Did anyone catch this over the weekend in Sam Tanenhaus's New York Times Magazine cover story on William F. Buckley's 1965 campaign for the mayor's office in New York?

...although [Buckley] did not sound like a bigot - and indeed he was not - he seemed to give comfort to those who were.

A startling instance of this occurred in April, even before the campaign began. Buckley was the featured speaker at the Holy Name Society Communion Breakfast, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, and he caused a sensation. Speaking after the famous Selma marches, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Buckley, addressing the uniformed crowd of 5,600 (about one-quarter of the entire force), accused the news media of emphasizing the brutality shown by the Alabama police and editing out their initial restraint and of playing up the story of Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit housewife who had gone south to help civil rights workers and been murdered there. "Why, one wonders, was this a story that occupied the front pages from one end to another, if newspapers are concerned with the unusual, the unexpected?" Buckley asked. "Didn't the killing merely confirm precisely what everyone has been saying about the South?"

Yes, gosh -- why would this story make the front pages?

Ordinary people horrified by the attacks went to Selma to add their voices to the cry for justice. One who answered the call was a Detroit housewife, Viola Liuzzo, 40, wife of a Teamster official, and mother of five....

After the march ended, thousands had to get out of the city before nightfall. Viola Liuzzo got her car and headed back to Selma with a load of passengers. She had not been following the civil rights workers' rules of the road very carefully over the past several days. She drove fast along the highway, stopping for gas at white-owned stations in Lowndes County. Her Michigan plates made her green Oldsmobile conspicuous ... A carload of whites pulled up behind her, bumping the rear of her car several times before passing and racing off. She commented to Leroy Moton, a black teenager who had been helping her drive, that she thought these local white folks were crazy.

As soon as their passengers were dropped off at Brown Chapel in Selma, they headed back toward Montgomery for a second load. On the way out of town they stopped at a traffic light, and another car pulled alongside. In it were four Ku Klux Klansmen from Bessemer, a steel town near Birmingham, including FBI informer Gary Rowe, who was sitting in the back seat. Collie Leroy Wilkins looked out the window and saw Mrs. Liuzzo and her black companion stopped beside them. "Look there, baby brother," Wilkins said to Rowe, "I'll be damned. Look there."

Eugene Thomas, who was driving the Klan car, said, "Let's get them." When the light changed they began chasing the Oldsmobile, careening through the darkened swamps of Lowndes County at almost 100 mph. Rowe later said he tried repeatedly to persuade the others to give up the pursuit, but Thomas insisted, "We're not going to give up, we're going to take that car."

As the Klansmen closed in on their prey Thomas pulled out a pistol and handed it to Wilkins and told the others to draw their own weapons. Rowe tried once more to get them to abandon the game; but Thomas said "I done told you, baby brother, you're in the big time now." A moment later they pulled alongside the Oldsmobile. Wilkins put his arm out the window, Mrs. Liuzzo turned and looked straight at him and he fired twice through the glass. The fourth Klansman, William Eaton, emptied his pistol at the car. Rowe said he only pretended to fire his weapon. Then their car sped on away.

Yeah, it certainly would have been much more appropriate for the press to focus on the many demonstrators who weren't killed that night with malice aforethought.

And as for the "initial restraint" of local police officers, perhaps there was an explanation other than their fine moral character:

Gov. Wallace told the White House the state couldn't afford to pay the cost of mobilizing the National Guard for the march, giving President Johnson the opportunity he was looking for. He federalized 1,900 of Alabama's National Guard, authorized use of 2,000 regular army troops, as well as 200 FBI agents and U.S. marshals to protect the march.

In any case, it's a good thing Buckley was, indeed, not a bigot. If he had been, it might be appropriate to be offended by his remarks.