From Unbeginning to Unend

THE UNMAKING OF A MAYOR by William F. Buckley Jr. 341 pages. Viking. $6.95.

The unmaking had its unbeginning when elegantly eloquent Conservative William F. Buckley Jr. got to thinking seriously about one of his "semi-jocular" newspaper columns, in which he had "vouchsafed a paradigmatic platform, theoretically useful in any large-size American city." From there, it was no more than a few thousand syllables into the 1965 New York mayoralty campaign as the Conservative Party contestant against Republican-Liberal John V. Lindsay and Democrat Abraham Beame.

"There never was," writes Buckley, "a less deliberated, less connived at, less complicated entry into any political race." He was under no illusions. A spoiler redeemed by a sense of humor about the political grotesqueries of New York--and, happily, about himself as well--Buckley merely set out to give his lumps to all comers, notably Lindsay, whose campaign Buckley characterizes as "sheer, utter, hopeless, humorless, philistine fatuity." For all that, Buckley got a respectable 341,226 votes--not bad for a gadfly.

Although he writes at yawnful length about real and imagined distortions of his positions as carried in the press, and at even greater length about what those positions really were, the charm of this book lies in Buckley's unfailing awareness of the absurdities of campaign rhetoric and rigmarole. He recalls that during televised debates, Lindsay carefully arranged in front of him vast numbers of index cards "on which were graven in Magic Marker salient points or statistics." Admits Buckley: "I had a mad impulse, one time when he went off to pose for a picture, to scramble the cards around, or maybe doctor the statistics just a little, horrible bit." Buckley also recalls envying candidates who could "manage a warming half-smile" for the audience when the panel moderator introduced them. He himself had practiced the smile at home, but "I completely spoiled the intended effect of a sort of reserved benevolence by breaking out in a disconcerting sea of teeth."

When, at campaign's end, Buckley wandered out of the political wonderland he had wrought, he was bemused by the thought that he had "really and truly become a politician--and how would I formulate that sin at my next session with my confessor?" Given the entertainment with which he enlivened New York's 1965 campaign, Buckley should probably be assigned no greater penance than reading his own book--twice.

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