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WHEN WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. MET JAMES BALDWIN  
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Sam Tanenhaus
May 20, 2025
The Atlantic
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_ In 1965, the two intellectual giants squared off in a debate at
Cambridge. It didn’t go quite as Buckley hoped. _

, Photo-illustration by Colin Hunter. Sources: Bettmann / Getty;
Steve Schapiro / Getty.

 

In February 1965, three months after Barry Goldwater had been trounced
by Lyndon B. Johnson in the presidential election, one of the
Republican candidate’s most forceful advocates, William F. Buckley
Jr., had an important event on his calendar. Taking a break from his
annual ski vacation in Switzerland with his wife, Pat, he made his way
to England for a debate at the Cambridge Union with one of the most
celebrated writers alive, the novelist, memoirist, critic, and
essayist James Baldwin. Buckley had been paying attention to Baldwin.
He had read and admired his novel _Another Country_
[[link removed]], which subtly explored
complex gay and racial themes. But he disliked Baldwin’s journalism
and his profuse commentary on race. Baldwin, he had written,
“celebrates his bitterness against the white community mostly in
journals of the far political left,” which suggested complicity—or
was it cowardice?—on the part of guilt-ridden white editors.

Baldwin’s presence in England was itself an event. He was there to
promote the paperback edition of _Another Country_ and to discuss a
screenplay with a filmmaker. He also made himself available to
journalists and students. And there was the debate with Buckley at the
Cambridge Union—a debate on the subject of race in America.

Baldwin’s numerous venues were not, as it happened, limited to those
of the left. His arguments, moreover, were original and unorthodox,
and at times even paralleled Buckley’s own. Baldwin, too, was
skeptical of liberal programs and the meliorist principles they rested
on. When he observed that the “mountain of sociological
investigations, committee reports, and plans for recreational centers
have failed to change the face of Harlem,” a conservative could
agree.

The difference came in the conclusions Baldwin drew. The true lessons
of race in America, he argued, began in what had been revealed about
its white population. “The interracial drama acted out on the
American continent has not only created a new black man,” he wrote
as early as 1953; “it has created a new white man, too.” This was
a year before the Supreme Court’s decision in _Brown v. Board of
Education_ outlawing segregation in public schools, and two years
before the Montgomery bus boycott. Yet Baldwin understood that the
white monopoly on racial discourse was already weakening. What that
new white man seemed unable to understand, much less accept, was that
“this world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.”

It would never be so, because “white power has been broken,”
Baldwin had said in a debate with Malcolm X in 1961. “And this
means, among other things, that it is no longer possible for an
Englishman to describe an African and make the African believe it.
It’s no longer possible for a white man in this country to tell a
Negro who he is, and make the Negro believe this.”

In the 1964 election, Johnson, the incumbent, had tagged Goldwater as
an extremist, and had coasted to one of the most overwhelming
victories in history, winning 44 states and the District of Columbia.
And the extremist charge had a sound basis. Goldwater had been one of
only six Republicans to vote against the landmark Civil Rights Act
when the Senate passed it in June 1964. At the GOP’s nominating
convention in San Francisco a month later, a desperate attempt by New
York Governor Nelson Rockefeller to add an anti-extremism plank to the
party platform had been thunderously rejected. Five of the six states
that Goldwater won in November—all but his own Arizona—were in the
Deep South. The journalist Robert Novak observed that Goldwater and
his allies had completed their makeover of the GOP into “the White
Man’s Party.”

Buckley was the right’s undisputed intellectual leader, who as a
speaker, a columnist, and an author made his case with remarkable
fluency and wit.

And a primary shaper of that new party was Bill Buckley. In the pages
of _National Review_, the political fortnightly he had founded in
1955 and still edited, he and his colleagues continued to support
segregation in the South, a decade _after_ the Supreme Court’s
ruling in _Brown_. In his writing, he referred to the Reverend Martin
Luther King Jr. and others in the civil-rights movement as lawbreakers
and agitators.

Buckley had become, at age 39, the right’s undisputed intellectual
leader, who as a speaker, a columnist, and an author made his case
with remarkable fluency and wit. Goldwater “has near him at least
one man who can think,” the novelist and Syracuse University
professor George P. Elliott had warned. Commenting on an address
Buckley had given to a college audience, Elliott judged him “an
all-or-none theocratic zealot of the most dangerous kind,” partly
because “his criticism of the faults of the liberal rulers of the
nation was incisive and accurate; his forensic power and control were
by far the greatest I have heard in an American speaker.” Now, as
Republican strategists struggled to move forward, Buckley’s forensic
talents were among the few assets they could count on.

For years, Buckley had wanted to debate Baldwin. He was all the more
eager to do so after the publication of Baldwin’s polemic _The Fire
Next Time_ [[link removed]], in 1963. With
this small, powerful book, Baldwin became a different writer: no
longer a witness to racial injustice but a prophet of racial
reckoning.

Read: The famous Baldwin-Buckley debate still matters today
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Most of the book had been first published as a long article in _The
New Yorker_
[[link removed]] in
November 1962, and Buckley had read it during his preparation for a
two-week visit to South Africa and Mozambique as a guest of their
respective governments. Buckley was especially impressed by South
Africa’s prime minister, Hendrik Verwoerd, the principal creator of
apartheid in 1948. To Buckley, apartheid—literally racial
“separatehood” in Afrikaans—was more than defensible. It was a
kind of ideal system in a caste-divided society, what Jim Crow might
have become if only its architects had been more systematic in their
thinking and had embraced the concept of fully developed separate
nations, Black and white.

Despite Verwoerd’s valiant efforts, Buckley reported in _National
Review_, South Africa was beset with peril. The threat came from the
“beady eyes of the Communist propaganda machine,” which was
cynically stirring the embers of “black racism.” In Buckley’s
view, this left Verwoerd only one sensible option: cracking down on
dissidents. For “in such an eutectic situation it is necessary to
maintain very firm control. Relentless vigilance” and “relentless
order” were required “because the eudaemonic era has not yet come
to Africa.” _Eutectic_, _eudaemonic _: Buckley had a weakness
for arcane words, which he deployed as weapons. The more fragile his
argument, the more syllables he used: “preemptive obfuscations,”
as one of his protégés, the novelist and critic John Leonard, called
them. But in this instance, the tongue twisters could not obscure raw
facts; 70 percent of South Africa’s population was Black, and
eventually that majority would assert itself and challenge white
dominance—just what was happening in the American South.

Baldwin also had things to say about South Africa and Verwoerd. _The
Fire Next Time_ included a bold assertion about the origins of
radical evil over the past two millennia. “Whatever white people do
not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do
not know about themselves,” Baldwin wrote.

White Christians have also forgotten several elementary historical
details. They have forgotten that the religion that is now identified
with their virtue and their power—“God is on our side,” says Dr.
Verwoerd—came out of a rocky piece of ground in what is now known as
the Middle East before color was invented, and that in order for the
Christian church to be established, Christ had to be put to death, by
Rome, and that the real architect of the Christian church was not the
disreputable, sun-baked Hebrew who gave it his name but the
mercilessly fanatical and self-righteous St. Paul.

Baldwin did not pause to analyze. He did not allow the emotion to
cool. He saw in Paul a zealous convert and proselytizer, and he also
saw the intolerance, extremism, prejudice, and persecution that would
come in the name of faith. The Christian world, he wrote, “has
revealed itself as morally bankrupt and politically unstable.” With
the Church’s long history of anti-Semitism in the background, he
stated bluntly: “The fact of the Third Reich alone makes obsolete
forever any question of Christian superiority.” The Holocaust—the
most radical instance of modern evil—was thus not truly surprising
to him and other Black Americans. Just as Christians had monstrously
mistreated Jews, so “white men in America do not behave toward black
men the way they behave toward each other. When a white man faces a
black man, especially if the black man is helpless, terrible things
are revealed.”

Buckley had been affronted by the line Baldwin drew from Saint Paul to
the gas chambers. But he was also well aware that Baldwin was steeped
in Church history and teaching, and knew scripture far better than
Buckley himself. The stepson of a Pentecostal minister, Baldwin had
been a teenage preacher before abandoning what his book called “the
church racket”—the phrase all but calculated to stir the
wellspring of Buckley rage. Nothing defined Buckley so fully as his
Catholicism. He had been raised in the Church and as a teenager had
talked of joining the priesthood. As recently as 1961, he had told an
admirer, “If I am ever persuaded that my attachment to conservatism
gets in the way of my attachment to the Catholic Church, I shall
promptly forsake the former.” At the same time, Buckley knew how
deft Baldwin’s glancing reference to Verwoerd had been. During the
Second World War, Verwoerd had been enthusiastic in his support for
Nazi Germany, and openly anti-Semitic.

But Buckley was, among many other things, a first-rate editor. He
recognized that Baldwin had written a major statement and must be met
on his own ground. One _National Review_ contributor had the
intellectual and literary gifts to do it, a young critic whom Buckley
esteemed above all others—Garry Wills.

In 1958, when Wills had applied to Harvard’s Ph.D. program in
classics after a summer working at _NR_, Buckley had written a
recommendation saying, “There simply is no doubt in my mind that
twenty-five years hence he will be conceded one of the nation’s top
critics and literary craftsmen.” (Wills had gone instead to Yale,
which offered a better fellowship.) He was now teaching at Johns
Hopkins and writing prolifically for _NR_. He could handle almost any
subject—history, literature, philosophy, politics, religion. Better
still, he had spent six years preparing for the priesthood, as a
Jesuit, before being released from his vows so he could enjoy a
secular life of marriage and family and pursue a literary career. Up
to now, Wills had written very little on race, but what he had written
was less ideological than most other _NR_ commentary on the subject.
Wills made no defense of segregation and was dismissive (like Buckley)
of white racists who argued for their own biological superiority.

What Buckley did not know was how formative race had been for Wills.
He had grown up in the Midwest, but his family came from the South and
were typical white southerners of the time. Once, “on a family visit
to Louisville,” Wills later recalled, “my grandmother took me to
Sunday Mass and a Black priest came out from the sacristy. My
grandmother snatched me by the hand and hauled me outside. When I
asked her why, she—who would never go without Mass on Sunday—said
she could not stand to see a ‘nigger’ at the altar. I observed
that she had Black women help her bake loaves of bread for sale in her
kitchen, but she answered: ‘A nigger does not deserve the dignity of
the priesthood.’ ”

At Wills’s Jesuit seminary near St. Louis, his training included
orderly service in a hospital. Most of the patients were Black. He and
other seminarians “gave the men their baths, rubbed cream on to
prevent bedsores, and washed the bodies of those who died
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Wills’s best friend in the seminary was Black and “told me of the
obstacles the order had put in the way of his joining—he was bluntly
told that Southerners in the novitiate would resent his presence.”

This resistance was one reason, Wills believed, that meeting “the
demands (even legitimate demands) of some” to outlaw segregation
might “bend the permanent structure of our society permanently out
of shape” and “sacrifice the peace of all of us.” To that
extent, Wills could sympathize with white southerners. But they must
also respond humanely. This was the test being failed time and again.

The permanent structure of society was Baldwin’s theme too, only he
was making the opposite case: The structure itself was rotten and
awaited the match that would set it ablaze. Here Wills was ready to
meet Baldwin. Unlike Buckley, who read just enough of books he
disliked to collect ammunition for disparaging them, Wills brought
Jesuitical thoroughness and precision to his reading. He read not
only _The Fire Next Time_, but just about everything else Baldwin had
published, and he was overwhelmed by its artistry and power.

Wills had agonized over the assignment, he told Buckley in the winter
of 1963. “But after tearing up many attempts at the thing, I send
this off immediately, before I decide to tear it up.” He still was
afraid he had not risen to the task, because refuting Baldwin required
“new arguments for civilization”—and, Wills confessed, “I
don’t know any.” There were only the old arguments, and under the
pressure of Baldwin’s impassioned language, they seemed to wilt.
“There is virtuosity, even a dark gaiety in his anger,” Wills
wrote in his article. Baldwin, he went on, had an “uncanny way of
writing to a background music that somehow gets transmitted along with
the words.”

And his account of America’s racial history was accurate. “We have
been cruel to the Negro,” Wills wrote. “We have, more than we
know; more than we want to know.” But Baldwin did not limit his
attack to white America alone. He condemned the system of belief from
which the entirety of Western civilization arose. “He does not
attack us for not living up to our ideals, for lapsing, for sinning,
for being bad Christians,” Wills went on. “He says we do
not _have_ any ideals: we do not believe in any of the things our
religion, our civilization, our country stand for. It is all an
elaborate lie whose sole and original function is to fortify
privilege.”

Baldwin’s sweeping denunciation ignored the saving virtues of the
Western tradition—its humanism, its ideas of justice and human
dignity, its embrace of charity as a defining principle—the same
ideals that informed his own writing. Yet reviewers seemed
uninterested in pointing out this rather obvious omission. Why? This
was the question Wills’s essay asked and tried to answer. What
looked like sympathy for Baldwin, he concluded, was in reality a
condescending refusal to take him seriously—arrant hypocrisy that
Baldwin himself exposed by “attacking all our so-called beliefs,
then standing back and observing that no one defends them. In fact,
everyone rushes to defend _him_.”

Instead, Wills wrote,

somebody should take Baldwin’s charges seriously enough to ask, not
whether they are moving, or beautiful, or important, or sincerely
meant—they are obviously all these, and there has been enough
repetition of the obvious—but whether they are _true_.

In depicting white evil in absolute terms, Wills believed, Baldwin
foreclosed the possibility of redemption—this despite an evident
history of moral growth and improvement. Wills acknowledged the
discomfort of defending the existence and importance of ideals so
brutally violated by the race to which one belonged, but insisted on
its necessity. “We must have the courage to defend the ideals we
have, perhaps, not lived up to, but only known to be true. It takes a
special courage to bear witness in this way; to be wrong, yet defend
what was right; to be what one is, yet continue to fight for what one
should have been; to oppose a better man than oneself in the service
of a better creed than his.”

Nothing like this had ever been published in _National Review_. Even
as Wills disagreed with Baldwin, he ceded him high authority as an
artist and praised in exalted terms what the magazine’s chief
political theorist, James Burnham, in his book _Suicide of the West_,
was soon to call “the abusive writings of a disoriented Negro
homosexual.” Another respected _NR_ elder—its books editor Frank
Meyer, Wills’s mentor at the magazine—pleaded with Buckley not to
publish the essay. But Buckley was captivated. What Wills had written
was quite possibly _National Review_’s “finest hour,” he later
said.

Overruling Meyer, Buckley edited the essay himself; printed it at
eight full pages under the title Wills had chosen, “What Color Is
God?”; and made it the cover story. It appeared in May 1963 just
after the historic civil-rights protest in Birmingham, Alabama.
Americans watched televised footage of firefighters as they aimed fire
hoses at children who were then slammed to the pavement, the pressure
of the hoses turned so high, _The New York Times_ reported
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that the spray “skinned bark off trees.”

At the time, Buckley also efficiently drew on Wills’s argument in
his own writing about Baldwin. One column restated the argument so
closely that it “suggests some interesting reflections on your
conception of editing and/or plagiarism,” Wills protested. But
Buckley also honed Wills’s nuanced words into the sharp blade of
accusation. _The Fire Next Time_, Buckley wrote, was a violently
racist tract—“A Call to Lynch the White God.”

None of this deterred Baldwin from agreeing to debate Buckley in
early 1965. “It will be a tough one,” Buckley wrote to a friend.
And he had made it no easier by taunting Baldwin in a column only
weeks beforehand, calling him the “Number-1 America-hater.”

Buckley had no idea what to expect from the audience he would face at
the Cambridge Union. For a recent debate on the Labour Party’s
“hypocritical attitude on immigration,” one Labour member of
Parliament after another declined to come. The union had held the
event anyway, and 200 demonstrators had marched through campus, many
carrying banners and placards saying the Conservative speaker was a
racist. Forty police officers had been brought in to protect him.
American civil-rights leaders, by contrast, had been warmly received
in England. In December, when King, en route to Oslo to receive the
Nobel Peace Prize, had stopped over in London to give a sermon at St.
Paul’s Cathedral—“the first non-Anglican ever allowed in the
pulpit [[link removed]]” there,
according to King’s biographer Taylor Branch—some 4,000 people had
turned out to hear him, more than the great church could seat.

Cambridge Union debates were held in the evening, preceded by a
dinner, with the student leaders as hosts and the invited guests
seated on either side of the union’s president. Not this time.
Baldwin had instead requested to be seated as far as possible from
Buckley. He wanted no pre-debate pleasantries. Buckley respected this.
He also disliked forced geniality with strong adversaries; it made
going after them harder.

Baldwin’s words were as much sermon as argument. The audience was
stunned into silence. Hardly anyone stirred. When Baldwin finished,
after almost half an hour, the ovation lasted a full minute.

The union hall that night—Thursday, February 18—was filled to
capacity and beyond. “By eight o’clock, the hall was so jam-packed
with students that officials had to set up crash barriers,” the
political scientist Nicholas Buccola writes in his 2019 account of the
debate, _The Fire Is Upon Us_
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All the benches were taken, and many students sat on the floor.
Buckley and Baldwin had to pick their way past them as they were led
to the long table at the front of the room. Buckley had two British
companions with him—his close friend, the journalist and historian
Alistair Horne, and the film star James Mason, who sat high above in
the gallery. Baldwin’s small entourage sat there too. Hundreds more
viewers gathered in nearby rooms with TV screens, making the total
audience about 1,000.

The BBC had sent a crew for a broadcast. “I don’t think I’ve
ever seen the union so well attended,” said the Tory MP Norman St.
John-Stevas [[link removed]], who was
there as the station’s commentator. To a home audience that had
never heard of William F. Buckley, St. John-Stevas explained that he
was “very well known as a conservative in the United States,”
smiling as he added, “I must stress, a conservative in the American
sense”—closer, in British terms, to a Manchester-school classical
liberal—and “one of the early supporters of Senator Goldwater.”

The topic of the debate called to mind an especially provocative
sentence in _The Fire Next Time _: “The Negroes of this country
may never be able to rise to power,” Baldwin had written, “but
they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and ring down
the curtain on the American dream.” The motion put up for debate was
this: “The American dream is at the expense of the American
Negro.” The phrase _American dream_ was one that Buckley seldom,
if ever, used except ironically, but he would now be forced to defend
it.

Baldwin began by saying that, in terms of the Black
experience, _American dream_ was an all but meaningless expression.
“Let me put it this way,” he said in what became the most famous
words spoken that evening:

From a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports, and the
railroads of the country—the economy, especially of the southern
states, could not conceivably be what it has become if they had not
had, and do not still have, indeed and for so long, for many
generations, cheap labor. I am stating very seriously, and this is not
an overstatement, that I picked the cotton, and I carried it to the
market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for
nothing, for nothing.

The custom at Cambridge Union debates was for audience members to
address questions to the speaker, even interrupting to demand a reply.
But Baldwin’s words were as much sermon as argument—“a highly
refined version of soapbox speech,” one of Baldwin’s biographers
later wrote—even as his description of the capitalist uses of
slavery was grounded in historical fact. In 1965, structural racism
was a new idea, certainly for this audience, which had been stunned
into silence. Hardly anyone stirred. When Baldwin finished, after
almost half an hour, the ovation lasted a full minute. “The whole of
the union standing and applauding this magnificent speech of James
Baldwin,” St. John-Stevas excitedly told the BBC audience. “Never
seen this happen before.”

All the while, Buckley had been sitting by, writing notes on his
yellow pad, thinking, as he later recalled, “Boy, tonight is
a _lost cause_.” For years to come, he would maintain that the
debate had contrasted his exercise in high logic with Baldwin’s
emotionalism. But many present that day thought otherwise. Baldwin had
been careful not to say a word about Buckley, not even to utter his
name. He had stood at the podium and spoken as if in a kind of
reverie. But Buckley, when his turn came, “stalked the center
debating table like a panther,” _The New York_ _Times_ reported.
“He began in a low monotone, almost a snarl.”

And the snarling words were distinctly ad hominem, a direct attack on
Baldwin himself and the hypocrisy of his admirers. Baldwin’s
writings constituted a bitter catalog of American sins, yet no one
challenged him. Instead he was “treated from coast to coast in the
United States with a kind of unctuous servitude, which, in point of
fact, goes beyond anything that was ever expected from the most
servile Negro creature by a southern family.”

Inside the Cambridge Union, February 18, 1965: The union president
introduces the debate; Buckley takes his turn.

The audience in the chamber; Baldwin eyes the proceedings.

Baldwin’s indictment of America was so sweeping, Buckley continued,
that it deserved to be met head-on, which meant granting him no
special favors. Baldwin could not be engaged squarely in debate

unless one is prepared to deal with him as a white man. Unless one is
prepared to say to him, “The fact that your skin is black is utterly
irrelevant to the arguments that you raise.” The fact that you sit
here, as is your rhetorical device, and lay the entire weight of the
Negro ordeal on your own shoulders is irrelevant to the argument that
we are here to discuss.

But it was Buckley who seemed disconnected from the larger context.
Wills was soon to denounce (in his new column in the _National
Catholic Reporter_) “the savage policemen of Mississippi and
Alabama” who had been brutalizing people seeking only their
constitutional right to vote. Buckley simply reverted to the
two-year-old argument from “What Color Is God?,” which he repeated
almost verbatim. “The gravamen of Mr. Baldwin’s charges against
America,” Buckley said, is “not so much that our civilization has
failed him and his people, that our ideals are insufficient, but that
we have no ideals.” Baldwin had written this in _The Fire Next
Time_ and asserted it again in the union, only “he didn’t, in
writing that book, speak with the British accents that he used
exclusively tonight.”

Up to that moment, Baldwin had been almost impassive as Buckley spoke.
The BBC camera now captured his look of angry surprise. There was
nothing “British” in Baldwin’s accents. He was a practiced and
polished speaker, who had gone before many audiences and spoken
exactly as he had on this occasion, in elevated tones steeped, like
his prose, in the vocabulary and cadences of the King James Bible.
Buckley had insinuated that it was a kind of minstrel performance
worked up for this British audience. Murmurs of disapproval and loud
hissing rose in the hall.

Buckley, always attentive to his audiences and their responses,
realized he had erred. He tried to recover. He took this debate
seriously. He took all debates seriously, often writing out his major
statement in advance. Tonight, as always, he had a case to make. He
rightly pointed to the logical error, the “soritic” leap, by which
Baldwin connected the “fanatic” teachings of Paul to the genocide
at Dachau. He accurately remarked that other countries had histories
of persecution no better than America’s.

But other realities seemed lost on him. When he acknowledged “those
psychic humiliations which I join Mr. Baldwin in believing are the
worst aspects of discrimination,” he cited an incident in _The Fire
Next Time_, when the 13-year-old Baldwin had been walking along Fifth
Avenue on his way to the public library, and a policeman had said,
“Why don’t you niggers stay uptown where you belong?” But
Buckley said nothing about Baldwin’s recollection of having been
accosted at age 10 by two white police officers, who “amused
themselves with me by frisking me, making comic (and terrifying)
speculations concerning my ancestry and probable sexual prowess, and
for good measure, leaving me flat on my back in one of Harlem’s
empty lots.” Flat on his back. This wasn’t merely psychic
humiliation; it was physical intimidation and threat. “I have been
carried into precinct basements often enough,” Baldwin wrote,

and I have seen and heard and endured the secrets of desperate white
men and women, which they knew were safe with me, because even if I
should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me
precisely because they would know that what I said was true.

Those secrets were the secrets of violence committed with impunity.
Even now, Buckley seemed unable to grasp this reality of America’s
racial history—very much alive in the winter of 1965. On the same
day that Buckley and Baldwin met in debate, voting-rights
demonstrators who’d assembled peacefully in a downtown square in
Marion, Alabama, had been sadistically beaten by state troopers. The
victims included a Black minister whose skull had been cracked as he
knelt in prayer. The police had also attacked an 82-year-old man and
his 50-year-old daughter. Both had been hospitalized. When a third
member of the family had leaped at the officer beating his mother, the
officer had shot him in the stomach. (He died eight days later.) These
were the facts putting the promise of the American dream to the test.

When the debate ballots were counted, the motion carried 544 to 164, a
lopsided defeat for Buckley. “Baldwin worsted Bill,” Buckley’s
friend Alistair Horne recalled in 2013. “He was electric, so
wonderfully articulate, and—this is what I think shook Bill—so
highly entertaining.”

This last would have stung most of all. Buckley had been not just
outdebated but outperformed. Soon after, Buckley opened _The New York
Times_ and saw almost the entire transcript of the debate printed
without permission in the newspaper’s magazine. The two combatants
now found common cause. Baldwin’s lawyer let Buckley know so both
could lodge a protest. _Playboy_ had reportedly offered Baldwin as
much as $10,000 to publish his remarks. Eventually he and Buckley
received token payments of $400 each. The _Times _article appeared
in print on March 7, the day of the voting-rights march from Selma to
Montgomery, Bloody Sunday.

The Cambridge fiasco might have permanently damaged Buckley’s
reputation—except there was a second debate with Baldwin, under very
different conditions. It happened in New York in late May 1965
on _Open End_, a talk show moderated by the TV personality and
producer David Susskind. The subject was police brutality in big
cities. In the South, the violence was plain for all to see—the
beatings and killings of people seeking the right to vote. But in the
North, the issue was more complex, especially in places such as New
York, where rising crime was inextricably bound up with the emergence
of white “backlash politics.”

_Open End _’s format was more favorable to Buckley than the formal
Cambridge proceedings had been. The three men were seated and went
back and forth for nearly two hours. One columnist described Buckley
this time as “cool, detached, confident,” and in command as he
warned that the talented Baldwin was also “destructive and
sullen,” and on a course that would ultimately harm Black people.
“The best fight in town,” the columnist wrote. Less than two weeks
later, Buckley called a press conference and confirmed the rumor that
had been building for weeks: The “one man who can think” in the
conservative movement declared himself a candidate for mayor of New
York City.

Buckley lost the election, but it made him a household name—and fed
an ambition to reach a broader audience and become a facilitator of
discussion rather than a mere combatant. He launched his own TV debate
program, _Firing Line_, in 1966; the guests eventually included the
Black Panthers Eldridge Cleaver and Huey P. Newton. “Amazingly, a
PBS public affairs program designed to convert Americans to
conservatism,” the media historian Heather Hendershot later wrote
[[link removed]],
was broadcasting “some of the most comprehensive representations of
Black Power” of that era. _National Review_ had praised Malcolm
X’s doctrine of self-reliance, and Buckley’s own enthusiasm for
“black capitalism” was one reason the National Urban League
invited him to join a group of other journalists it sent on a tour of
eight cities in 1969. Buckley was impressed by the leaders he met, in
particular by a young Chicago organizer, Jesse Jackson. The next year
Buckley, who came to see _The Fire Next Time_ as a “spectacular
essay,” wrote an article for _Look _magazine titled, “Why We
Need a Black President in 1980
[[link removed]].”
He knew that it would happen eventually and almost lived to see it.
Buckley died at age 82 on February 27, 2008, three months before
Barack Obama clinched the Democratic nomination.

_SAM TANENHAUS [[link removed]], a
former editor of The New York Times Book Review, is the author
of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography
[[link removed]] and Buckley:
The Life and the Revolution That Changed America
[[link removed]]._

_This article was adapted from SAM TANENHAUS’s new book, Buckley:
The Life and the Revolution That Changed America
[[link removed]]. It appears in the June
2025 [[link removed]] print
edition with the headline “When Buckley Met Baldwin.”_

__

_Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America
[[link removed]] By Sam Tanenhaus_

_​When you buy a book using a link on this page, the Atlantic
receives a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic._

_A 165-Year Tradition_

_Since 1857, THE ATLANTIC has been challenging assumptions and
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_When the founders of The Atlantic gathered in Boston in the spring
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_Here is the mission statement published in the very first issue
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* William F. Buckley
[[link removed]]
* James Baldwin
[[link removed]]
* Racism
[[link removed]]
* the ultra right
[[link removed]]
* democracy
[[link removed]]
* police brutality
[[link removed]]
* capitalism
[[link removed]]
* slavery
[[link removed]]
* The American Dream
[[link removed]]

*
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*
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*
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