The Conservative Mind

William F. Buckley made a speech down at Yale the other night. Buckley, you might remember, is the author of God and Man at Yale and of McCarthy and His Enemies, about the only book favorable to McCarthy to have been reviewed in the New York Times His subject was "The Liberal Mind," of which he probed three aspects: its inconsistency; its intolerance; and its contempt for facts and evidence. This, he said, is the kind of mind that dominates both political parties, from President Eisenhower leftward.

To show the inconsistency of the liberal mind, he told a story about Mrs. Roosevelt. In her regular question-and-answer column in the Woman's Home Companion, she had been asked whether she would shake the hand of either Senator McCarthy or Andrei Vishinsky. She said she would shake with both. The next week, she was asked whether she would have shaken with Hitler. She would have, Mrs. Roosevelt answered, in Hitler's early years; but not after he had started his mass killings. Reminding his audience that Vishinsky had been responsible for some mass killings himself, Buckley offered this as evidence of the inconsistency of the liberal mind.

This must have made an impression on the audience, for the hand-shaking subject dominated the question period. Asked whether he would have shaken hands with Vishinsky, Buckley said most decidedly not. Nor Stalin. Any Communist? No, he said. Did that mean he favored ending diplomatic relations with Russia? Yes. And would he boycott any international conference with Communists, given that it might involve shaking hands as a preliminary? Yes, Buckley favored no conference of that kind.

Would he shake hands, asked one cynic, with anyone whom he knew had shaken hands with a Communist?

"I would," Buckley replied, "but I would feel quite differently about it."

After making it clear he would not have shaken hands with Hitler either, he tried to drop the subject. No luck. A student who had been to Europe on a Fulbright Scholarship asked him about Franco? Yes, said Buckley, he would shake hands with Franco. Franco and not Stalin? "The meaning of his life is different from that of Stalin's."

He elaborated:

"One who wanted to traipse through Madrid making speeches against Franco would find it much different from trying to traipse through Moscow making speeches against Stalin."

"As one who has traipsed through Madrid," said the Fulbright, "I don't think there would be any difference at all."

"Where are your scars?" asked Buckley.

"I didn't risk getting any."

As the evening wore on, Mr. Buckley's reception line lengthened. He would shake hands with Peron, though not Tito, and with British diplomats who had shaken with Communists--though he wouldn't feel good about it. Would he have shaken with FDR even though Buckley thought he had betrayed us into the Second World War and sold us out at Yalta? Yes, said Buckley, because there was a difference between "subjective" and "objective" treason.

As the audience left, Mr. Buckley probably felt as if he had developed a case of bursitis. Whatever other maladies the audience might have wished on him might better be left unsaid, since they are evidence of the liberal mind's intolerance toward ideas on the right.