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Wall Street Journal
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
A Soulless Biography of William F. Buckley Jr.
At 1,040 pages, Sam Tanenhaus's biography of William F. Buckley Jr. is a book you can't pick up once you put it down. Barton Swaim truly does the heavy lifting in 'More Than a Man of His Time' (Books, May 31). Despite the book's subtitle, there is far less 'life' in Mr. Tanenhaus's biography than there is an indictment of what he calls Buckley's 'Revolution That Changed America.' Mr. Tanenhaus is a 'gifted writer and a diligent scholar,' as Mr. Swaim says. His book isn't a screed but something worse. The soul of WFB, so apparent for those who knew him—and the subject of the second book under review, Lawrence Perelman's 'American Impresario'—is conspicuously absent in this telling. Mr. Tanenhaus gives readers a hollow portrait of a reckless leader with his hands off the tiller, crashing into the docks of Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon and other sundry characters. As a young research assistant for Buckley's novel 'Spytime' (2000), written over a winter skiing together in Gstaad, Switzerland, I discovered a mentor who always looked to others for the next plot twist and scene location. He rejoiced in turning over the wheel, even if it meant burning out the clutch, as I promptly did to his manual transmission Peugeot.
Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Business
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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.'
Wall Street Journal
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Buckley' and ‘American Impresario': More Than a Man of His Time
Sam Tanenhaus is the author of a superb biography of the onetime communist mole and later conservative journalist Whittaker Chambers. Soon after the publication of that book in 1997, word circulated that Mr. Tanenhaus had been chosen by William F. Buckley Jr. to write his own biography. In the intervening quarter-century, admirers of Buckley—this reviewer among them—have had reason to regret Buckley's decision and look forward to the biography with unease. Mr. Tanenhaus, a man of the left who served for some years as the editor of the New York Times Book Review, has over the years assumed the role of American conservatism's liberal interpreter, the wise observer capable of explaining the right to the left. His book 'The Death of Conservatism' (2009), published in the afterglow of Barack Obama's election, contends that the right dissolved into incoherence when it abandoned its proper role as a check on liberalism's excesses and aspired to govern according to its own philosophy. For those of us on the right, Mr. Tanenhaus is a familiar type: the enlightened liberal prepared to praise important conservative figures of the past but not of the present. Ronald Reagan gained the respect of many such people the moment he died in 2004. Mr. Tanenhaus's biography of Buckley has arrived at last, and it is more or less the book conservatives feared it would be. The author is a gifted writer and a diligent scholar; his account is ably paced. But the Bill Buckley of this book is little more than a wasted talent: a man who put his stupendous gifts in the service of a perverse cause and, though he got one or two big things right, propounded a muddled ideology and probably compounded the nation's problems. A book so long in the making was bound to sprawl, and this one does, with nearly 900 pages of text and another 100 or so of often prolix endnotes. I'm not convinced the decision to supersize the book was a good idea. Buckley's devotees will find it frequently irritating and occasionally enraging, so often does the author question his subject's motives and portray the movement he coalesced as beset by phobias and crotchets. Buckley's despisers, on the other hand, won't want to spend 900 pages with him.
Yahoo
12-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Oh, where have you gone, William F. Buckley, Jr.?
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — American conservatism was not always a primary political force in the United States, nor were its ideals and principles well articulated for a mass audience. Then came William F. Buckley Jr. With his precise Connecticut diction and boyish blond hair, Buckley's firebrand form of intellectualism gave conservative ideology a face, name and energy in the decades following Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal America. During the latter half of the 20th century, Buckley was everywhere — on television and radio, his columns syndicated to hundreds of newspapers (he wrote some 6,000 over his lifetime), and he could even be found in the halls of power, including the White House. Through the publication he founded, National Review, Buckley articulated his views cheerfully and with acerbic humor. His tenets were those associated with conservative ideology today — individual liberty, unregulated capitalism, traditional family values and the importance of faith — and he championed them while goodnaturedly sparring with his ideological opposites. 'Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view,' Buckley wrote in 1959, 'it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.' Buckley's influence on American culture will be freshly examined with the June publication of a biography written by a writer that Buckley himself selected: Sam Tanenhaus, a historian and former editor of The New York Times Review of Books. The two got along well after collaborating on Tanenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chambers and, in the past 10 years of his life, Buckley gave Tanenhaus access to his personal papers as well as substantial interview opportunities. Twenty-five years later, 'BUCKLEY: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America' will be released on June 3. On Friday, Tanenhaus was at Buckley's alma mater, Yale University, for a conversation at the Yale Review Festival. 'He's not just an ideologue. He's a very interesting, more-complicated person than you might think,' said Tanenhaus, whose book comes in at a door-stopping 1,040 pages. 'I was never in the company of someone whose mind worked as fast as his. And he was just a step ahead of you.' Interviewing Tanenhaus was Beverly Gage, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian and biographer of J. Edgar Hoover. A professor at Yale, she often interacts with Buckley's personal archives, which are stored on the campus — the same school with which Buckley had, at best, a contentious relationship. 'One of the things that has always struck me in thinking about Buckley and teaching about Buckley is that he narrated himself as both an insider — he loved to be at the center of things… — and then he [was] this ferocious outsider: 'the most misunderstood man of a movement that came from out in the wilderness to forge through the American consensus of the establishment,'' Gage said. Tanenhaus agreed. Though Buckley's father was fiercely opposed to the New Deal, the family lived 30 minutes away from FDR and frequented some of the same social circles as the president. Buckley was a conservative who attended a college that taught liberal economic policies and he had religion professors who were atheists, and yet he still managed to become the chairman of the Yale Daily News and 'a big man on campus,' Tanenhaus said. Buckley's first book, 'God and Man at Yale,' was a scathing denunciation of the school. The talk covered Buckley's anti-communism, which first showed itself as support of Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator whose name is now synonymous with 'The Red Scare' and the political persecution of supposed communists in the 1950s. Gage suggested that his commitment to anti-communism became 'not only the central part of his worldview,' but allowed him to assemble the team of conservatives that became National Review and promote a common cause. Tanenhaus suggested, too, that his defense of McCarthy forged one of the more effective arguments still used by some conservatives today. 'So, you don't like McCarthy. Does that mean you like communists better?' In the years that followed, Buckley made a 'transition from being the intellectual gadfly, to being someone who's much more directly engaged in politics,' Gage said. He helped to nominate a prominent conservative onto the Republican presidential ticket in Barry Goldwater, then ran a mostly performative bid for mayor of New York that garnered significant national attention for his political views, which he used to create his television brand. His show 'Firing Line' lead to a series of era-defining debates. 'The best thing he had was his ability to listen,' said Tanenhaus. 'The way I call it, a 'predatory attentiveness.' He wanted to know what you were going to say so he could take it apart.' He quickly rose to greater and greater spheres of influence, which culminated in the presidential election of 1979. By that November, Buckley had helped to usher in a new president in Ronald Reagan, whose platform was aligned with much that Buckley had argued for since his days at Yale. It represented a sea change in how America understood its values from the days of progressive politics and large-scale federal actions to one of smaller government, free markets and more traditional family values. 'Reagan was in some ways a creation of Bill Buckley, ideologically,' Tanenhaus said. In the Q&A following the talk, an audience member asked Tanenhaus — who admitted that he doesn't always agree with Buckley or conservative politics — if he had been co-opted by the charm and affability of Buckley. 'It's very complicated,' said Tanenhaus. 'If you were in his company, no matter who you were, then you'd be treated with courtesy and dignity. I'd rather have more of that in a culture than less.' He added, 'Given all the options, all the ways things can go and have gone, I think we're better off with him than without him.'
