WILLS, Garry

(b. 22 May 1934 in Atlanta, Georgia), renowned essayist, historian, professor, critic, and Catholic layman whose work in the 1960s addressed many of the most controversial issues of the era, from the Vietnam War to civil rights.

Wills was the son of John H. and Mayno (Collins) Wills. He went to school in Wisconsin and spent six years in a Jesuit seminary before deciding voluntarily to leave hopes for the priesthood behind. He earned a B.A. degree from St. Louis University in 1957, an M.A. degree from Xavier University in Cincinnati in 1958, another M.A. degree from Yale University in 1959, and a Ph.D. from Yale in 1961.

The culmination of Wills's education coincided with the beginning of the decade of the 1960s. He was completing his M.A. at Xavier in Cincinnati when William F. Buckley of the National Review brought him to New York to discuss further writing prospects. The Buckley enterprise was virtually a Catholic cell of conservatives, some of whom, like Buckley, had served in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Wills, who was beginning doctoral studies at Yale, felt privileged to be working with a national publication. However, he found that the magazine was an enabler of its friends and was reluctant to allow harsh criticism of its own. For example, Wills wrote an unfavorable review of Whitaker Chambers's Cold Friday, which Buckley refused to print. While contributing to the magazine, Wills began to explore writing opportunities with other publications.

Bob Hoyt, the editor of the National Catholic Reporter, contracted with Wills to appear as conservative counterpoint to John Leo. Wills found himself espousing liberal viewpoints on civil disobedience, the civil rights movement, and the U.S. war in Southeast Asia. Wills did not see how combating Communism in Vietnam was in the nation's interest. In 1962 he had taken a position as an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University with the hope of embarking on an academic career. He soon found that his articles in the National Catholic Reporter were being syndicated to diocesan publications. One of his articles espoused the candidacy of Spiro Agnew for governor of Maryland over George Mahoney, whom Wills castigated as a racist. This article appeared in the Baltimore Catholic Review, and Wills's department chair ordered him to stop publishing locally or risk losing his tenure. Wills refused to stop and was fired despite his argument that his scholarly work equaled that of his peers. The department charged him with not sticking to his discipline.

Wills moved to a position as adjunct professor in the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center. He declined invitations to return to his old department when the administration changed. Nevertheless, he retained ties to academia while pursuing work as a professional writer. A friend from graduate school and also a former seminarian, Neil McAffrey, offered him an advance of $7,000 to write a biography of Buckley. McAffrey was an editor with Doubleday and had previously hired Wills to write short religious booklets. Wills began his Buckley book with a chapter dealing with Buckley's debate with the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, the radical Yale campus minister. Buckley was impressed and urged Wills to send the piece to Harold Hayes, the editor of Esquire. Hayes hired Wills as a contributing editor at a salary higher than what he earned at Johns Hopkins. Wills subsequently dropped the biography, alienating McAffrey, who demanded a return of the advance after reading Wills's attack in the National Catholic Reporter on Alabama Governor George Wallace, who was actively fighting against racial integration in his state.

The Esquire experience in the 1960s was an epiphany for Wills. Hayes was a daring and demanding editor who spared neither expense nor people in seeking out good stories. Wills was assigned work on Jack Ruby, the killer of the John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Wills's partner was Ovid DeMaris, a smart, determined investigative journalist with connections within the justice system. Wills wrote a piece on Ruby's motives for killing Oswald and another on the Ruby trial. From both, he determined that there was no larger conspiracy regarding the assassination of President Kennedy. Wills followed with another collaboration with Demaris on Soviet leader Josef Stalin's daughter, which gave Wills insight into the CIA and domestic surveillance techniques.

Hayes now turned Wills to Detroit and Los Angeles to study the growing urban turmoil and government plans to combat social unrest. Wills collected his articles in his book The Second Civil War: Arming for Armaggeddon (1968). The book also included his observations during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which he covered for the National Review. He exposed the stupidity of both police and military in creating a riot with their arbitrary tactics. Wills followed with another piece criticizing the Vietnam War on the grounds that the United States was not fighting in self-defense. His arguments were to reappear in his book Nixon Agonistes in a chapter entitled "Our Country." McAffrey accused him of "going over to the militants," and the National Review cover superimposed Wills's head on the body of the activist and Black Panther leader Huey Newton. His break with the magazine and with Buckley was a foregone conclusion as Wills's thinking moved decidedly left of center.

A virtual wunderkind of the conservative revival, Wills was now attacking racism in reviews of works such as James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, which he praised in the National Review. In running the review, the magazine suggested that it had an enlightened view of racial issues. Wills was again accused of having "gone liberal," for in 1964 he had suggested that a system of preferential hiring be used to compensate blacks for historic grievances. Buckley repeated the suggestion in a column of his own, and he, too, was attacked for selling out to liberalism.

Wills had also written in the National Catholic Reporter that historic guilt for racial wrongs was part of the conservative heritage. He argued that those who prided themselves on inherited values and traditions had to admit to accountability for historic wrongs. He went so far as to declare that "the new Negro … would rather be feared than patronized and he is getting his way, and he should."

In Wills's illuminating personal study Confessions of a Conservative (1979), he takes up much of his activities during the 1960s. His reflections on student riots, antiwar rallies and sit-ins, campus unrest, the intransigence of the government on Vietnam policy, civil rights, and the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., can be found here as well as in the several other books he has published.

Wills has shown himself to be a master writer of analogies among and between often seemingly disparate personalities or situations. As a conscientious Catholic, he has risen as a veritable conscience of the church in all its variables. As a thinker, a writer, an academic, and a critic, Wills has always been willing to take action on behalf of his beliefs. His concerns for social unrest are founded on an abiding faith in American institutions such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, and the pathbreaking assertions of respected leaders both within and without the government. Wills was not hesitant about allowing himself to be arrested in protest gatherings against government policy. He also openly refused to pay income taxes in protest against Vietnam policies, the thought of which chastened him later in life as he felt he had been caught up in the cynicism of the American critic H. L. Mencken.

A recurring theme in many of Wills's works is the alienation of portions of society from the government and their subsequent reaction to that government. Another is the infatuation of political figures with power and its uses. His book The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power (1982) displays the perils that awaited the Kennedy family, whose desire for power in the 1960s shadowed all the policies of subsequent administrations. Wills is enamored of leaders and leadership, and he is dismayed and disaffected by those who fail to measure up to the demands of the time. His Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders (1994) counterpoises various historical personalities against one another. Recalling the 1960s, he poses the civil rights leader Andrew Young against the controversial University of California, Berkeley, president Clark Kerr, Young being a proactive agent of healing during racial unrest while Kerr absented himself from the student clamorings for guidance. Kerr alienated those he was charged to help while Young reached out a calming and hopeful hand to his people. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is a personal favorite of Wills, because Wills sees King as a leader who exploited the system for lawful purposes to aid his cause. Rather than tear down and alienate the institutions of the nation, King compelled society and its leadership to examine themselves in the glare of his cause. Wills uses some of the same arguments on those who brandish the Second Amendment as a defense of the right to bear arms. He is a fervent believer in the structure of governmental authority, yet he comprehends the failure of government to do right by its people and to some extent the world at large. In Wills's eyes bureaucracy, incompetence, secrecy, inefficiencies, and hubris too often combine to prevent clarity of thought and a courage to alter course whether it be military policy, civil rights, social policies, or political change.

An inveterate writer, Wills has alternated at university positions, holding positions at Johns Hopkins University and at Northwestern University, where he has been since 1980, first as Henry Luce Professor of American Culture and Public Policy, and, since 1988, adjunct professor of history. Fellowships, lectureships, and titled appointments have been awarded from Yale, Notre Dame University, theUniversity of California, Princeton, Union College, and Edinburgh University.

He has honorary degrees from colleges and universities such as Yale University, College of the Holy Cross, Spring Hill College, and Siena Heights University. He has also won such awards as the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction for Lincoln at Gettysburg; the Organization of American Historians Merle Curti Award; the George Foster Peabody Award; two National Book Critics Circle awards; the John Hope Franklin Award; and the National Humanities Medal. Wills married Natalie Cavallo on 30 May 1959. They have three children.

Much information on Wills and his relationship to the 1960s is found in his writings during the decade in the National Review and the National Catholic Reporter as well as in Esquire. See also his books Politics and Catholic Freedom (1964); Jack Ruby (1968), with Ovid Demaris; The Second Civil War: Arming for Armageddon (1968); Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1970); Confessions of a Conservative (1979); Lead Time: A Journalist's Education (1983); A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government (1999); and Why I Am a Catholic (2002). See also Wills as editor of the New York Times compilation of articles Values Americans Live By (1973).

Jack J. Cardoso