doesn't have one. But who does approve of Babbittry? Not even Babbitt. He merely practiced Babbittry. The middle-class values I admire are husbandry, industry, loyalty, a sense of obligation to the community and a sense of obligation to one's patrimony. When Winston Churchill died, Rebecca West said that he was a great affront to the spirit of the modern age because he was manifestly superior. I said in introducing Clare Boothe Luce, when we did a TV program in Hawaii a few months ago, that her documented achievements are evidence of the lengths to which nature is prepared to go to demonstrate its addiction to inequality. It is a middleclass value to defer, without animosity, to people of superior learning, achievement, character, generosity.

[Q] Playboy: To whom do you personally feel inferior?

[A] Buckley: Millions of people, living and dead.

[Q] Playboy: Who among the living?

[A] Buckley: To begin with, anyone who knows more than I do, which would be millions of people--or hundreds of thousands of people--right there. I also feel inferior to people who regulate their lives more successfully than I do, to people who are less annoyed by some of the petty distractions that sometimes annoy me, to people who are more philosophical in their acceptance of things than I am.

[Q] Playboy: Does that include Mrs. Luce?

[A] Buckley: She's much more talented than I am.

[Q] Playboy: Norman Mailer?

[A] Buckley: Much more talented than I am. Now, there are certain things in which I am Mailer's manifest superior. Politically, he's an idiot. And he's botched his life and the lives of a lot more people than I've botched, I hope. On the other hand, he's a genius and I'm not.

[Q] Playboy: Among other contemporaries, how about T. S. Eliot?

[A] Buckley: You're talking about birds of paradise now. Like Whittaker Chambers. I make it a point to seek the company--intellectually, above all--of people who are superior to me in any number of ways, and I very often succeed.

[Q] Playboy: To whom do you feel superior--and why?

[A] Buckley: To those who believe that they are the very best judges of what is wrong and what is right.

[Q] Playboy: Would you please name names?

[A] Buckley: Would you please expand your printing facilities?

[Q] Playboy: As long as the discussion has become personal: To what extent has your feud with Gore Vidal developed into a publicity stunt from which you both have benefited?

[A] Buckley: In my case, at least, to no extent at all. I don't see how one profits a) from being publicly libeled or b) from walking into a situation in which one pays legal expenses several times the value of anything one earned after industrious work preparing for television programs or doing an article.

[Q] Playboy: Would you care to add anything to what you said about him on the air during the 1968 Democratic Convention and in response to his subsequent comments about you?

[A] Buckley: No.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you agree to appear with him in the first place?

[A] Buckley: I agreed to appear in November of 1967 because I thought I could use the forum effectively to advance the conservative viewpoint. I was informed in April that Vidal had been selected to appear opposite me. My alternatives then were to break my contract or to proceed. I decided not to break the contract, even though Vidal was the single person I had named as someone I would not gladly appear against.

[Q] Playboy: You have been publicly active for 19 years. How successful do you think you have been in advancing the conservative viewpoint?

[A] Buckley: Very successful. That success has come primarily through the instrumentality of National Review, which has the second highest circulation of any journal of opinion in America. It repeatedly furnishes the reading public with the very best conservative thought, whether philosophical, critical, strategic or social. It has had the effect of consolidating the conservative position, causing many people to abandon--however unhappily--their resolution to dismiss the conservative alternative as anachronistic, superficial and inhuman. I don't say that National Review, or something like it, would not have been created had I not been around; it most certainly would have--in fact, I only midwifed it--but I'd say that the mere fact of having done so renders me, as midwife, very successful.

[Q] Playboy: Which failures of the conservative movement in the past 10 to 20 years most distress you? The fact that Goldwater didn't get more votes than he did?

[A] Buckley: No, not at all. It was a forgone conclusion that he wouldn't get many votes from the moment Kennedy was assassinated. It's very hard to explain to militant pro-Goldwaterites like myself that in a strange sort of way, an inscrutable sort of way, voting against Goldwater was explainable as a conservative thing to do. The reason I say that is because a nation convulsed in November of 1963 as ours was reached for balm, for conciliation, for peace, for tranquility, for order. To have had three Presidents over a period of 14 months would have been dislocative beyond the appetite of many conservatives. Now, this doesn't mean that I side with those conservatives who voted against him--I happen to be more adventurous than some conservatives--but I can respect their point of view. In any case, that was not by any means my idea of the great disappointment of the Sixties. That was the failure, on the whole, to verbalize more broadly, more convincingly, the conservative view of things. The conservative critique has been very well made, but it hasn't got through with sufficient force to the opinion makers. It is still hard as hell to find a young conservative with writing talent. That distresses me deeply. Most of the people who write the really finished essays in the college newspapers are liberals, New Leftists. I don't know exactly why and I'm vexed by it, but there were only a dozen--or fewer--conservatives in the Sixties who have become writers of some achievement.

[Q] Playboy: Personally, what do you expect to do during the next five years? Do you plan any more political candidacies?

[A] Buckley: There was a lot of pressure on me to run against Goodell. By the way--I haven't told this before to anybody, but what the hell--I had decided back in 1967 to run against Bobby Kennedy in 1970. I reasoned that Johnson would be re-elected and that Bobby would go for President in 1972. He was, in 1967--as, indeed, later--the symbol of left opposition to Johnson. I resolved to challenge his politics in the Senatorial race. When he died, I abandoned any idea of running for Senator in 1970. Along came Goodell--and the pressures on me to challenge him. The principal moral allure was that it was something I deeply wanted not to do. Quite apart from the sort of inertial disadvantages of running against Goodell, and the gruesome prospect of campaigning, I had to face the fact that I would automatically be stripped of those forums to which I had gained access. No more thoughtful television programs, no more columns--because it has now been more or less agreed among American editors that they won't carry a column written by a practicing politician. I think of Galbraith's adage: The Senate is a good place to be if you have no other forum. If I were Senator from New York, it isn't at all clear to me that I'd have more influence than I have today, with my various outlets.

[Q] Playboy: Did running in the 1965 mayoral race in New York strip you of those forums?

[A] Buckley: Yes and no. In the first place, it was a local contest and I never wrote about it in my columns. The television series was postponed precisely on account of my running. Another thing: It was sometime after 1965 that many newspaper editors reached their decision to embargo writer-politicians. They faced the problem directly when Senator Goldwater, a columnist, ran for President, lost, resumed his column and ran for Senator in 1968.

[Q] Playboy: How would you feel about running for a seat in the House?

[A] Buckley: God, no. Not unless I can have all the seats simultaneously.

[Q] Playboy: If there were a conservative Administration in this country--say, if Ronald Reagan became President--would you be tempted to accept a high post in the Administration?

[A] Buckley: No. In the first place, I don't like it much. In the second place--

[Q] Playboy: Don't like what much--Washington?

[A] Buckley: That's right.

[Q] Playboy: Cabinet meetings?

[A] Buckley: I don't much like any kind of meetings. Besides, I have no reason for supposing that I'm a skillful administrator; I may be or I may very well not be. But the kind of thing that I am practiced in requires considerable freedom of expression, and freedom of expression is obviously something you need to be very continent about when the point of the thing is to advance the collective endeavor.

[Q] Playboy: With or without your own involvement in an official capacity, are you optimistic about the conservative movement in America?

[A] Buckley: I am, mildly. There has been some encouraging de-ideologization of politics in the past 20 years. When I went to college, Henry Wallace was still able to grip a lot of people with hopped-up visions like the nationalization of the steel industry. We've watched the experience of England since then and studied nationalized industries elsewhere, and no one will go to that parade anymore, no one except the types who squat in the fever swamps of ideology. The collapse of the poverty program as a Federal enterprise strikes me as significant. It strikes me as significant, too, that Patrick Moynihan got up at an A.D.A. meeting a year or so ago and said, Let's face it, gang, conservatives know something intuitively that it takes us liberals years of intellectualizing to come up with--namely, that the Federal Government can't do everything it wants to do. Peter Drucker, who is certainly not considered a conservative fanatic, says now that the only things the Government has proved it can really do competently are wage war and inflate the currency.

[A] We've seen what's-his-name, that nice guy Kennedy sent down to South America to screw things up--Richard Goodwin--predict in Commentary that the great struggle of the Seventies will be over the limits of state power. Which is exactly what conservatives wanted to fight about in the Thirties. We've seen Arthur Schlesinger call a couple of dozen Kennedy types into his apartment for a daylong "secret" seminar--nobody was supposed to know about it, but I knew about it--in which they reconsidered their enthusiasm for executive power, because executive power, it turns out, can be administered by the likes of Lyndon Johnson! These are pretty encouraging indices. They suggest to me that there is a wide concern over the survival of the individual in the machine age and over the limits of Federal and executive power. They may, in turn, stimulate a curiosity about the ontological role of the state. That is conservative territory, but admittance is free.

[Q] Playboy: Even if you don't intend to run for office again, do you plan to keep writing?

[A] Buckley: Yes. We've kept an alternative landing field in operation, you see. When the liberals fly in, thirsty, out of gas, they'll find it in full working order--radar OK, bar open, Coca-Cola and coffee on the house. We know it's necessary to assimilate the experience of the modern age. Cardinal Newman said in a related contest--between the logical positivists and the conservatives--that one of our great challenges is constantly to incorporate new experience, so as not to leave ourselves with a piece of brittle lace, the touching of which would cause it to crumble.

[Q] Playboy: Don't most dogmas, theological as well as ideological, crumble sooner or later?

[A] Buckley: Most, but not all.

[Q] Playboy: How can you be so sure?

[A] Buckley: I know that my Redeemer liveth.