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“In the 60s [federalism] grew fat on segregation, taking up the states’ rights argument for allowing jim crow to die in bed. The Tribune couldn’t countenance the [1963] Birmingham bombings, but William Buckley’s National Review, which would champion Barry Goldwater for president the following year, was able to. ‘Let us gently say,’ it said, ‘the fiend who set off the bomb does not have the sympathy of the white population in the South; in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur–of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro.’ The magazine said some evidence supported this possibility.
“Fourteen months later the National Review weighed in on the murders of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney in Mississippi. It noted that a federal grand jury in Neshoba County had returned indictments against local police officers. ‘It is everyone’s impression, including ours, that some, at least, of the Neshoba police are a crummy lot,’ said the magazine airily. ‘But we pause for reflection. Are “violation of the Civil Rights Act” and the even more tenuous “conspiracy to violate” going to become a catch-all charge by which the Federal Government can get its hands on nearly any citizen?’
I doubt if these second thoughts come anywhere close to the order of hand-wringing Goldberg has in mind for Ayers and Dohrn. Not that a comparison should be forced. Ayers and Dohrn opposed a war that deserved opposing, but did so egregiously, violently, and ineffectually. To whom should they apologize — the members of the nonviolent but equally ineffectual resistance whose name they sullied by association? Buckley supported the greatest institutional evil of 20th century America, however only with words and money. To whom should he apologize — God? The truth is, Americans aren’t much for apologizing — in large part, I’ll surmise, because the demand for an apology is so often so patently political. What we do instead is move on, and in the end the obit writers kick us around just as little or as much as they want to. Buckley took a fair number of odious positions in his life, but eulogists are reminding us he was fervent and nonpartisan in friendship. In the end the pleasure of his company won out and the baggage of segregation cost him nothing at all.
