Preface: The Making of William F. Buckley Jr. -- Introduction: The Making of Firing Line : A "Bare Knuckled Intellectual Brawl" with "No Production Values!" -- Forging a New Image for the Right : Goldwater, Extremism, and Stylish Conservatism -- "Apodictic All the Way Through" : Firing Line Takes on Communism -- From "We Shall Overcome" to "Shoot, Don't Loot" : Firing Line Confronts Civil Rights and Black Power -- Chivalrous Pugilism : How Firing Line tried to K.O. Women's Lib -- Tripping Over Tricky Dick -- From the Mashed Potato Circuit to the Oval Office : Ronald Reagan, Firing Line, and the Triumph of the Right -- Conclusion: In Praise of Honest Intellectual Combat

"Few conservatives are as revered and admired as William F. Buckley. Buckley is best known for founding National Review, the flagship journal of the right. But his long-running talk show Firing Line was equally important, because it allowed him to reach beyond the conservative enclave and engage millions of mainstream Americans. When Firing Line premiered in 1966, only two years after Barry Goldwater's blow-out defeat in the 1964 presidential election, it seemed as if liberalism had decisively won. Buckley's liberal guests clearly thought so. Yet he gamely and serenely soldiered on in his role as a public contrarian, making the case for conservative ideas and assuming that his side would ultimately win because its arguments were better. In time he was proven correct. Buckley's show--challenging, exciting, and always unpredictable--engaged the most urgent issues of the day and paraded the cream of America's intellectual class across the screen. The guest list reads like a who's who of midcentury American liberalism-David Susskind, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, along with major conservative figures like Henry Kissinger and Milton Friedman. It was also responsible for inspiring several generations of conservatives"--