• Richard Brookhiser, Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 262 pages
At 14, Rick Brookhiser backed into the spotlight of the conservative movement: a letter to his brother in college, describing a callow Vietnam-era protest by his high school classmates, ended up as a cover story in National Review.
By 23, he was seated at the flaming hot center, already tagged as William F. Buckley’s heir apparent, being groomed by WFB personally to take the reins at National Review. By 32 he was busted to four days a month at NR, desperately freelancing all over New York and D.C. to keep bills paid. Today, he is a senior editor at the magazine he once planned to run, and Right Time, Right Place is his memoir about the remarkable turns in life that came from a close professional and personal relationship with the mercurial WFB. At its heart, it’s a love story.
This narrative of the rise and fall and rise of a man’s fortunes could be the outline of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, but there’s too much pain to make light of it. Brookhiser never asked for the honor which Buckley bestowed on him, but its sudden withdrawal was like a tooth extracted without anesthesia. Even when the trauma abates, the wound remains. It throbs through the book. “At age 32, I suddenly went from precocious to retarded,” he writes, “from out in front to lagging behind … .” Maybe midlife crisis comes early to prodigies.
At the same time, the attachment Brookhiser felt for his mentor would never allow him to cut free of him entirely. Buckley never really let Brookhiser leave, either; though Brookhiser brooded over the injury, he continued to write for the magazine, and Buckley kept him in the loop — “the orbit of Saturn”, he says — dropping occasional gestures of generosity as outrageous as his lapses of consideration.
Brookhiser was always something of the outsider on NR’s staff. Though a Yale graduate, he was a young, somewhat lapsed Methodist from the country, different from the urbane Catholicism exemplified by Buckley and common to the magazine. When three priests showed up at a meeting one afternoon, his Jewish colleague David Brooks whispered to Brookhiser that he hadn’t been among so many Catholics since, oh, lunchtime. It was probably a feeling familiar to Buckley, who had grown up intensely Catholic among conspicuously Protestant communities. That minor but unmistakeable “otherness” may have allowed him to take the ups and downs more phlegmatically than otherwise.
Readers have asked if Brookhiser reveals “too much” about Buckley’s faults. Brookhiser is very clear that he recognized WFB’s self-centered impetuousness at the time. He suggests that only Hugh Hefner’s Playboy was as closely attuned to the thoughts and whims of a single editor-in-chief.
Buckley’s natural graciousness and a deep desire to avoid conflict with his employees was the Achilles heel of his management style. Criticism was so indirect as to be invisible. Really bad news was delivered by memo as WFB left town, never face-to-face. When a long-standing editor was booted, Brookhiser observed, “Naturally, this being National Review, everything was being done behind his back.”
He’s also very blunt that Buckley fumbled replies to public challenges, several times, and acknowleges that WFB’s later writing wasn’t nearly as keen as earlier. I disagree that Nearer, My God was his best late book — I think the decline started before 1997 — but he is objective about both the loss of flame and the heat that still lived in the embers.
The book is about more than Brookhiser and Buckley. He brings the outsider’s eye to the world of National Review in the run-up to Reagan, and offers a newcomer’s view of the “giants,” both in accomplishment and personality, who filled the magazine’s masthead in the early 1970s. He talks about life in New York in that moribund era and the changes finally wrought under Rudy Giuliani’s mayoralty. He explains how a WASP from upstate became convinced of the need for medical marijuana through a bout with cancer (his parents sent Buckley an outraged letter when WFB’s mention of this embarrassed them). Brookhiser hired many of the next generation of writers, and he freely praises the current staff at NR and NR Online.
He also talks about trends in the movement he calls “right-world,” meaning a larger piece of land than NR chose to encompass. He only touches on the controversies that predated his time, like Buckley writing the John Birch Society out of the conservative movement in the 1960s, and doesn’t discuss the conflict with Ayn Rand’s followers either. Of the rising tide of “new libertarians,” he acknowledges some official agreement in principle but notes the magazine also published Ernest van den Haag’s rejection of them as “rigid, impactical, and otherworldly.” Unlike the exit of the Birchers, Brookhiser says the libertarians’ separation from NR was “a defection” as they simply took their movement and went their own way.
This is a smoothly written book that can be read on several levels — the history of modern conservatism, the rise and decline of Reaganism, country boy comes to the big city. Best, it’s what the subtitle says: a story of a young writer growing through triumph and trial, both of them at the hands of an exasperating man who loved him in return.