Rick Perlstein seems to believe that because Buckley was nice to him, we should now forget the evil he did:
I’m hard on conservatives. I get harder on them just about every day. I call them “con men.” I do so without apology. And I cannot deny that William F. Buckley said and did many things over the course of his career that were disgusting as well. I’ve written about some of them. But this is not the time to go into all that. My friend just passed away at the age of 82. He was a good and decent man. He knew exactly what my politics were about—he knew I was an implacable ideological adversary—yet he offered his friendship to me nonetheless. He did the honor of respecting his ideological adversaries, without covering up the adversarial nature of the relationship in false bonhommie. A remarkable quality, all too rare in an era of the false fetishization of “post-partisanship” and Broderism and go-along-to-get-along. He was friends with those he fought. He fought with friends. These are the highest civic ideals to which an American patriot can aspire.
What’s happenening here is that Perlstein confuses Buckley being charming and friendly in person, which really is the least impressive achievement of any human being, with being a “good and decent man”. Just a good and decent man who believed in white supremacy, the stamping out of homosexuality and who prepared the way for the complete conservative takeover and fuckover of America. There are very, very few people who can’t be nice to their friends and families, but it doesn’t matter if, like Buckley, you perpetuate evil on strangers.
Perlstein doesn’t see this because he wasn’t the one to suffer the consequences of Buckley’s actions; he was of the right class and ethnicity, moved in the right circles to be accepted. Buckley and Perlstein both could be “implacable ideological adversaries” yet part as friends because the consequences of their fights were not on their heads. For those of us outside the cocoon it’s different.
Which is why the idea of “not speaking ill of the dead” is so pernicious. buckley was a monster when he was alive and his death didn’t change that. To cover up his crimes in the name of politeness is to falsify history. It already happened with Nixon, with Reagan, so let’s not do this with Buckley.