Excerpt:
RUSH: Well, you know, Bill, you are a true renaissance man. You're in the clouds above so many other people, and it's a real treat to bring you to people who... You know, the audience in this program spans the demographic spectrum, many young people -- for example, who have not read God & Man at Yale which was one of the things that established you and put you on the map, and so let me ask you about that. What...? For people who have not read the book but maybe have heard about it, why did you write it? What was the point? What's its staying power?
MR. BUCKLEY: Well, what happened there was that as a student at Yale in my junior and senior year, certain paradoxes sort of crystallized. One of them had to do with Christianity. Although Yale was at least ostensibly a Christian-oriented college having been founded as such 200 years earlier, there was a kind of nagging inattention and sometimes hostility to religion in the classrooms, and then it was -- I'm talking about 1945, '46, '47, '48. There was a great infatuation with postwar socialism, so that the socialist government in Great Britain was spoken about here and there as sort of a high point of political sophistication. So when I pulled out, I thought that these paradoxes should be examined in the framework of a book that said, "What is a college supposed to do by way of furthering missions?" and who is entitled to vote on what should be in that mission, my point being that the alumni who sustain a college should have a significant voice in it. What really was extraordinary, Rush, was the reception to that book. It was just simply feverish. I quote some excerpts from it, very respectable people, in the book, people who spoke (scoffing chuckle) as though I was going to appear the next day as the head of the Ku Klux Klan. It is, in retrospect, amusing, but 50 years ago it was kind of off-putting to think that anybody would interpret a reasonable book making this point as an invitation to totalitarian intervention in the college.
RUSH: Yeah, it doesn't sound like things have changed too much (laughing) in terms of reaction to conservative thought, and if that was the reaction back in 1945, what is, how -- you've gone through the whole period since, that book and then National Review. You have gone through these years as arguably the leader and the go-to guy for the definitions, the explanations of modern conservatism. How have you been reacted to over the years, and did any of it surprise you?
MR. BUCKLEY: Well, what happened when we started National Review was that we acknowledged that it was necessary to excrete the kooks 'cause here were anti-Semites in the conservative movement, and there were -- well, there were people whose sense of balance was in disorder.
RUSH: I think you cited the John Birch Society.
MR. BUCKLEY: Yeah, for five years there was the John Birch Society. So we had to -- gently but very firmly -- say to these people, "Look, we consider the movement as very wide and as capable of many, many voices, many, many interpretations, but in the course of progressing, one has to engage in exclusion. If you believe a set of things today, that set of things is arrived at by rejecting certain other things," and that included, in our century, a rejection of the kind of racial animosity that culminated in Germany and what you and I both know and weep over. So that figured -- and you asked about the reaction to my own row. It was sometimes pretty feverish, pretty unfriendly. It would have been unthinkable back then to have somebody of your stature say, you know, pleasant things about my work. That has changed. By no means totally, but it has changed... (chuckle) It has changed in a direction you would approve. What are you going to do when somebody like Ronald Reagan, who was an early enthusiast for National Review, is elected president of the United States? You can't rule him out as a right-wing fanatic -- not that some people didn't try. (chuckle)
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