FIRING LINE TRANSCRIPT: Democratic Culture with Guest Leslie Fiedler (November 15, 1974) by BUCKLEY, William F. Jr

Columbia, South Carolina: Southern Educational Communications Association, 1974. Very good with minor wear, fraying to back cover along spine. Non-profit Org stamp is blacked out and replaced with second Non-Profit stamp postage (assume to be an error in initial mailing). Mailing label to Notre Dame Catholic H.S. on back cover. FIRING LINE was produced and directed by Warren Steibel, Other guests on this telecast were Gerald Duchovnay, John Taylor, Steven Brodeur. Buckley was an American conservative, author and commentator. He founded the political magazine National Review in 1955, hosted 1,429 episodes of the television show Firing Line from 1966 until 1999, and was a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist. George H. Nash, a historian of the modern American conservative movement, believed that Buckley was "arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century... For an entire generation, he was the preeminent voice of American conservatism and its first great ecumenical figure." Buckley's primary contribution to politics was a fusion of traditional American political conservatism with laissez-faire economic theory and anti-communism, laying groundwork for the new American conservatism of U.S. presidential candidates Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan. Throughout his career as a media figure, Buckley had received much criticism, largely from the American left but also from certain factions on the right, such as the John Birch Society and its second president, Larry McDonald, as well as from Objectivists. In 1965, Buckley ran for mayor of New York City as the candidate for the new Conservative Party. He ran to restore momentum to the conservative cause in the wake of Goldwater's defeat. He tried to take votes away from the very liberal Republican candidate and fellow Yale alumnus John Lindsay, who later became a Democrat. Buckley did not expect to win (when asked what he would do if he won the race Buckley responded, "Demand a recount.") and used an unusual campaign style; during one televised debate with Lindsay, Buckley declined to use his allotted rebuttal time and instead replied, "I am satisfied to sit back and contemplate my own former eloquence." (Judis, 1990. William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives).