William F. Buckley and the Remnant

The recent PBS television documentary The Incomparable Mr. Buckley has much valuable information and insight in it, but I think it has three serious deficiencies that deserve prompt noting.

First, Buckley grew on racial issues, as Alvin S. Felzenberg has shown in his excellent article “Correcting the Record on William F. Buckley Jr. and Civil Rights.” Second, the association of Buckley with Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s looks very different now after the fall of European communism in 1990, the opening of the Russian KGB files, and the outstanding documentary books, about the extent of Russian communist domestic subversion in the United States, by writers including Ronald Radosh, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Allen Weinstein (Perjury: The Hiss–Chambers Case, 1978), Sam Tanenhaus (his 1997 biography of Whittaker Chambers), and the Annals of Communism series edited by Jonathan Brent for Yale University Press. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Senate hearings on secrecy, his 1998 book on the subject, and other commentary on the Venona transcripts should by now have led to a much more accurate assessment of Russian and American communist behavior in the 1930s through 1950s. Compared with Stalin and his numerous Western apologists and fellow travelers, McCarthy is a very small villain.

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).

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The recent PBS television documentary The Incomparable Mr. Buckley has much valuable information and insight in it, but I think it has three serious deficiencies that deserve prompt noting.

First, Buckley grew on racial issues, as Alvin S. Felzenberg has shown in his excellent article “Correcting the Record on William F. Buckley Jr. and Civil Rights.” Second, the association of Buckley with Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s looks very different now after the fall of European communism in 1990, the opening of the Russian KGB files, and the outstanding documentary books, about the extent of Russian communist domestic subversion in the United States, by writers including Ronald Radosh, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Allen Weinstein (Perjury: The Hiss–Chambers Case, 1978), Sam Tanenhaus (his 1997 biography of Whittaker Chambers), and the Annals of Communism series edited by Jonathan Brent for Yale University Press. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Senate hearings on secrecy, his 1998 book on the subject, and other commentary on the Venona transcripts should by now have led to a much more accurate assessment of Russian and American communist behavior in the 1930s through 1950s. Compared with Stalin and his numerous Western apologists and fellow travelers, McCarthy is a very small villain.

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).