Latest news with #NationalReview
CBS News
19 hours 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:
Forbes
a day ago
- Business
- Forbes
Next Up On Trump's Tariff Plate: Mexican Tomatoes, At 21 Percent
Threre's a good chance that tomato you eat this summer came from Mexico, since Florida's growing ... More season has ended and California's tomatoes often are used for processing into Ketchup, tomato sauce and the like. A 21% tariff on fresh tomato imports from Mexico is scheduled to go into effect next month, just as the season for shipments from south of the border winds down and domestic production kicks in. Should the Mexican and U.S. governments fail to renew a 2019 agreement before July 14, the most likely beneficiary will be the state of California, led by one of President Trump's top antagonists, Gov. Gavin Newsom. For four months of the year, California leads the nation in tomato production. Even that benefit is questionable. More about that in a moment. The other eight months of the year, Florida leads the nation in tomato production. That means the state of Florida, a state that, like a ripening tomato, is becoming redder and redder, would not likely benefit nearly as much. That's true unless the tariffs stay in place until the winter processing season. The loser would almost certainly be American consumers, who, as it turns out, like to eat tomatoes all 12 months of the year in one form or another. As Dominic Pino wrote in the National Review, 'The government is straightforwardly promising to take money from you and give it to U.S. tomato growers.' Consumers, and businesses, always lose when specific industry or special interest – in this case, Florida tomato growers – is able to convince the federal government its industry needs protection from foreign competitors 'dumping' their produce or goods on U.S. markets. Similarly, the aluminum and steel industry have been in the news lately. It has benefitted from protection against foreign competition at the expense of American consumers on more than one occasion, including many years recently. Trump, not one to be shy about threatening to impose tariffs, withdrew from the 2019 agreement with Mexico that had suspended previous penalties on tomato imports, something my company's vice president, Tatiana Panzardi, brought to my attention. As is the case with steel, the feud is not a new one. The first anti-dumping agreement was signed in 1996, and renewed numerous times, including in 2019, during Trump's first term in office. One thing is clear: The United States is increasingly dependent on Mexico and other countries for its fruits and vegetables, including the tomato (which is a fruit even though the U.S. Census Bureau classifies it as a vegetable). Imports now account for about 60% of all the fruit consumed in this country, double what it was in the early 1980s. While Mexico does not dominate all fruit and vegetable imports – 45.01% of all fruits this year, 67.21% of all vegetables – it does account for more than 90% of all tomato imports most years. Through April of this year, that percentage has dipped to 89.03%. The vast majority of fresh tomato imports into the United States occur at three ports of entry along ... More the U.S.-Mexico border. Canada is the only other meaningful supplier; those tomatoes enter at Detroit's Ambassador Bridge. Just three ports of entry from Mexico – Nogales, Ariz.; Pharr, Texas; and Laredo, Texas – account for 82.26% of all fresh tomato imports from Mexico this year. Those three, as well as all other ports of entry on the Mexican border that import tomatoes, have wrapped up the busy first-of-the-year season, including a slow April. Though the three leaders volume is down this year – with Nogales down 31.05% – imports from Mexico have still topped $1 billion through April for the third consecutive year, according to my analysis of the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data. In the first four months of 2024, imports through Nogales had topped $500 million, partially explaining the decline this year. Indeed, 2024 was a record year, with imports into the United States topping $3.63 billion, a 6.91% increase since 2017, Trump's first full year as president. This year, through April, tomato imports are down 17.63%, below the pace set in both 2024 and 2023. This April was a particularly tough month. While the previous April, in 2024, was the fourth-best month in the last two years, this April was the fifth-worst. Generally, July and August are the two slowest months for imports of tomatoes from Mexico; June and September often bracket it in being relatively slow. Those are the only four months when California, which specializes in tomatoes for processing – think ketchup, salsa, tomato sauce and paste, tomato juice, etc. – leads the nation. Tomatoes from Florida are often for the so-called 'fresh' market, and it leads the nation in the other eight months of the year, with two primary harvesting seasons – winter and spring. A couple of questions remain: What happens if the tariffs go into place, ending the 2019 agreement? That remains to be seen – particularly given the global trade war Trump initiated on April 2 – but it certainly would not be anti-inflationary. And, if they go into place, will they stay in place until the South Florida season kicks into gear in the late fall and winter? Then Florida growers would benefit, presumably, being able to charge higher prices for their tomatoes – at the expense of American consumers.
France 24
4 days ago
- Politics
- France 24
Global media reports Israel-Iran ceasefire with caution, speculation
A lot of uncertainty surrounds Trump 's announcement of a ceasefire between Israel and Iran after 12 days of war. The language in the press is very cautious. The New York Times website's front page reads "Iran announces ceasefire, but status is unclear". There's no comment from Israel, which warns of continued Iranian attacks, while Iranian state television is making the announcement of a ceasefire, hours after Trump's comments. The Washington Post is also reiterating this message, albeit cautiously: "Iran appears to confirm it'll cease attacks on Israel". Haaretz, the Israeli centre-left daily, reports that six waves of missiles have hit Israel since daybreak, killing several people. The conservative magazine National Review has published an exclusive report which looks at why Trump is particularly wary of the Iranian threat. If US strikes against Iran appear to be an escalation of the conflict, the National Review explains that this stems from a personal fear. The article details how seriously the Trump team has taken the threat of Iran. It feared Iranian retaliation against him after the 2020 assassination of Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. As far back as 2022, Trump's team cancelled certain international events for fear of exposing him to Iranian threats. The magazine even says that the failed 2024 Pennsylvania assassination attempt on Trump never yielded a culprit, but that senior campaign staff suspect it may have been part of an Iranian murder-for-hire plot. This takes on new importance given Trump's approval of US strikes against Iran. The National Review says that those who have worked for Trump for years speculate that the regime's assassination plots against him have "hardened his resolve against Iran". The Financial Times says the last 48 hours have been a real headspin. On Sunday, Trump appeared open to regime change in Tehran, alarming his isolationalist allies on the right. On Monday, he called for a complete ceasefire. It appears, the FT says, that the trigger for this about-face was the limited nature of Iran's response: attacking a US military base in Qatar, but giving ample notice beforehand. For the Emirati paper The National, it's clear that Trump has gone from being a "peacemaker to a wartime president". It also notes a biting coincidence: just as Trump authorised the US strikes on Iran, Pakistan announced it would be putting his name forward for a Nobel Peace Prize for his "pivotal leadership and peacemaker role in the recent Kashmir conflict". If Trump's goal by attacking Iran was peace, it's a roaring success, the Guardian says ironically with a cartoon of the US president depluming a dove. All these developments come just as NATO leaders prepare to meet at The Hague for a summit beginning this Tuesday. La Croix, the French daily, is looking at the summit on its front page. "NATO under pressure", the paper says. La Croix's editor says the conflict in the Middle East has forced a change in the order of things to discuss at this summit and it will cause an upheaval in European defence, inevitably shifting some focus away from what the bloc believed was the immediate threat: Russia. The editors of the Washington Post, meanwhile, reiterate a common gripe of Trump's – that Europe needs to more for its security. Spain has already rejected NATO's calls for the Alliance to dedicate 5 percent of its budget to defence spending, with NATO chief Mark Rutte agreeing to exempt Madrid. A somewhat exasperated Post says that Spain's obstinance gives Trump fodder to call into question the US's commitment to NATO and gives other European countries an excuse to drag their feet down the road on the issue of defence spending. As Politico advises: "If you ask European officials, the goal is simple at this summit. Keep it short, keep it smooth and keep Donald Trump from blowing it up."
Miami Herald
17-06-2025
- Politics
- Miami Herald
Trump saves farmworkers, but what about other hardworking immigrants?
Does President Donald Trump even know what he's doing on the immigration issue? Alarmed that his supporters in agriculture and the hospitality industry are getting hit or about to be hit by his mass deportation order, Trump has backed down on social media. 'Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,' the president posted on Truth Social last Friday. Tatum King, a senior official with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, quickly followed orders with a directive. 'Effective today, please hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.' That means Trump has granted amnesty for an estimated 2 million undocumented residents, according to an estimate by National Review. The United Farm Workers, however, is skeptical of Trump's abrupt change on immigration enforcement. 'We will believe it when we see it. In the meantime farm workers are defending themselves and their co-workers in real time, every day,' said UFW President Teresa Romero in a statement on Friday. 'If President Trump truly cares, and is actually in charge, these raids would stop today, and everyone taken from the fields of California his week would be released to their families immediately.' He knew farms would get hit When President Donald Trump signed the Protecting the American People Against Invasion executive order on Jan. 20, he should have known his 'greatest deportation in American history' would harm farmers and their field workers. To the president's surprise, the Department of Homeland Security's recent crackdown on undocumented immigrants in the fields has generated pleas of help from farmers who voted for him knowing full well of Trump's intentions. Never mind the business uncertainty swirling around the Trump tariffs. Now Trump wants to tighten the leash on federal agents whose presence in farms has been limited to reported sightings in strawberry fields in Ventura County. As a result, that county's Farm Bureau reports that between 25% and 45% of farmworkers have not shown up for work since the raids began earlier this month. 'When our work force is afraid, fields go unharvested, packinghouses fall behind, and market supply chains, from local grocery stores to national retailers, are affected,' Ventura County Farm Bureau CEO Maureen McGuire told the Los Angeles Times. 'This impacts every American who eats.' It appears that farmers, who should have known better with their vote, have convinced the president that his deportation push is bad for their business. Disruptions like droughts, tariffs and disappearing work force have major impacts. Deporting the 75% of California's field workers who are undocumented would have severe consequences for all county residents. Every $1 generated by ag generates another $3.50 for the local and regional economy, according to the county. That means Fresno County's economy got a $30.1 billion boost from ag in 2023. Why should Trump decide who is protected? We are concerned that Trump gets to choose and pick immigration winners and losers. Why should his amnesty overlook hard workers vital in other industries? The construction industry relies on undocumented roofers, carpenters and cement finishers. About 23% of construction workers lacked legal status in 2021, according to the Center for American Progress. These workers and their families, the center said, pay $12.9 billion in federal taxes and $7.7 billion state and local taxes. Aren't they hard-working individuals and not part of Trump's imagined migrant invasion? If an undocumented resident is working, paying taxes and not committing crimes, they also deserve the right to benefit from Trump's amnesty.
The National
12-06-2025
- Politics
- The National
Can the man who paved the way for Trump heal divisions in the US?
For at least the past 10 years, there has been a steady stream of articles and surveys that have concluded that the world is more divided than ever: over the rise of China and ethno-nationalism, Russia-Ukraine, Brexit, gender ideology, culture wars, the revival of racial conflicts, free speech, religion versus secularism, to name just a few issues. The re-election – sometimes, it feels, the very existence – of Donald Trump is also usually on the list. So it may be a surprise to hear that a man who has recently been described as 'the conservative intellectual who laid the ground for Trump ' or who 'paved the way for Trump' could provide a model for how to bridge those divides. Not necessarily for how to heal them; but how to keep the conversation going. William F Buckley Jr is considered by many to have been the architect of the modern conservative movement in the US, and an intellectual flagbearer whose influence helped it completely take over the Republican Party (which for a long time had also been the party of northern liberals). In 1955, he founded the influential National Review magazine, and later backed both Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan as Republican presidential candidates. From 1966-1999, he presented Firing Line, a weekly television show that set a very high bar for depth of debate and width of discussion. He was so famous that his distinctively patrician tones were impersonated by both Robin Williams – in the 1992 Disney film Aladdin – and by the talk show host Johnny Carson. Mr Buckley wrote more than 50 books and was an aesthete with high-brow tastes. The connection with Mr Trump may not be immediately obvious; although Mr Trump knew all about him. When Senator Ted Cruz tried to claim that Mr Trump was not a true conservative in a 2016 primary debate, saying that 'not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan', Mr Trump replied: 'Conservatives actually do come out of Manhattan. Including William F Buckley.' The similarities between the two are currently being examined partly because of a new biography, Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus, which has just come out. Two salient points are that both understood the power of mass media, and that both were suspicious of elites and wanted to overturn a liberal establishment that each saw as not consisting just of a few big corporations but as having infiltrated state institutions and a vast number of professions at nearly every level. In an important sense, Mr Buckley and Mr Trump can both be seen as genuine revolutionaries. By this point, some readers may be doubting that Mr Buckley has any lessons to offer about uniting people. But he does. Take this line from an interview with Tanenhaus, who was also his biographer: 'Yet the current era feels a world away in other respects. For one, Buckley's politics rarely affected his many friendships. 'His best friends were liberals,' Tanenhaus said. He greatly admired Jesse Jackson. It was not strange for Eldridge Cleaver, the black nationalist, and Timothy Leary, the psychonaut, to stop by his house. 'If he became your friend, and then you told him you joined the Communist party, he would say: That is the worst thing you can do, I'm shocked you would do it, but you're still coming over for dinner tomorrow, right? It's just a different world view, and we don't get it because we take ourselves more seriously than he did.' Buckley and Trump can both be seen as genuine revolutionaries That's one way of putting it. I think there's more. It may have been to do with Mr Buckley's devout Roman Catholicism – and hence the possibility of redemption – or the belief, common to all Abrahamic faiths, that we are all part of God's creation, but he didn't see people solely as the sum of their beliefs. It's there on Firing Line (now available on YouTube), where Mr Buckley had many guests who he clearly believed not only were wrong but had morally flawed views. But he engaged them in highly informed debate, and never treated them as irredeemably evil. Nowadays many appear to have accepted that certain beliefs absolutely define who people are. One columnist wrote last week that 'Trump and Brexit' were 'two causes so clearly defined between left and right that few of those from one camp were pre-existing friends with the other'. As a lifelong Eurosceptic with a huge number of pro-EU friends in the UK, I take exception to that. But I understand the position. The dangers of such an attitude are outlined in a new book Against Identity by the Australian philosopher Alexander Douglas. 'People respond to criticisms of their views as though their very identity is being attacked,' as a review of the book this week put it. 'Here we have the basis for division and intergroup conflict,' Mr Douglas wrote. I remember seeing the consequences of identity being all among my family's Northern Irish friends at Al Kharj dairy farm in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s. The Catholic nationalist farm manager my family used to spend happy weekends with would socialise with the Protestant unionist vet in that setting. But 'back home I wouldn't acknowledge him if I crossed him in the street,' said our friend. Similarly, I saw politics in Malaysia become so rancorous, so personal, and so all-identifying during the prime ministership of Najib Razak (2009-2018) that when a friend went to work for him, he was viciously attacked by close associates who supported the then opposition. Believing in the policies of a moderate reformist leader was enough to sunder bonds that went back decades. Mr Buckley offered another way. On his television shows, he engaged persistently but politely, and with a weight of research that paid his guests the evident compliment of taking them seriously, even if he thought them dangerously misguided. And in his personal life: you advance something I think is terribly wrong, but we can remain friends and – of course! – we should still break bread together. Because we are more than our views, and our identities and common humanity transcend them. Isn't that something we could do with a lot more of? In a sea of uncertainty and bad news, I didn't expect to find my spirits lifted by the man 'who paved the way for Trump'. But I did. Thank you, Bill Buckley Jr – and may many more follow your example.
