This is John Batchel, a conversation with my colleague Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution

about Bill Buckley and his opinion of experts and his opinion of the elite and his opinion of

people who make decisions of the U.S. government. It was not high. There is a witty way to put this,

of course. Peter quotes it in his most recent article at Real Clear Politics,

that Mr. Buckley said that he would rather trust the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than he would,

and then he named a distinguished body the Harvard faculty.

What does that mean?

Well, here Peter explains.

And all these decades later,

it still brings a smile to everyone's face, and then more than half nod, yes.

Peter Berkowitz on Bill Buckley

and the Boston phone book.

More of this tonight.

What he was getting at, what he understood himself to be saying, I believe, is that the Harvard University faculty is intellectually corrupt and corrupting.

How do we know that?

Because he wrote a book about 10 years earlier, early 1950s called God and Man at Yale. There's no suggestion

that Yale was differed from its elite partners in higher education. And the argument was that

elite education, and not only at Yale, was teaching collectivism in the form of statism at home and collectivism in the form of

um uh... uh...

uh... i should say atheism in uh... within the humanities and that this was undermining

America at home and undermining America's efforts in the Cold War.

So I think that's what Buckley had in mind.

...