Next on booktv from our recent coverage of the Chicago Tribune printers row with dust, Kevin Schultz details the relationship between william f. Buckley junior and Norman Mailer. Todays program is being broadcast live on cspan2s booktv. We will leave some time at the end for audience questions then you can just come out up to the microphone to the side of the stage so the home viewing audience can hear the question. He can keep the spirit of that test lit fest going yearround with a subscription to the premium book section fiction series in membership program. Also please download the app for more info on lit fest as well as access to our digital book store store. 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 for todays program jane daly. [applause] thank you. Im jane daly from the university of chicago. I teach American History then im very happy to welcome my colleague from the university of illinois in chicago Kevin Schultz. Kevin is a historian of modern United States and american politics. He wrote a fabulous book on religion in american politics in the mid20th century. The book is called tristate america how postwar catholic and choose 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 in a book thats not called a scholarly book is i think in the modesty of the author in making invisible all of the incredible archival work that he has done all of the notetaking and the months and months of questioning and finding sources and thinking critically about things. Kevin has written a wonderful new book that is just now being published. I believe the hardback copies are out there which you should all buy. This book is called buckley and mailer sub five. It of course deals with the friendship between William Buckley and Norman Mailer, a a friendship i did notice that 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 i knew of both of largerthanlife figures. Norman mailer this novelist and one at the inventors of new journalism and somebody who is just a great firstperson voice on the 1960s and just a huge personality and william f. Buckley who was any way 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 newspapers today. Ransom center at the university of texas in austin. A couple of those letters have picked up in a magazine and i was leafing through the magazine one night and i read some of the letters. I stopped cold because i read one of the letters between Norman Mailer and buck late and there was cutting humor. There was really deep insight into what was going on in the 1960s. They were obviously friends and i have been sitting around thinking about what to write on next as far as my next book to the 1960s i wanted to tell the story from the 1960s. It has become this time in our past that is almost mythologize but not quite. D. C. Madam madmen and some of the movie. I was there too and i thought that taking the figure on the left and the figure on the right both these articulate really smart really and voices and investigating their friendship was just a way to tell a great story about the 1960s. As i look at the archives and i looked at the letters and i looked at the debates and the Television Shows they were on together there they are debating the cold war. There are they are debating the civil Rights Movement. There they are debating the womens Rights Movement and their the whole friendship takes them on a tour for all the major events of the 60s and 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 the book right there. I can tell the story of the 60s or a least a story from the 60s being attacked from the left being attacked from the right from this funny friendship friendship. I think its surprising to us today that sadly indicative of where we are politically that they could he absolute diehard political opponents. They both ran for mayor cleared city which was another thing i had forgotten. They founded as you pointed out their own magazines within weeks of each other National Review on the side of buckley and the Village Voice which again i didnt realize Norman Mailer had a big role in founding that. So there were clearly political opponents in the sense of their stands on the major questions of the day but they were not enemies. They were friends and thats part of what i think makes this such a compelling story. Why did they get along so well . They came from vastly different worlds as you point out. What was the bond that held their friendship together besides the love of arguing which i think is clearly something they both enjoyed. Absolutely they both 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 colon the streets. Just a really brilliant guy goes to harvard. Buckley on the other hand he is catholic, a staunch catholic that he lives more or less what we thought of as a quintessentially waspy life. He is raised in a huge mansion with 114 years. The house has a name, its called rate down. He has private tutors. There were 6 00 p. M. Mohsin this house so they would bring in a piano teacher to go from one kid to another and there were 10 in the family. Different backgrounds but then he goes to gail so they both are white men and they both get ivy league educations. They end up serving in world war ii the end of action on the referee of the action that they have that is common experience. Both of them have a complaint, dramatically different prescription for what america should be but they have a very similar complaint to one another but the common culture postwar america about to leave it to Beaver Society about the postworld war ii culture that gets built and so in that common complaint against this 1950s culture they realize that they had something in common so you have these two brilliant guys who are complaining about the same thing even though they want the country to go in completely different directions. Add to the common background the common complaint and also there really is, their love of argument their love for of cracking jokes and making fun of each other and thats where the friendship came from. Their love of making fun of everybody else to should be in there because they are as unsparing on pretty much anybody they talk about as they are about themselves. Tell us more about this thing they had in common this critique of america. What were they unhappy about and what was that . You can dislike leave it to beaver or 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 war ii veterans . That was the interesting part for me to write to analyze this postworld war ii culture. It is in some accounts Richest Society that it was ever built. The income inequality was at the lowest it had ever been in since i should add so there were a lot of great things about the society and people coming out of this called the greatest generation and yet here are these two people coming from these generation who are pillorying it. I wanted to analyze it. What were the things they were complaining about so i set up a tripartite image of what the culture stood for what the beliefs were, the central belief and the rational thought that was going to carry the day for us. We could trust and the bureaucrats to cure us from the Great Depression or when the Second World War or develop the interstate highway system to get us places so there was this belief in rational thought and progress. Its a fundamentally american belief and in the 1950s it was at its peak. Then another part of this trip trip trip ticket i developed this is belief in a friendly capitalism where they government is going to take your corporations and corporations arent going to necessarily push back hard on paying taxes. Of course nobody likes to pay too high taxes but this is the time when the president of General Motors gets tapped to be the secretary of defense as i can imagine a time when i had to make a decision that would be bad for General Motors and bad for america. Intervene there to see if anybody can guess what the top personal income tax rate was under eisenhower. I think that was 78. Hard to imagine today. Now we are half that. And then the third part of my triptych painting here is what i call for rules of society which has to do a with sort of the basic demeanor the rules about a womans hair and how high her skirt had to be above her knee and a mans haircut above his ears and what kind of shoes he would wear also how you would address somebody your principle or your boss, mr. Or mrs. Very formal. There were these rules and embedded in these rules for the higher acute society how you were supposed to live in order to get ahead. And so 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. They couldnt push beyond and mailers case the sexual limitations or the use of bad words. He wanted these kinds of freedoms and buck lee for his part, he wanted freedom from the bureaucratic state. You wanted freedom from government to get government off of our backs to use the famous line. You talk about how freedom and how to get it and what it means and what to do with it is one of the clues that hold the friendship together and indeed that pulls them apart because their debates are quite divisive on this question. Freedom has got to mean more to them than haircuts and good manners. I will say that mailer flunks the haircut tests. I think at any point during this decade but i wonder if you can tell us, if id be illustrative to talk about their attitudes towards the civil Rights Movement because when you were saying we have these rules in which everyone says mr. And mrs. My thought was acceptable out people in which white people in the south at least deliberately withheld those terms of respect because they did not want to recognize africanamericans as people worth addressing with honorifics doctor, mr. Mrs. , professor. Yeah so the story in the book starts with this budding friendship which starts in 1962 in chicago. These two guys are brought together. They are both in their late 30s and it was as equally young promoter who wanted to get the left and the right are doing this guy named john golden who decided he was going to host a debate between but leanne mailer and he was a brilliant promoter because he was going to post it two days before a title fight promote this debate exactly the same way as the fight. Outside of the grayer tino theater outside of chicago he had the billboard opposite but we mailer and yet posters everywhere set up to be just like the title fight. They were brought together and they had this ears and funny debate. Buckleys first line out of the gates as 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. There were people like Abbie Hoffman there are and a lot of the new left comes out of this and the new right was there. At the end of the debate they realize they dont want to score simple points like a debate but it occurs to both of them that they are both trying to shape the future. Theyre both trying to push out of the bounds of these cold war assumptions this postwar liberalism. They want to create what comes to be called as we all know at the 1960s. They want these radical movements on the right and the left to push beyond. One of the first that comes up that you speak of his civil Rights Movement and this is course of movement for freedom. Its called the freedom movement, the wash march on washington for jobs and freedom. Freedom is the key phrase there and buckley and mailer have complicated relations with the civil Rights Movement. Neither one can say we are sterling supporters of civil rights although to be fair mailer does support the civil Rights Movement and he did think the honorifics you are talking about were moved way more significant than a name. It was were spurred respecting the person as a fellow human being. Yet for his part he didnt have that many africanamerican friends. He had all sorts of problematic understandings of what my people were. He thought of them as hypersexualized, living for the moment kind of people because they never know if they are going to be around tomorrow. He wrote his famous essay in 1957 called the white and James Baldwin hated that. James baldwin and mailer were really good friends. He had a long response called a love letter to Norman Mailer a black void looks at a white way but elysee supports the movement. He understood the 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 have 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 you who can sit next to who. Instead he crafted to arguments that we recognize today for better or for worse really. He first of all thought that most africanamericans werent yet civilized to have access to the boat. He felt the same about uneducated white people too and of course there 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. There was this not yet civilized not yet ready argument. The other argument that buckley coined was what was called the bootstraps argument whereas he would say the irish the jewish came to america with nothing on the ship and they raise themselves up by their bootstraps and succeeded. How come africanamericans havent done that . What is wrong with your culture and your people . Deoxy says this and the celebrated debate against James Baldwin. The cast of characters in my book was so much fun. Theres James Baldwin and betty for dan and gore vidal and Truman Capote became to this story. In this debate with Baldwin Buckley spells out this bootstraps argument completely ignoring the fact that the g. I. Bill had all sorts of segregation regarding local control. The new deal had all sorts of segregation and how it would be implemented. White americans benefited from those pieces of legislation. One of the things that is interesting is the way these authors are going on tour around the world debating each other over and over again. I think people knew what they were getting if they had James Baldwin and William Buckley or William Buckley and Norman Mailer. One question is why did anyone care what these authors. . Its hard to imagine asking any of our major novelist today well 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 ruling. People were looking to the smartest people in the world room to explain to the people what was going on. 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 tablets as much as they could appear in the books section and an oped piece writing about the cold war. They could talk on all sorts of subjects. They were fun to listen to. I think really people enjoyed listening to them. As i talk about this book i had people come up to me and say i disagree with Everything Else up we ever said and yet i love to hear him talk and i love to hear him use his expansive vocabulary that the vocabulary that is famous for and i love the way he showed respect to the opposition. He let them air their opinions and have a voice and that he would destroy them. But he would destroy them with his intellect and his wet and not simply by yelling louder at them. Exact weight so i think the combination of these things really matters. Ive been asked quite a bit recently where are the public intellectuals of twoday . Where the people who are these largerthanlife people who can