Recently, I read a bit (I don’t remember where) by Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, airing his grievances with his dead father. It wasn’t terribly gracious, but such is the way these days, and given that he clearly had a difficult relationship with his father, one can see where the various eulogies might have gotten a little old. Still, I don’t think his extended argument that everyone who had a good opinion of his father was wrong really accomplished anything much worth accomplishing.
Of more interest, I thought, was Garry Wills’ piece on the elder Buckley in the most recentAtlantic, which set out to defend its subject against the charge of elitism and snobbery (an odd charge to be mounted, when one thinks about it, against the man who famously declared that he’d rather be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard). Wills was, for a time, a protégé of William F. Buckley’s and quite close to him, before becoming politically and personally estranged from him over the issue of the Vietnam War, and he certainly presents a fair number of his erstwhile mentor’s warts; the difference is that he does so in the course of also trying to present some of the man’s real virtues, and thus offers a more balanced and thus more valuable picture.
There was a time when I would have been bothered to read a critical portrayal of someone I had long admired. Admittedly, depending on the person and the substance of the portrayal, that can still be bothersome, for one reason or another; but I’ve come to realize over the years that more often than not, if I’m bothered by such a thing, it means that I was expecting too much of someone simply because I admired one aspect of their life. The mature Christian, I think, is never surprised to find the saint a sinner, nor ever compelled to find the sinner any less a saint. May we bear one another’s sins with grace.