‘Buckley' and ‘American Impresario': More Than a Man of His Time
Sam Tanenhaus is the author of a superb biography of the onetime communist mole and later conservative journalist Whittaker Chambers. Soon after the publication of that book in 1997, word circulated that Mr. Tanenhaus had been chosen by William F. Buckley Jr. to write his own biography. In the intervening quarter-century, admirers of Buckley—this reviewer among them—have had reason to regret Buckley's decision and look forward to the biography with unease.
Mr. Tanenhaus, a man of the left who served for some years as the editor of the New York Times Book Review, has over the years assumed the role of American conservatism's liberal interpreter, the wise observer capable of explaining the right to the left. His book 'The Death of Conservatism' (2009), published in the afterglow of Barack Obama's election, contends that the right dissolved into incoherence when it abandoned its proper role as a check on liberalism's excesses and aspired to govern according to its own philosophy. For those of us on the right, Mr. Tanenhaus is a familiar type: the enlightened liberal prepared to praise important conservative figures of the past but not of the present. Ronald Reagan gained the respect of many such people the moment he died in 2004.
Mr. Tanenhaus's biography of Buckley has arrived at last, and it is more or less the book conservatives feared it would be. The author is a gifted writer and a diligent scholar; his account is ably paced. But the Bill Buckley of this book is little more than a wasted talent: a man who put his stupendous gifts in the service of a perverse cause and, though he got one or two big things right, propounded a muddled ideology and probably compounded the nation's problems.
A book so long in the making was bound to sprawl, and this one does, with nearly 900 pages of text and another 100 or so of often prolix endnotes. I'm not convinced the decision to supersize the book was a good idea. Buckley's devotees will find it frequently irritating and occasionally enraging, so often does the author question his subject's motives and portray the movement he coalesced as beset by phobias and crotchets. Buckley's despisers, on the other hand, won't want to spend 900 pages with him.
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