Latest news with #SamTanenhaus
Washington Post
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
A troubling chapter in William F. Buckley's life
CAMDEN, S.C. — In breaking news this week, former New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus finally finished his authorized biography of William F. Buckley Jr. It took him only about 25 years to complete the 1,000-page tome — 'Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America' — which is approximately how long it likely will take me to read it. Given actuarial projections on aging, I'd better get cracking.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
The genteel, silver-tongued thinker who fathered US conservatism - and paved the way for Trump
Back when the 'public intellectual' was still a thriving species in America, the conservative writer William F Buckley Jr was one of the most famous – of any political stripe. On the PBS television show Firing Line, which he hosted weekly until 1999, he debated or interviewed people ranging from ardent rightwingers to black nationalists. In between, he edited the magazine National Review, wrote three columns a week, wrote or dictated hundreds of letters a month, and was known to dash off a book while on vacation. He was photographed working at a typewriter in the back of a limousine as a dog looked on. In Aladdin (1992), Robin Williams's genie does Buckley as one of his impressions. Buckley's extraordinary energy is captured in a sweeping new biography that also uses its subject to tell a larger story of the American right. 'As far as I'm concerned, he invented politics as cultural warfare, and that's what we're seeing now,' the writer Sam Tanenhaus said. Tanenhaus spent nearly three decades researching an authorized biography that was published on Tuesday, titled Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America. Buckley is often remembered as the architect of the modern conservative movement. For decades he worked to unite anti-communists, free marketeers, and social conservatives into the coalition behind the Reagan revolution. Yet today, almost two decades since Buckley's death in 2008, the conservative landscape looks different. Free trade is out, economic protectionism is in. The Republican party's base of support, once the most educated and affluent, is now increasingly working-class. Even as Donald Trump remakes the right in his own image, however, Tanenhaus sees Buckley's thumbprints. One of the biggest is Trumpism's suspicion of intellectual elites. Although Buckley was a blue blood and loved the company of artists and literary people, he famously said that he would 'sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University'. His first book, in 1951, accused professors of indoctrinating students with liberal and secularist ideas – more than half a century before the Trump administration's bruising attempts to pressure Ivy League universities into political fealty. Tanenhaus, the former editor of the New York Times Book Review, spoke to me by video call from his house in Connecticut. He is a gregarious and funny conversationalist. At one point, he paused a digression about Joan Didion to observe: 'Wow. There's a vulture in my backyard. For God's sake.' He said he looked forward to reading my piece about him, 'unless you're saying bad stuff about me. Then send it to me and say: 'My editors made me write this.'' Our free-flowing, one-and-half-hour conversation gave me some sense of why Tanenhaus's biography took so long to write. It also made me better understand how the conservative Buckley was charmed into the decision to allow a self-described 'lifelong unregistered liberal Democrat' unfettered access to his papers, and to give that person the final – or at least most comprehensive – word on his life. The outcome is a lively, balanced and deeply researched book. At more than 1,000 pages, including end matter, the hardback is an engrossing, if occasionally wrist-straining, read. Tanenhaus was born in 1955, three weeks before Buckley published the first issue of National Review. Writing the book, he said, often felt like a kind of 'reconstructive journalism' where he relived history that he had experienced but never considered in its context. As a liberal and an 'unobservant, ignorant, secular Jew', he also had to try to understand someone with whom he had little in common, politically or culturally. Although Buckley's views on some subjects evolved over time, 'he was pretty and firmly entrenched with two foundational ideas,' Tanenhaus said. 'One was Catholicism, which was the most important thing in his life. The second was a kind of evangelical capitalism.' Unlike many of his mentors and allies, who tended to be ex-Marxists or ex-liberals, Buckley was not an ideological convert. His father, a wealthy, devoutly Catholic and rightwing oilman from Texas who raised his large family in Connecticut and across Europe, loomed large over his early life. Buckley and his nine siblings were desperate to impress their father. He was loving to his family and also racist, in a 'genteel Bourbon' way, and antisemitic, in a more vitriolic way. In 1937, when Buckley was 11, his older siblings burned a cross in front of a Jewish resort. He later recounted the story with embarrassment but argued that his siblings did not understand the gravity of what they were doing. Although Buckley came to make a real effort to purge the right of racist, antisemitic and fringe elements, Tanenhaus thinks his upbringing held sway longer than most people realize. One of the most interesting sections of the book concerns Camden, South Carolina, where Buckley's parents had a home. In the 1950s the town became notorious for violence against black people and white liberals. During his research, Tanenhaus discovered that the Buckleys – who were considered by their black domestic workers to be unusually kind relative to the white people of the area – also funded the town's pro-segregation paper and had ties to a local white supremacist group. After a spate of racist attacks in Camden, Buckley wrote a piece in National Review condemning the violence, but not segregation itself. He defended segregation on the grounds that white people were, for the time being, the culturally 'superior' race. Buckley's views on race began to change in the 1960s. He was horrified by the Birmingham church bombing that killed four little girls. During his unsuccessful third-party campaign for mayor of New York in 1965, he surprised both conservatives and liberals by endorsing affirmative action. In 1970 he argued that within a decade the United States might have a black president and that this event would be a 'welcome tonic'. Despite his patrician manner and distinct accent, Buckley had a savvy understanding of the power of mass media and technology. National Review was never read by a wide audience, but Buckley and his conservative vanguard fully embraced radio, television and other media. A technophile, he was one of the first to adopt MCI mail, an early version of email. Tanenhaus thinks he would thrive in the age of Twitter and podcasts. 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. Buckley was deeply embarrassed by the notorious 1968 incident in which Gore Vidal called him a 'crypto-Nazi', on-air, and Buckley responded by calling Vidal an alcoholic 'queer' and threatening to punch him. It was an exception to a code of conduct that Buckley generally tried to live by. '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?'' Tanenhaus laughed. 'It's just a different worldview, and we don't get it because we take ourselves more seriously than he did.' Being the authorized biographer of a living person entails a special relationship. You become intimately familiar with your subject – perhaps even good friends, as Tanenhaus and his wife did with Buckley and his socialite wife, Pat. Yet you also need critical distance to write honestly. It was impossible to finish the book 'while he was still alive', Tanenhaus said. He realized in retrospect that Buckley's death was 'the only way that I could gain the perspective I needed, the distance from him and the events that he played an important part in, to be able to wrap my arms around them'. He thinks Buckley also understood that a true biography would be a full and frank accounting of his life. 'I think that, in some way, he wanted someone to come along and maybe understand things he didn't understand about himself.' Despite his disagreements with Buckley's politics, Tanenhaus was ultimately left with a positive assessment of him as a person. 'He had a warmth and generosity that are uncommon. When you're a journalist, part of your business is interacting in some way with the great, and the great always remind you that you're not one of them. They have no interest in you. They never ask you about yourself. Buckley was not like that.' He is not sure what he would have made of Trump. Buckley was willing to criticize the right, and was an early critic of the Iraq war, Tanenhaus said. Yet 'conservatives can always find a way to say: 'Whatever our side is doing, the other side is worse.'' This is Tanenhaus's third book about conservatism. I asked what he thinks the left most misunderstands about the right. He instantly responded: 'They don't understand how closely the right has been studying them all these years.' He noted that Buckley surrounded himself with ex-leftists and that he and other conservatives made a point of reading left and liberal books and studying their tactics of political organizing. But that doesn't seem to go the opposite direction. Leftists and liberals 'don't see that the other side should be listened to, that there's anything to learn from them. And they think, no matter how few of them there are, that they're always in the majority.' Buckley once said that his 'idea of a counter-revolution is one in which we overturn the view of society that came out of the New Deal', Tanenhaus said. Today, Trump is aggressively moving, with mixed success, to roll back the federal administrative state – a vestige of Buckley's vision of unfettered capitalism, even if Trump's other economic views aren't exactly Buckley's. 'It would not be far-fetched to say we are now seeing the fulfillment of what he had in mind,' Tanenhaus said.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
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
New York Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Man Who Turned Right-Wing Politics Into Entertainment
BUCKLEY: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, by Sam Tanenhaus In the age of Steve Bannon and Bronze Age Pervert — the pseudonymous author acclaimed by young Trumpists — a biography of William F. Buckley Jr. seems almost quaint. Since his death in 2008, the aristocratic founder of the flagship conservative magazine National Review has been wreathed in nostalgia. Especially as the Trump era dawned, there was a sense that somehow Buckley would have stopped it, even as National Review's iconic 2016 'Against Trump' issue proved no match for the MAGA insurgency. At a moment without gatekeepers or even gates, it was said, Buckley showed how much we had lost: It was he who had kept out the crazies, the conspiracy theorists, the antisemites; it was he who had defined, even created, the respectable right. Sam Tanenhaus's immersive authorized biography partakes of this nostalgia, even as his portrait of Buckley dispels it. Tanenhaus, a former editor of The New York Times Book Review, concludes on an elegiac note, imagining Buckley trapped in a world different from ours, 'beyond our reach but hovering near.' But the Buckley that emerges from his exhaustive, 1,000-page portrait is not so much a stranger to our times as a precursor to them. After all, Buckley made his name with 'God and Man at Yale,' his slashing 1951 attack on his alma mater as a hotbed of leftism, complete with the suggestion that alumni withhold donations as a means of pressuring the university to remedy the issue. Tanenhaus's case for Buckley's significance is mostly tacit, as the book curiously lacks a formal introduction; his keenest insight is to understand him as the right's 'first intellectual entertainer.' In his precocious youth, not only did Buckley realize that politics was becoming entertainment, but he helped make it so, branching off from magazines into television, spy novels and a stunt run for New York City mayor, all while befriending and advising the most powerful politicians of his day. More than a political journalist, Buckley was an unabashed activist who intuitively grasped the centrality of the media and the power of attention, and wielded both on behalf of his cause. American politics has never been the same since. As Tanenhaus lavishly elaborates in the book's early chapters, Buckley was to the manner born. His oil speculator father had spent years in Mexico — where he was involved in various counterrevolutionary intrigues until he was expelled in 1920 — and he recreated the country's colonial aesthetic meticulously at Great Elm, his Connecticut estate. Late in life, Buckley once claimed he had been raised in Mexico. This was not the case, but Buckley and his nine siblings did grow up in a veritable hacienda, speaking Spanish, English, French as well as 'a polyglot of their own invention,' and attended by a fleet of tutors, nannies and maids. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
