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When he is confronting a Firing Line adversary, Buckley's secret is surprise, plus the ability to maneuver his opponent into vulnerable positions. He often hoists the man with the petard of his own argument. When Yale's Marxist-minded Professor Staughton Lynd told Buckley that he had made a trip to Hanoi to clarify Ho Chi Minh's peace terms, Buckley shot back: "Surely, as a Marxist, you don't seriously believe that your little vacation to Hanoi would have midwifed some sort of a dialectical reconciliation which would not otherwise have taken place? Surely Hanoi isn't dependent upon Yale's vacation schedule for deciding how to press its foreign policy?" Or Buckley may carry an opponent's line of reasoning one step further and make it look ridiculous. On Firing Line, TV Star Robert Vaughn started naming the people he thought had conspired to commit the U.S. to the defense of Ngo Dinh Diem's regime in South Viet Nam. "Joseph Buttinger, General Edward Lansdale, Wesley Fishel, Cardinal Spellman . ." Buckley broke in: "And the Holy Ghost?" With these tactics, Buckley often reduces his adversaries to nonverbal floundering. Novelist Nelson Algren simply gave up talking and started singing. "I want to turn you on, Bill," said Timothy Leary. "I want to get you to drop out."
Not everyone is willing to do battle with Buckley on his turf. Buckley was anxious to match wits with Senator Robert Kennedy on Firing Line, offered him $500 and a role in planning the format. But Bobby was not about to rise to that tempting bale. He sent word back through an aide that he would rather not. Asked why he thought Kennedy had turned him down, Buckley replied: "Why does baloney reject the grinder?"
Violently Inflamed. Buckley has a fondness for far-out analogy. Last spring, when John Kenneth Galbraith appeared at a picket line of striking television employees in order to show that he would not cross it, Buckley wrote in his column: "It was a nostalgic demonstration of an old faith, rather as if Marlene Dietrich, emulating the Victorian ladies of yesteryear, were to faint upon hearing an obscenity." Buckley summed up the attitude of Texas Republicans facing the approaching presidential election: "The dilemma is how to be, at once, both a winner and a Republican. That is the lot of the woman, as La Rochefoucauld observed, who is at once inflexibly virtuous and violently inflamed." Listing possible Republican tickets, Buckley offered his own preference—with reservations. "Reagan, Javits—with perhaps the explicit understanding that if President Reagan were to die in office, Vice President Javits would hurl himself upon the funeral pyre in grief."