Dimensions
167 x 235 x 38mm
A unique history of William F. Buckley's groundbreaking television program Firing Line - just in time for the show's 50th anniversary. Few conservatives are as revered and admired as William F. Buckley. Buckley is best known for founding National Review, the flagship journal of the right. But his long-running talk show Firing Line was equally important, because it allowed him to reach beyond the conservative enclave and engage millions of mainstream Americans. When Firing Line premiered in 1966, only two years after Barry Goldwater's blow-out defeat in the 1964 presidential election, it seemed as if liberalism had decisively won. Buckley's liberal guests clearly thought so. Yet he gamely and serenely soldiered on in his role as a public contrarian, making the case for conservative ideas and assuming that his side would ultimately win because its arguments were better. In time he was proven correct. Buckley's show - challenging, exciting, and always unpredictable - engaged the most urgent issues of the day and paraded the cream of America's intellectual class across the screen. The guest list reads like a who's who of midcentury American liberalism-David Susskind, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, along with major conservative figures like Henry Kissinger and Milton Friedman. It was also responsible for inspiring several generations of conservatives. Indeed, though it is largely forgotten today, Buckley pioneered the role of the talking head in the media age. With his magazine, syndicated column, radio appearances and television talk show, Buckley was the prototype of the ideological talking heads we see and hear today. Yet his style and tone were very different. Unlike today's political pundits, on both left and right, Buckley never took a cheap shot or appealed to emotion and prejudice. Instead he went out of his way to engage the smartest opponents he could find at a high intellectual level. And he did so with a unique and entertaining combination of clearly articulated principle, sly and biting wit, a truly fearsome vocabulary, and genuine affection for his adversaries. Author Heather Hendershot maintains that if Buckley were alive today, he would be appalled at the decline in insight, respectability, and cogency in conservative discourse - and in political discourse generally. Drawn from archives, interviews and transcripts of the shows themselves, the book provides a rare and intimate portrait of Buckley at his best as an ideological warrior. But much more than just the story of a TV show, it is a history of American public intellectual life in the 60s, 70s and 80s as well as a detailed portrait of how America itself grew more conservative during those years. In short, the book will be a must read for conservatives and should sell for many years to come.
