Your Highbrow Host : Buckley Launches 25th Season of ‘Firing Line’

William F. Buckley Jr. takes personal credit for wrenching American politics to the right over the past three decades.

An unabashed ideologue, Buckley has been expounding his highbrow version of conservatism on television since 1966, when “Firing Line,” the medium’s first political debate program, debuted on 26 stations as a syndicated production of RKO General.

Now shown on 232 public-television stations nationwide, the program launches its 25th season today (at 1:30 p.m. on KCET Channel 28).

Political thinkers ranging from liberals John Kenneth Galbraith and Bill Moyers to conservative George Will say the former instructor of Spanish at Yale deserves the distinction he claims.

“He’s a formidable purveyor of ideas,” said Moyers, “and a man who shaped modern conservatism intellectually.”

Buckley first began to organize and encourage the nation’s coterie of conservative intellectuals in the 1950s through his magazine, National Review.

“Before Reagan,” explained Will, “there was Barry Goldwater, before Goldwater there was the National Review, and before the National Review there was Bill Buckley with an idea.”

Today, Buckley--once widely denounced as a crackpot and unwelcome in all but the most conservative of circles--retains a hold on the nation’s intellectual landscape that seems remarkably secure.

“My goal (when founding National Review) was to find a forum from which to express my dissent from common political and cultural positions and to make it possible for others who shared my views to do the same thing,” Buckley said in a telephone interview from his Connecticut home.

“I see National Review as having been the principal vehicle for the expression of opinions that have led us roughly in the direction we have gone, and I think ‘Firing Line’ has had influence of the same kind,” he said. “When you consider that two years before ‘Firing Line’ began, Barry Goldwater carried five states (1964), and then Ronald Reagan carried 49 states saying pretty much the same thing (in 1984)--that’s a pretty graphic way of describing what happened.”

Little is mysterious about the man himself: Buckley makes no attempt to hide his personality (buoyant), his background (patrician and devoutly Catholic) or his beliefs (libertarian regarding economics, moralistic in terms of personal behavior).

Yet his presence and his legacy are puzzling. He is an arch-conservative who counts among his friends liberals like Galbraith and the Kennedys and activists like the late Harriet Pilpel, who debated him time and again on issues of women’s rights and abortion.

He is an extremely civilized and erudite debater whose television program has spawned a host of imitators who--like the belittling, arch-conservative, tabloid-style Morton Downey Jr.--have often adopted the concept of the debate while discarding Buckley’s civility and intellectualism.

He has accepted the position of the conservatives on issues of sexuality and morality, yet believes that drugs should be legalized. He is the host of a barely watched talk show--about 840,000 households tune in each week, according to PBS--yet he is credited with helping to shape the opinions of Presidents.

His admirers relish the contradictions.

“He’s a very devout Catholic; I’m an agnostic Jew,” said Warren Steibel, Buckley’s close friend and his producer since the show’s first season. “I’m liberal; he’s totally conservative.”

It is Buckley’s ability to play on those tensions, say Steibel and others, that is key to the conservative’s dynamic and his charm.

While there is no question, for example, that “Firing Line” was conceived as a soapbox for Buckley, it was also meant to be a forum for both left and right, on which the host would use his considerable debating skills to disprove the arguments of his opponents, who were supposed to be equally formidable spokesmen for the left. His first guest was the late Norman Thomas, then head of the Socialist Party.

“It was originally launched to test the question of whether a conservative could hold his own against the liberal bill of indictments,” Buckley said.

Over the years, the format was expanded to include guests from the center and right with whom Buckley disagreed on particular issues--he debated Ronald Reagan about the Panama Canal--and to include interviews with such like-minded conservatives as Margaret Thatcher.

Because Buckley kept the debates impersonal--they were more like intellectual sparring matches than life-or-death struggles between world views--the formula worked.

“ ‘Firing Line’ played a role in legitimizing the right in the eyes of a lot of people who never thought of themselves as conservatives back in the ‘60s,” said Michael Kinsley, editor of the moderate/liberal New Republic magazine, Buckley’s second banana on “Firing Line” and co-host of Cable News Network’s derivative “Crossfire” program.

Galbraith, the Harvard economist who influenced the policies of the Kennedy Administration, was invited on Buckley’s program as a guest and remained as a loyal friend. The moderate liberal--who Buckley as recently as 1986 claimed was representative of political extremism--continues to appear on “Firing Line.”

“If I didn’t go on the program, he might have somebody who agrees with him,” Galbraith said. As an interviewer and sparring partner, Galbraith said, Buckley is “undeniably pleasant, and his political view is totally predictable.”

“Bill demonstrated that you can combine strong passions and strong opinions with fundamental fairness,” Will said. “And he showed that conversation--real conversation--can be entertaining.”

To Buckley’s critics, it is his very civility that defines their disagreements with him. Jeff Cohen, executive director of the left/liberal media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, said that Buckley does not choose the sort of opponent who might disagree with him so vehemently as to eschew light banter in favor of earnest debate.

“What Buckley has done is continually move the spectrum to the right, with opponents only quibblers, not forthright progressives,” Cohen said.

But Cohen said his real beef is less with Buckley than with the television networks and PBS, who he says have given forum after forum to the right, with little thought for balance from the left.

Programs like “The McLaughlin Group,” “American Interests,” “Firing Line,” “Crossfire” and “The Capital Gang,” Cohen said, claim to be balanced because their right-wing hosts face off against people whom the producers or hosts consider to be left wing, but who in fact are moderates.

“The power that Buckley or any other talk-show host has is that they get not only to frame the issue, but they get to decide who is on to discuss it,” Cohen said.

For example, he said, on CNN’s “Crossfire,” the New Republic’s Kinsley is featured opposite Pat Buchanan. Yet Kinsley, a moderate liberal, is hardly as far to the left as Buchanan is to the right. Similarly, he said, George Will’s appearances on ABC’s “This Week with David Brinkley” are “balanced” by the moderate Sam Donaldson.

What’s missing, according to Cohen, is a strong, articulate and ideological host from the left or even the liberal side of the spectrum.

Moyers said that he thinks one obstacle may lie in the continued use of the liberal-conservative continuum in the first place. If the liberals facing off against Buckley and the others are not passionate enough to counter the conservatives’ ideas, Moyers suggested, perhaps that is because there is no longer enough of a difference between the two groups to make for a truly contentious encounter.

“Much of what’s on television that passes for discussion is really the verbal equivalent of mud wrestling,” Moyers said. “It doesn’t contribute anything useful. It makes the entertainers rich and the audience mesmerized, but it doesn’t really clarify issues or persuade anybody.”

What’s needed, Moyers said, is a new type of activist, part of a grass-roots swell of citizens who demand that their dissatisfaction be answered outside of the old paradigms of left and right. That type of person, he said, could add to the discussion and hold his own.

“I think it’s probably true that there isn’t exactly my equivalent on television of a highbrow talk show that’s left-oriented,” Buckley conceded. But he stopped short of recommending that one be started.