Buckley Draws Applause at NYPD Gathering

Apr. 4, 1965 - More than 5,600 New York policemen clapped and cheered this morning as William F. Buckley Jr. praised the “restraint” of the police in Selma, Ala., and criticized the civil rights demonstrators.

“The television cameras showed police nightsticks descending upon the bodies of demonstrators” in Selma, the editor of the conservative National Review said, “but they did not show the defiance” of Dr. Martin Luther King and the demonstrators.

This remark brought a standing ovation from the overflow audience of policemen in the New York Hilton Hotel attending the 47th annual communion breakfast of the department’s Holy Name Society, following a mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Buckley said the television cameras showed “none of the restraint” of the Selma police or any of the 20 minutes during which the demonstrators and police faced each other at the bridge, but only the “flurry of nightsticks.”

He said the policemen moved forward “excessively, yes,” but only after the demonstrators “marched in defiance of a lawful order.”

The policemen cheered again and again as Buckley praised “the world of order and values,” which he identified with policemen, and the “world of man bites dog,” which he said was created by racial demonstrators and the press.

“Something is happening to the world when there is a general atmosphere of hostility to the police,” he said.

“The doctrine that a man is innocent until proven guilty seems to have been stretched to the point where the man who apprehends the criminal is guilty until proven innocent. Nobody is more sacrosanct these days than the man who strikes a policeman.”

Mayor Robert Wagner and Police Commissioner Michael Murphy, who were seated near Buckley on the speaker’s platform, maintained a cool reserve during the speech.

Buckley told the group about a policeman in Hattiesburg, Miss., named Humphrey — “apparently not related to the Vice President” — who was shot dead by a Negro in Mississippi 10 days after the Selma march.

“Vice President Humphrey did not appear at his funeral or even offer condolences,” Buckley said. “Dead policemen are undramatic.”

The death of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo could have been predicted, Buckley said, because by “ignoring any patrols of the National Guard and sitting on the front seat with a young Negro,” she might have expected to be shot.

He said this was no more surprising than if the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan announced he was coming to Harlem.

“Men who rail unthinkingly at policemen,” Buckley concluded, “tend to have a relationship with the revolutionaries.”

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