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For all its championing of free enterprise, National Review gets precious few ads. The captains of industry that it celebrates are reluctant to return the favor, largely because the magazine does not reach enough readers to suit them; profits take precedence over ideology. Besides, Buckley is not a totally reliable supporter. In one breathtaking column for the Review, he managed to equate Henry Ford's divorce with the suicides of Publisher Philip Graham and Stephen Ward, Christine Keeler's keeper. All were men, wrote Buckley "wanting in the stuff of spiritual survival." Ford yanked its advertising. BOAC, on the other hand, is one of the Review's most faithful advertisers. Muses Buckley: "Maybe only a state-owned airline can afford to advertise in National Review."
To relieve the magazine's annual deficit of $200,000 or so, Buckley contributes his own substantial earnings from his column, from Firing Line, and from his lectures (fee per appearance: $1,000). Nevertheless, every year he has to warn of the magazine's imminent extinction unless contributions are forthcoming. The latest appeal, last June, brought 2,000 contributions, enough to make up the loss.
Art of Maneuver. During the years he has edited the Review, Buckley's own views have remained consistently conservative; few people are permitted to influence his thought. One who did was Whittaker Chambers, who added some warmth and humanity to Buckley's bookish conservatism. Chambers, says Buckley, "was an anti-theory man, a poet—not an exegete." A line he once wrote to Buckley is engraved on his memory: "To live is to maneuver." And despite his devotion to conservatism, Buckley has learned to maneuver. He has urged his fellow Roman Catholics to moderate their hostility toward birth control and abortion, thereby alienating Brother-in-Law Bozell, who publishes the conservative Catholic magazine Triumph. Believing in the innocence of Edgar Smith, a convicted rapist now in the death house in Trenton, Buckley has done his level best to win him a retrial. In recent columns, he has come out in favor of L.BJ.'s rent-supplement program, compulsory arbitration of major labor disputes, and "massive" aid to the ghettos—scarcely traditional conservative causes.
Though he resists suggestions that he has become a liberal in any sense, Buckley admits to being "less insistent on rhetorical purity than I was a few years back. It's one thing to complain that Government has got into a situation. It's another to keep repeating it all your life. In an ideal society, I'd be against compulsory arbitration; yet I think people are a bore who create a theology around private enterprise." It has been a firm conservative tenet that the state must be kept as limited as possible. Yet that belief has run smack into the conservative demand to fight the cold war as vigorously as possible. "Today, as never before," concedes Buckley, "the state is the necessary instrument of our proximate deliverance."