This following essay was authored by Thomas E. Lynch and is reprinted in its entirety by permission from THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW, a publication of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. This essay also appears in the Fall 2015 issue of Modern Age.
Clare Boothe
Luce, with only a tinge of hyperbole, referred to the 1965 version of New York
City as “the biggest urban mess on earth.” In that same year, the American
conservative movement’s condition could not have been considered much better.
The Republican Party’s right-wing presidential candidate had just suffered a
defeat of stunning magnitude, its northeastern liberal wing was in rebellion,
and the party’s governing philosophy was up for grabs. With Barry Goldwater
routed, the center of gravity in the Republican Party was moving sharply left
and toward the East; the two men vying for the party’s leadership, Richard
Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller, lived in the same Manhattan apartment building
separated by a mere six floors.
In the spring
of 1965, the plight of the Republican Party weighed heavily on William F.
Buckley Jr.’s mind. At the time, the thirty-nine-year-old Buckley was spending
some weekdays in his Park Avenue apartment, commuting to the midtown National
Review offices by day and jousting with New York’s highbrow society by
night. The city outside his part-time residence was in full-scale decline. The
crime rate was high, deficits higher; a drought had made water scarce; traffic
was slow; municipal employee strikes were prevalent; the previous summer’s race
riots in Harlem were fresh in people’s minds. Over the past decade, nearly a
million members of the white middle class had left the city.
“You and I
are not in fact running for mayor,” Buckley wrote in his syndicated column in
late May. “But suppose we were?”. He outlined, “half in fun,” a ten-point plan
for conservative governance of New York City. A few days later, as National
Review prepared to reprint the column, Buckley’s sister Priscilla proposed
a playful cover banner: “Buckley for Mayor.”
The line was
a joke, but in the first week of June, Buckley later noted, “the idea came to
me very suddenly”: why not actually run for mayor as the candidate of the state
Conservative Party?. With little forethought, and no groundswell of popular support,
Buckley committed to the race and was enthusiastically backed by the
Conservative hierarchy.
Although his
brother James later remarked, “Bill did get into the thing for a lark,” there
was a serious purpose lurking right below the surface. That purpose was to
wrest control of the Republican Party from its liberal wing and to do so on its
home turf in New York City.
The election
in this Democratic city was shaping up to be an important one for the national
Republican Party. With few major elections scheduled in odd-numbered years, the
1965 New York City mayoral race would be watched by the nation.
From the
perspective of 2015, the Buckley campaign, though launched “half in fun,” had
another half that was far more serious. The other half was rooted in the notion
that ideas have consequences, that they can change people and politics and can
transform society. The great surprise of this campaign was how profoundly
transformational these ideas were for the candidate, for New York City, and for
the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
When Buckley announced for the race, the New York Republican Party
had already nominated John V. Lindsay as its candidate for the New York
mayoralty. Glamorous, handsome, and Yale educated, the forty-three-year-old
Lindsay was a four-term congressman from Manhattan’s Upper East Side “Silk
Stocking” district. With a voting record in the House that earned him an 85
rating from the left-wing Americans for Democratic Action, Lindsay quickly
procured the endorsement of the state’s Liberal Party as well.
For Lindsay,
the New York City mayoralty was a way station on the road to the presidency. He
had aspirations of taking the Republican Party leftward with him. Buckley, in
his unique style, was determined to block these ambitions.
Shortly after
announcing his candidacy, Buckley replied to a friend who urged him, for the
sake of the Republican Party, not to challenge Lindsay. “It is my judgment,”
the new Conservative candidate wrote, “that John Lindsay will do as much harm
to the Republican Party if he is elected and becomes powerful as anyone . . . in
recent history.” Buckley was nearly as blunt in the public statement announcing
his candidacy: “Mr. Lindsay’s Republican Party is a rump affair, captive in his
and others’ hands, . . . indifferent to the historic role of the Republican
Party as standing in opposition to those trends of our time that are championed
by the collectivist elements of the Democratic Party.”
The campaign
began with a promise of low effort and high art. Buckley, who had warned the
Conservative Party that the race would not disrupt his already crowded
schedule, had privately committed no more than a day a week to the effort. To
the assembled press, he noted that he expected to campaign when he had time.
From the
first press conference, it was clear that he would be running on his own terms.
The candidate read his statement of principles in a tone Murray Kempton
described as that of “an Edwardian resident commissioner reading aloud the 39
articles of the Anglican establishment to a conscript assemblage of Zulus.”
Buckley was
as committed to enjoying himself as he was to fulfilling his objectives:
Press:
Do you want to be mayor, sir?
Buckley:
I have never considered it. . . .
Press:
How many votes do you expect to get, conservatively speaking?
Buckley:
Conservatively speaking, one.
Within days
of launching the campaign, Buckley would make his most lasting contribution to
American campaign lore by telling the press that if he were elected, his first
action would be to “demand a recount.”
Joking aside,
Buckley had at his disposal one powerful advantage, namely that he “did not
expect to win the election, and so could afford to violate the taboos.” From
the start, his campaign sought to undermine the basic vocabulary of New York
City politics: ethnic-group and other bloc voting.
For most of
the twentieth century, the Democratic Party’s dominance was rooted in the
hundred or so local ethnic clubs—Irish, Italian, Jewish, black, Puerto
Rican—that enfranchised recent immigrants and traded votes for municipal jobs
and petty graft. By the early 1960s, reform movement Democrats—often from the
left wing of the party—had taken over many of the old clubs. But the habits of
political affiliation were ingrained in the political culture; ethnic-bloc
voting was reality in New York City political life.
Buckley
launched a frontal attack on these patterns. Bloc voting of all kinds, he
argued, was the enemy of good governance. There was “marginal disutility” involved
in appealing to voting blocs; the politician’s desire to satisfy the needs of
the largest and most powerful blocs ultimately undermines the welfare of the
individual members of those blocs. The taxi driver might enjoy the enforced
oligopoly that government provides, but political concessions to other blocs
result in higher taxes, greater congestion, weaker schools, and hundreds of
problems that ultimately outweigh the value of the oligopoly.
The city’s
problems, Buckley claimed, were rooted in maladministration and the
capitulation to special interests. Much of the latter could be resolved if
politicians engaged voters as individuals, “depriving the voting blocs of their
corporate advantages” and “liberat[ing] individual members of those voting
blocs.” Buckley committed to this idealistic form of campaigning: “I will not
go to Jewish centers and eat blintzes,” he declaimed, “nor will I go to Italian
centers and pretend to speak Italian.”
Through the summer, Buckley’s campaign barely qualified as back-page
news. The leading local political story was the September Democratic Party
primary, in which City Comptroller Abraham Beame emerged the victor. Other
stories occupied the city’s attention: the drought and the New York World’s
Fair continued through the summer, and many working-class Catholics were buying
televisions so they could witness the pope’s first visit to New York (and
America) in early October.
Buckley’s
program was scarcely registering with voters until, on September 17, the
campaign caught a huge break: the Newspaper Guild called a general strike. The
city newspapers, largely in the thrall of the Lindsay campaign, would not
publish for twenty-three days. The mayoralty campaign now would be waged on
television: in four televised forums, Buckley’s wit, manners, and mercilessly
adept debating style transformed him into the central figure in this campaign.
“Love him or hate him, TV fans found it difficult to turn off a master
political showman,” wrote one scribe, while famed campaign chronicler Theodore
White deemed Buckley a “star” who would be “Oscar Wilde’s favorite candidate
for anything.”
The effect in
the field was even more surprising, especially to those inside the campaign.
Television was allowing Buckley’s seemingly academic attack on voting blocs to
gain traction not among the intellectual or business class but with the ethnic
voters themselves. The largely Catholic ethnic vote—increasingly alienated from
both the old and the new reformist clubs—was warming to Buckley’s
conservative message of low taxes, individual accountability, and law and
order.
“I can tell
you that it surprised me,” campaign aide Neal Freeman recalled. “I suppose that
I was expecting our supporters to be National Review types—car dealers,
academic moles, literate dentists. . . . As soon as we hired halls, though, we
learned that [Buckley] was speaking for the people who made the city
go—corner-store owners, cops, schoolteachers, first-home owners, firemen,
coping parents.”
The polls
showed Buckley rising to 16 percent of the vote—one poll put him at
20 percent—mostly with support from largely disaffected and strongly
Catholic voters. Any sense of the campaign’s being a “lark” quickly
disappeared, and Buckley, instead of limiting his political activity to a day a
week, began to campaign every day.
Buckley’s
opponents began to take his campaign seriously, too. After mostly ignoring the
Conservative candidate, both Lindsay and Democrat Abe Beame shifted their
attacks to Buckley in the campaign’s final days. For Lindsay, it was a matter
of survival: polls showed him trailing Beame, and the new attacks on the
Conservative were, as the New York Times reported in late October, “an
acknowledgment that [Buckley] was a serious threat and could draw off enough
votes to cost Mr. Lindsay the election.”
On Election
Day, Lindsay pulled out the victory, with 45 percent to Beame’s
41 percent. Buckley took 13 percent of the vote. Although that
represented a decline from his high in October polls, the demographics told an
important story. The polls published after the election showed that Buckley won
more than 20 percent of his vote from the ethnic Catholic minorities whom
the Democrats normally took for granted. In some heavily Catholic districts,
his vote grew to 25 and even 30 percent.
The great
unintended consequence of the Buckley campaign was the identification of the
conservative Catholic vote, a vote that for the first time in modern history
was willing to migrate in large numbers from the Democratic Party. Four years
later, Kevin Phillips would note Buckley’s success with Catholic voters in his
influential book The Emerging Republican Majority. As Phillips observed,
these results were no “Buckley-linked fluke.” Other conservative candidates for
city and statewide offices would make inroads with Catholics. And in 1980,
Ronald Reagan would be elected president with a majority of Catholics voting
for him. The Catholic swing vote provided Reagan the margin of victory he
needed in critical northern industrial states.
Although the discovery of the conservative Catholic swing vote is the
great contribution of the Buckley campaign, the race contributed to the
conservative cause on multiple other fronts. Buckley failed in achieving one of
his main objectives: defeating his liberal Republican adversary, Lindsay. But
his campaign helped wrest control of the state and national Republican Party
from Lindsay and other liberals.
In winning
the mayoral race, Lindsay claimed almost a quarter of his votes on the Liberal
Party line. Buckley, meanwhile, earned 341,000 votes—some 60,000 more than
Lindsay claimed on the Liberal line, and nearly three times as many as the
Conservative Party’s Senate candidate had won in New York City the previous
year.
This was the
first time the Conservative Party had outpolled the Liberal Party in New York.
It marked an important shift, as the Conservative Party endorsement became the
most valuable accoutrement for an aspiring Republican candidate. In fact,
without conservative support, the incumbent Lindsay failed to get the
Republican nomination in 1969. He was reelected mayor as the candidate of the
Liberal Party. Thanks in part to Buckley’s campaign, John Lindsay had failed to
take the Republican Party to the left, and soon thereafter he abandoned the Republican
Party entirely.
The
Conservative Party, by contrast, was buoyed by Buckley’s high-profile mayoral
campaign. In 1970 the party achieved its first big win: a liberal Republican
whom Governor Nelson Rockefeller had appointed to replace the late Senator
Robert F. Kennedy was defeated in the general election by James Buckley,
the mayoral candidate’s younger brother.
The Buckley
mayoral campaign also created the first systematic application of conservative
principles to urban problems. Starting with a conservative respect for markets,
individual choice, accountability, and localism in politics, Buckley alone
drafted all ten of his campaign’s position papers. It is here where Buckley’s
skill as a curator of ideas proved most powerful.
On urban
development, he wrote, “the beauty of New York is threatened by the schematic
designs . . . of social abstractionists . . . who do not . . . recognize what
it is that makes for human attachments—to little buildings and shops, to areas
of repose and excitement.” Here he echoed the words of Jane Jacobs, whose
recently published The Death and Life of Great American Cities
ultimately became the textbook for smart urban planning.
In the area
of race, Buckley adopted the findings of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer
in Beyond the Melting Pot and stressed that a sensitivity to family
structure was critical to any policy maker’s deliberations on the plight of
late-twentieth-century black Americans.
In
transportation, he proposed the development of a network of bikeways. The idea
was greeted with laughter, but four decades later New York mayor Michael
Bloomberg would install hundreds of miles of bike lanes across the city.
The Buckley
campaign even toyed with the idea of decriminalization of narcotics, but ultimately
backed away in its final position papers.
In a sense,
Buckley’s 1965 campaign was a precursor to and inspiration for much of the
successful Republican urban policy of the past quarter century. Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani and his successor, Bloomberg, each offered a softer and personalized
version of Buckley’s urban polity: balancing budgets, advocating personal
accountability, making demands of municipal unions, and being tough on crime.
For Buckley,
the effect of the campaign was profound. Soon after the election, WOR-TV in New
York agreed to syndicate a television program he produced and hosted. The show,
Firing Line, would air for more than three decades. In fact, it remains
the longest-running public affairs program in television history with a single
host. That television exposure helped make Buckley, along with Ronald Reagan,
the face of modern conservatism.
What is often overlooked by the academic historian is the
importance of style over substance in political developments. Whereas Barry
Goldwater was easy to demonize with his supposed apocalyptic musings, with
Buckley (and later Reagan), the charges just wouldn’t stick. “There was a real
effort to demonize the right, to treat it as barbaric,” noted one conservative
political strategist. “You couldn’t watch Bill Buckley conduct himself and
believe that.” The Buckley campaign showed that a conservative message, when
appropriately styled, could command a stage and engage a reasoned audience,
even an adversarial one.
What is most
surprising about the Buckley campaign is that it mattered at all. The race
wasn’t national, and the candidate was inexperienced and running on a
third-party line. But as George F. Will has written, in 1965 “the prestige
of government, and government’s confidence, not to say hubris, were at
apogees.” The two-party system was consolidating around a common idea of
governance, and the difference between candidates in many races, as Buckley
described his mayoral opponents, “was biological, not political.” In his
seemingly quixotic mayoral race, Buckley exposed the inadequacies of this
political consensus and helped recall the Republican Party to what, at the
campaign’s outset, he described as its “historic role” of “standing in
opposition” to centralized government power.
As Will
wrote, 1965 proved to be “the hinge of our postwar history.” William F.
Buckley Jr. played a crucial role in this historic turning point. The Buckley
campaign mattered not because it won votes but because it found votes.
It reached voters silently disaffected from their heritage party, and with
style and reason it seduced them from their historic voting habits. In the
process, Buckley helped re-create a thriving two-party system; his efforts
would even usher in periods of conservative ascendancy. Goldwater’s postmortem
stands true on many levels: Buckley had “lost the election but won the
campaign.”
Thomas E.
Lynch is a former ISI Weaver Fellow who earned graduate degrees from Oxford and Stanford. He is founder and senior managing director of Mill Road Capital.
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