1,582 words
Sam Tanenhaus
Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America
New York: Random House, 2025
This month the Postal Service issues a new “Forever” stamp honoring William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008). Its portrait is distinguished by a) being black-and-white, like a photograph, and b) not looking an awful lot like the gentleman in question.
One wonders why the art director bothered with engaging a professional illustrator to reimagine Mr. Buckley, a figure with whom they are evidently unfamiliar. Why not simply take a familiar photograph (perhaps from a book cover of collected essays, e.g., The Jeweler’s Eye or The Governor Listeth) and just punch it up a little in Photoshop?
I find something of the opposite problem in Sam Tanenhaus’s recent biography, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution, etc. We get an abundance of actual images and vignettes, in photos and prose, each recognizable; yet a clear portrait of the man fails to resolve itself in the biography as a whole. Daunted by the sheer mass of the book (1,040 pages) I went straight to the index early on, checking to see which names got a lot of ink, and which ones got passed over. The results didn’t clarify the picture entirely, but they helped show me where the story was spotty and incomplete. I’ll talk about some of those holes farther down.
The book is sprawling and episodic. An easy read, for the most part, but lacking the soaring and tense plot arc we got in Tanenhaus’s biography of Whittaker Chambers.[1] That was the book Christopher Buckley was thinking of when, after his father’s funeral, he asked Tanenhaus to consider taking on an authoritative life story of William F. Buckley, Jr. That seemed a good choice: the Chambers book is a superb narrative, stuffed full of Sturm und Drang, with lots of personal agony and slow, grueling vindication. A heroic romance along the lines of The Count of Monte Cristo, only with real-life historical gravitas as well. When Tanenhaus was writing the Chambers book in the early 1990s, Alger Hiss was still very much alive, and to some extent so was the Hiss-Chambers case. It wasn’t hard to find people who had devoted years to proving Alger’s innocence. I knew people like this. They told me they still talked to Alger. Even in 1990 they would grab you like the Ancient Mariner and tell you insistently, with bulging eyes, how they had collected acres of evidence back in the 1950s, and it was now proven, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the FBI could and did construct a fake typewriter!
Alas, Tanenhaus could not frame the Buckley story with a similarly compelling plot and moral, let alone with frothing crazies full of inchoate rage a half-century on. This hero isn’t thrown into a dank prison for fourteen years, or threatened with extinction during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s.The closest Bill Buckley ever came to being an outcast was when he was barred from giving an Alumni Day speech at Yale because it was too critical of faculty and administration. Explaining who he is or what he and his National Review stood for (once upon a time) is no easy task when the historical context or the 1950s and 60s has long vanished. You’d have to scratch hard through old bound volumes and collected essays to find anything both interesting and conceivably controversial.[2]
But Tanenhaus does his best, making it the story of Buckley’s thirty-year struggle against liberal and complacent politicians and opinion-makers, ending with the triumphant election of Ronald W. Reagan as President in 1980. Here is young William F. Buckley, Jr., resolutely fighting his uphill battle to make “conservatism” acceptable and even fashionable. There he goes, politely shunning the cranks of the “fever-swamp right.” He tactfully praises members of the John Birch Society while calling its founder (who contributed $2,000 startup money to National Review) a loon. We see Bill Buckley supporting segregation when that seems a winning cause in the mid-50s, then quietly stepping away, leaving James Jackson Kilpatrick of Richmond as the last syndicated columnist to man that crumbling fort. Buckley cheerfully rides through the Goldwater loss in 1964, and then makes his own amusing run for New York mayor the following year. Two years later he’s a known television personality and makes the cover of Time, in a spindly David Levine caricature (“Conservatism Can Be Fun”). Through it all, he manfully puts up with those Republican Party opportunists who gave us the insipid Eisenhower and deceitful Nixon, and even attempted vainly to push William Scranton and Nelson Rockefeller. And in the end, unbowed and barely battered, Buckley and his little magazine succeed in achieving the near-impossible: Ronald Reagan is elected President in 1980. It’s a victory Reagan generously if glibly credits to his favorite reading material, Bill Buckley’s National Review.
And so at last, parade’s end. The climax of the story. If the triumph seems limp and unremarkable today, just put it down to foggy hindsight, and maybe politics-fatigue. Anyway, it was such an innocent time back then, was it not? We were so easily impressed. And, truly, Reagan didn’t really accomplish much, did he? A wasted presidency, some say today. “A historic failure of nerve,” carp the critics. “To True Believers, Reagan’s presidency was like an eight-year Inaugural Ball.”[3]
Surely that presidency was instrumental in bringing the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Iron Curtain, but that’s a hard story to get across today. Just saying it, you feel like George W. Bush hanging his “Mission Accomplished” banner, thirty days into his endless Iraq fiasco. Memories fade. Who now recalls Yuri Andropov, the career KGB hood who sent Soviet tanks into Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968, and in 1983 was insisting to the world that Reagan, the trigger-happy cowboy, was bringing us to the brink of nuclear war by putting Pershing II missiles in West Germany? Or that nuclear-disarmament propaganda we were continually force-fed, with horrifying scenarios laid out in tedious New Yorker essays, comic books and pop songs about “Nuclear Winter” and “How the World Ends”? And who could possibly give a damn that one of the Reagan Administration’s first priorities was rebuilding the morale and effectiveness of the CIA, after the despoliation of the Carter years?
Weirdly enough, this Collapse of Communism occurs offstage even in Tanenhaus’s Buckley, with scarcely a footnote. (Mikhail Gorbachev barely makes it into the book’s index; Boris Yeltsin not at all.) Thus the peak of Buckley’s career, and National Review‘s, comes as a sad-trombone anticlimax. Maybe the chopping block is to blame: I imagine pages of toothy geopolitical analysis about the 1980s-90s winding up on the writing-room floor, as the author cuts his unwieldy typescript down to publishable size.
But probably not. The geopolitics aren’t there because Sam Tanenhaus just isn’t a geopolitical kind of guy. His métier is writing about individuals and personal crises. One reason his Whittaker Chambers works better than Chambers’s own memoir, Witness, is that it leaves out all the Chambersian brooding and thumbsucking about Historical Necessity and the Crisis of the Middle Class. The kind of thing that makes my eyes glaze over, as Bill Safire used to say. And for most readers it’s not nearly as interesting and down-to-earth as stuff like Bill Buckley’s slide into near-bankruptcy in the 1970s. That was the result of over-leveraged and unprofitable side businesses (Starr Broadcasting Group radio stations) as well as heavy personal debt—largely from the purchase and upkeep of yachts—which Bill would take on compulsively. And I must say, Tanenhaus really does indulge his Schadenfreude over financial setbacks of Buckley and kin. He loves giving us the bad news, at ungainly length and in considerable detail. We get continuing updates on the downturn of the family’s oil business and the eventual sell-off of their gigantic estates in South Carolina and Connecticut. And all the lowdown about the alcoholism and various mental illnesses and physical disabilities that eventually befall many Buckleys and in-laws.
Anyway, once we get Reagan safely in the White House, Sam Tanenhaus seems to be in a hurry to wrap things up. Perhaps he’s been on the job for 14 or 15 years, and Random House now wants him to get them a semi-final typescript so they can have the book out for Buckley’s centenary in 2025. And so Sam skates through Bill Buckley’s last couple of decades…in about 20 pages. Not much to say here, besides valedictions and physical decline. There’s the death of wife Pat, his lookalike partner and alter ego, in 2007. Then Bill’s prescription-drug gulping, suicidal thoughts, and his quick and merciful death the following year, in his garage office. Finally, a memorial mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, with some words from Henry Kissinger (a longtime chum) and a supercilious eulogy delivered by his apostate son, Christopher. That’s all, folks!
Notes
[1] Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers. 1996.
[2] There is a “Yale Alumni” Facebook group, evidently populated mostly by recent grad students. Recently, after the postage stamps were announced, a number of them were denouncing Buckley in chorus, because they had learned that back in 1957 he wrote an essay, “Why the South Must Prevail,” which argued that negroes, for the most part, were not yet advanced enough to be awarded the voting franchise by fiat. Of course none of these could remember the era or could even fathom that this opinion was fairly mainstream, let alone quite reasonable.
[3] F. Roger Devlin said this once, in 2016, supposedly quoting Joe Sobran, but I have never located the original.
24 comments
“Here is young William F. Buckley, Jr., resolutely fighting his uphill battle to make “conservatism” acceptable and even fashionable.”
It may be better to say that Buckley fought to make conservatism something other than what it actually was to support elitist (and his own) interests. I doubt that the Jewish former editor of the New York Review of Books (Sam Tanenhaus) presents an accurate picture of Buckley, who came out of the same mid-20th century Yale and Skull and Bones that produced shady CIA honchos James Jesus Angleton and George Bush Sr. As Collins alludes to, Buckley consistently purged the nativist wing–John Birch Society, Joe Sobran, Pat Buchanan–out of the so-called conservative coalition (cleverly praising and damning them at the same time). As the article indicates, he jumped ship from honest, true positions when they became politically inexpedient. And he was joined at the hip with Israel and its American Jewish supporters–while trying to appear “balanced” on the topic. A devious, opportunistic snake if there ever was one.
Buckley picked Revilo Oliver to write for NR because he wanted there to be a veneer of academia to it. But after a few years he let Oliver go due his “anti-semitism,” a process which would repeat itself over the years. Really Buckley was standing athwart history yelling stop bad-mouthing the Jews.
George Lincoln Rockwell, who worked closely with Wm. F. Buckley as a Conservative activist, said that he was “100 percent square” except on what we would now call the Jewish Question. That pretty much sums things up.
🙂
Stay tuned. I hadn’t expected my meandering commentary to be cut up into three parts like Gaul, but Part I here works nicely as a cheerful executive summary. Dark and granular stuff is over the next pass, along with those wayward friends.
Tepid article! Alas, poor William F. Buckley, Jr., I hardly knew you at all—and still don’t! 🙃
Buckley and Nat Review were/are CIA disinformation.
Why make the CIA the center of this when Buckley was connected to far older networks (e.g. Skull & Bones dating to 1832)? Also, he joined the CIA in 1950 in order to not get drafted in the Korea War. 5 years after WWII it was expected that a young man would have to serve his country in times of war, and smarter, more educated folks used to prefer intelligence work in both wars. Beats getting shot at.
Buckley came from a rich and internationalist family (oil), and both he and his siblings were chosen for Skull & Bones at Yale. At Yale, he was politically active, journalistically active and acted as a FBI informer (all at a time when the CIA was not even founded or had just been founded). After graduating, he had great ambitions to create a Conservative movement, because he perceived the Zeitgeist at Yale (as in American society in general) as being too Liberal.
Buckley eventually founded National Review with Willi Schlamm, a former Communist of Jewish heritage. NR would invite lots of former Communists, often of similar ethnic background, and Buckley himself was so philosemitic he had left the Conservative newspaper “The American Mercury” in 1952 over perceived as antisemitism.
~
My point is that CIA reductionism is ahistorical, distracts from the real powers (identity groups & ideologies) and triviliazes the power of both the media and the intellectual arena, reducing all of that to invisible spookwork.
That’s also what I’ve heard from one of his close associates.
The comment section illuminates the true nature of Buckley more efficiently than the article did. 🙃
NR excommunicated Brimelow and Derbyshire as well, though I think that was after Buckley. Essentially over time the magazine got rid of all the so called paleoconservatives. It was certainly not a profile in courage.
(Maybe read the whole article, not just this teaser.)
Here is young William F. Buckley, Jr., resolutely fighting his uphill battle to make “conservatism” acceptable and even fashionable.
I have always perceived the Republican Party as “conservative,” whatever that means? So if the Republican Party was not “conservative” before Buckley made it fashionable—what was its orientation? 🙃
The Republican Party began as more or less the social left party. Originally they opposed slavery in the South, as well as the Mormon menace (thanks, guys!) in the West. The Democrats began taking on the social reformer role when the New Dealers were ascendant. Then in the 1940s, a realignment began when the Democrats got on board with “civil rights” and dumped the Deep South. Still, that process was about 80% complete when Buckley got on board, and would’ve completed with or without him. Anyway, that’s about a century of partisan history in an itty bitty capsule.
That’s very good, and worthy of a multipart monograph in itself. The Republicans were formed out of Free Soilers, Know Nothings, and old Whigs (eg Lincoln) who had no place to go. Those first two strains gave it its bloodyminded sloganeering side, good for filling the cheap seats, while the Whiggish legacy gave it solidity and longevity, with a central focus on financial health and stability, and a business-friendly Federal government that actively promoted internal improvements, and growth of transport and industry. (“Michael, this is a government that understands business.)
The Whig inheritance defined what is still popularly thought of as the traditional GOP, from the bearded “Smith Brothers Presidents” of the latter 1800s, through the definitional McKinley and T. Roosevelt, and on up to Coolidge and Hoover. On the negative side of the ledger were widespread graft and “Robber Baron” scams in the 1860s-90s, where clubmen and presidential relatives (an Adams, a Lincoln) made quick fortunes by promoting vast, redundant railroad lines throughout the West (often poorly built and maintained). Less famously, it prolonged oppression of the former Confederacy, retaining restrictive commerce statutes that lasted well into the 20th century; and otherwise discouraged investment and internal improvements in the South.
On the positive side the Whiggery nurtured reform legislation that was needed and useful, rather than showy do-gooderism. This trend is usually said to begin with that 1890 Anti-Trust Act authored by General Sherman’s younger brother, the Senator. But we should probably go back further to a clearer example of reform legislation: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. A popular law, it zipped through House and Senate and signed right away by President Chester A. Arthur. Besides keeping the West Coast from being further swamped with coolies, this Act demonstrated how it was possible for Americans, including politicians, to show some agency; steer their country where they wanted it go; and use legislation to improve their health, appearance, and morale. President Arthur also signed, and was responsible for in so many ways, the Civil Service Act.
The Sherman Act seemed weak and wobbly until it grew some court rulings to cut its teeth upon. The most famous “trusts” of the time, the muckrakers’ meal tickets (Carnegie Steel and Standard Oil) never even got gummed by Sherman because they sold or spun off their assets into other companies. But for “trust busters” like Teddy Roosevelt who could see an existential danger in megacartels (they won’t just control their industry, they’ll control your government, your foreign policy), no big deal, because the bigger lesson, was that there are always dragons to slay, bullies to stop, utilities and other public monopolies to restrain. (We’re back with Charles Foster Kane fighting the traction monopoly tycoons, he’s got charm a mile wide and an inch deep, and a five-second attention span. No, that’s not the Chief, that’s not Mr. Hearst… it’s Teddy.)
The Republicans and their “Reform Era.” That phrase didn’t always have a bad smell. This period also brought the beginning of the Conservation movement and National Forests (particular interests of TR); and the passage of the first Pure Food and Drug Act. These were substantially expanded over the next few decades with bipartisan support. Like environmental matters they ceased to be regarded as primarily Republican concerns.
From the same movement: the Johnson Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1924. A bipartisan interest that grew out of Republican reformers’ concern with conserving the national environment and heritage.
For the most part, those Whig/Reform Republicans also did a good job of keeping their party’s various social-activist radicals and millenarians on a tight leash. It may surprise some today that not only was it Republican legal and civil-rights activists who tried to overturn Southern segregation laws in the 1890s, it was a Republican-majority Supreme Court in 1896 that finally upheld “separate but equal” segregation as Constitutional (Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896). And Democrats who overturned that with the Brown decision in ’54. All except Earl Warren, the governor who packed the Isei and Nisei off to Camp Manzanita in ’42.”The Warren Court.” So when Little Rock wants to know whom to blame, it’s the Republicans. Did you know Ike was a Republican? It’s true, been one since ’52.
And then some other crackbrained initiatives popularly thought to be 100% GOP Platform: Prohibition. The World War One-era frenzy that sought to ban alcoholic beverages was a bipartisan affair, sort of. However, the Eighteenth Amendment was passed by both Democrat-led houses of Congress in December 1917 and ratified by most states by 1921, but rejected by strongly Republican Connecticut and Rhode Island. Just prior to the war, and the 18th A, Prohibition was almost entirely a phenomenon of Democrat areas, with dry states and counties concentrated in the South and Southwest.
“‘Robber Baron’ scams in the 1860s-90s, where clubmen and presidential relatives (an Adams, a Lincoln) made quick fortunes by promoting vast, redundant railroad lines throughout the West (often poorly built and maintained).”
Damn, this is a coincidence. I’m reading right now the scathing 2011 “Railroaded” book by Stanford professor Richard White, which is all about the seamy side of the Pacific railroads (they were called transcontinentals but that was a lie; they were semi-transcons, and only now, when Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern might combine in a friendly merger, will we have a genuine transcon railroad in the US). He focuses on Collis Huntington and Charles Francis Adams, mostly, but he really has it in for Leland Stanford, the namesake of his own university. I mean, he really hates the guy. It’s a spirited, rowdy book for a semi-academic one. I got it heavily used in a Little Free Library and some college student who had been assigned it underlined almost everything in the book. Why?
Yes, I thought those remarks rang a bell. I think we have that Railroaded book here on our shelves, and I’m pretty sure I have it on Audible as well. It’s been a while.
By the Election of 1940, they were Internationalist weasels that wanted to go to war just like the Roosevelt cabal.
After WWII, some like Senator Robert A. Taft (R-OH) and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R-WI) were good men but they were outliers.
The U.S. Senate was slower to adopt the Globalist rot, but the legacy of the 17th Amendment (1913) which switched to direct elections, eventually gutted the institution of authentic Nationalism.
🙂
You can’t judge him too harshly. They have to make big compromises just to stay on the news stand. It’s more true now than ever.
I’ll have to be a big meanie and judge him harshly. Rather than taking the “let a hundred flowers bloom” approach, Buckley willfully inserted himself in a gatekeeper role.
And the damage he did should not be underestimated.
🙂
I honestly thought he was a crypto-Jew. Within the last 18 months, I think I saw something that was a slam-dunk that his mom was 100% Jewish, and I recall I “liked” it in order to quickly save it in my social media history to be able to retrieve it for further investigation. Whether Jew, or Gentile, he was definitely “Jew-ish” when it came to gatekeeping.
We’ve never really had someone publicly pro-White + GOP. All the high-profile Republican White men were gatekeeping their audiences. Did you ever hear Rush Limbaugh mention the serious threat of demographic change to our nation?
I used to listen to him. I’m no fan of feminism, but I’m glad I never picked up using his slang term “feminazi.” It makes about as much sense as “nazi-commies.”
I understand that he was Irish Catholic, WASPy presenting, and I’m guessing with a weasel, skunk, and rattlesnake in his ancestry.
There have been a few prominent pro-White Republicans, such as Jesse Helms. I suspect that there are many more pro-Whites who are not open about it, and even Democrats. Granted, it was a while ago, but when the MLK holiday was put up for a voice vote in Congress, it overwhelmingly failed. Then some jerk called for a vote in writing, and it overwhelmingly passed. What a henhouse of chickens!
WFB Jr was Catholic, not “Irish Catholic,” whatever that is (the Buckleys were always baffled by that term, evidently some kind of Jewish effort to ethnicize all old-stock Americans).
Fanatical gate-keeping doesn’t require such a background; a closed mind + ideological zeal + political ambition suffice
Buckley was a highly self-opininated individual who regarded it his life’s mission to wage a Conservative crusade against the Liberal establishment. He was an ideologue, and so saw no value whatsoever in viewpoints further to the Right. Rather, those were a danger because the Left would use them against him. From Buckley’s perspective, everything that would reduce the mass appeal of Conservativism had to go.
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