Latest news with #Buckley:TheLifeandRevolutionThatChangedAmerica
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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.'
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Did Bill Buckley Really Lead a Successful Revolution?
Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America, by Sam Tanenhaus, Random House, 1,040 pages, $40 For decades, William F. Buckley Jr.—journalist, editor, novelist, television host, mayoral candidate, high society bon vivant, and former CIA agent—was the undeniable intellectual head of the American right. Until the rise of Rush Limbaugh in the 1990s, Buckley was likely the right's most genuinely popular exemplar as well: By no means restricted to the pages of National Review, the conservative magazine he founded in 1955, Buckley had a 33-year, 1,504-episode run of his TV show Firing Line and a syndicated newspaper column that at its height appeared in 350 publications. Fewer than 20 years after Buckley's 2008 death, few influential American conservatives act as though they are more than vaguely aware that he existed, at least from how often his spirit or words are explicitly invoked. But a careful read of Sam Tanenhaus' Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America, a new biography that was nearly three decades in the works, suggests that more than one contemporary right-wing figure is in many ways recapitulating Buckley's early career, whether consciously or not. Tanenhaus does not spell that out explicitly. Buckley's position vis-à-vis the contemporary American right is not an obvious concern of this book, which mentions the name Donald Trump exactly once, in the future president's role as a real estate entrepreneur and supporter of Roy Cohn. But it's easy to come away from this book wondering just how many truly lasting victories William Buckley ultimately won. Buckley's father, who grew up in Texas but lived for many years as an oil wildcatter in Mexico, imbued his kids with a Catholic old-time conservatism that mistrusted the state and communists—and Jews, an enmity that led four of his kids (not young William Jr.) to burn a cross in front of a Jewish resort in 1937. The junior Buckley's first public speech, written in February 1941, was "In Defense of Charles Lindbergh." Specifically, Buckley defended the airman from accusations of Nazi sympathies while Lindbergh was agitating to keep America out of World War II. Buckley's first book, and first New York Times bestseller, was God and Man at Yale (1951), which denounced the regnant institutions of American liberal culture for turning their back on religious faith. God and Man attacked, as the conservative journalist John Chamberlain explained in its introduction, an "elite of professorial Untouchables" who were wedded to an "unadmitted orthodoxy" in the guise of objectivity: "agnostic as to religion, 'interventionist' and Keynesian as to economics, and collectivist as applied to the relation of the individual to society and government." Buckley, a free speech absolutist for those who wanted to keep the U.S. out of World War II, adopted a more authoritarian mindset in the Cold War, and had colleagues who thought espousing communism should be straight-up illegal, though Buckley did not go quite that far. But in his second book, co-written with his brother-in-law Brent Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies, he predicted that even liberals in America would someday find "the patience of America may at last be exhausted, and we will strike out against" them. He cooperated with the FBI in investigating the feared communist presence at Yale. In 2025, this sounds like a prototype for the academic activist Christopher Rufo, or maybe the podcaster Ben Shapiro: Like them, young Buckley decried and strove to defeat a smug intellectual elite barricaded into educational institutions that he accused of annihilating American values. Buckley's early days also summon thoughts of the neo-reactionary writer Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. "Mencius Moldbug." Both men feared what Yarvin calls "the Cathedral": a complex of institutions and ideas trying to convince the world that only progressivism can be tolerated. In a 1949 speech, Buckley complained that "hundreds of thousands of students leave the universities every year, and their influence pervades the entire country. They get jobs with the government, with newspapers, with the civil service. In a very few years the intellectual collectivist drive of the universities is translated into legislative and public policy." In a 1950 speech at Yale, he declared the university "is very, very allergic to criticism from the liberal, who is the absolute dictator of the United States today." In God and Man, he wrote that "there are limits within which [Yale's] faculty members must keep their opinions if they wish to be 'tolerated.'" He wondered "how long a person who revealed himself as a racist, who lectured about the anthropological superiority of the Aryan, would last at Yale." Buckley was also a premature exponent of worries about the sinister machinations of a "deep state." McCarthy and His Enemies defended Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R–Wisc.). As Tanenhaus notes, McCarthy's "vigilante crusade went after a second group—not Communists (everyone already knew about them) but the much bigger universe of treasonists, shadowy functionaries in the State Department, the CIA, even the U.S. Army—what later came to be called the 'deep state'—always abetted by their handmaidens, the 'intellectuals and the "liberal press."'" Especially the press: "It was the lords of media who put the most vivid pictures in people's heads and expertly applied the instruments of social pressure to shape and direct public opinion." In a pre-publication fundraising letter for what became National Review, Buckley argued, Yarvin-style, that opinion makers "control the elected," by which he meant "not merely our political office-holders" but "everyone who administers any form of public trust, such as government, schools, churches, civic organizations, and our channels of communication, information, and entertainment." Though in this case, Tanenhaus notes, Buckley perceived "not a secret conspiracy but a coordinated duplicity of the like-minded." Buckley's patrician reputation and his ability to befriend intellectual opponents have led some to think he'd disapprove of Trump. But it seems unlikely that the Buckley of the 1950s would have felt that way. When National Review launched, one of Buckley's most influential mentors was Willmoore Kendall, who then was a political philosophy professor at Yale. Kendall helped turn the firebrand who started his public career as a critic of American involvement in overseas wars into someone who thought the battle against communism was the highest public policy concern—and that it might demand, in Buckley's own words, "native despotism" and nuking millions of innocents. For Kendall, McCarthy exemplified "the true American tradition…less that of Fourth of July orations and our constitutional law textbooks, with their cluck-clucking over the so-called preferred freedoms, than, quite simply, that of riding somebody out of town on a rail." That's Trump's stance on immigrants and leftists right there. It was easier for Buckley to seem like the king of American conservatism before National Review–era conservatives started achieving real-world political victories. Their first major win was the ascension of Barry Goldwater to the GOP nomination in 1964—followed by his crushing defeat in November, which many assumed was the death of the American hard right in the party. Buckley knew better than to put all his project's weight on Goldwater; he doubted the Arizona senator's intellectual and ideological bonafides and thought the man wasn't "smart or educated enough to be president," as Tanenhaus summed it up. (Goldwater believed the same about himself.) Buckley wasn't comfortable getting fully behind him with an endorsement until after he won the California primary in June 1964. But Goldwater's political success, such as it was, put a fire in the belly of a new generation of conservative activists, many organized under the banner of Young Americans for Freedom, famously born in 1960 at Buckley's Connecticut home. Buckley, who believed his was a fully oppositional movement when he launched National Review to "stand athwart history, yelling stop," was amazed to find the activists who arose around the Goldwater campaign "talk about affecting history." Buckley's crew was generally not very excited about Richard Nixon, the 1968 Republican nominee. They hadn't even officially endorsed him in his first go-round as the Republican nominee, back in 1960. But Buckley came around in 1968, becoming a major media defender bordering on lackey to Nixon and his foreign policy maven Henry Kissinger. (He was then bitterly disappointed when President Nixon, who he thought was at least staunchly anti-Communist if not sufficiently conservative at home, opened relations with China.) Bozell, who became a Catholic traditionalist, saw the embrace of Nixon as the death of the original Buckleyite conservatism. As Tanenhaus paraphrased Bozell, under Nixon "all the old targets—big government, Keynesian economics, 'compulsory welfare'—had been left untouched. And all the high values—states' rights, 'the constitutional prerogatives of Congress,' a militant anti-Soviet foreign policy…had been betrayed." But Ronald Reagan's ascension to the presidency in 1980 felt like the apotheosis that Buckley had been working toward: an anti-Communist who espoused free markets now ruled America. Curiously, that's exactly when Tanenhaus' narrative momentum falls apart, with the last 27 years of Buckley's life getting 30 pages after Reagan strolls into the Oval Office. While this book is very long, and very long in the works, it could leave devotees of American right-wing history wishing Tanenhaus had reported more on, say, the relationships between Buckley and other National Review staffers over the years, or how the flagship conservative magazine's concerns and approaches changed during the years Buckley managed it. One could also wish Tanenhaus gave us more details about Buckley's relationship with the CIA, where he officially worked—under the tutelage of future Watergate burglar Howard Hunt—from July 1951 to March 1952. Specifically, it would be good to either reinforce or dispel suspicions about how much, if anything, the CIA had to do with Buckley's later choices as a public figure and as editor of National Review. (Hunt, as various figures suspicious of Buckley have noted, had a career largely devoted to clandestine psywar and disinformation.) During his time on the CIA payroll, Tanenhaus reports, the agency assigned Buckley to seek out student activists in Mexico "to lure away from Communism and into the non-Communist left. It was not the ideal task for Buckley, who deemed liberals 'far more dangerous' than Communists." Tanenhaus does take the time to explicitly reject the suspicion, nursed even by the early and important National Review contributor Frank Meyer, that Buckley's magazine was essentially a CIA operation. But he also notes that in the 1970s, as the agency was tarred by a series of scandals, "Buckley supported the CIA in its growing time of crisis, publishing essays by former operatives who not only defended the CIA at every turn—even after reports of illegal domestic spying— but also drew on information and arguments supplied by the Agency." Tanenhaus is out to tell stories about his subject, not to sit in judgment. Still, he devotes a thick throughline to Buckley's attitudes about African Americans. The Buckley family appears to have treated black people decently on a personal level. (When a black schoolteacher wanted to buy some land from William Sr., he gave it to him as a gift.) But in 1957, Buckley infamously argued for denying black southerners meaningful electoral participation, declaring that "the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage." He took a long time to stop downplaying or ignoring the violence inherent in efforts to keep African Americans down, and to stop blaming Southern racial troubles on outside agitators. Buckley, his former protégé Garry Wills once wrote, "could turn any event into an adventure, a joke, a showdown." This book's tone and feel rarely hit with the best of Buckley's fizz or verve. Despite its length, it feels too thin rather than too thick when it comes to the question of whether Buckley did in fact effect a revolution in America. Decades after Reagan won office, America's current president is a trade-hating Republican who is consistently soft on the Soviet Union's heir, Vladimir Putin. Given that, one might question whether Buckley truly had enough lasting impact to warrant a book this size. The best of Buckley's ideas—restraining much of the government and protecting market liberties—do hopefully have a future. The worst, such as his attitudes on how to wage war and how to handle America's racial troubles, we can only hope remain a part of the past. The post Did Bill Buckley Really Lead a Successful Revolution? appeared first on
Atlantic
7 days ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
What Made William F. Buckley So Unusual
The June issue of The Atlantic features an excerpt from Sam Tanenhaus's long-awaited biography of the conservative intellectual and polemicist William F. Buckley Jr. That book— Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America —will be published by Penguin Random House on June 3. Buckley exerted enormous influence not only on American politics but also on how political debate was waged (more and more, on television). I asked Tanenhaus to review the highlights of Buckley's 60-year career, and to explain some of the qualities of personality—incuding his sense of humor—that made Buckley such an unusual public figure. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Cullen Murphy: William F. Buckley Jr. died in 2008. Two generations of Americans have no real firsthand memories of him, and probably an even larger number don't fully appreciate the role he played in American political and intellectual life for almost half a century. Can you give us a quick overview of Buckley's significance and how it endures? Sam Tanenhaus: WFB—or Bill Buckley, as all who knew him learned to say, at his insistence—was too many different people to summarize easily. He is best-known for being the architect of the modern conservative movement that remade the party of Eisenhower in the 1950s into the party of Reagan in the 1980s. That was one Buckley. He was also the author of some 50 books. His very first, God and Man at Yale, a scathing and witty critique of his alma mater published in 1951, when he was 25, laid out the lines of attack being repeated today by the Trump administration and its allies, who like Buckley say that Ivy League institutions enforce anti-American orthodoxies and through them corrupt the broader culture. Buckley was also a pioneer in the uses of media. At his peak, he was a thrice-weekly columnist syndicated in more than 360 newspapers—this at a time when most people got their information from newspapers. His TV debate-and-discussion program, Firing Line, which began in 1966 and lasted until 1999, invented the talking-head cable-news programs of our own time. Bill Buckley the literary man and editor was also a discoverer and nurturer of talented young writers whose work he published in National Review, the magazine he founded in 1955. Some of the best American writers and critics in the second half of the 20th century—Joan Didion, Garry Wills, George F. Will, Arlene Croce, John Leonard, and more—got their start writing for National Review. And this doesn't touch on Bill Buckley the sailor, skier, best-selling spy novelist. Or Bill Buckley the devout Catholic—'our pope,' as one admirer told me. Murphy: What's astonishing to think about is how quickly he arrived on the scene with God and Man at Yale. He goes from being utterly unknown to nationally known with a snap of the fingers. Why did the book make such a splash? Tanenhaus: Novelty and timing had much to do with it. He excelled at choosing moments, and seeing where the argument was and also where it wasn't. In 1951, McCarthyism was a potent force, and Ivy League campuses were under assault—rather as they are today. The difference was that God and Man at Yale, or GAMAY in the shorthand acronym that Buckley and his publisher used, was the first assault to come from high up inside the ivory tower. Buckley wasn't a populist scourge or congressional Torquemada. He was Mr. 'White Shoe' Yale—editor of the campus newspaper, the 'last man tapped' for Skull and Bones, which meant the No. 1 big man on campus. He was chosen to give the Class Day oration—that speech, delivered before 10,000 people at commencement, presaged the book. Also, he wrote with wit and style. Even as he attacked left-leaning 'atheistic' professors, he learned from them. He wanted to write a book they would respect for its arguments and prose. From the April 1968 Issue: What makes Bill Buckley run And they did. When I was first getting to know him, he invited me to his home in Stamford, Connecticut, for lunch. I was amazed to see that the other guest was a distinguished Yale professor, Charles Lindblom, who is denounced in GAMAY. Of course, this was long afterward—40 years later. But still, I was surprised. When Buckley was out of earshot, I asked Lindblom what he'd made of the book at the time. 'Oh, that was Bill,' he replied. 'He had to do that to make his point.' Then he tucked into lunch on the lovely veranda with its view of Long Island Sound. I wasn't writing about Buckley yet. I was in the first stages of a biography of Whittaker Chambers. But moments like that—the sheer improbability of Bill Buckley, of which this was just one glimpse—made me wonder, Okay, this person is not like anyone else I've encountered. What makes him tick? Murphy: Well, what did make him tick? There was his Catholicism, as you've mentioned. He was preternaturally, to use a Buckley word, congenial, and his congeniality crossed party lines. Where did his conservatism—his type of conservatism—come from? It was not a populist conservatism. It had intellectual roots. Tanenhaus: It all began at home, the large rural estate in the northwest corner of Connecticut where he grew up, the sixth of 10 children. Later, when Bill was a fixture on TV—with his memorable voice and patrician style—many assumed he came from Old Yankee stock. He did not. His father, a lawyer and oil speculator, came from the Rio Grande Valley—in fact, from one of the frontier border towns that helped 'Landslide' Lyndon B. Johnson steal a Senate election in 1948. Bill's mother came from New Orleans. This made the Buckleys 'culturally southern,' according to Bill's older brother Jim, who became a U.S. senator and federal judge. That culture included southern courtliness and graces. I kept meeting brilliant people who said Bill Buckley was the 'best conversationalist in the world.' This seemed extravagant—until I got it. They meant the best listener. In the book, I call it 'predatory attentiveness,' the debater's habit of absorbing everything you said so it could be—elegantly most of the time, though not always—tossed back at you. Murphy: And his conservative philosophy? Where did that come from? What were its basic tenets? And how did it take hold of a Republican Party that mostly seemed to be living in an Eisenhower mold? Tanenhaus: The single greatest disappointment in Bill Buckley's intellectual life—letting down himself, friends and admirers, and, I increasingly feel, the country at large—was his failure to articulate a serious coherent conservative philosophy. He tried to do it, with a book he began writing in 1963 after the assassination of President Kennedy, which brought much hard scrutiny to the American right and its growing militancy. He wrote several chapters—some 60 pages—but could get no further. He kept promising himself and others that he would return to this book, but he never did, and by the end of the 1960s had given up. I knew about this book when I began work on the biography, and wondered, like his friends, why he was not able to finish writing it. But when I read the pages he did write, which are in the enormous Buckley archive at Yale, I saw that the problem was the opposite—not that he couldn't finish but that he didn't know where to begin. The few chapters keep circling back to a single point, contained in the title, The Revolt Against the Masses. Buckley was always good at book titles, and this one extends the argument made in José Ortega y Gasset's classic The Revolt of the Masses, published in 1930, which Buckley read at Yale in a seminar taught by his mentor Willmoore Kendall. Ortega's book is a learned aristocrat's complaint about the leveling sins of democracy and modern technology, which elevated the lower orders at the expense of their betters—people like Bill Buckley, with their taste and refinement, their respect for tradition, and, in Bill's case, the age-old Catholic Church, with its high dogma and sacred rituals. Ortega was a big influence on the first American thinker the teenage Bill Buckley met—he was a guest in the Buckley family's home in Sharon, Connecticut—the libertarian man of letters Albert Jay Nock. Any reader of Buckley can always tell when he's reaching for a big point because he'll quote Nock, usually on the debasement of American life in the modern era. Nock's most important book was Our Enemy, the State (1935). Ortega plus Nock equals aristocratic libertarianism. From the February 2008 Issue: 'We're on our way home now, duckie!' Another component, much the finest aspect of Buckley's thinking, came from Catholic teaching, in particular belief in charity—that is, the love one extends to friends and even adversaries. Out of this came Buckley's many philanthropies. When I told him about a young writer at work on a book about a Catholic school in Harlem, Buckley sent a substantial sum the writer's way so he could finish it. He very much believed in noblesse oblige, a belief he got from his father, a political reactionary who was also exceedingly generous. It was this idea of a kind of voluntarist society superintended by a small, enlightened group—Nock called them 'the remnant'—which Buckley and his allies developed into a hard-edged attack on the New Deal 'welfare state' and all its offshoots, including Eisenhower's modified version of it, sometimes called the Big Deal. Every national political leader Buckley ardently embraced for the whole of his life—in sequence, Charles Lindbergh (1939–41), Joseph McCarthy (1950s), Barry Goldwater (1960s), and Ronald Reagan (1970s–80s)—declared himself the enemy of 'big government,' meaning our own federal government as it expanded under Democratic and Republican leaders alike during the period many look back on as the American Century. Buckley absorbed this philosophy in childhood and never abandoned it, though he added a new layer during the Cold War, with the emergence of an enemy even more dangerous than the U.S. government: global communism. Defeating it— or them— became his guiding mission. That epic battle required a big military (including a costly nuclear program), and interventions across the world (including in Vietnam) as well as closer to our shores (Castro's Cuba, Allende's Chile). Closer still, and nearly as menacing, were 'socialistic' elements inside America's own political, cultural, and intellectual establishment. Put all these ideas together, and you have the ideology of the modern right through the end of the 20th century, which simultaneously opposed the encroachments of government (especially when it sought to raise up the 'undeserving' at the expense of talented 'individualists,' as Nock and his disciples called themselves) even as it urged that same government to wage the Cold War on every front. This ideology, sometimes called 'fusionism,' was spelled out in the pages of National Review and eventually was adopted by the GOP, whose leaders saw the utility of presenting themselves to voters as more than pastel 'me too' Republicans (later called Republicans in Name Only—RINOS), and instead as counterrevolutionaries determined to 'roll back' statism at home and abroad. It worked brilliantly in strategic and tactical terms, especially when the liberal Cold War consensus began to come apart in the 1960s as anti–Vietnam War protests and the civil-rights movement synchronously grew. Buckley and others argued that the increased radicalism of the left was the stepchild of a permissive, wayward consensus politics that lacked clear, coherent principles. The masses were now in control, and the only solution was to rise up against them. Buckley was not a serious political thinker, but he was a gifted enactor of political ideas as a writer, debater, and—in one pivotal chapter in the life of both him and the conservative movement—candidate for mayor of New York in 1965. Murphy: Since you brought it up: I remember the mayoral campaign vividly. Buckley was funny, and he turned conservative politics from resolutely angry into something that could be fun. Do you think the mayoral race changed the conservative movement? Or him? Or both? Tanenhaus: When he was asked what he'd do if he won, he said: 'Demand a recount.' It was a line he'd worked out in advance. His aide de camp, a young Yale grad named Neal Freeman, pleaded with him not to use it, since it would feed suspicions that Buckley wasn't taking the campaign seriously. But one of the points Buckley wanted to make was that people were taking politics too seriously. He seldom talked about politics. He once told me he did it only when he was paid, and when he was paid, it was a lot—$11,000 per episode of Firing Line as of 1971. In 1967, Time put him on the cover—a big deal in those days. (Just ask Donald Trump.) The headline was in fact 'Conservatism Can Be Fun.' Ta-Nehisi Coates: When James Baldwin met Bill Buckley Why did anyone care about fun? For one thing, because fun was in short supply in the politics of that time. In the span of five years, three of our greatest figures—Jack and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King—were assassinated. We worry about violent uprisings in our moment. In the 1960s, they happened almost continually. New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Newark all became war zones. And here was Bill Buckley suggesting there might be another way: Ideological adversaries could talk to one another, use language as a weapon but also as an instrument of persuasion. In the course of that singular New York mayoral campaign, which one friend likened to Andy Warhol–quality performance art, Buckley articulated his ideology with remarkable flair in a city that was being undone by crime, delinquency, and out-of-control municipal spending. He summoned all the strains of conservative belief and remade the GOP into the party we knew until 2016 The luckiest turn for Buckley and New York voters during the mayoral election was a newspaper strike in the fall of 1965. This made TV the main news medium. Each of the local news stations invited the three candidates—the Conservative Party candidate, Buckley; the Republican, John Lindsay; and the Democrat, Abe Beame—into the studio for debates. They were a revelation. Here was something no one had ever witnessed before—a first-class mind and university wit talking about issues like crime in the streets and welfare rolls. Columnists like Murray Kempton and Pete Hamill were enthralled. It wasn't just the debates. Twenty years ago I wrote an anniversary story on the 1965 campaign for The New York Times Magazine. One of the items that turned up in my research was an audiotape of a luncheon speech Buckley gave to the Overseas Press Club in October 1965. At the time, Buckley was 39. I have never heard anyone command an audience the way he does on that tape—the jokes, the erudite wit, the phrasing and polish, the mellifluous voice, the charm. It was the mayoral campaign that persuaded Buckley—and WOR, a local New York TV network—to broadcast a regular weekly debate program beginning in the spring of 1966: Firing Line. Richard Nixon's speechwriter Ray Price—who had known and been awed by Buckley at Yale in the late 1940s—told me that Firing Line was Bill's single greatest contribution to the conservative movement and to American politics. For the first time, he brought his argument into the living rooms of Upper West Side liberals and their equivalents across the land, and many were entertained and also persuaded—not every time or in all cases, but just enough to keep listening. Liberals found themselves thinking, I don't agree with him but he's smarter than I am, and maybe I should hear him out. Getting people to listen, to drop their defenses and let you inside their minds, is the all-important first step in winning the argument. With the mayoral campaign and Firing Line, Buckley became good company. At the same time, the mayoral race was caught up with race in the other sense—that is, racial conflict. It was the great issue in the 1965 campaign, as it was in so much of American politics in those years, and in subsequent years too. One of the things that became clear as I explored the life and times of Bill Buckley was that issues involving race made the conservative movement—that is, brought it into the mainstream. Anti-communism was a strong cause, but it was shared by many. Murray Kempton, Buckley's favorite columnist—in those days, just about everyone's favorite columnist—once pointed out that differences between the patrician Averill Harriman and the rogue Joe McCarthy were differences of taste, by which he meant Harriman's anti-communism was genteel while McCarthy's was vulgar. Matthew Yglesias: William F. Buckley, RIP In May 1954, at the same moment McCarthy was coming apart during the Army-McCarthy hearings—seen by as many as 20 million people in the infant days of television—the Supreme Court issued the Brown decision outlawing segregated schools. This instantly created new allegiances and new enmities—first in the '50s, when the Dixiecrats found allies among northern Republicans, and then in the '60s and '70s, when the civil-rights movement moved north, and the new 'backlash politics' arose in big cities where the conflicts were different and ethnic groups clashed over schools, jobs, and housing. The same argument that landed with a thud in Buckley's debate at Cambridge University with James Baldwin—Black Americans were actually doing pretty well, and whites should stop apologizing—excited audiences a month or two later when Buckley made it in Manhattan. Murphy: The high-water mark of Buckley's political influence may have been the election of Ronald Reagan. Would that be fair to say? What was the Buckley-Reagan relationship like?—that's the first question. And the second is related: The GOP itself is changing by the time Reagan assumes office—the conservatism, if that's the word, it espouses more and more is not an intellectual conservatism but a populist emotion. How did Buckley think about what was happening? Tanenhaus: Yes, most would agree that in 1980, with the election of Reagan—'my favorite president,' as Buckley called him—his ideology and the movement reached their peak. It was a personal triumph for Bill, because he had been Reagan's tutor, going all the way back to 1961, when he had gone to Los Angeles to speak to conservatives and Reagan—then a TV actor and nascent right-wing activist—had been his introducer. Today, after so many transformations and with the passage of time, few grasp how fringe a figure Reagan seemed to many, even after he was twice elected governor of California [in 1966 and 1970] and proved himself to be a responsible and sensible administrator. The fringe reputation grew out of his association with the John Birch Society, a major force in California politics despite the wacky assertions of Robert Welch, its leader—most notoriously that President Eisenhower was a Soviet agent. Buckley and company didn't know what to do about Welch. At first they prescribed an early version of 'don't take him literally, take him seriously,' but once Welch became an embarrassment, Buckley huddled with Goldwater and some others. All agreed that Bill, the super-clever counterpuncher, would take apart Welch's mad theories, which he did at length in the pages of National Review in 1962, outraging many subscribers—one of many episodes that prompted Buckley's famous retort, 'Cancel your own goddam subscription.' Reagan was one of those enlisted to second the attack on Welch—and both the movement and Reagan were saved. But Buckley wanted to bring 'Ronnie' along slowly. In 1968, riding high on his landslide first victory in California, Reagan was the presidential favorite of many on the right—including the campus legions who were members of the Young Americans for Freedom (one of Buckley's many suboperations). Buckley said no. Reagan wasn't ready. It was Nixon's turn. He came to regret this—first when Nixon went to China, undermining his own long history of anti-communism, the one important conservative credential Nixon had; and later, amid the catastrophe of Watergate, set in motion by Buckley's own good friend and former boss, E. Howard Hunt. Hunt was Buckley's handler when Bill was briefly a 'deep cover' CIA officer in Mexico City in 1951. He quit after eight months, having found his assignments 'tedious'—always the death-knell word for him. Besides, far more stimulating work awaited him back in the U.S.: promoting the surprise best seller God and Man at Yale. From the July/August 2009 Issue: Daredevil But, as you suggest, Buckley's relationship with Reagan was complicated, in part because Reagan was more complicated than many realized. I myself didn't realize it until I dug into the facts of Buckley's friendship with him. These were two large figures with, shall we say, healthy egos. A colleague of Reagan's once said Reagan felt superior to everyone in any room of politicians he was in because he had the confidence of one who came from nowhere but had a successful career in Hollywood in its golden age, the 1930s and '40s. That took discipline, skill, talent. Reagan, as the nation and world eventually learned, was a master script reader and deliverer. Gore Vidal once said that Reagan was a far better actor than he was given credit for, and acting is an art. And his speaking voice was probably the best of any American politician's, then or since. Well, Buckley was pretty good in the speaking and script department too, and in fact wrote his own scripts (including the 1,500 introductions he wrote to Firing Line episodes), and he discovered—or, rather, had the reality thrust upon him—that at a certain point, Reagan decided his tutelage under Bill Buckley was complete, and it was Reagan's turn to take over. This happened in the days following his epic landslide victory in 1980. Thrilled and excited, National Review 's editors declared themselves the true victors and brashly announced, 'We have a nation to run.' That sealed it. Reagan decided not to attend the magazine's big 25th-anniversary bash at the Plaza Hotel, in New York, held in December 1980—a snub that caused Buckley acute embarrassment and haunted him all his remaining days. In fact, he was still steamed about toward the end of his life, when he was working on his final book, The Reagan I Knew, which was published posthumously in 2009. The last time I saw Buckley, at his home in Stamford in February 2008, three weeks before he died, the two people he talked about were Reagan and Henry Kissinger, who had become his closest friend—a friendship that dated back to 1954 but grew in the Nixon years and after. In 1980–81, Buckley pleaded with Reagan to bring Kissinger into his Cabinet, but Reagan wouldn't do it because Henry was so deeply disliked on the right—blamed for détente with the Soviet Union and for the China opening. Buckley himself opposed both gambits but liked and admired Kissinger anyway, in part because of his exceptional intellect. Nevertheless, he felt better about it all when, long afterward, Kissinger told him, on one of his last visits to Stamford shortly before Buckley died, that both heretical moves had originated with Nixon, who in addition to being a criminal was one of the most talented geostrategic chess players ever to occupy the White House. Reagan was very good at that too. Buckley and others were appalled when Reagan reached a truce with Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan had gotten out in front of them all. One of the lessons of modern politics, reinforced for me while working on this book, is that the role of intellectuals, while important, is actually different from what we—and they —may suppose. Buckley and his allies liked to think of themselves as preceptors and teachers—even visionaries and prophets—ushering in the grand ideas. Mere vote-hustling presidents were the vehicles or instruments of those ideas. In truth the relationship is generally the opposite. The charismatic leader clears the way and the 'verbalists,' in the term used by one of Buckley's mentors, James Burnham, fall behind in the important but subsidiary roles of cheerleaders and publicists. This was the message the supposed simpleton Ronnie Reagan coolly delivered to the über-sophisticate Bill Buckley by deciding to skip the banquet at the Plaza. Emma Green: In the age of Trump, no wonder Republicans miss William F. Buckley This led to another painful irony. Once Reagan entered the White House, he didn't need Bill Buckley. Nixon had needed him, to keep the right wing in line. But Reagan came directly out of the right wing. Bill Buckley was a social ornament—especially to the ladder-climbing Nancy Reagan—but otherwise not especially useful. The journalist the Reagans cultivated was Buckley's protégé George F. Will, the king of Washington columnists. Fortunately, Buckley had so big and full a life in New York, and had so many interests and friendships of his own there, that he didn't need Reagan either. Murphy: Reagan aside, what did Buckley think about the direction his party was going in? Tanenhaus: Populism is a fraught subject for the whole of conservative-movement history. Lindbergh wasn't precisely a populist, but he also was not an officeholder or office seeker. But Joe McCarthy was, and he remains the most important figure in Buckley's crucial formative years. Buckley took up his cause early and defended him 'til the end of his life, though he made vague stabs at saying that maybe 'Joe' had been more trouble than he was worth. In fact, Buckley was well aware that the movement needed crowd-pleasing candidates. How else to win office? The ideas and arguments—the philosophy—could be adjusted and contoured (and readjusted and recontoured) to suit each new movement tribune. After Reagan left office, and the Cold War was won, Buckley found himself a reluctant promoter of the movement's new causes, the 'culture wars,' which in the '70s included disputes about 'forced' school busing and abortion and, in the '80s, revolved around the AIDS epidemic. The booming voices belonged to Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh. Buckley liked them all, in particular Limbaugh. When I attended one of National Review 's big events in the early 2000s, Rush was the host and man of honor. Many were surprised. They shouldn't have been. He was a rabble-rouser, but then so had been McCarthy. I'm asked time and again what would Buckley have made of Donald Trump. My answer is, first, that backward-looking prophecy is the bane of poor historians. It's impossible to read the present into the thinking of a person who lived in an earlier time. Buckley died in 2008, at age 82. He came from a different world than our own but also helped bring our world into being, particularly the world of American conservatives. Many Buckley admirers and acolytes are now Trumpists. Is this a betrayal of Buckley and his legacy, or is it a fulfillment? There are arguments to be made on both sides. I decided not to discuss or quote Buckley's one extended commentary on Donald Trump, a penetratingly dismissive assessment written in 2000 (and published in, of all venues, Cigar Aficionado), when Trump was toying with running for president on the Reform Party ticket invented by Ross Perot. Why did I omit this? Because it was written long before Trump emerged as a force in the Republican Party. Many who agreed with Buckley's dismissive words back then have since changed their minds. The editors of National Review vehemently opposed Trump in January 2016 but no longer do so. Would Buckley have undergone a similar revolution in his thinking? I can't say, and neither can anyone else. Murphy: You've spent 25 years working on this book. You've had access to Buckley's papers. You've interviewed his friends and members of his family. You knew Buckley, and spoke with him often and at length. A life fuller than his is hard to imagine, and like anyone's, it had its complexities. As a person—as I understand it, and as he emerges in your book—he elicited great loyalty and affection, and returned it. What were the qualities that accounted for this? Tanenhaus: Like most journalists who've been kicking around for a long time, I've been in the company of many prominent people. But of them all, not one (with the exception of the great Linda Ronstadt, when I got to interview her some years ago) was so natural and enjoyable company as Bill Buckley. As Garry Wills said, he was 'just exciting to be with.' One reason was that the distinctions that so often place barriers between the great and the ordinary simply melted away, with no effort on his part. This may seem strange, since Buckley's speech and manner struck so many as affected or even pretentious. Nothing could be further from the truth. An interviewer asked him once about his ornate vocabulary and diction. Bill replied, 'I talk to my dog the same way.' (That was Rowley, his adored Cavalier King Charles spaniel). Ross Douthat: Cruisin' with the Right When I first met Buckley, in 1990, he was at or near the peak of his fame. He was a best-selling author, TV star, and Manhattan socialite. He was the acknowledged leader of one of the great political movements in American history and had just seen the single great mission in his life, the defeat of global communism, achieved under American statesmen he had anointed. I was nobody, a 34-year-old barely published freelance journalist. Yet Bill Buckley treated me as his equal in every way, with no hint of pretense or condescension. He had a quality not just of courtesy but of deference I'd not encountered before or since. This is related to something else—his utter lack of pettiness. His mortal enemy was Gore Vidal, yet I never heard Buckley speak ill of him. One of Buckley's protégés, the writer Michael Lind, told me that the only time he heard Buckley mention Vidal was to praise his brilliance as a writer. Some of this was good manners. My wife and I were recently in Sharon, Connecticut, and spoke with many there who knew several generations of Buckleys. Not once did any Buckley they knew disparage or criticize anyone in personal terms. In Bill's case this carried over into all his dealings. Courtesy was also rooted in his faith. When Bill was growing up in Sharon, every Catholic member of the household—that is, servants and groomsmen—went to church together on Sundays. They piled together into the family Buicks and drove to the modest Catholic church, St. Bernard. Murphy: Why did you write this biography? You've been at work on it, off and on, for a quarter of a century. Tanenhaus: Books, as you know, seem to choose authors rather than the other way around. But I can tell you the precise moment when it occurred to me to write about Bill Buckley, if not exactly why. It was in 1992. I was midway through my biography of Whittaker Chambers, and I had just read Garry Wills's wonderful little book Confessions of a Conservative, which included a tantalizing reference to a lunch with Chambers when Garry was at National Review in 1957. Wills was my idol then—as he still is—and I wrote asking if I could speak with him. This was pre-internet and pre-email. Letters were really letters signed and posted in the mail. After some weeks had passed, it seemed clear that Wills was not going to reply. I mentioned my frustration to Buckley. Not long after, the phone rang. It was Bill Buckley, and I remember his exact words. 'I hadn't spoken to Garry Wills in 20 years'—because of an epic falling-out during the Vietnam and civil-rights era—'but I just got off the phone with him and he's waiting for your call.' And he was. I made the call, and Garry Wills told me about his meeting with Chambers. I've turned that little episode over in my mind many times in the past more than 30 years, and each time I'm struck by something different: his extravagant kindness to me, the delight he plainly took in letting me know the extent of his interest in the book I was writing, the excuse he was perhaps looking for to resume a connection whose loss troubled him. But when I think about it now, what I think of is the enjoyment it afforded Buckley too in solving my problem—the pleasure he found or created in such moments, and there were thousands like them. It is the pleasure of the artist, pleasure allied with an odd detachment. It is of a piece with the feel for comedy—his love of conversation as continual repartee and his embrace of the political life as more than the grim clash of zealotries but instead an adventure and expression of personality. The greatest work of secular religious writing is Dante's La Divina Commedia —comic because the hero reaches paradise. And Buckley, the Catholic who never knew a moment of doubt, was sure the same deliverance awaited him. From the December 1951 Issue: The changes at Yale Buckley was born in 1925, the same year a writer he admired and identified with, his fellow Irish Catholic romantic F. Scott Fitzgerald, published The Great Gatsby. Both Bill Buckley and Jay Gatsby turn 100 this year. The two epigraphs in my book come from Marcel Proust and John Keats. I was sorely tempted to add a third, from Gatsby: If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away … it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. To be in Bill Buckley's company was to feel this and also to feel—to know—that hope really is a gift, not a delusion, though Buckley knew a great deal about delusion too.
