Latest news with #WilliamFBuckley
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:
Washington Post
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘Buckley' is the richest account yet of an enthralling and maddening conservative icon
Tucker Carlson was ecstatic. In a 2023 interview, Dave Smith, a comedian and regular in Joe Rogan's orbit, had just called William F. Buckley Jr. 'one of the great villains of the 20th century.' Banging his fists on the table, Carlson shouted, 'I couldn't agree more!' Sam Tanenhaus reaches a kinder verdict in 'Buckley,' his captivating biography of modern American conservatism's founding father. More than 1,000 pages long and almost 30 years in the making, the book has been eagerly — and, to guardians of Buckley's legacy, anxiously — anticipated.
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.
Wall Street Journal
13-06-2025
- General
- Wall Street Journal
Santa Clara, an Alumnus Would Like a Word
Four generations of Corrigans have been educated by the Jesuits at Santa Clara University. Naomi Epps Best's expose of her graduate class was gobsmacking, sordid and sad ('Santa Clara University's Crazy Idea of Human Sexuality,' op-ed, June 7). I applaud her for courageously revealing the profane underbelly of the 'critical theory' method of teaching. She has helpfully revealed what is happening behind the portieres in these classrooms. As William F. Buckley Jr. relayed in his seminal book 'God and Man at Yale' (1951), 'the alumni haven't the slightest idea what is going on' at these schools. That raises the question: What role do I have in what is taught on campus? Buckley again chimes in about alumni, writing that the school 'is glad to settle for their money and to eschew their counsel.' Here's the deal: No voice, no money.
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.
