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a day ago
- Politics
- CBS News
Book excerpt: "Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America"
Random House We may receive an affiliate commission from anything you buy from this article. William F. Buckley (1925-2008), founder of the National Review and host of the TV debate show "Firing Line," was a leading political commentator who catalyzed America's conservative movement with his support of such figures as Joseph McCarthy, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. In his new biography, "Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America" (published by Random House), historian Sam Tanenhaus (author of books on Whittaker Chambers and Louis Armstrong) writes about the life and influence of Buckley, whose drive to push America to the right would alter the Republican Party and lead to the rise of Donald Trump. Read an excerpt below, and don't miss Roert Costa's interview with Sam Tanenhaus on "CBS Sunday Morning" June 29! "Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America" Prefer to listen? Audible has a 30-day free trial available right now. Connecticut Yanquis William F. Buckley, Jr., the intellectual leader of the modern conservative movement, rightly saw himself less as founder than heir. Everything he learned, and all he became, began at home. It started with his father, William F. Buckley, Sr., a lawyer, real estate investor, and oil speculator who grew up in the brush country, the scrubland frontier, of Duval County in South Texas. He was thirty-five and had made his first fortune when, on a visit to New Orleans, he met twenty-two-year-old Aloise Steiner, the eldest of three sisters of Swiss and German background—"the very essence of old New Orleans charm," said one of the many men smitten by her. She had a year or two of college, played Mozart on the piano, and told captivating if not always quite credible stories—for instance, of the fourteen marriage proposals she claimed to have turned down before W.F. Buckley began courting her in the spring of 1917. The physical attraction was immediate, almost electric. Many years later the couple's children remembered the "frisson" that connected their parents. The couple also shared a deep and abiding Catholic faith. After the wedding ceremony at the Steiner family's parish church, Mater Dolorosa on South Carrollton Avenue, on December 29, 1917, the Buckleys began their married life in Mexico. W.F. Buckley had been living there since 1908. He had apartments and law offices in Mexico City as well as in Tampico—the oil boomtown on the Gulf where, after building a prosperous law practice writing oil leases, he had gone into real estate and then into oil, borrowing substantial sums to sink five wells on the banks of the Panuco River. Oil speculation was always a high-risk venture, but especially in Mexico. It was in the throes of the twentieth century's first great revolution, its ten-year-long "bloody fiesta," which ended in 1920 with the rout of the right-wing faction Buckley had supported and the election of a new president he despised. It was a stinging defeat, and he would never get over it. Yet he also could say, and often did—to his children most emphatically—that although he had lost, he had done so on his terms, without giving an inch to the opposition. Other oilmen, including some far wealthier and more powerful than he, had submitted to the new order and made lucrative deals with each fresh regime. W.F. Buckley refused to do it. He left Mexico—in fact was expelled by order of its government—with debts totaling one million dollars. In later years he showed his children a treasured souvenir from those times, an architect's sketch of the grand palacio, with private chapel, which W.F. Buckley had planned to build on substantial property he had purchased in Coyoacan. Bankrupt at age forty, Buckley would have to start all over. He had a family to support, his wife and three small children, now living with his mother and two sisters in Austin, Texas. But there was a new opportunity. In fact, having to put Mexico behind him might be for the best. The oil fields in its Golden Lane were nearly tapped out. The great new oil patch was in Venezuela. Once again there were large profits to be made but also many hazards—in this case "hostile Indian tribes," as well as malaria and fatal "liver and intestinal disorders." Visitors were advised to stay no longer than a few weeks. For W.F. Buckley admonitions were a goad. He went to Venezuela, stayed a full six months, and came back in 1924 with leasing rights to three million acres surrounding Lake Maracaibo, spreading east and west, a complexly organized checker-board whose squares "in practically every instance adjoin properties that are being actively developed by major American oil companies," it was reported at the time. The concession was "rated among the most valuable in Venezuela." Buckley, now based in New York, formed a new company, Pantepec (named for a river in Mexico), and with the sponsorship of the Wall Street broker Edward A. Pierce floated stock shares and secured investments from two California majors: Union Oil and California Petroleum. Matching wits against some of the finest legal minds in the United States, W.F. Buckley worked out the terms for an innovative "farm-out." In return for gaining temporary control of a third of the holdings, the two behemoths would cover the costs of exploration and drilling and reap most of the profits once oil was struck. W.F. Buckley would be allotted a tiny fraction of those profits, and he now had funds to send teams of engineers and geologists to explore the remaining two million acres. Remade as a Wall Street speculator, W.F. Buckley bought a suite of offices on lower Park Avenue and furnished them sumptuously, the better to impress investors. He also bought an apartment building nearby where he stayed alone during the week. Jazz Age Manhattan, with its speakeasies and fleshpots and lurking criminal element, was no place for his wife and growing family. They lived on his third shrewd purchase, a large estate in the rural northwest corner of Connecticut. On Fridays, the work week finished, W.F. Buckley walked a few blocks uptown from his office to Grand Central and rode the train home to his family, three full hours through exurban New York—Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess counties—all the way to Amenia, where a Buick sat idling with the Black "houseboy," James Cole of New Orleans, behind the wheel in a chauffeur's cap. Together they drove three miles along a country road and, if daylight remained, enjoyed the vista—the wooded Litchfield Hills and the dipping valley, the bright quilt of dairy farms—and then crossed the Connecticut state line at Sharon, a picturesque village of fifteen hundred, incorporated in 1739 and named for the fertile Biblical plain. A favorite weekend and summer getaway for wealthy New Yorkers, Sharon was famous for its narrow elongated green, originally grazing land, which gracefully stretched for more than a mile from its north end—with storefronts and wooden walkways where in summer elms arched overhead, the branches on either side touching to form a canopy—to South Main Street. There, near the town hall and the Hotchkiss Library, stood what is still today Sharon's chief landmark: a granite-and-brownstone clock tower, forty feet high with a pyramid roof, built in the 1880s by the same firm that designed Theodore Roosevelt's Sagamore Hill estate on Oyster Bay, Long Island. On either side of South Main, set back from the street, were large and imposing manor houses. The Buckleys lived in one of them, Number 32, called the Ansel Sterling House after its first owner, a lawyer and judge twice elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1820s. Sterling had purchased the property in 1808 and then torn down the original brick, replacing it with a Georgian frame structure. Over time the ten-acre property had tripled to thirty acres, beautiful and lush, with thick stands of oaks and sugar maples, outbuildings including barn, stables, and icehouse, and horse trails that wound through the rolling pastures and up into the gentle hills beyond. Today Ansel Sterling's house still stands, though much enlarged by W.F. Buckley. Its handsome entrance with pediment and pillars stares across Main Street at Sharon's two historic churches: little Christ Church Episcopal, with its witch-hat spire, and the Congregational church, the town's oldest. In 1923, when W.F. Buckley first toured the property and rented it for the summer, its most striking feature was the elm that towered up from its front lawn. It had been planted in colonial times by Sharon's most illustrious forefather, the Congregational minister Reverend Cotton Mather Smith, a descendant of Cotton Mather. It was now the largest elm in the entire state, its immense trunk measuring eighteen feet around. In 1924, the same year Main Street was paved for motor traffic, Buckley bought the estate outright and renamed it Great Elm. This was the new life Buckley had conjured in a few short years, seemingly pulled out of thinnest air, for his wife and growing family. So promising did the future look that when a sixth child was born on November 24, 1925, husband and wife agreed that this son, their third, should be his father's namesake: William F. Buckley, Jr. It was always an event when "Father" came home. The children who were not away at school or upstairs in the nursery crowded in front of the house to greet him. "We'd wait there for his car to come," one of his six daughters remembered, "and make bets on which car would be Father's." He was delighted to see them, but even happier to see his wife. "He'd kiss us all and he'd say, 'Where's your mother?' Mother would come and say, 'Darling,' and the two of them would walk out together." No one felt these currents more keenly than Billy Buckley, who had the middle child's fear of being overlooked, lost in the crowd. And the Buckley siblings really were a crowd: ten in all, many of them very close in age, five born ahead of Billy and four after. With servants added, as well as tutors, workmen, groomsmen for the horses, and later a riding instructor and his family, the household numbered more than twenty and was alive with pranks, schemes, hilarity, and strife. Excerpted from "Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America" by Sam Tanenhaus. Copyright © 2025 by Sam Tanenhaus. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Get the book here: "Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America" Buy locally from For more info:
Economist
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Economist
William F. Buckley, the man who put the charm into conservatism
Culture | Standing athwart history, yelling stop Photograph: Eyevine/New York Times/Redux/Sam Falk R EADY to feel lazy and unaccomplished? William F. Buckley wrote his first bestseller when he was 25. Over the next 57 years, he would write more than 50 books, including 20 novels. When he was 29, he founded the National Review, a magazine. When he was 40, he created 'Firing Line', a public-affairs tv show; he would go on to host 1,505 episodes. Buckley wrote and edited thousands of articles, made thousands of public speeches, and once, quixotically, ran for mayor of New York. (He won 13% of the vote.) This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline 'Right on' Will it rev up new fans for the motorsport? Fenix, in Rotterdam, lets visitors make up their own minds American and Irish writers dominate the list Rachel Zegler's streetside 'Evita' reveals a lot about fame and London In this week's list, the water is not so fine In a post-apocalyptic horror sequel, monsters and mockery co-exist
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
What the Godfather of American Conservatism Would Think About Donald Trump
I've often wondered what William F. Buckley Jr., the most influential conservative of the 20th century, would make of Donald Trump as president. A potential answer, I thought, might lie in Sam Tanenhaus' epic new biography of Buckley. It took nearly 30 years and a thousand pages for Tanenhaus to craft the book, but it was worth the wait. The prodigious research includes years of interviews and unfettered access to the family's history. And it's resulted in a fascinating portrait of a man who was an arresting figure, beginning in his days as a Yale undergraduate to his life as a columnist, editor, television star, author, debater, political candidate, and ultimately a key figure in the ascent of conservatism from fringe movement to the highest reaches of power. Yet it leaves unsettled the question of whether Buckley set the stage for the rise of Trump. For me, this is more than an academic issue. I first met Buckley in 1966 when he read my student coverage of his appearance at Yale with amusement and invited me to participate in public discussions with other young voices about politics. These, in turn, led me to appear on the TV show Firing Line as an 'examiner' — someone who could offer different perspectives on his conversations toward the end of the show. It also led to a friendship: He brought me to London for Firing Line episodes, we dined at each other's homes, and I became one of a long line of people — Murray Kempton, John Kenneth Galbraith, Al Lowenstein to name a few — whose companionship he enjoyed even as he staunchly challenged our more liberal opinions. As Tanenhaus' biography makes clear, his gift for friendship was a lifelong quality. There are also far less admirable aspects of Buckley's life. His first appearance in the public spotlight came with his 1951 book God and Man at Yale where he urged alumni and trustees to use their financial power to pressure the university into combating the faculty's more left-leaning doctrines. His second book was a ringing defense of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his demagogic attack on subversives in government. (Tanenhaus does note that McCarthy's foes were less than vigilant about the fact that there were indeed some spies within the halls of government.) Perhaps most shameful, Buckley was a defender of segregation throughout the 1950's and 60's, infamously writing in 1957 that the white minority had to prevail in the South because it was for the moment 'the advanced race.' He was a financial supporter of a newspaper in Camden, South Carolina, that embraced the white supremacist views of the powerful Citizens' Council. (Later in life, Buckley acknowledged that his views on race were wrong.) The books leaves no doubt about just how crucial Buckley was to the shaping of the conservative movement's ascent. 'Without Buckley, there is no Reagan,' more than one voice asserts. But by necessity, it leaves a huge amount of doubt about how Buckley would have viewed the rise of Donald Trump and the lurch away from some of the right's once-sacred beliefs, including free trade and a muscular internationalism. Buckley died in 2008 when Trump was still a political dilettante rather than the formidable politician he now is. In 2000, when Trump was flirting with presidential run, Buckley scorned him as a 'narcissist.' A whole suitcase full of Trump's qualities — historical ignorance, near-illiteracy, vulgarity — would suggest that Buckley would have joined his old colleagues at the magazine he founded, National Review, and devoted an entire issue in 2016 exclusively to making the case against Trump. And yet — Buckley often embraced figures whose behavior was markedly different from his own, because they were serving a greater purpose in promoting his beliefs. Joe McCarthy was one example; Rush Limbaugh was another. Buckley was usually a loyal Republican and fiercely committed to the right; if both groups chose Trump, he might have also embraced the ex-reality TV star. In fact, Buckley and Trump may have shared more political similarities than Buckley might have liked to admit. The seeds of Trump's appeal could be found in Buckley's 1965 campaign for mayor of New York, where his strongest support came from the cops, firefighters, shop keepers and other elements of the white working class. Furthermore, as Tanenhaus noted in the New York Times, Buckley's first two books offered themes that resonate strongly with Trump's world: his scorn of the academic elitists who abandoned traditional values and his sharp critique of the bureaucrats who formed a kind of permanent government — essentially the 'deep state' belief central to the Trumpier version of conservatism. I still find it hard to believe that this highly educated, multilingual polymath whose disposition was so antithetical to the dark, resentment-fueled figure of Donald Trump, would have thrown his political weight behind the candidate of retribution. But if politics makes strange bedfellows, then the possibility of this coupling can't be dismissed. The potential through-line from Buckley to Trump is also important because of what it says about the right. For years, many Republicans and conservatives claimed Trump was an aberration and not representative of the movement or the party. Today, with many of Trump's key arguments found in the writings of the right's most historically prominent voice, that's harder to accept today.
Politico
15-06-2025
- Politics
- Politico
What the Godfather of American Conservatism Would Think About Donald Trump
I've often wondered what William F. Buckley Jr., the most influential conservative of the 20th century, would make of Donald Trump as president. A potential answer, I thought, might lie in Sam Tanenhaus' epic new biography of Buckley. It took nearly 30 years and a thousand pages for Tanenhaus to craft the book, but it was worth the wait. The prodigious research includes years of interviews and unfettered access to the family's history. And it's resulted in a fascinating portrait of a man who was an arresting figure, beginning in his days as a Yale undergraduate to his life as a columnist, editor, television star, author, debater, political candidate, and ultimately a key figure in the ascent of conservatism from fringe movement to the highest reaches of power. Yet it leaves unsettled the question of whether Buckley set the stage for the rise of Trump. For me, this is more than an academic issue. I first met Buckley in 1966 when he read my student coverage of his appearance at Yale with amusement and invited me to participate in public discussions with other young voices about politics. These, in turn, led me to appear on the TV show Firing Line as an 'examiner' — someone who could offer different perspectives on his conversations toward the end of the show. It also led to a friendship: He brought me to London for Firing Line episodes, we dined at each other's homes, and I became one of a long line of people — Murray Kempton, John Kenneth Galbraith, Al Lowenstein to name a few — whose companionship he enjoyed even as he staunchly challenged our more liberal opinions. As Tanenhaus' biography makes clear, his gift for friendship was a lifelong quality. There are also far less admirable aspects of Buckley's life. His first appearance in the public spotlight came with his 1951 book God and Man at Yale where he urged alumni and trustees to use their financial power to pressure the university into combating the faculty's more left-leaning doctrines. His second book was a ringing defense of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his demagogic attack on subversives in government. (Tanenhaus does note that McCarthy's foes were less than vigilant about the fact that there were indeed some spies within the halls of government). Perhaps most shameful, Buckley was a defender of segregation throughout the 1950's and 60's, infamously writing in 1957 that the white minority had to prevail in the South because it was for the moment 'the advanced race.' He was a financial supporter of a newspaper in Camden, South Carolina that embraced the white supremacist views of the powerful Citizens' Council. (Later in life, Buckley acknowledged that his views on race were wrong). The books leaves no doubt about just how crucial Buckley was to the shaping of the conservative movement's ascent. 'Without Buckley, there is no Reagan,' more than one voice asserts. But by necessity, it leaves a huge amount of doubt about how Buckley would have viewed the rise of Donald Trump and the lurch away from some of the right's once-sacred beliefs, including free trade and a muscular internationalism. Buckley died in 2008 when Trump was still a political dilettante rather than the formidable politician he now is. In 2000, when Trump was flirting with presidential run, Buckley scorned him as a 'narcissist.' A whole suitcase full of Trump's qualities — historical ignorance, near-illiteracy, vulgarity — would suggest that Buckley would have joined his old colleagues at the magazine he founded, National Review, and devoted an entire issue in 2016 exclusively to making the case against Trump. And yet — Buckley often embraced figures whose behavior was markedly different from his own, because they were serving a greater purpose in promoting his beliefs. Joe McCarthy was one example; Rush Limbaugh was another. Buckley was usually a loyal Republican and fiercely committed to the right; if both groups chose Trump, he might have also embraced the ex-reality TV star. In fact, Buckley and Trump may have shared more political similarities than Buckley might have liked to admit. The seeds of Trump's appeal could be found in Buckley's 1965 campaign for mayor of New York, where his strongest support came from the cops, firefighters, shop keepers and other elements of the white working class. Furthermore, as Tanenhaus noted in the New York Times, Buckley's first two books offered themes that resonate strongly with Trump's world: his scorn of the academic elitists who abandoned traditional values and his sharp critique of the bureaucrats who formed a kind of permanent government — essentially the 'deep state' belief central to the Trumpier version of conservatism. I still find it hard to believe that this highly educated, multilingual polymath whose disposition was so antithetical to the dark, resentment-fueled figure of Donald Trump, would have thrown his political weight behind the candidate of retribution. But if politics makes strange bedfellows, then the possibility of this coupling can't be dismissed. The potential through-line from Buckley to Trump is also important because of what it says about the right. For years, many Republicans and conservatives claimed Trump was an aberration and not representative of the movement or the party. Today, with many of Trump's key arguments found in the writings of the right's most historically prominent voice, that's harder to accept today.
Yahoo
03-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Conservative Intellectual Who Laid the Groundwork for Trump
The January 2025 issue of National Review magazine featured, on its cover, a cartoon image of Donald Trump driving a campaign bus-cum-garbage truck into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a handful of Harris-Walz campaign posters tumbling out of its tailgate. 'After the Sweep,' read the triumphant headline. Over the course of eight-odd years, the publication that had once dedicated an entire issue to anathematizing Trump had moved from cool accommodation to warm, if not entirely reservationless, embrace. The February issue offered a study in dissonant juxtaposition: Gazing out beatifically from the cover was the magazine's late founder, William F. Buckley Jr., rendered in schmaltzy watercolor to mark the centenary of his birth. Sam Tanenhaus's marvelous, decades-in-the-making biography, Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America, begins with an epigraph from John Keats's letters: 'Man's life of any worth is a continual allegory.' For many in the Trump era, looking back wistfully on an imagined past of comity and consensus, the Buckleyite allegory has been one of declension: from the sesquipedalian verbalist who gamely sparred with liberals on TV to the monosyllabic vulgarian occupying the White House. From Bach's bouncy Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, with which Buckley's Firing Line television show opened for more than 30 years, to the schlocky Trump-rally ballads of Lee Greenwood. From a movement helmed by a 'responsible' leader who made conservatism respectable by (as the story goes) cleansing it of its kooks and antisemites to one led by a man who enthusiastically welcomed them back in. Tanenhaus's biography complicates this narrative. It offers a deeply affectionate portrait of Buckley's personal life: of his munificence, his sense of humor, his extraordinary loyalty and capacity for friendship—what the ex-Communist intellectual (and early National Review staffer) Whittaker Chambers, the subject of Tanenhaus's first biography, called Buckley's 'special grace.' Yet Tanenhaus also methodically surfaces the darker strains of the movement that flourished even, and sometimes especially, in its most rarefied precincts. The political vision that Buckley helped forge was, as it is now, concerned not primarily with advancing a particular set of principles but with defining and rooting out perceived enemies. When Donald Trump rails against the 'Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, Fascists, Marxists, Democrats, & RINOS' who comprise the 'enemy within,' he inherits Buckley's legacy far more than he blasphemes a man who lived an infamously peripatetic life—winters skiing the slopes of Gstaad, summers sailing up and down the Atlantic Coast, decades criss-crossing America on a speaking tour so unremitting that it's a miracle he lived into his eighties—Buckley's politics never strayed far from his childhood hearth and home. 'Everything he learned, and all he became,' Tanenhaus writes, began in the hothouse environment delicately constructed by his father. A Texas-born lawyer turned oil wildcatter who made a fortune in Mexico, Will Buckley was later expelled from the country for 'secretly disbursing large sums of cash to insurgent caudillos and paying for truckloads of Winchester rifles to be smuggled into Baja California' on behalf of right-wing insurgents. Briefly bankrupt, Buckley struck black gold again in Venezuela, returned stateside, and, in 1924, purchased a many-acred property in Sharon, Connecticut, an idyll he christened Great Elm. The Buckley paterfamilias—'Father,' to his growing brood—intensely supervised the cultivation of his children, populating Great Elm with tutors, workmen, groomsmen for the horses, a French mademoiselle, and Mexican nanas. The children were schooled in a curriculum of his own creation, emphasizing history, literature, and music. Tanenhaus writes beautifully of the extended household, which 'numbered more than twenty,' and was 'alive with pranks, schemes, hilarity, and strife.' (The pranks weren't always so innocent: In 1937, the elder Buckley siblings—young Bill was left out, much to his regret—burned a cross on the lawn of a Jewish resort. Years later, his sisters defaced a nearby Episcopal church.) The home often left visitors agog. Buckley's prep school roommate described 'a vast gaggle of smiling, brilliant children, all chattering—in several languages—at once, playing the piano, but, above all, laughing with each other … the whole place rang with music and laughter.' It would 'take Tom Wolfe to describe that scene,' one of Buckley's close college friends, Paris Review co-founder Tom Guinzberg, recalled. Since Buckley and Wolfe would only later become friendly, we are left to settle for the observations of a 19-year-old Sylvia Plath: 'How can I ever, ever tell you what a unique, dreamlike and astounding weekend I had!' she wrote to her mother after attending a coming-out party for one of Buckley's sisters, a college classmate of hers. 'A hundred moons twining in dark leaves, music spilling out and echoing inside my head.' Part of what made the Buckleys such excellent hosts was their ability, 'with no visible effort, to detach personal feeling from ideological passion.' But passion still burned. They were committed America Firsters, their anti-interventionism a species of their ardent anti-communism, their anti-communism a species of their Catholic piety. Bill, displaying a middle child's fear of parental inattention (he was the sixth of 10 children), parroted his father's extreme political opinions 'with remarkable felicity and alarming confidence,' earning him the dictatorial nickname 'Young Mahster.' Buckley's first formal political act, at age 14, was to join the America First Committee. His inaugural public speech, delivered in front of his classmates at the Millbrook prep school, was an argument 'In Defense of Charles Lindbergh.' It began, Tanenhaus writes, 'not as a defense of Lindbergh but as an attack on his critics'—a prelude to the vituperative style Buckley would later deploy as a consigliere to Joseph McCarthy. While still at Millbrook, Buckley came under the spell of the aristocratic thinker Albert Jay Nock. A friend of Buckley's father who engaged the family in 'evening-long denunciations of the New Deal,' Nock became, Tanenhaus writes, Buckley's 'lifelong hero and guide.' In an essay published in The Atlantic when Buckley was 10, Nock drew on the biblical story of Isaiah to distinguish the 'mass-man,' or the great democratic majority, which is devoid of the 'force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life,' from 'The Remnant,' the precious capable few charged with keeping alive the flame of those principles. 'Buckleys against the world' became the family version of Nock's slogan, and young William quickly adopted the requisite pose of condescending hauteur, writing essays against the cult of 'democratism' and sparring with his interventionist peers. 'It was, though a very nice audience, one of mediocre intellectual capacities, and I'm afraid that my thing was a little too complicated,' he reported to his mother after a visit to another prep school to debate Roosevelt's policies. Once at Yale, Buckley leavened his still-extreme beliefs (no longer a strict isolationist, he was equally fervent in his anti-communism) with what he discovered to be a great asset: his profound sociability. Once at Yale, Buckley leavened his still-extreme beliefs (no longer a strict isolationist, he was equally fervent in his anti-communism) with what he discovered to be a great asset: his profound sociability. He had begun to negotiate the gap between his 'two different selves, the rigid ideologue and the boon companion,' developing what the historian Gary Wills—one of Buckley's prized early recruits to National Review, who would later become an apostate over civil rights and Vietnam—described as his 'strange power to ingratiate even on the attack.' It made him popular and admired, even as he wielded his column in the Yale Daily News to 'fire volley after volley from his crossbow into the roaring multitude,' cataloging Yale's offenses against the eternal truths of Christianity and laissez-faire. Unsurprisingly, Buckley gravitated toward Yale's controversialist professor, the political philosopher Willmoore Kendall, a needler of liberal pieties and hard-nosed theorist of majority rule. (When Kendall later wrote that the 'true American tradition' was 'less that of Fourth of July orations and our constitutional law textbooks' than 'that of riding somebody out of town on a rail,' he meant it as a compliment.) Buckley was moved by Kendall's description of a faculty meeting in the early days of Joe McCarthy's rise, in which he'd repeated a conversation he'd had with a Black campus janitor: 'Is it true, professor'—Kendall, with his Oklahoma drawl, idiosyncratically Oxfordized while he studied as a Rhodes scholar in England, imitated the janitor—'Is it true, professor, dat dere's people in New York City who want to … destroy the guvamint of the United States?' 'Yes, Oliver, that is true,' Willmoore had replied. 'Well, why don't we lock 'em up?' Appearing to shed his Nockian pretenses, Buckley heartily agreed. 'Citizenship implies subscription to certain ideals,' he wrote in a paper for Kendall. 'Failure to adhere to these ideals means, in effect, renunciation of citizenship.' Kendall scribbled in the margins that the First Amendment 'will have to go one day.' All the while, Buckley kept in close contact with his father, whose interest in education was not confined to his own progeny. He had begun working with and financially supporting an activist named Lucille Cardin Crain, one of the most important leaders of a growing grassroots campaign to identify and attack 'subversive' educators and books. Buckley Sr. encouraged Crain to draw upon her 'wealth of knowledge and experience' and give his son 'a few pointers.' The book that Buckley published in 1951, God and Man at Yale, included a list of 'collectivistic' textbooks that largely came from Crain; Buckley's core proposal—a call for alumni and trustees to re-exert control over university hiring and curricula in order to 'narrow the existing orthodoxy' on campus—was an idea his father had already discussed with her. But it was Buckley who went on to attain unparalleled heights of public visibility. The year God and Man at Yale became a bestseller (thanks in part to a publicity blitz bankrolled by his father), Crain's Red-hunting publication was castigated by a congressional committee as redolent of the 'book burning orgies' of Nazi Germany; it folded soon after. While Buckley didn't fully avoid charges of fascism—'the methods he proposes for his alma mater are precisely those employed in Germany, Italy, and Russia' was The New Republic's assessment—the book's Latinate prose helped insulate him from the accusation that, to borrow a phrase thrown at a later right-wing polemicist, his work might have sounded better in the original German. His winsome tone—'not one of wild attack,' Tanenhaus writes, 'but of ironic, even amused forbearance'—set him apart from the 'heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy' that Richard Hofstadter would diagnose as the 'paranoid style' in American politics. His was a stylish voice, to be taken seriously, even if, in substance, little separated Buckley's arguments from those emanating from the febrile grassroots. In some ways, he went further than they Kendall believed there were two founding moments of postwar conservatism. The first was the publication of God and Man at Yale. The second was McCarthyism. Buckley might seem an unlikely advocate for the latter, a movement the moderate conservative writer Peter Viereck once described as 'the revenge of the noses that for twenty years of fancy parties were pressed against the outside window pane.' (Buckley's wife, Pat, a Canadian heiress whom he married in 1950, later became one of the most famous high-society hostesses in New York; the couple were a frequent item in the gossip pages.) Yet Tanenhaus describes Buckley as McCarthy's 'tireless champion, defending him on every platform and in every forum he could find,' most notably in McCarthy and His Enemies, published in 1954 and co-authored with Buckley's brother-in-law and former Yale debate partner, Brent Bozell. The effete, eminently clubbable Yale alum had acquired a populist flair for flouting what he derisively called 'the Racquet and Lawn Club rules for dealing with the Communists in our midst.' (When he spoke those words, Tanenhaus notes wryly, Buckley was wearing his own Racquet Club tie.) In 1955, with the peak of McCarthyism having passed, Buckley assembled an eclectic group of ex-Communists, libertarians, traditionalists, and Catholics to found National Review, a publication for 'radical conservatives.' What kind of magazine would it be? And given its indelible association with Buckley, who held a voting majority of stock ownership, what kind of public figure would he become? In its mission statement, Buckley distanced the magazine from the 'irresponsible' right, though he declined to name any names. In a letter quoted in John Judis's 1988 biography of Buckley, he responded to an early complaint that the magazine was too highbrow to be effective by explaining that he wanted to 'abjure the popular and cliché-ridden appeal to the 'grassroots'' and to target 'opinion makers.' But Tanenhaus shows that Buckley and the magazine were also pulled by countervailing impulses. In an early profile of Buckley, the literary gadfly Dwight MacDonald was surprised to hear him defend a crass book by 'two peephole Hearst reporters who trafficked in innuendo, smear, and sexual sensationalism' (the book alleged, for instance, that 90 percent of crime in the city of Cleveland was committed by 'darkies' and called the University of California, Berkeley 'a bed of sexual perversion, left wing teaching and narcotic addiction'). 'I don't like the way the book is written any more than you do,' Buckley admitted. 'But it's on our side.… And anyway you've got to write that way to reach a big public.' For an early issue, the magazine called on McCarthy himself to pan a book by former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, though Bozell actually wrote the review, inserting enough schoolyard invective ('As 'Brains' Acheson sees it …') to impersonate Tailgunner Joe. Tanenhaus notes that National Review's editors may have striven 'for learned hyperliteracy, but as leaders of a nascent movement they were prepared to welcome almost anyone who wanted to join and sought them out, wherever they were to be found—including in groups with names like American Heritage Protective Committee, the American Way, Citizens Grassroots Crusade of South Carolina.' South Carolina was a state Buckley knew all too well. Some of the most revelatory parts of Tanenhaus's biography depict the family's second homestead in Camden, a small city in the middle of the state. At the behest of Buckley's mother, a 'proud daughter of the Confederacy' who never quite felt comfortable in Yankee Connecticut, his father had purchased a sprawling antebellum property that was once owned by the first senator to resign after Lincoln's 1860 election. There, the family befriended figures like the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, who garnered more than 80 percent of the vote in their county in 1948, and the archconservative textile magnate Roger Milliken, later the most munificent National Review donor outside the Buckley family. They employed a staff drawn from the area's population of Black sharecroppers and domestics, whom they treated relatively well, at least compared to their neighbors. The 'family seemed, and in many respects were, models of compassion and fair dealing,' Tanenhaus writes. Yet Buckley's parents were also the sole financial backers behind a new local newspaper associated with the white supremacist Citizens Councils. National Review's shameful defenses of white rule in the South, Tanenhaus shows, drew on Buckley's own complicated experience of it. On the one hand, he seemed incapable of grasping white supremacy in its vicious totality, given the more genteel and paternalistic form of racism he experienced within his family: 'Any suggestion, made to a [white] Southerner, that segregation is in fact a manifestation of 'race hatred' elicits from him an expression of sheer wonderment,' he wrote. Yet the magazine also exhibited a 'craze' for John C. Calhoun's defense of states' rights, and Buckley himself made arguments in public that were 'far more incendiary and racist,' according to one historian of the right, than anything said by Robert Welch, the conspiratorial John Birch Society founder whose banishment from the conservative movement Buckley considered a career-defining achievement. Tanenhaus shows just how much Buckley's approach to the 'kooks' to his right was 'strategic, a matter of weighing costs and benefits.' Tanenhaus punctures that self-mythology as well, showing just how much Buckley's approach to the 'kooks' to his right was 'strategic, a matter of weighing costs and benefits.' In print, he called Welch an 'amazing man' and assured him in private that 'we agree on essentials.' Tanenhaus generally concurs. 'The primary distinction between NR's reading of the world calamity and Welch's was that in NR's view the enemies were liberals and in Welch's they were Communists,' he observes. 'And since NR all but accused liberals of being Communist handmaidens the wall of separation between the two positions was so fine as to crumble into dust.' When Buckley finally ventured some temporizing criticisms of Welch, he spared the society's members, whom the Barry Goldwater campaign considered an essential source of grassroots support. It was only after Lyndon Johnson's electoral rout of Goldwater threatened to cast the conservative movement back into exile that Buckley attempted a full-throated excommunication. 1964 may have temporarily set back the cause of radical conservatism, but it was a boon to Buckley's intellectual celebrity. In an election postmortem published in Partisan Review, the sociologist Daniel Bell described watching Buckley—'an all-or-nothing theocratic zealot of the most dangerous kind'—address a college audience with an astonishing level of 'forensic power and control,' even as Buckley's 'simplism' appalled him. 'Forensic power and control' plus 'simplism' was a potent combination, one Buckley employed in his extraordinary 1965 campaign for New York City mayor—then the third-most-visible public office in the country. In his mind, he still maintained a Nockean disdain for the brute din of democratic politics—'I will not go to Irish centers and go dancing. I will not go to Jewish centers and eat blintzes, nor will I go to Italian centers and pretend to speak Italian'—yet Tanenhaus frankly summarizes the demagogic theme that gained him a surprising amount of support. 'That theme was race,' filtered through the topoi of welfare, taxes, schooling, and above all, crime and policing. Buckley set the tone for his campaign with an address to 5,600 Catholic NYPD officers, in which he inveighed against the media's coverage of Bloody Sunday in Selma and defended the brutal actions of the Alabama police. Later, he would acknowledge that his own distorted version of events had come from 'someone who misinterpreted a television comment.' Even his disavowals of racist intent—'I believe that young thugs are young thugs, irrespective of race, color, or creed'—smacked of racism. Buckley, Tanenhaus writes, was groping his way to a position as 'a leader of forgotten Americans'—of American mass-men. His mayoral bid ultimately did best in the city's white ethnic enclaves, especially in Queens, the home of a future Republican president whose early forays into political advocacy included an infamous full-page New York Times ad calling to 'Bring Back Our Police!'Tanenhaus presents the tempestuous 1960s as a crossroads in Buckley's public life. Would he grow into his own as a serious conservative intellectual, or would he succumb to the temptations of celebrity? Buckley had taken some tentative steps down the first path in 1963, when he began work on a book that would, Tanenhaus writes, be 'a definitive statement on the meaning and value of an authentic American conservatism,' and not just another archly written attack on liberals. The thesis was Nockean, a critique of 'the masses' and their demands for 'egalitarianism,' and an argument for the need to restrict the votes of lesser Black citizens as well as whites—a proposal Buckley made in his infamous 1965 debate at Cambridge against James Baldwin. But Buckley never made much headway on the idea, and not only because it complicated the Kendellian majoritarianism he'd evinced in his political life. The basic problem was, as Tanenhaus frequently points out, that Buckley was at his core 'a controversialist, not a thinker and still less a theorist.' He was a 'performing ideologue' who thrived on provocation and had trouble sitting still. As one contemporary of Buckley's put it, he responded to 'ideological battle like Pavlov's dog to the sound of the bell.' The argumentative bell wouldn't stop ringing, especially once the debate show Firing Line debuted in 1966. It would last for more than three decades, launching Buckley to new heights of fame. He was recognized in airports and hounded for autographs on the street, as his unmistakable televisual style—the improbably mobile eyebrows, the serpentine tongue, the ironizing drawl—became fodder for generations of late-night impressionists. Buckley, the talk-show host Jack Paar said, was 'the Tiffany lamp of television.' He was 'pure camp,' the sensibility that, as Susan Sontag famously wrote, converts 'the serious into the frivolous.' It also invited accusations of frivolity, of Buckley the theatrical persona overtaking Buckley the movement leader. The literary modernist Hugh Kenner, who briefly worked as NR's poetry editor and whom Buckley had asked to help him on his abortive book project, later wrote that Buckley had 'ceased to be a public outrage. He became an ingratiatingly unpredictable personality.' Kenner had compared Buckley's telegenic mayoral campaign to Andy Warhol's Pop Art creations and homemade films. Buckley, the talk-show host Jack Paar said, was 'the Tiffany lamp of television.' He was 'pure camp,' the sensibility that, as Susan Sontag famously wrote, converts 'the serious into the frivolous.' The most lacerating assessment of Buckley's celebrity persona came from Gary Wills, who, in his memoir, Confessions of a Conservative, charged that Buckley had become a 'dandy': He is the object of a personal cult subtly at odds with his own intentions. The very thing that charms even those on the left makes grimmer types on the right distrust him. Striving for objective results, he seems only interested in theatrical effects. What a curious trial for the aspiring ideologue: By restricting himself to combat, he floats above it—intending to strike blows, he is applauded for striking has become something of a cliché for liberal and left-wing observers of the Trump era to cite an aphorism now known as Wilhoit's law (after the musician and composer, not the political scientist). It reads: 'Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.' Does that capture the essence of Buckley? Temperamentally, no. He was a 'moderate, even a kind of liberal,' Tanenhaus writes, 'in his openness, in his curiosity, his ability to turn arguments around, look at questions from different sides.' But Tanenhaus also quotes from an assessment given by one of Buckley's prep school teachers, which could easily double as a summation of his politics: He 'has to be made to realize that rules are not merely made so he can invoke them in his favor.' Throughout his life, Buckley never seemed to learn this lesson. He invoked the value of principled dissent to protect the speech of America Firsters, but passionately defended McCarthyite repression. He attacked the credibility of an anti-war intellectual like Staughton Lynd for traveling to North Vietnam to meet with Communist leaders ('Here is an American idiot'), but displayed little compunction about embarking on his own junkets, including to Pinochet's Chile and apartheid South Africa, for whom he happily propagandized. He reproached liberal journalists for declining to testify before government inquiries but stayed mum about his extensive knowledge of Watergate's crimes (knowledge he acquired via his lifelong friend E. Howard Hunt, whom Buckley had met during a brief postgraduate stint working for the CIA in Mexico City). He was a stalwart defender of mass incarceration and the death penalty, but became the loudest voice proclaiming the innocence of Edgar Smith, an articulate fan of National Review (and Buckley's obsequious pen pal) who was convicted of murdering a young girl—and who would attempt to kill again after his release. In this inconstancy, Buckley was carrying on a family inheritance. 'On the one hand he had himself once been a revolutionary, or rather a counter-revolutionary,' Buckley reflected of his father. 'On the other hand, he was the conservative who believed in law and order.'
