This year I am at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where I'm completing my book on fire line, which was William M. Buckley Jr.'s public affairs show that ran on PBS from 1966 to 1999. Buckley was a key figure in pushing the extreme aside of the conservative movement and forging a more mainstream image for right-wing conservatism. Fire line premiered in 1966 at a moment when people thought liberalism had really won in America. He created the show in large part to debate with liberal guests to put liberals and left-wingers on the firing line. It's the name of the show. To show what a proper right-wing conservative response would be to the left and to liberals. If you watch the show from 1966 to 1980, which is in many ways the golden age of the show, you see him encounter so many of the key liberals and left-wingers of that era. It's astounding. The people like Betty Friedamp, William's Liberation Movement, a Huey P. Newton in Onder's Cleaver from the Black Power Movement, Nixon was on the show, up before he was president. Reagan was on the show, so it was time to break gold water was on the show. Victor Navaski, the former editor of the nation, and so you really get to see the encounter between left and right over this period as the country started veering more to the right. People who were later not obscure were on the show when they were obscure. For example, a very young marine named Oliver North was on the show shortly after the meal. I massacred when there were debates over war crimes happening in Vietnam. You have, or you could have Mr. Buckley, a marine general, an army general come down here on this show and tell you what his specific waters were when he was a colonel or you could have a lieutenant colonel come up and tell you. I think it would be massively disbelieved because here's a man who in the eye of the public because of the way this thing has been presented, is trying to cover his tail in front of here's the vernacular with paper. I think I want to go on the set of firing line and watch it happening live. I'm not sure which episode because there are so many good ones. The show's often start with a camera, moving over the crowd, there's a couple of great episodes, one with Timothy Leary and one with the filmmaker Otto Preminger, shot with students from Queens College asking really great questions. Do you plan in the future to use these means to settle with present day problems? Let's say as in the cardinal you dealt with Nazism, do you plan to deal with let's say communism? If I have a chance yes, I would like to make a film. What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? Well a story. You see I make films I basically needed the cardinal as a personal story. How about I chose freedom? Well, might be interesting. Whether you're politically the left or the right or more towards the center, I think you can really learn a lot from thinking about William F. Buckley from looking at his program because it was a space where left and right could have honest debate. Sometimes it was clear who it won, often it was not clear who it won. You can watch it as a liberal and learn about liberalism. You can watch it as conservative and learn about conservatism and learn about Buckley's idea of what true conservatism was. And it was a moment when political debate was not driven by soundbites. There was real discussion. These were hour long shows. And so in a cable news environment like we have now, it's hard to find that kind of extended debate. People get a minute to be a talking head and then you move on to the next person. Not to the cable news is divided politically so that you have the liberal station, the conservative station, Fox News, MSNBC. And a firing line is present in such a different picture of how we can debate politics, how we can think about politics, and how we can listen to each other on the left and the right.