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Taped on November 12, 1981.
Abortion, supply-side economics, the Moral Majority, and the Equal Rights Amendment all get a look in during this installment of the semi-annual turning of the tables. And this time, our guests sometimes get sufficiently caught up with one another that not all the fire is directed at their host: Mrs. Pilpel: “You’re attacking the Constitution…. What you’re really saying is that the system devised by the Founding Fathers was not a very good one…” Mr. Sobran: “Let me reinterpret my remarks in my own way. Congress has the obligation to uphold the Constitution too. If the Court acts unconstitutionally, it should take some sort of action.”
Summary by Firing Line staff.
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Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. “William F. Buckley Jr. on the Firing Line”
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Taped on July 21, 1978In this installment of the semiannual turning of the tables, the guests question their host on everything from government spending to the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion to aid to authoritarian regimes. Two samples: Pilpel: “I think what we can agree on in disputes of this kind is that the role of the government, in a culturally diverse, pluralistic society, is to be neutral.” Buckley: “My God! You want to pass a law [ERA] forbidding me to hire a female nurse for my mother, and you’re telling me the law has to be neutral in matters of such gravity as abortion!” . . . Burden: “But if life is sacred, if that is a basic moral premise, then how can you in any case justify taking life [via the death penalty]?” Buckley: “By reading the Bible.” Burden: “An eye for an eye? You subscribe to that?” Buckley: “No, I don’t subscribe to that. But there are many instances in the Bible where, given due process, and given the gravity of the crime, the taking of life is authorized.” Summary by Firing Line staff.
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Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. “Three vs. William F. Buckley Jr.”
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Taped on December 21, 1972
A splendid conversation with the author of A Clockwork Orange, who had just infuriated what Mr. Buckley calls “the militant student community” by publishing an open letter urging them to “think harder and learn who Helen of Troy and Nausicaa were and, for God’s sake, stop talking about relevance.” One sample from Mr. Burgess: “What have I, a person of a very ancient generation, a person who’s already 55, to say to young men and women in their late teens and twenties? I think I have something to say, but this is contested, and not only by the young. It’s contested also by people who should know better–the professors, the lecturers who put themselves beside the young deliberately, hoping thereby when the revolution comes, if it does come, that they’ll get some sort of special preference, discounting the fact that they’ll probably be the first to be put up against the wall and have to face the firing squad.”
Summary by Firing Line staff
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Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. “The Young”
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Taped on June 27, 1978The last time Muggeridge was on Firing Line, Buckley reminds us, it was to comment on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first television interview (#S225); a few weeks before today’s show was taped, Solzhenitsyn had again made waves, this time with his Harvard commencement address. Solzhenitsyn, with those great burning eyes, speaks like a prophet. Muggeridge, with his twinkling eyes, speaks like a benevolent grandfather–but the two men wind up saying much the same thing, whether speaking of the City of God or the City of Man. Muggeridge: “Every courageous man in the West who believes in freedom and equality will have a go at them [the South Africans], because that’s very easy. But–” Buckley: “Or Chile.” Muggeridge: “Chile, not quite so easily, because there aren’t many black people there, and it’s not within the orbit much of the West; but South Africa is the absolutely favorite thing. In order not to have to do or say anything about the Gulag, it’s perfect. . . . I’ve been reading Spengler in these dark days. Do you ever read it?” Buckley: “I’ve managed to avoid it.” Muggeridge: “You won’t avoid it for long.” Summary by Firing Line staff.
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Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. “Muggeridge Revisited”
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Taped on May 1, 1967De Sapio was the Tammany Hall “boss” defeated in 1963 by a young “reform Democrat” named Edward Koch. Buckley attempts in this hour to explore how party leaders actually wield their power, but De Sapio is wary and can’t be drawn. Buckley: “Suppose I had been a district leader and said, ‘Mr. De Sapio, I love you like a brother, but, in fact, I want Adlai Stevenson nominated [as opposed to John F. Kennedy].’ What happens to me? Do I get thrown in the East River?” De Sapio: “You are applauded for your candor.” Buckley: “You are not suggesting that you wouldn’t put . . . pressure on me? Unless you were in a position to put pressure on me, Mr. Kennedy wouldn’t be so concerned to get your support–isn’t that the way it works?” De Sapio: “Not necessarily.” Buckley: “I’m not necessarily against pressure, I just want to know more about the mechanics . . .” De Sapio: “I don’t think that’s the proper word; I think that a better word would be an understanding.” Summary by Firing Line staff.
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Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. “The Regular in Politics”
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Taped on January 23, 1973
“More attention,” Buckley begins, “is given to the politics of Texas than to those of practically any other state of the Union. There is, of course, the matter of the hugeness of Texas; but there is also the tradition of Texas–rich, powerful, self-assured, demanding, cocky, impenitent.” Mrs. Farenthold is a Democrat who has fought the Democratic establishment on the grounds of its corruption (“We don’t have clean-cut bribery any more. It’s all with stock manipulation or sale of ranch lands at inflated prices or disposition of oil leases”)–although she is evidently shocked when Mr. Buckley asks whether “the Federal Government ought to intervene in Texan affairs in order to set things right.” To Mrs. Milburn, the problem is that Texas has “a one-party monopoly and it breeds corruption… You may change some of the players but the plays remain the same.” Mr. Dugger admits that “I would prefer an honest Republican to a dishonest Democrat”–but instantly carries the fight back into the enemy’s camp over the way Texas primaries are run. A hard-fought, entertaining hour in this larger-than-life state.
Summary by Firing Line staff
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Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. “Texas Politics”
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Taped on December 2, 1974
General George Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had set off an avalanche of criticism by referring publicly–in the context of emergency aid to Israel following the Yom Kippur War–to the extraordinary influence of Jews on our foreign policy. He had been quickly defended, not in every particular but on the main point, by the Jewish journalist Stephen Isaacs. This lively discussion, full of detail, ranges from the Holocaust, to voting patterns of Jewish intellectuals, to the emotional effect of the 1967 Mideast War: Isaacs: “Well, the Jew, up until that time, was this impression of a desk-bound, cowering sort of individual, who was led off, unprotesting, to a cattle car to be taken to his death. Well, ‘67 changed all that. Suddenly the Jew became a very strong person…. When I was a kid growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, and I was a 230-pound tackle, the people there who had never met a Jew couldn’t believe I was really a Jew…. It just didn’t fit with the image.”
Summary by Firing Line staff
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Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. “Jews and American Politics”