Althouse: William F. Buckley discusses hippies with Jack Kerouac, Ed Sanders (of The Fugs), and a sociologist named Lewis Yablonsky.

July 27, 2019

William F. Buckley discusses hippies with Jack Kerouac, Ed Sanders (of The Fugs), and a sociologist named Lewis Yablonsky.

"Are you a hippie, Mr. Sanders, and if not, wherein not?"

The year is 1968, and I believe I watched this at the time:

If you're not watching the whole thing, please just watch these 13 seconds, where the sociologist is droning and Kerouac comes alive:

Cadre!

77 comments:

The Godfather said...: Is a cadre bigger than a squad?; 7/27/19, 10:34 AM
Trolls4Hire said...: Exciting subject matter!; 7/27/19, 10:42 AM
Shouting Thomas said...: I know, or knew, Sanders from my days in Woodstock.

I once asked him what he was teaching at Bard College, and he replied:

“My job is to fuck the coeds.”

He’s every bit as odious as that remark suggests.

The Fugs were (and are) absolutely terrible. Probably the worst rock band to ever gain some kind of public attention.

I think they still perform that awful shit in the barn at Byrdcliffe once in a while.; 7/27/19, 10:44 AM
Fernandinande said...: Cadre!

The more boring guy pronounced 'cadre' correctly so the squirmy guy on the left, I suppose it was, helpfully demonstrated that he uses a different, less popular pronunciation.; 7/27/19, 10:46 AM
daskol said...: If Woodstock Journal Ed Sanders is the same Ed Sanders, he's a liar: he's absolutely a hippie. Yablonsky looks a dead ringer for NYT Tom Friedman.; 7/27/19, 10:48 AM
daskol said...: Pretty funny that even at the earliest days of "the movement," hipsters were intent on differentiating themselves from hippies, and even a clear hippie, even though hip, rejected the label.; 7/27/19, 10:49 AM
daskol said...: They all adopt Buckley's bored, world-weary affectation to some extent. That attitude works best in seersucker.; 7/27/19, 10:51 AM
Ann Althouse said...: I think the choice of the word "cadre" was heard as containing an idea of communism.

I looked up "cadre" in the OED and the only meanings that referred to groups of people and that were not about the military had to do with communism: "In Communist countries, a group of workers, etc., acting to promote the interests of the Communist Party... In the People's Republic of China, an office-holder in a Party, governmental, or military organization; also more widely, one who holds a position, esp. in a local organization, school, etc."

Other dictionaries define the word more generally — "a small group of people specially trained for a particular purpose or profession." But that show is 50 years old. I think what roused Kerouac was the insinuation of communism, and that's why he adopted a foreign accent.

From the OED's examples for cadre: "1967 G. Steiner Lang. & Silence 341 Around the hard core of French Stalinism, a harsh and disciplined cadre..there has always flourished a large and animated world of intellectual Marxism." That's 1967 and the show was 1968.; 7/27/19, 10:52 AM
daskol said...: Yablonsky calls out Kerouac for using the unhip drug alcohol what, a few months before he drank himself to death?; 7/27/19, 10:52 AM
Ann Althouse said...: "the squirmy guy"

That was what was left of Jack Kerouac in 1968.; 7/27/19, 10:54 AM
sykes.1 said...: The beats, like Kerouac, Ginsburg, Ferlinghetti, were actual, productive artists, mostly novelists and poets. The hippies produced literally nothing. They were stoned dropouts and parasites. Asking a beatnik or any producing artist if he were a hippie is a very big insult.

You have to be at least 70 to know that.; 7/27/19, 10:55 AM
libertariansafetyguy said...: A more disturbing evolution is how a show like Firing Line gave way to the cable shout shows where sound bites and one-up-man-ship is the prize. It’s the responsible, orderly, and thoughtful who now turn off, tune out, and drop cable.; 7/27/19, 11:00 AM
Shouting Thomas said...: For those of you who don’t know, Bard College is an East Coast equivalent of Antioch or Oberlin.; 7/27/19, 11:02 AM
daskol said...: Ha, Bard, Hampshire and Reed were three colleges my dad said he'd refuse to pay for.; 7/27/19, 11:04 AM
daskol said...: Bard and Hampshire both featured students sleeping in nooks and crannies throughout the campus when we visited, while Reed was just too far away.; 7/27/19, 11:05 AM
Wince said...: Did Kerouac have Tourette's?; 7/27/19, 11:08 AM
madAsHell said...: Why does Buckley always sound so sarcastic bordering on condescension?; 7/27/19, 11:09 AM
J. Farmer said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 7/27/19, 11:09 AM
J. Farmer said...: Allen Ginsberg was in the audience, and he discusses Kerouac's appearance here. Yablonsky reminds me of the actor Richard Masur.; 7/27/19, 11:11 AM
Narr said...: I dunno, define Hippie. Most of the people I was in college with (1971-76) looked and acted like hippies, and wanted to be thought of as hippies, but very few of them actually dropped out.

Or, if they did, it was a temporary condition and they got back on the middleclass track pretty quick, most of them.

Yeah, the accented "Cadre" was a political point, and a fair one--any interjection to a sociologist spouting off is a fair one.

Narr
Monday nothing, Tuesday nothing . . .; 7/27/19, 11:14 AM
Amexpat said...: I've been watching a lot of old Firing Line shows on Youtube. Saw this one, but the one with Allen Ginsburg is much better. Ginsburg gets the better of Buckley early with how the FCC limits his free speech. Buckley prevails in the end, showing how artists are politically naive.

There is a great bit around 18:00 where Ginsburg reads a poem that he wrote under the influence of LSD that Buckley likes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBpoZBhvBa4

I watched Firing Line when they were aired. I was a very liberal kid living in a very liberal area, but I secretly had an affinity for Conservative ideas. It's ironic that it was the publicly funded PBS that first exposed me to those ideas; 7/27/19, 11:14 AM
J. Farmer said...: p.s. If you don't want to listen to Ginsberg talk for nine minutes, skip ahead here and listen to him read a letter from Buckley regarding Kerouac.; 7/27/19, 11:14 AM
Mary Beth said...: Kerouac's "cadre" reminded me of the way NPR people say Nicaragua.; 7/27/19, 11:17 AM
Shouting Thomas said...: The Beats were nihilist drunks and dope addicts.

The Hippies started out as a Christian revivalist group, you know, going back to the Garden of Eden.

That lasted for about 5 years, then the bubble burst, and the Hippies became nihilist drunks and dope addicts.

I moved to San Francisco in 1971 as the collapse was under way.; 7/27/19, 11:22 AM
Psota said...: Isn't Kerouac taking the boring guy down a peg by offering the correct French pronunciation of "cadre?"; 7/27/19, 11:23 AM
rcocean said...: Kerouac wasn't drinking water out of that paper cup. Sad, that he died from Esophageal varices. Sanders comes off a dumb kid just parroting crap that someone told him.

I'll have to see if Kerouac ever talked to WFB one on one; 7/27/19, 11:32 AM
rcocean said...: Those were the days when you could have some boring Professor on as an "expert" and everyone more or less respected them.

Today, we all know they are jokes.; 7/27/19, 11:33 AM
Ice Nine said...: Buckley sounded sarcastic because he was sarcastic (when needed). I used to think Buckley was a pretentious twit until I realized that you ain't pretentious if you got the goods. He had the goods. Then I liked him - for his politics and for his wonderful intellect. He was also a decent man.

I attended a Buckley lecture at College of Marin many years ago. It was great, of course. There was an open mike question session afterwards. Lots of good questions but one weiner - one of these dumb guys who shouldn't talk but does it just to hear himself talk - got up and prattled on with some stupid, convoluted "question." Something any intelligent person would consider suicidal doing to William F. freakin' Buckley. We had all seen Buckley verbally destroy pricks on Firing Line and knew of course that Buckley could shred this fool with a sentence, and we waited for it.

Buckley, in an impressive display of civility, briefly and politely replied with an answer that was an amazing amalgam of allowing everyone else to know that, yes he had a fool on the line, while simultaneously giving the guy some satisfaction without publicly castrating him as he, frankly, deserved. It was as if Bill was talking to each group simultaneously but with a different answer. You had to be there but it was just magnificent. I liked him even more after that.; 7/27/19, 11:37 AM
rcocean said...: This was Buckley in his prime. By the mid 80's he was just phoning it in and the tics and mannerisms had gotten out of control.; 7/27/19, 11:40 AM
Fernandinande said...: "cadre" was heard as containing an idea of communism.

Never heard of that (which doesn't mean much), so I figgered the squirmy guy was trying to show-off his Buckley-like pronunciation, but: Professional revolutionaries or a cadre: in Leninism, an organized revolutionary vanguard aimed at moving society to the realisation of communism (6th definition).; 7/27/19, 11:42 AM
Bay Area Guy said...: I loved Buckley! His "Firing Line" lasted for 40+ years, and he interviewed every single famous person alive including Leftists, Saul Alinsky, Allen Ginsberg, and Jesse Jackson.

He also spoke/debated over 10,000 times at college campuses. If alive today, he'd probably be assaulted by Antifa.

Since Buckley passed, NR has sadly gone to shit. But I bet Buckley woulda liked Trump. Buckley was an intellectual, but he had a big practical streak.; 7/27/19, 11:54 AM
Kevin said...: The more boring guy pronounced 'cadre' correctly so the squirmy guy on the left, I suppose it was, helpfully demonstrated that he uses a different, less popular pronunciation.

Maybe it's how Che taught him to pronounce it.; 7/27/19, 12:06 PM
Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...: are cadres better than juntas ?; 7/27/19, 12:07 PM
Kevin said...: I was a very liberal kid living in a very liberal area, but I secretly had an affinity for Conservative ideas.

What's truly funny is the people who run everything in those areas still think they're oppressed and are consumed with sticking it to "the man".

It's a rare thing when "the man" recognizes himself.; 7/27/19, 12:14 PM
DavidUW said...: I watched this not knowing when Kerouac died and immediately thought when Kerouac said he was 46 (!!), man he looks bad. Then I looked up when he died. That's an advertisement for moderation in drinking. Not only did he look bad, it was pretty clear he was a formerly articulate man who was behaving and talking like an ex-boxer who stayed too long in the ring.

The casual anti-semitism was something to behold. along with Kerouac's casual mention of being Catholic as setting him apart, a good reminder that catholics really were not in the mainstream either.

However, drunken Kerouac (never mind the impressive Buckley) is better than the typical dimwitted "sociologist" who clearly wasn't smart enough to get a real degree and taught at some 4th rate school, and the self-anointed successor to the Beats, the Hippie who wasn't nearly as smart as he thought he was and certainly the least classically well-educated of the bunch. A sad harbinger of the degradation of education for the next half century.

Overall, also a sad reminder of how much more articulate even 4th rate professors and dimwitted hippies were than the average twittered SJW gender studies major dominating today's discourses.; 7/27/19, 12:38 PM
Ingachuck'stoothlessARM said...: He did a good job with "Cadre!"

...but could Kerouac say "Fug" evocatively?; 7/27/19, 12:40 PM
mccullough said...: The Fug guy majored in Greek at NYU.

No one on that panel was uneducated. They were all a lot better educated than people nowadays.; 7/27/19, 12:44 PM
DavidUW said...: Which shows how much standards had slipped from Kerouac's education at Columbia.; 7/27/19, 12:54 PM
rightguy said...: Fascinating artifact from the sixties- thanks for posting Professor.

I watched it as an 8th grader, but I was unable to see how good a show this was. Buckley pulls out of Yablonsky an essential fact- that is that the hippies who actually dropped out were over-represented by draft dodgers and not people who were disaffected by the political system- all that civil rights and Great Society stuff was then current law.

But the biggie was the massive political contradiction of the hippies, who had just witnessed a brutal Russian/Communist take over of Czechoslovakia, going on to champion the cause of the communist North Vietnamese.; 7/27/19, 1:27 PM
Narr said...: Gore Vidal claimed to have buggered Kerouac. Just thought you'd like to know.

Narr
Buckley was OK in small doses; 7/27/19, 1:39 PM
rightguy said...: I agree, S Thomas, that the spiritual component of the hippie movement (Peace! Love!...) was sort of Christian, but this ideology was appropriated from, and was never attributed to, Christianity. Yes, the whole movement was eventually corrupted by far left politics.

"Please don't dominate the rap, jack, if you've got nothing new to say..."
Robert Hunter, 1969; 7/27/19, 1:44 PM
Bilwick said...: In his groundbreaking REVOLT ON CAMPUS, M. Stanton Evans credited the Beats with sowing the seeds of rebellion against the "liberal" orthodoxy of the Fifties and Sixties. He mentioned a Kerouac characters who hated three groups: labor Unions; liberals; and cops.; 7/27/19, 1:52 PM
Bay Area Guy said...: The "draft-dodging" component of the hippies was huge! Also, the college deferment. Blue collar guys like my uncles, got shipped to Nam. Brainy rich assholes like my stepfather did not.

Nixon should have gotten more credit for dropping the draft.

I liked the sex and RockNRoll parts, not so much the drugs:); 7/27/19, 2:02 PM
Clyde said...: The past is a different country. Kerouac smoking a cigar on stage would never be allowed today and shows how much the customs have changed in that regard.; 7/27/19, 2:10 PM
Howard said...: James Baldwin destroyed Buckley in debate at Oxford.; 7/27/19, 2:17 PM
Phil 314 said...: "Dr. Yablonsky, who was 89 when he died on Jan. 29 in Santa Monica, Calif., became a prominent and provocative public intellectual in the 1960s, combining academic analysis, experiential research and sometimes direct, unconventional efforts to solve social problems...Later, Dr. Yablonsky took LSD as part of his research for “The Hippie Trip,” his 1968 book about hippie culture...He also drew on personal experience, particularly his sexually open marriage, for his 1979 book, “The Extra-Sex Factor: Why Over Half of America’s Married Men Play Around.”"

(more from the NYT obit:

"“My greatest achievement in life,” he liked to say, “was getting out of Newark.” He received a baseball scholarship to the University of Alabama, but stayed only a year; he did not like Southern bigotry, Navy service in World War II gave him perspective, he said. He dropped the hustling, earned a bachelor’s degree at Rutgers, enrolled in graduate school at New York University and earned his doctorate in 1958.

Dr. Yablonsky taught at City College, Columbia University, the University of Massachusetts and Harvard before moving to the West Coast in the early 1960s. He taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, before moving to California State University, Northridge, in 1963. He spent more than 30 years there, but his favorite classrooms were usually off campus...One of his best-known books, “The Tunnel Back: Synanon,” published in 1965, was partly about his experience meeting and marrying her and his belief in the Synanon system...(Synanon later lost credibility after declaring itself a religion and being linked to a series of violent episodes.)"

And in the video clip he's the "sane one". I had forgotten how crazy the '60's were.; 7/27/19, 2:21 PM
Psota said...: Of course Kerouac looks awful. Unlike the vast majority of NPR/New Yorker approved writers, he truly suffered for his art -- not just through drinking but also through his vagabond existence.

but there would have been no on the road without all those years on the; 7/27/19, 2:22 PM
Michael said...: Ed Sanders wrote the definitive Manson book.; 7/27/19, 2:24 PM
Iman said...: That was a hoot! Sanders wrote an interesting book on the whole verminous Manson Family scene... I think it was titled “The Family”.; 7/27/19, 2:29 PM
Iman said...: Agreed, Michael!; 7/27/19, 2:30 PM
Nichevo said...: Why does Kerouac affect a Spanish pronunciation of cadre? Of course it came from French sources.; 7/27/19, 2:36 PM
rcocean said...: "James Baldwin destroyed Buckley in debate at Oxford"

The liberal/Left thought EVERY Liberal destroyed Buckley in a debate. Even Abe Beame!

If Youtube had been around in 1960s, it would've been "Vidal DESTROYS Buckley" "John Lindsey DESTROYS Buckley" "Timothy O'Leary DESTROYS Buckley".; 7/27/19, 2:53 PM
rcocean said...: Kerouac strikes me a witty guy. Too bad he didn't talk to WFB one-on-one while Sober.

But he wasn't just an alcoholic, like Burroughs and Ginsberg he had some mental problems. He was bounced out of the Navy in WW 2, with a psychiatric discharge. He was friends with Ginsburg who just screams Mental Illness. He was involved in covering up a murder by his friend Lucian Carr while at Columbia. He had issues.; 7/27/19, 3:03 PM
rcocean said...: Its fitting justice that after appeasing the liberals for the last 25 years of his life, WFB is now known primarily as a Racist supporter of segregation in the MSM. Bill's "reasonable conservative" act post 1990, didn't cut him any slack with the Liberals in the 21st Century. And his magazine has now become a FAKE CON joke. Its hard not to laugh.

No doubt if Rod Dreher died today, all the Liberal Obits would mention his homophobia and support for Republicans. Cucks never win.; 7/27/19, 3:07 PM
Paddy O said...: Kerouac very much seemed like he was doing a Jerry Lewis impression without the humor. Or did a later Jerry Lewis adopt a bit of a Kerouac persona?; 7/27/19, 3:28 PM
Howard said...: Rcocean: so many cucks, so easily triggered; 7/27/19, 4:11 PM
Howard said...: Kerouac was crazy brilliant and self medicating. He was already toast in 1968; 7/27/19, 4:14 PM
Cuong said...: What an interview. Thanks for sharing, Ann. Jack Kerouac died a year later.; 7/27/19, 4:41 PM
Robert Cook said...: "Maybe it's how Che taught him to pronounce it."

If you're talking about Kerouac, he was a conservative.

(Being snarky doesn't work if you don't who you're being snarky about.); 7/27/19, 4:46 PM
rcocean said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 7/27/19, 4:48 PM
Robert Cook said...: Sanders wrote a great book of short stories about that era: Tales of Beatnik Glory.

I've heard his book on Manson is perhaps the best of them all, but I've never found it anywhere.; 7/27/19, 4:48 PM
rcocean said...: Jack Kerouac died a year later.

Kerouac had internal bleeding due to the booze but tried to tough it out. IRC, he was woozy and throwing up blood before he would go to the Doctor. He died in the ER.

John O'Hara had the same condition. Fortunately for O'Hara his Sister forced him to go to the ER immediately in Manhattan and his life was saved. O'hara had to quit drinking, and had another 25 productive years. In fact, he became a bore on the subject. Like many reformed drunks.

7/27/19, 4:48 PM Delete; 7/27/19, 4:48 PM
rcocean said...: How conservative Kerouac was, is open to interpretation. In a letter to Ginsberg in October 1960, he says voting is a waste of time, but if he did vote, he'd vote for Kennedy. He than slams Nixon a couple times. Unlike Ginsberg, he was basically apolitical.; 7/27/19, 4:54 PM
Narr said...: That Yablonsky dude sounds like a typical 60s academic hack. Needed regrooving!

Narr
The Beats never moved me; 7/27/19, 4:56 PM
MikeD said...: Maybe if it'd just been Kerouac I would've wasted my steadily decreasing time in this mortal coil watching. I remember Kerouac well, summer of '59, between jr. & sr. years in HS read "On the Road". Upon completion went on the road from South of Oakland (Hayward) utilizing the evolutionary thumb. Picked up a buddy travel partner in Santa Cruz, partied with some friends of his cousin in said mountains, stopped to visit his old girlfriend and her Christian missionary father at a Reser North of Bakersfield. Hung out on Santa Monica streets/beaches for some weeks and decided SF Bay Area would be more of whatever. Headed back up the coast and got busted for juvenile vagrancy in San Luis Obispo necessitating rescue by parentals.
OK, I'm aware nobody cares but, tho't of Kerouac sent me down memory lane, electricicles are free and my times my own to waste (I didn't force you to waste yours if you somehow/some reason got this far). Stay tuned at Althouse for a short story long about college in SF, "beat coffee houses" (Enrico's 4 1) & Condor Club having open air shutters for Dave Brubeck performances.
OK they're bringing me my white extra long sleeved dinner jacket and removing my wi-fi privileges.
I said I'm not a robot but. I am!; 7/27/19, 5:11 PM
Robert Cook said...: I've tried to read ON THE ROAD twice. I hated it. Couldn't get past the first 40 pages or so, either time.; 7/27/19, 5:47 PM
narciso said...: well compared to Ginsburg, ferlinghetti and kesey, the interesting thing is the psychosis that Ginsburg was projecting in howl, is the reality today,; 7/27/19, 6:33 PM
wild chicken said...: I liked On the Road, read it twice. I love memoirs. He captures an era in jazz, if nothing else, but very subjectively of course. He was not a musician but he gets that Bop was changing things radically.

Anyway I liked all three of those guys actually. They all acquit themselves well, in the end. Even the bloody sociologist.; 7/27/19, 6:38 PM
Ann Althouse said...: Here at Meadhouse, we decided Yablonsky looks like Lech Walesa.; 7/27/19, 6:56 PM
Ann Althouse said...: "Isn't Kerouac taking the boring guy down a peg by offering the correct French pronunciation of "cadre?""

Today I learned that Kerouac, born in Lowell, Massachusetts, spoke French as his first language and didn't begin learning English until he was 6.

(His parents were French Canadian.); 7/27/19, 6:58 PM
Ann Althouse said...: "The Beats were nihilist drunks and dope addicts."

From Wikipeda: "Kerouac... was a serious child who was devoted to his mother, who... was a devout Catholic, who instilled this deep faith into both her sons. Kerouac would later say that his mother was the only woman he ever loved.... On May 17, 1928, while six years old, Kerouac had his first Confession. For penance, he was told to say a rosary, during which he heard God tell him that he had a good soul, that he would suffer in life and die in pain and horror, but would in the end receive salvation. This experience, along with his dying brother's vision of the Virgin Mary (as the nuns fawned over him, convinced he was a saint), combined with a later study of Buddhism and an ongoing commitment to Christ, solidified the worldview which would inform Kerouac's work.... According to Kerouac, On the Road "was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him. I found him in the sky, in Market Street San Francisco (those 2 visions), and Dean (Neal) had God sweating out of his forehead all the way. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY OUT FOR THE HOLY MAN: HE MUST SWEAT FOR GOD. And once he has found Him, the Godhood of God is forever Established and really must not be spoken about."[18] According to his biographer, historian Douglas Brinkley, On the Road has been misinterpreted as a tale of companions out looking for kicks, but the most important thing to comprehend is that Kerouac was an American Catholic author – for example, virtually every page of his diary bore a sketch of a crucifix, a prayer, or an appeal to Christ to be forgiven... erouac found enemies on both sides of the political spectrum, the right disdaining his association with drugs and sexual libertinism and the left contemptuous of his anti-communism and Catholicism; characteristically, he watched the 1954 Senate McCarthy hearings smoking marijuana and rooting for the anti-communist crusader, Senator Joseph McCarthy. In Desolation Angels he wrote, "when I went to Columbia all they tried to teach us was Marx, as if I cared" (considering Marxism, like Freudianism, to be an illusory tangent)....Kerouac's novel is often described as the defining work of the post-World War II Beat Generation and Kerouac came to be called "the king of the beat generation," a term with which he never felt comfortable. He once observed, "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic", showing the reporter a painting of Pope Paul VI and saying, "You know who painted that? Me.""; 7/27/19, 7:03 PM
Ambrose said...: Shameless promotion here - but if you have any interest in Jack Kerouac, read my good friend Sean McGrady's novel "Sleeping With Jack Kerouac." Available through the good professor's Amazon portal. Jack bounced baby Sean on his knee in Northport LI many years ago. (I get nothing from sales of this book - other than satisfaction that a good book is being read).; 7/27/19, 7:04 PM
wild chicken said...: Trouble is, Kerouac dabbled so much in Buddhism and dharmas and stuff. If he's Catholic, why is he doing that. Buddhism is opposed. It doesn't hold with individualism. Individualism is an illusion to them.

The church in those days was pretty clear about heresy.; 7/27/19, 8:05 PM
J. Farmer said...: Today I learned that Kerouac, born in Lowell, Massachusetts, spoke French as his first language and didn't begin learning English until he was 6.

That is an interesting factoid and might partially explain why he had some affection for Buckley. He spent his childhood years in Mexico and spoke Spanish exclusively until the age of six.; 7/27/19, 8:52 PM
Rick Lee said...: As a teen I read a snippet in Mad Magazine (A Liberal Primer) about how liberals wished Buckley was one of them. I started watching Firing Line and was just astonished at how he demolished his opponents with pithy one liners. As a kid from West Virginia, I wasn't happy to hear him say (paraphrasing) "The Democrats want to pay laid-off miners to stay in West Virginia and NOT mine coal"... but I couldn't deny the logic.; 7/27/19, 9:48 PM
Char Char Binks, Esq. said...: Buckley allotted an occasional installment of Firing Line to fluff.; 7/28/19, 3:12 PM
Bilwick said...: "'James Baldwin destroyed Buckley in debate at Oxford"

"The liberal/Left thought EVERY Liberal destroyed Buckley in a debate. Even Abe Beame!

"If Youtube had been around in 1960s, it would've been 'Vidal DESTROYS Buckley' 'John Lindsey DESTROYS Buckley"''Timothy O'Leary DESTROYS Buckley"'"

Those of us who were around at the time recall Abe Beame and John Lindsay destroying NYC. My only recollection of James Baldwin in connection with WFB was Baldwin saying ghetto Blacks having the right to throw garbage on the streets as a form of protest--then WFB asking Baldwin if he (WFB) had the right to throw garbage on the streets every time Lindsay appeared. I'd say Buckley got the better of that exchange,; 7/29/19, 2:38 PM