Welcome to the 31st annual chicago lit road book fest. My name is tom and before we get started i would like to thank our sponsors and thank all of you for coming. Todays program is being broadcast live on cspan2 spoke tv. We will leave sometime at the end for audience questions and you can just come on up to the microphone up to the side of the stage so the home viewing audience can hear the question. You can keep the spirit of lit fest going year round with a subscription to the printers row journal. Thats the tribunes premium book section fiction series and membership program. Also please download the trip took ask for more info on that fast. We encourage everyone to post messages and photos to facebook, instagram and twitter using the hashtag pr al f15. Before we begin we ask that you turn off your cell phone ringers and any flashes on your cameras. With that please welcome our interviewer from todays program jane daly. [applause] hi. Thank you. Im jane daly from the university of chicago. I teach American History there and im very happy to welcome my colleague from the university of illinois and chicago kevin schultz. Kevin is a historian of modern United States in american politics. He wrote at davos book on religion in american politics in the mid20th century. The book is called trifaith america how postwar catholics and help america to its protestant promise. The title gives you a hint of how exciting and interesting the book is my urge you all to read it. That was a scholarly book and this book is equally a scholarly book. The difference between a scholarly book and a book that is not a scholarly book i think in the modesty of the author and making them visible all at the incredible archival work that he has done all of the notetaking and the months and months of questioning and finding sources thinking critically about things. Kevin has written a wonderful new book that is just now being published and i believe the hardback copies are out there which i think you should all buy buy. This book is called buckley and mailer the difficult friendship that shaped the sixties. It of course deals with the friendship between William Buckley and Norman Mailer a friendship i didnt know existed until i read your book. So i guess i will start out by asking you how did you know this friendship existed . How did you get started on this book collects. Thank you very much for coming and that generous introduction. This book was so much fun to write because they knew of both of these largerthanlife figures. Norman mailer does novelist and one of the inventors of new journalism and somebody who is just a great firstperson voice on the 1960s and a huge personality and william f. Buckley there was an equally large personality on the right founder of National Review and it never occurred to me that they would be friends. After Norman Mailer died he sold his papers to the Harry Ransom Center at the university of texas in austin and a couple of those letters got picked up in a magazine and i was leafing through the magazine one night and i read some of the letters. I just stopped cold because i read one of the letters between Norman Mailer and buckley and there was cutting humor. There was deep inside into what was going on in the 1960s. They were obviously friends and i have been sitting around thinking about what to write our next as far as my next book. In the 1960s i wanted to tell a story from the 1960s and it has become this time in our past that is almost mythologized but not quite. You see madman and some of the movie. People are talking about trying to understand it and i was there too. I thought by taking a figure on the left and a figure on the right those articulate really smart brilliant voices and investigating their friendship was just a way to tell a great story about the 1960s. As i looked at the archives i looked at the letters and i looked at the debates and i looked at the Television Shows that they were on together. There are they are debating the cold war. There they are debating the Civil Rights Movement. There they are debating vietnam and their whole friendship takes you on a tour through the major events of the 60s and hear these brilliant articulate funnyman who are trying to figure it out in these gorgeous letters back and forth to each other so i thought thats it thats the book right there. I can tell a story from the 60s being attacked from the left and being attacked on the right it is funny and fun friendship and. Is surprising to to us these days and its really kind of sadly indicative of where we are politically that they could be absolute diehard local opponents and they both ran for mayor of new york city which was another thing i had forgotten. They founded as you point out they found that there are magazines within weeks of each other. The National Review on the side of ugly and the Village Voice which again i didnt realize Norman Mailer had a big role in founding that. There were clearly political opponents in the sense that there has been some major questions of the day but they were not enemies. They were friends. Thats part of what i think makes for such a compelling story. Why did they get along so well . Came from vastly different worlds as you point out. What was the bond that help their friendship together besides a love of arguing which i think was clearly something they both enjoyed. Absolutely did of love to argue. A couple of things. He said they came from different backgrounds and thats true to a point. Norman mailer was middleclass jewish boy from brooklyn aspirational family playing stick while in the but 170 iq or 162 iq, just a really brilliant guy. Goes to harvard. Buckley on the other hand, hes catholic and is pretty staunch catholic buddy lives more or less what he thought of as a quintessentially waspy life. Raised in connecticut in a huge mansion with 114 rooms. The house has around called great elm. He yes private tutors flown into educate him. There were six pianos in the house so they were ringing at piano teacher that would go from one kid to the other. There were 10 children in the family. They had different backgrounds but he goes to yell so they are both white men they get ivy league educations. They end up serving world war ii band of action and on the periphery of action but they both have that is a common experience and both of them have a complaint, dramatically different prescription for what america should be that they have a very similar complaint of one another about the common culture of postwar america about the leave it to Beaver Society in the postworld war ii culture thats built. In a common complaint against the 1950s culture they realize they have something in common so you have these two brilliant guys complaining about the same thing even though they want the country to go in completely different directions. Add to there and background, common complaints and their really ensign love of arguing their love of cracking jokes and making fun of each other and thats where the friendship came from. Their love of making fun of everybody else too should be in there because they are not sparing to anybody to talk about as they are on themselves. Tell us about this thing they have in common this critique of america. What were they unhappy about . s you can dislike leave it to beaver or dislike ozzie and harriet but you dont have to start a magazine against it. So what was wrong with america in the early 1960s for these world were to veterans . The interesting part for me about writing this book was to analyze this postworld war ii culture. It isnt some accounts the Richest Society of rep told. And, equality income inequality was at the lowest it has ever been in since i should add so there were a lot of great things about Society Coming out of the greatest generation and yet here are these two people coming from that generation who are just pillorying them. I wanted to analyze that. What were the things they were complaining about . s so i set up a tripartite image of what the culture stood for, what the police were the central belief in the rational thought that would carry the day for us. We could trust in the bureaucrats to cures from the Great Depression or when the Second World War for developing interstate highway system dig to get us places. There was this belief in rational thought congress. Its a fundamentally fundamentally american believe that in the 1950s it was at its peak. Another part of this trip that i develop in the book is belief in a really friendly corporate capitalism or the government is going to take care of the corporations and corporations are not going to necessarily push back too hard on paying high taxes rate nobody likes to pay too high taxes but this was a time when the president of General Motors when his secretary of defense as i can imagine a time when i would have to make a decision or something would be bad for General Motors and also be bad for america and vice versa. Intervened there to see if anybody can guess what the top personal income tax rate was under eisenhower. I think it was 78. Hard to imagine today. And then the third part of my painting heres what i call the rules of society which has to do with sort of the basic demeanor of the people the rules about a womans hair and how high her skirt had to be a ernie and a mans haircut above his ears and what kinds of shoes he would wear and also how you would address somebody to principal or your boss, mr. Or mrs. , very formal. There were these rules and embedded in these rules were the hierarchy of society of how you were supposed to live in order to get ahead. Both buckley and mailer looked at the society and even though it was the Richest Society in the history of man with a greater share of equality with higher taxes as you make mention they felt sort of limited. They felt like they couldnt be truly free and they couldnt push beyond in mailers case this sexual imitations or the use of bad words. He wanted these kinds of freedoms and but we for his part wanted freedom from the bureaucratic state. He wanted freedom from government to get government off our backs to use buckley sprays. You talk about freedom and what it means and what to do with it is one of the glues that hold the friendship together and that pulls them apart because the debates are quite divisive on this question. Freedom has got to mean more to them than haircuts and you know good manners. I will say that mailer flunks the haircut test at any point during this decade but i wonder if you could tell us it might be illustrative to talk about their attitudes toward the Civil Rights Movement raid you are saying we have these rules in the society where everyone says mr. Or mrs. My thought was except to black people in which white people in the south at least liberally withheld those terms of respect because they did not want to recognize africanamericans as people worth addressing with dr. Mr. Mrs. , professor. The story of the book starts with this budding friendship which starts in 1952 in chicago. These two guys are brought together both in their late 30s and there was this equally young promoter who wanted to get the left and right are doing this man named john golden who decided he would host a debate between buckley and mailer and he was the william promoter because he would host it two days before the title fight. He was going to promote this debate exactly the same way as the fight. Outside the grand medina theatre in Downtown Chicago get the billboard out the set up the mailer and yet posters everywhere. It was setup set up to be like the title fight. They were brought together and they had this fierce and very funny debate. Buckley his first line out of the gates is i dont think i can hold the attention of mr. Mailer because he will never stop looking at the worlds glands and they went back and forth like this. You read this and you think what fun it would have been to have been there and there were people like Abbie Hoffman and a lot of the new left comes out of this and the out of this in any right as they are. At the end of that debate they really realize that they dont want to score simple points like a debate that it occurs to both of them that they are both trying to shape the future. Theyre both trying to push out of the bounds these cold war assumptions this postwar liberalism as we have come to call it. They want to create what comes to be called as we all know what the 1960s. They want the radical movements on the right and the left to push beyond. One of the first that comes up as you speak of is the Civil Rights Movement and this is of course a movement for freedom. Its called the Freedom Movement the march on washington for jobs and freedom. Freedom is the key phrase there and buckley and mailer have very complicated relations with the Civil Rights Movement. Neither one of them looking back on a can we say were sterling supporters of civil rights although to be fair mailer did support the Civil Rights Movement and he did think the honorifics you are talking about worm more specific than just name. It was respecting the person as a human being as a fellow human being and yet for his part he didnt have that many africanamerican friends. He had all sorts of problematic understandings of what black people were. He thought of them as hypersexualized, living for the moment kind of people because they never knew if they would be around tomorrow. He wrote the famous essay in 1957. James baldwin hated that. James baldwin and mailer were really good friends. James baldwin hated that and had a love letter to my friend Norman Mailer. At least he supported Civil Rights Movement. He understood that kind of freedom honoring someone as a human being is capable of living up to their fulfillment. Mailer understood that. Buckley for his part has a problematic relationship with the Civil Rights Movement and basically he helps articulate the conservative opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. Which is how would you characterize that . Against everything. He could have taken a conservative libertarian argument which would Say Something like the state has no business telling who sits next to who. This is not the states responsibility and instead he crafted to arguments that we recognize today for better or worse really. He first of all thought most africanamericans werent get civilized to have access to the vote. He felt the same about uneducated white people too but of course there will wasnt a systematic movement trying to prevent white people from voting while there was this Huge Movement to prevent black people from having to vote. So there was this not civilized argument. The other argument that buckley coined was what was called the bootstraps argument. Where whereas he would say the irish and the jewish came to america with nothing on a ship tell us about your views on the social questions facing america today. Its a great question. I think this was a moment in American History when the experts were still whirling. People were looking to the smartest people in the room to explain what was going on and at this moment there was this incredibly small group of mostly white men but not entirely but mostly, who were brilliant in their way who were articulate, who led these largerthanlife lives who could appear on the page six tabloids as much as they could appear in the book section or an oped piece writing about the cold war. They were fun to listen to. I think people really enjoyed listening to them. Ive had is as they talk about in this book people come up to me and say i disagreed with Everything Else ugly ever said and yet id love to watch them. I love to hear him use the expansive vocabulary that he is famous for and they love the way he showed respect to the opposition. He let them air their opinions and have a voice. Then he would destroy them. He would destroy them with his intellect and wit and not by yelling at them. Exactly so i think a the combination of these things really matters. I have been asked quite a bit recently where are the public intellectuals of today . Where the people who are these largerthanlife people who can illuminate us on isis and the kardashians at the same time. This is the kind of thing that buckley and mailer and gore vidal and James Baldwin were able to speak on all the subjects. I think there has been a decline and i dont think we are less really and now than they wear them but i do think there has been a decline. I think part of the reason is because we now have 114 channels to choose from so everyone can go to their own corner and listen to the voices that they want to hear. At night back in the 1960s and 70s there were three networks and very few outlets for people so you are almost networks if a large platform. Somebody must have thought the way to draw viewers is to have two people who disagree debate each other as a post today having five people all of whom agree with each other have a joint conversation about the things they agree about. Have we lost the capacity to tolerate opinions that dont conform precisely to our own . No of course not. Maybe on tv we have but as human beings i dont think that at all. Another thing that has happened is that changes that especially mailer on the left in the 1960s were advocating have taken hold and that is to broaden the table to invite more voices to sit at the table africanamericans would women all sort of underrepresented voices to come to the table. To an extent they won. Now there was a time in the 60s when guys like buckley and mailer they felt like they could speak on behalf of the country. They felt like they could speak to the nation. They could be the walt whitman eliminating the whole country to itself and with the rights revolutions of the late 60s and 70s that became exposed as always fiction i guess but it became exposed as such and that would take a whole lot of tenacity of whole lot of guts to say i can speak on behalf of the nation. I dont think anybody has done that quite successfully at and not as successfully as these people have. Wait a few weeks. I think there are a number of potential candidates out there who will definitely speak for america. It sounds a little bit like they invited so many people to the table that they lost their seats. In some ways thats exactly right. You talk about these largerthanlife figures in when hes has largerthanlife mailer was married and divorced six times. Married six times and only divorced five times. Buckley was married once. When you talk about largerthanlife the named Truman Capote springs immediately to mind another one of our great novelist interesting brilliant character. He had a ball. The blackandwhite ball and ive never understood how Truman Capote he had a ball but there was a ball and it was referred to as Truman Capotes blackandwhite all which everybody who was anybody went to. Can you tell us again why is that important not just something that makes us all long for elbow gloves . The story of the ball again as i wrote this book it was sort of, i wanted to engage with the 60s and there they are in Truman Capotes novel in a fistfight. There they are debating James Baldwin. The story told itself. It was so much fun to write and so one of the great pleasures is that i could tell the story of Truman Capotes blackandwhite wall. In 1966 he had just finished and coldblooded it was this huge success and he didnt have a hook to write Truman Capote. He had all this money now this time but no book to write. He always wanted to throw the blackandwhite masquerade all so he did. He rented out the ballroom and the plaza hotel in new york city and he invited all of his friends and whats interesting about the story and wide the blackandwhite all is said estimating moment in time is because you look at his friends word and its all these literary intellectuals all these politicians were there. The editor of the Washington Post was the belle of the ball and that ensured a huge number of politicians coming from washington d. C. Secretaries and families of former president s. They were kennedys there in trumans fair in all sorts of families there. Then of course new york socialites the circle that Truman Capote he mostly swam in. So he embarked these new york wealthy elite the cultural literary intellectuals and they were there with franks somehow turned Lillian Hellman and things like that. There was this moment when americans both buckley and mailer wrote about it afterwards. There was a time when americans could pat themselves on the back and realize the health of the nation was good. This was 1966. This is why they almost get in a fistfight he kisses at moment where it starts to break down their relationship but also the sense that america as a whole is conscience of the part of a common good that can speak to everybody. As the elegant blackandwhite ball are walking into the plaza there were porters there taking pictures and Norman Mailer the worst dressed in the whole entire ball. There were people protesting saying theres a war going on. How can you celebrate while this is happening . Do you fistfight between buckley and mailer and i hate to spoil it but mailer has two or three or 12 drinks and he sees george bundy working in the Defense Department for lbj. He is Holding Forth on how the war is righteous and good and mailer goes up to him and challenges him and says how one earth can you possibly believe this . This is the blackandwhite ball. Lillian halim is there and she starts dressing down norman. How are you picking a fight at the ball and he said he felt like he was the younger brother and his younger sister was dressing him down in front of the football team. He went back to the bar and had more drinks and look for someone else who could fight and he saw his old friend william f. Oakley. Hes goes up to him and says put up your dukes, lets fight about vietnam and buckley says seasoned mailers impossibly drunk. He puts his arm around him and they walk off together. Its an amazing moment and not just a celebrity story but filled with the substance of the breaking apart of American Life as reflected through this friendship. To push you a little bit on the breaking of American Life because you admit this idea of the commonweal meaning this idea that there is whats good for america is good for General Motors and vice versa. This is an idea that both mailer and buck wade subscribe to but certainly someone like James Baldwin knew all along that there was not one vision of this commonweal. There were at least two and probably three. Can you imagine tom hayden crashing the blackandwhite all or Stokely Carmichael even better crashing the ball. Are they oblivious to the generational divide . Are they unwilling in 1966, are they unwilling to even factor in the Civil Rights Movement as an important component part of the commonwealth or as a final critique of the commonwealth or did they just turn their backs on these things and argue with each other . Yes and no. In 19666 is right is black power is coming. The more Nonviolence Movement of Martin Luther king is still carrying on. Starting to pick apart and 65 66 and 67 absolutely absolutely but there still is hope that we can reform this idea of the commonweal to the way that buckley and mailer wants to see fit. I dont want to say they dont see it taking apart but they sense theres this break is coming. There has been too much built up in the early 60s. Their there are challenges from the left and from the white right. As represented by these conservative parties starting to get votes throughout the country. The right of the left are attacking the common middle and think very vision has a chance to carry the day so they are fighting for this vision. But they dont see is the distraction of a comment wheel. They dont see this possibility that americans will give up on the good of the nation in favor of the good of themselves. When you say the destruction of that, and well both of them see this happening and it alarms both of them in here i think it began as the world war ii generation. They may not have been fighting for the same things at least not at home but what are the signs that the commonweal is falling apart. Is there something broader suggested that the whole thing is going to topple . Its a good question. Theres a great moment that i was delighted to discover where in 1968 buckley invites mailer onto a Television Show that he had that was well viewed and propped him up and elevated him to yet another status higher up on the celebrity status and he has mailer on after he writes this incredible book which tells the first hand account and Norman Mailer was the star of the book as he was for most of Norman Mailers books and its the story of the march from the Lincoln Memorial to the pentagon pentagon, sort of this antiwar march and when you get to the pentagon they are going to invade the corridors of the pentagon and destroy americas war machine. They all know that they are not going to do this but this was the stated goal and when the protesters got there they were going to levitate the pentagon and get rid of the evil spirits and things like that. Mailer writes this Remarkable Book and buckley has mailer on the Television Show on firing line and its a great interview. You can youtube it now. One of the questions the buckley asks is the one that the conservatives and middle americans wanted to know what the left at the time were protesting against the war. It says are you now an enemy of the country correct. Does this make you as a representative of the left and enemy and mailer is flabbergasted. The language he uses if he says he has a steering love of country. He loves this country and what it can be so his mission was to make it the best it possibly could be. He failed in that in many reasons for his own personal failings was that his vision wasnt as inclusive as it might offend or as brilliant as it might have been that he and buckley both shared the steering love of country. I just love that phrase and when you get to the later 60s and people protest and get laid commonweal against the war machine and seeing the country in those ways thats where buckley and mailer pullback from the new left and the new right. In doing so theres a little bit of your rowboat irrelevance. You said something that sparked an idea and now it has gone away. What is it . Talk a little bit about their humor because you said it was fun to write this book and i think one of the reasons it was so fun is because they were really funny. If mailer writes his own obituary as if it were written by buckley so its a. If buckley style talking about baylors death which is just one of the things that they like to do for each other. There are all these jewels in the archives. You would never know it unless you look. I think was 1979 boston magazine as mailer to write his own obituary and its very very funny and it starts off talking about how his old friend bill buckley called him i cant remember what the words were because they were buckley words about 12 syllables long and the acronym was. Rmv but the piece you are referring to is 1975 a Charitable Organization was auctioning off tonight with bill buckley. They were looking around saying who could auction off bill Buckley Alex Willmar men mailer so in the archives i found this typewritten here to auction off the night with bill buckley and Norman Mailer writes this description of what bill buckley is like and i couldnt repeat it because the vocabulary word searches huge and its really funny. Id try to figure out what all the words were. I tried to explain it to somebody and they said those words dont make sense. He mailed off a clean copy to ugly right after the auction and he said for you and buckley writes back and he says thanks i havent had a thesaurus around long enough to figure out what you just auction off but i will try to sound as smart as you made me sound. Lets get together for a drink sometime. It was a great archival find and that was one of the things do every single debate they were and they just had so much fun making fun of the other one for their vices. But it was a friendly kind of making fun of. They werent attacking too deeply and i knew when they were making these personal cuts they still were going to debate the deeper subjects that they didnt let the personal given the way of the deep philosophical arguments that they wanted to have. Thats one of the biggest changes from today is that it does seem to be very ad hominem. People do attack each other rather than contesting the ideas that they are putting out. I think mailer and buckley certainly didnt pull their punches and both of them punched hard but they didnt call each other names. Well they called each other names. But what they did too was the defendant the other person to their own parties. So in late 1963 and North Carolina of all places buckley was talking about in his speech talking about Norman Mailer. He was engaging with the radicals on the left saying what is wrong with the left is whats wrong with Norman Mailer. Its not his wives or his girlfriends what happens when you try to live a life free of foundations. When you give up christian ethics and these kinds of things. They look at how radical you are and theres nothing to groundview. He talks about mailers bad words and his descriptions of sex acts and things like that. The students at the university of North Carolina attacked him for using foul language. He said how can you engage with the ideas of Norman Mailer if you dont engage with the ideas of Norman Mailer . Do you really need to understand what the left is argued all about if you want to argue with them. I do want to monopolize you. I think we have people who are anxious to ask a question so we will take some questions from the audience. Yes maam. It would help if you could go to the microphone. Sorry about that. You havent talked about their relationships to the Womens Movement which were very powerful. Both of them are antagonistic and Norman Mailer loved the idea of women being independent enough to sleep with him but not big enough to be political in the world so i would like you to talk about that. Theres a whole chapter in the book on this exact question and im grateful. The first time i ever presented on this friendship i had no business doing it. I was thinking of this book and presenting it. The first question someone asked was that one. How are you going to write a book about the 60s based on two old white guys and wheres the Womens Movement . s both of them were so wrong when it came to this movement in a lot of ways and the section where i talk about this at the last section of the book where buckley and mailer are starting to watch the 1960s and early 70s watch American Life move on both of them being quite as as they were in the middle 60s. At this moment where they have to recalibrate before they can get involved in public life and one of the big challenges the both of them faces the rights of women. The story of mailer has a perfect encapsulation of this. He imagined itself as the leader of the sexual revolution of the 60s but it meant to have as many lovers as he could possibly happen not be punished by the constraints of society. Hugh hefner was one of the people that appears in the book as the paragon of the sexual revolution. So in 1969 Time Magazine calls of Norman Mailer and wants to interview him about the sexual liberation and Womens Movement. He thinks he is the star because hes the one promoting this and when it comes out Time Magazine is cape kate millett was on the cover of Time Magazine. She spent 30 pages destroying mailers fictional understandings of women and how was based on power and conquest. It wasnt based on equality at all and mailer realized these movements for freedom for pushing in directions that he was unprepared for and he was really unwilling to acquiesce. So he writes a book about it like he does because hes Norman Mailer and to promote it in to sell books because he is a paramount promoter above all else he has this debate at town hall in new york city which brings for feminists up diane trilling the poet jill johnson and two other women in that debate him. He comes in a threepiece suit and hes walking around. He calls them all ladies the whole time. Hes in on the joke in some ways. He knows he is being made a buffoon of but rather than take their side he plays the odd man out trying to sell books in some ways. After that he takes a step back from public life and he starts writing about celebrities. He is no longer the walt whitman to america and it takes them a full decade to recalibrate. When he does recalibrate hes writing about utah and a murder that takes place there as opposed to writing about what life in america is like today. Its a great question. Thanks. I was fortunate enough to read Richard Hofstadters the pier and id style of american politics just a few weeks ago and its great hearing you talk about this. I was thinking that these two men are so brilliant that they couldnt make themselves demonize what the other person was saying. They had to really think about where the other person was coming from and where the other side was coming from so they couldnt go to that level of vituperation that we kind of do now like sean hannity. Thats exactly right in every single one of their letters not every but every time that the long letter they say lets get to you there sometime and after dinner we can retire just the two of us and i can cure you of all the problems in your thought and you can cure me of all the problems in my thought. They have this impact for each others intellect. They had this respect for people people for each other as people. They did think the other person might be able to teach them something and that was the spirit of engagement that they had. It wasnt about scoring points. It was about figuring out the best way to live a fulfilling life in the United States. These guys have all sorts of flaws as we just talked about without respect was the ground of their friendship. It sounds like people on television today are not as smart as buckley and Norman Mailer and they might do better if they were smart enough to figure out the rebuttals to their own arguments might be. I also think they are not rewarded for being as capacious thinkers for being as engage with the other side and think about who crosses lines. Maybe you get jon stewart debating bill orielly but that is seen as a sideshow and thats maybe not a bad parallel. Bill orielly is very successful at what he does. Jon stewart is a comedian and a very effective and good one and i dont mean to criticize these people but they are rewarded in different ways than how mailer and buckley were awarded. Speaking of crossing lines mr. Buckley played a key role in the stifling of the john birch and the Republican Party would perhaps be better off if there was someone to speak and fill that vacuum. Kimmie speak to that . One of the things that buckley was central in doing and why hes such an important figure in American History is he in the 1950s not singlehandedly but it was safe to say he was a key player who took these very strands of conservative thought traditionalist ideas that we need to follow the rules scrupulously these libertarian ideas im bring them together into what we now know as the Republican Party in some ways. Part of the reason he was so successful at doing that was because he did excommunicate the most ideologically pure voices. He got rid of all ayn rand. He didnt get rid of her. He started excised or from the movement. He got rid of the John Birch Society and chastised the pope are not living up to Church Additional living. He wanted to curtail the uglier parts of what have been american conservatism and getting rid of its antisemitism. He was very active in getting rid of the antisemitic threat of conservative thought in the 50s. That was the conservative party that he will. I do think if you look at the Republican Party today he might Say Something along those lines would be ideological. Needs to be excised or curtail the given a smaller part a smaller voice in the conservative party but i also think he would be instrumental about wanting the republicans to win. Let us suppose that the publisher w. W. Norton was developing a new text called anthology to modern political literature. Which letters of buckley and mailer would you submit is an excerpt or which transcript would you submit is being most representative of the conflict between liberalism and conservatism in the 1960s . Well its funny they use the word between liberalism and conservatism because one of the things that united them was they saw americas having a liberal center and we have appropriated that word and we think of that is as the leftwing. Playboy magazine what a great intellectual life. We have this intellectual heavyweights battling it out in chicago two days before price spike in the transcripts going to Playboy Magazine over two issues of Playboy Magazine. Upon a drinking a martini and buckley and mailers names next to it. A month later there is a letter to the editor from Norman Mailer saying i dont care what you call me. Call me a communist a rebel a left conservative. Whatever you do dont call me a liberal. Liberal is the liberal center that both the left and the right were attacking. But to get to your question specifically, one of my favorite letters that i found between the two of them happened after selma selma. Bill buckley was invited to prop up the new york city cops the Catholic Organization of new york city cops and he was trying to defend the Police Action at selma so it didnt go over well. Lets just say that and there was a huge theory going on in an New York Post attacking buckley for defending the plan and the police at selma. Buckley discovers the fathers of the Holy Name Society had taperecorded this lecture so he calls a press conference immediately. A press conference is full. They play the tape and when he starts to talk about some of the tape breaks. Its watergate all over again. Everyone is leaning an up and they fixed the tape there are 30 seconds missing and it was the moment when he was talking about selma. He has not recuperated at all in the press. Then there was this beautiful funny backandforth. His letter comes than a month later from Norman Mailer and it says i suppose you have just replaced me as the most hated man in American Life. He talks about how the left should view the cops versus how the conservatives should view the cops. Buckley writes back and engages with some of those ideas and the series of letters with this dynamic interplay on times are changing great how should we view them and understand them without becoming the most hated in American Life. Thats illustrative and one of the points you make in the book which is each of them is fearless and they are vilified. Each one of them is vilified many times that they are not afraid to say what they think and to tell people things that nobody wants to hear. I think thats another one of their hallmarks. You have to have a strong ego. You have to have thick skin but when they talk of themselves as citizen intellectuals they see that as their duty is to say things that people may not want to hear and may really come back at them for. They both have tremendous egos without a doubt. They both were told from a young age that they were the smartest person in the room and people needed to listen and respect them. One time when they are on firing line together buckley says suppose you are in the soviet union. Would you be more afraid of the mailer or a Buckley Administration and mailer laughs and says im glad im not the only egotist in the room. But yes they were fearless because they were confident but they also werent afraid to pick fights and as we talk about with the Womens Movement to risk losing fights and looking like a buffoon. To their credit but it also came with all this baggage. Is a person who lived in that era also as a baby boomer and a person who would be considered a conservative because i voted for Richard Nixon but i like what you said about the appropriation or perversion of the word liberal because jefferson and adams disagreed. Those were trying times or so intellectual people can disagree disagree. I wanted to mention one little thing. Buckley and i remember buckley admired him. I have read mailer and i dont like the language for the very intellectual person as well. You didnt touch on the fact that he shot his wife and didnt touch on belly of the beasts that we will leave that alone. He actually stabbed her. And she still didnt divorce him. It took a little while. You mentioned earlier in your introduction he mentioned a little thing that irks me on the thing when he said buckley grew up the acronym white anglosaxon protestant. Theres one other group which is protestant. Thats another core group. That would include j. Edgar hoover and Richard Nixon who grew up in poverty, not poverty but you know so im just saying thats an area that the young catholics were rebelling against their church and there were a lot of them marching on the left with father mohaqiq etc. That was leaving out a group of americana so thats what im saying the wealthy buckley and Kennedy Family and catholic frustration also wanted somebody to look at as well. Who became a punching bag is the Jaeger Hoover and the protestant people that came from poverty. I used the phrase waspy. I did mention he was catholic but i use it as a cultural marker is the refined life he lived. I have a part in the book where he talk about what it meant to him to be catholic. He was no fan of vatican ii and the changes. He didnt hate all of them but he was not a friend of them. He was a devout catholic and claim to have never wavered in his belief his whole life. Id like you are suggesting seem to think that made him, we talked about the competence of ego that made him made them work called that because he was sure he was in possession of the truth with a capital d truth. This was something he had been taught through his faith. When you have possession of the truth and catholics were vilified and sometimes discriminated against in d. C. This and it helps them develop this. Ive rebelling against the wasp elite absolutely right. His catholic faith was really important him and foundational. I was going to say he killed the father but he actually killed his alma mater by writing it which you could see apart is the product of the catholic at yale facing a roomful of protestants. The class of el i dont remember