For a man widely considered the pre-eminent American conservative of the twentieth century, William F. Buckley was something of a paradox. To begin with, he was a zealot for freedom who distrusted the masses and their ability to govern themselves; an American isolationist who befriended and supported imperialist presidents; a racist who gave a platform to Black radicals; a homophobe who maintained close friendships with many gay men; and an enemy of liberalism who became part of the liberal establishment.
These and many more contradictions are vividly captured in Sam Tanenhaus’s doorstopper biography, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America. The product of almost three decades of meticulous research, it is a fitting tribute to an extraordinary life, although Tanenhaus’s achievement is slightly marred by his cursory treatment of Buckley’s final decades.
Born in 1925 to wealthy Catholic parents, Buckley experienced a childhood notable for its privilege, adventure and cosmopolitanism. By the time he was seven, he had lived in Mexico, Paris and London, but home was the large family estate in Sharon, Connecticut, where young Billy and his nine siblings could indulge in horse-riding, sailing and private piano lessons.
From 1939, when Buckley’s father purchased a second estate in Camden, South Carolina, the family would split its time between North and South. Although Buckley resided in Connecticut and New York for most of his adult life (with winter skiing trips to Switzerland), this Southern connection would remain with him forever and influence some of his least attractive political views.
Though he was an isolationist — his first political act, aged fourteen, was joining the America First Committee — Buckley served in the army on the home front towards the end of the second world war. Discharged in 1946, he arrived at Yale University “determined to make something of himself.” He immediately tried out for the debating team, where he partnered successfully with L. Brent Bozell, who would become his brother-in-law, co-author and co-conspirator in a crusade to defeat American liberalism. Yale provided Buckley with his start in journalism when he was appointed as chairman of the Yale Daily News; he was also “tapped” for entry into the secret Skull and Bones society, confirming his trajectory towards membership of the highest echelons of the American elite.
In a formative experience shared by countless conservatives and reactionaries over many generations, Buckley’s university years cemented his steadfast opposition to liberal and left-wing thought of any kind. He was horrified that such a great institution as Yale was abdicating “its historic purpose of transmitting its values of Christian ideals and free-market faith” by cultivating new generations of critical thinkers.
Following his graduation, Buckley would develop that argument into his first book, God and Man at Yale (1951), which — thanks in part to a substantial advertising campaign funded by his father — became a bestseller and made his name as the voice of a new youthful conservatism. “Till the end of his life,” Tanenhaus writes, “Bill continued to think of colleges as the most important fields of battle.”
The late 1940s and early 1950s were a time of heightened cold war tensions and the second red scare, led by senator Joseph McCarthy and his increasingly deranged tirades against fictional traitors. Buckley, although generally more concerned with the scourge of liberalism than lurid conspiracies about widespread communist infiltration of American institutions, became a willing recruit to the anti-communist cause.
Along with many other Yale graduates, he was soon accepted into the CIA. His first assignment was in Mexico City, where he met and became close friends with E. Howard Hunt, who would later be convicted for his involvement in the Watergate scandal. Buckley also backed McCarthy to the hilt, co-authoring McCarthy and His Enemies (1954) with Bozell — less a defence of McCarthy’s methods than an attack on those who dared to object to them.
Buckley’s next great project was the launching of a conservative journal of ideas and commentary. With the help of Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Willi Schlamm and other ex-communists, National Review was founded in 1955, and is still published to this day. It was “the sharp advancing edge of an avowedly radical movement and its politics of insurgent revolt,” writes Tanenhaus.
Along with his columns — syndicated in newspapers across the entire country – National Review was where Buckley would use his considerable literary flair to fight political and cultural battles for the rest of his life. He also hosted his own television program, Firing Line, from 1966 until 1999, gave countless speeches, wrote fiction and non-fiction books, and maintained a remarkably active social life. Reading the book, one is continually astonished as to how he fitted it all in.
On the domestic front, the most important political battle of the 1950s and 1960s was fought over civil rights for African Americans, especially in the former slaveholding states of the South. Buckley was deeply sentimental about the old South from his childhood experiences in Camden, and Tanenhaus reveals for the first time that Buckley’s parents funded a local segregationist newspaper in the 1950s. In this context it is not surprising that Buckley supported the cause of white supremacy. In 1957 he made his most notorious statement on the matter, in a National Review editorial titled “Why the South Must Prevail”:
The central question that emerges… is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.
But as plain as Buckley’s racism is here, it is not the entire story. Despite other embarrassing and shameful moments — for example, losing hopelessly to James Baldwin in a Cambridge University debate in 1965, running a racially loaded campaign for mayor of New York City in the same year, and dismissing Martin Luther King as a rabble-rouser and law-breaker — Buckley could be more nuanced on race than many of his contemporaries. He welcomed Black activists on to Firing Line to share their views with his audience, and increasingly came to agree with many of their critiques of institutional racism. In his twilight years he admitted he had been wrong about segregation, though this was in the post-9/11 era, when his racial anxieties had turned sharply towards Muslim immigration.
Despite his and his wife Pat’s many close friendships with gay men, Buckley was also openly homophobic. Notoriously, he lashed out at Gore Vidal on live television during their coverage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. After Vidal called him a “crypto-Nazi,” Buckley reacted with sincere malice: “Now listen you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face, and you’ll stay plastered.”
Buckley regretted the incident for the rest of his life, less because of the homophobia than the fact that he had been successfully goaded by Vidal, a man he loathed. During the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, he argued in the New York Times that those detected with the disease should be forcibly tattooed to protect others. Some gay conservatives warned him that the movement was “in danger of sinking back to an aggregation of bigotries” — Buckley was privately sympathetic but publicly refused to budge.
One of the most enduring themes of Buckley’s life to emerge from this book is his extraordinary talent for friendship, a characteristic by no means limited to those who shared his privileged background or ideological obsessions. He was a loyal friend of the powerful, including Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. When he had misgivings about their insufficient adherence to conservative principles — or their flagrantly imperial foreign policies — he kept them to himself and maintained his wholehearted public support.
Despite devoting his life to opposing what he saw as liberal hegemony, he was also a good friend to many liberals. “He drew a sharp line between his ideological commitments and his social life,” writes Tanenhaus. This led some of the more rigid conservative ideologues to distrust him as being more concerned with carving out his place within the establishment than shaking it to its foundations.
Aside from the war criminals already listed, Buckley demonstrated remarkable loyalty to some truly objectionable individuals. His book-length defence of Joe McCarthy appeared just as public opinion was turning decisively against the senator. In the 1980s, along with Donald Trump, he testified on behalf of McCarthy’s roguish lawyer, Roy Cohn, who was facing disbarment. During Watergate, he lied for and covered the legal expenses of his old friend Howard Hunt.
Perhaps most egregiously, though, Buckley campaigned for the release of death-row inmate Edgar Smith, who had been convicted of the murder of a fifteen-year-old girl. Buckley never adequately assessed the evidence, but Smith wrote well and enjoyed National Review, which was seemingly enough to convince Buckley of his innocence. Later, when Smith had secured his freedom thanks in part to Buckley’s advocacy, he abducted and stabbed a young woman, almost killing her. He also confessed to his original crime after years of obfuscation. As Buckley’s friend Murray Kempton put it, he had a “genius at friendships of the kind that passes all understanding.”
Despite its considerable length, Buckley seems to have been subjected to some quite brutal editing. Tanenhaus spends 750 pages on the first fifty years of Buckley’s life, then rushes through his final three decades in just 100 pages. Had Buckley drifted off into retirement and obscurity, this might have made sense, but the period in question (1974–2008) includes the Reagan presidency, when Buckley’s conservatism achieved the kind of political ascendancy that he might have only dreamed of as a young activist. This culmination of a project decades in the making is inexplicably skipped over. The attempt to cut the book back to a reasonable length is understandable, but it leads to a lopsidedness that could have been avoided with some more astute editing of earlier chapters.
Tanenhaus has obvious affection for his subject, but is hard on him when the evidence demands it, as with his criticisms of Buckley’s racism and homophobia. More bitingly, he repeatedly returns to a damning intellectual judgement: for all his talents as a writer, organiser and media performer, Buckley was not a deep or original thinker. Tanenhaus suggests that Buckley himself knew this, eschewing postgraduate studies and an academic career for the less intellectually strenuous — and more enjoyable — world of opinion journalism.
Buckley did attempt on several occasions to write his one “big book” of conservative philosophy, “a definitive statement on the meaning and value of an authentic American conservatism.” The working title was The Revolt of the Masses, a deliberate nod to his distaste for universal suffrage. But he never came close to finishing it — “he was an arguer, not a thinker.”
Regardless of his intellectual status, no one — least of all Tanenhaus — denies Buckley’s role in advancing and consolidating the conservative movement into a hegemonic force in American politics. Buckley was a key player in every conservative advance from Barry Goldwater to George W. Bush. (Mercifully, Tanenhaus refrains from drawing explicit connections between Buckley and Donald Trump — there are merely subtle nods, left for the reader to consider further.) That Buckley failed to write an important book of conservative philosophy is hardly important in this context.
As a rule, it is never wise to read other reviews of books before completing one’s own, but I admit to dipping into a few before getting a hold of this biography. In doing so, I came across Osita Nwanevu’s description of Buckley in the New York Review of Books as “conservatism’s baton twirler”. As a metaphor for his role — richly evoking the performative absurdity of American leadership — this is simply unimprovable. •
Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America
By Sam Tanenhaus | Random House | $79.99 | 1018 pages
