William F Buckley, gentleman revolutionary and word-drunk dandy

Times

a day ago

The myriad of bien pensant western liberals reeling before the seemingly unstoppable Trumpist juggernaut would do well to read this book. One of the things they will learn from it is that the present US government, if it can be called that, is fulfilling a mission that is more than a century old. As Sam Tanenhaus writes at the start of his masterly biography of William F Buckley Jr, his subject, a public intellectual and highly influential journalist, 'rightly saw himself less as founder than heir' of the conservative movement in America.
Buckley's father, William F Sr, a south Texas lawyer of Irish Catholic descent, made a considerable fortune in the oil business, and married a much sought-after beauty, with whom he had ten children. Most of the Buckley brood were bright, some were brilliant, and all were, like their father, arch-conservatives who believed their country was going to hell in a handcart being vigorously propelled by liberals, Jews and opponents of black segregation. They grew up in two great and beautiful houses, one in rural New York state, the other in Camden, South Carolina. They were a fun-loving lot, although deeply religious, and were seriously determined to refound America as one nation under God and the Wasps.
They would have deplored Donald Trump as a vulgar arriviste, but by jingo they would have voted for him. In fact, they would support anyone, any scoundrel, crook or tyrant, who they felt could be depended on to further the conservative cause and fight communism wherever it reared its collective head. Buckley Jr cultivated the Red-baiting senator Joseph McCarthy, the egregious lawyer and future Trump enabler Roy Cohn, the diehard segregationist senator George Wallace, although he found him personally repulsive, and General Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean despot and mass murderer. Pinochet was judged to have been responsible for the violent deaths of thousands of his opponents, but Buckley would have none of it; the general 'told me otherwise', he said, and as his biographer observes, 'for Bill Buckley that was good enough'.
Although Buckley, born in 1925, was a 'radical conservative' from his earliest days, he did not show any particular early promise as a political mover and shaker. In his high school years, Tanenhaus writes, 'apart from music, which he worked at with discipline and zeal, his enthusiasms — horses and … sailing — seemed those not of the future leader of an intellectual movement but of a country squire's pampered younger son'.
However, at Millbrook private school, in Dutchess County, New York, the 'Young Mahster', as one of Buckley's sisters dubbed him, came under the considerable influence of Edward Pulling, an inspirational teacher for whom 'community service was nearly a fetish', Tanenhaus writes. 'Responsibility,' Pulling told his pupils, 'cannot be learnt only by hearing about it; one must actually experience it.' And indeed throughout his life Buckley fulfilled diligently his various obligations, as he saw them, to his family, to his religious faith and to his country, right or wrong.
He had not the slightest doubt that America was the world's greatest nation, and that its greatest task was the defeat of international communism. If some moral corners had to be cut in carrying out that task, so be it. At 14, in 1940, he became 'an ardent member' of the America First Committee, part of the isolationist movement 'remembered today', Tanenhaus notes, 'for its antisemitic and pro-Nazi associations'. The committee's specific aim was to fight Roosevelt's Lend-Lease scheme, under which the US sent warships to join in the British fight against Nazi Germany.
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At Millbrook, under Pulling's tutelage, Buckley proved a brilliant public speaker — throughout his life his greatest and most persuasive gift was for intellectual debate, even if at times he reduced his contests to the level of slanging matches. This was the case most famously in a TV prizefight during the 1968 presidential elections in which he was matched against the redoubtable Gore Vidal. At one point Buckley flew into a rage and snarled at Vidal, 'Now, listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face and you'll stay plastered.' Vidal, of course, was delighted to hear his despised rival losing it in such a coarse fashion on national television. As for Buckley, the incident haunted him to the end of his days.
Oddly, perhaps, it also provoked speculation as to Buckley's own sexual orientation. His wife, Pat, the socialite empress of Manhattan, asked by a journalist how she was holding up in the aftermath of the televised debacle, said ruefully: 'I'll tell you how I am. Two hundred million Americans think William F Buckley is a screaming homosexual.' Tanenhaus quotes A Scott Berg, the biographer of the America First leader and aviator Charles Lindbergh, saying of Buckley: 'He's so gay.'
That televised display of fury was an aberration. Buckley, unlike his thuggish hero McCarthy, for instance, was usually the epitome of New England suavity and southern charm. He had a gift for friendship, and not just among fellow conservatives; some of his allegiances were highly improbable. He was close to the economist and liberal intellectual John Kenneth Galbraith, and he had the highest regard for the novelist Norman Mailer, whose pugnaciousness he prized and whose prose style he revered — 'He makes the most beautiful metaphors in the business.'
His own literary style was elegant, indeed dandyish, elaborate and word-drunk. His first language was Spanish — he grew up in Mexico, where the family lived for some years, and Spanish was the language of parents and children alike — which may be part of the reason why throughout his life he gloried in the riches of the English tongue. He was a logophile, and loved obscure and little-used words, such as logophile.
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At Yale in the late 1940s he wrote for and eventually took over the Yale Daily News. He proved himself an excellent journalist, and used his position on the student newspaper to excoriate the university itself for its liberal outlook and its tolerance, as he saw it, of left-wing academics. It was good training for the project that would be his lifelong love, and the pulpit from which he could preach the doctrine of radical conservatism: the magazine National Review, which he founded in 1955 and edited until 1990.
He used his widely read column in the Review to back the ultra-conservative Barry Goldwater in his disastrous presidential campaign in 1964, and helped his old pal Ronald Reagan to win the White House in 1980, a victory that ushered in the conservative remake of America that Buckley had been advocating for so long. He and his staff at the Review were euphoric, to the point of delusional grandeur. When the winning result came in, the magazine warned its readers that from now on there would be no more levity in its pages: 'We have a nation to run.'
Was Buckley the political and social force in American life that Tanenhaus takes him to have been? Certainly in the National Review, and in his popular weekly TV talk show Firing Line, he promoted the conservative cause relentlessly, using wit and a polished style to charm, flatter and, he hoped, win over his readers and viewers. He was surely not the only begetter of, as Tanenhaus's subtitle has it, 'the revolution that changed America', but certainly he was as politically influential as anyone could be who did not hold political office.
Buckley is a magnificent work of history as well as of biography, and is as relevant to these parlous times as it is revelatory of Buckley and his times. Tanenhaus, a former editor of The New York Times Book Review, and Buckley's choice as his biographer, has an encyclopaedic grasp of his subject, his prose is clear-running, unassertive and elegant, and his judgments are sound throughout. Not the least of Buckley's attractions is that not only is it beautifully written and scrupulously edited, it is also that rare thing nowadays, a model of the book-maker's craft — and it is printed on acid-free paper, so it will last for generations. Well done, Random House.
Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus (Random House £33 pp1040). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members