It was a tweet by the novelist Joyce Carol Oates that warned us PBS, the American public broadcaster, had done a doco about William F. Buckley, Jnr and by some touch of providence it was there on YouTube to be watched at leisure. William F. Buckley was one of the most extraordinary conservatives who ever lived and he was also a charmer of positively bewitching powers.

He was a Catholic of the highest and most inflexible kind, relieved to discover the doctrine of invincible ignorance because it gave him the faith that he would see a much loved godless Jew in Heaven. And his political opinions beggar belief. He announced in a debate with the black American novelist James Baldwin at the Cambridge Union no less that ‘Negroes’ were not yet ready for the vote. The author of Go Tell It on the Mountain responded with the courtesy reserved for the great ones touched by Allah. Needless to say Buckley lost the vote overwhelmingly but there was something wonderful about the calm worldly radiance with which he would defend the untenable and unspeakable, a touch maybe of that starry power of personality and a loyalty to personal convictions that you got in Christopher Hitchens and which commanded respect long after you had ceased to agree with him.

Buckley took on Yale when he was an undergraduate and became the ally of a phalanx of former communists of whom Whittaker Chambers was the most notorious. He went a fair way to despising Senator Joe McCarthy and his inquisitorial witch hunt but he seemes genuinely to have believed that communism was the devil’s work.

Nothing was more anathema to William F. Buckley than a Republican like John Lindsay who ran for mayor of New York in 1965 with promises that he would increase welfare and housing and the needs of the common penny-poor person. So this quixotic aristocrat ran as an alternative conservative. In the process this oil-inheriting toff discovered that his lack of faith in tax and welfare meant – somewhat to his surprise – that he had become the natural ally of tough law-enforcing New York police officers eager to suppress liberal demonstrations and adamant in their disgruntlement with big government of the kind Lindsay was proposing with elan and sweeping certitude.

It’s difficult to capture the charm of William F. Buckley which is manifest when you hear and see him talk. The newspapers  – the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, all of them – discovered that the members of the press who had been asked to cover Buckley’s campaign for a while didn’t want to be re-assigned elsewhere because he was so much fun.

What would he do if somehow, against the odds, he were to win the election? The eyes twinkled with affection, the beautiful toney voice drawled with delight at the absurdity of life. ‘Demand a recount,’ he said.

The programme emphasises that although William F. Buckley despised liberalism from the bottom of his soul as rank heresy headed for perdition he actually liked liberals. So we get him (on his talkshow, Firing Line) horns locked with Norman Mailer at his most formidable, each man clearly delighting in the sound of his own voice, as they recite their dogmas like creeds all the more satisfying for the lightning flash of disagreement. We get Buckley amused to the point of enthralment as Allen Ginsberg plays the harmonium and chants the Hare Krishna maha-mantra for some considerable airtime. Buckley didn’t interrupt once only to respond at the end, ‘That was the most unhurried Krishna I ever heard.’

Buckley was no doubt a riddlingly complex man and the mad positions he adopted were not simply satirical cloak-trailing however much the gesture and the pose were as Wildean as you could wish. In 1964 he supported Barry Goldwater’s bid for the presidency – as the very young Hillary Clinton did – even though Goldwater’s politics were so extreme that even baby boomers in middle-class swinging-voter Australia were alarmed by them. Goldwater believed any extremity was justified by the situation in Vietnam and the spread of communism and what this lean authoritative man meant by ‘extremity’ was nuking Hanoi.

So no wonder that supporters of Bob Menzies were saying they hoped and prayed for LBJ’s victory. But there’s no real doubting that Buckley at least at some level of apprehension supported this extremity.

It was a mad time and a mad world however and Goldwater’s hopes were not helped by the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan. In any case William F. Buckley made a speech saying Goldwater would lose and Americans should be forearmed and forewarned. It’s at this stage that he starts getting closer to Ronald Reagan who became governor of California in 1967 and emphasised all the years he’d spent as a Democrat. In 1968 with all the tumult of that year William F. Buckley had his legendary debate with Gore Vidal on ABC television.

It’s an extraordinary performance on both sides. Each of them – the madcap reactionary and the supreme liberal – are such extraordinary orchids in the garden of political debate. For a start they both talk in those voices, so refined and English to American ears and they each have a mastery of debate that’s distinct from but compatible with the music of their eloquence. The debate leaves us like the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet agog with wonder at what language is – though it’s also true that the drama is heightened by the moment when Buckley uncharacteristically surrenders to fury at Vidal calling him a ‘crypto-Nazi’ and mutters antagonistically about his opponent as ‘a queer’.

There’s something extraordinary about these memerisingly actorish men in wordplay together, so aristocratic and so intense. After the show, Vidal says matily that they certainly gave the audience what they wanted. William F. Buckley looks less happy to have met his match. What’s not in doubt is that the debate is one of the great moments in American history.

But the doco is a good introduction to the splendours and miseries of what William F. Buckley visited on America. Like Vidal the histrionic fire in him was unquenchable. Bill Buckley was also a great yachtsman and it pleases some of us that he often went to sea with arguably the greatest literary critic of the period, Hugh Kenner.