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Stephen J Whitfield, The Incomparable Mr. Buckley, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 3, December 2024, Pages 632–634, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae255
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The Incomparable Mr. Buckley is the judicious biographical treatment that Pbs gives to a galvanizing, polarizing public intellectual. From the mid-twentieth century, a year after his graduation from Yale University, William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008) seemed inescapable—in print, on television, on campuses. Only when the century turned did he surrender control of the National Review, the magazine he founded in 1955, and the hosting of Firing Line, the television interview program that he created in 1966. Barak Goodman's contribution to the American Masters series does Buckley justice. The Incomparable Mr. Buckley is weighted toward the early years—say, until the Watergate scandals, an era when Buckley's influence on the Right was most striking and singular. Then much of the polity caught up with him, though the film rightly gives special attention to Ronald Reagan, who claimed that reading National Review persuaded him to abandon the liberalism of the Democratic party. His presidency marked the last major triumph of Buckley's version of conservatism, which blended a defense of unbridled capitalism, a fierce opposition to communism, and expressions of religiosity. If this documentary cuts him a little slack, that is quite appropriate. American Masters should give such figures an opportunity to make their own best case, before the national amnesia sets in to envelop even the ubiquitous.
