I leared exactly three things from Sam Tenenhaus' essay on William F. Buckley in The New Republic:
1) Buckley had more in common with his prime time antagonist Gore Vidal than anyone who remembers that famous debate ("stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, you goddamn queer, or I'll knock you in your teeth"). Both were isolationist boosters of the thoroughly uncrypto pro-Nazi Charles Lindbergh and staunch supporters of the America First Committee. That they both now find themselves on the anti side of what is glibly called the "new Vietnam" should perhaps fail to surprise.
2) Buckley is the one to whom credit is owed for plucking Alastair Horne's classic history of the French-Algerian war, A Savage War of Peace, off the shelf and refurbishing it for contemporary troubles. (The president claims to have read Horne's book, and Donald Rumsfeld got snippy when Horne gave him a copy with all the lines about torture underlined.)
3) Buckley's late conversion to supporting U.S. involvement in World War II had less to do with defeating Hitler's Germany and more to do with stopping the Asiatic hordes of Japan from overrunning the globe. Too far? Then why this?
Nonetheless, he added that he, and all Catholics, could "heartily ratify the action of our Government in joining hands with a state, no matter what color its banner, if such a union will further our aim of beating Japan."
The godfather of modern conservatism is not without his interesting and appealing contradictions. He thinks the American "war on drugs" was DOA when it began under the stewardship of the liberal Nelson Rockefeller. He also dropped, for whatever reason, his sinister talk about continuing the Christian editorship of the National Review — which George Will, another over-estimated, stuffed-shirt conservative apparently approved (okay, make it four things I learned from this piece) — when he handed the magazine over to Jonah Goldberg.
That said, why Buckley is seen as the Delphic winger to whom all must grant a sanctified audience will always be a mystery to me. The time of talking in terms of Christianity versus Communism has not only passed; it never existed.