In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr., aged 25, published his incendiary “God and Man at Yale,” targeting his alma mater — he’d graduated the previous year, garlanded with academic honors and club memberships — by alleging “liberal” capture of faculty. He named names, lobbed accusations of hypocrisy and lamented the storied Ivy’s drift from white Christian values, launching a radical conservatism that dominated the second half of the 20th century.
But the figure who came to personify the pretentions of old-moneyed New England WASPs was a Catholic arriviste, a quirky, cosmopolitan upbringing molding his dogmatism. Sam Tanenhaus’s colorful, comprehensive “Buckley” conjures the icon in myriad guises: merry prankster, political gadfly, CIA agent, family man, class snob, and thought leader of the Republican party. It’s a tall order the author pulls off with aplomb.
The sixth of 10 children born to a self-made Texan oilman and his wife, a New Orleans patrician and ardent Anglophobe, Buckley spent his early years abroad until the clan settled into a Connecticut estate, Great Elm, tended to by a retinue of servants. He later claimed he spoke Spanish and French before English; his trademark lockjaws blended Romance inflections with a Southern drawl inherited from his parents, and elocution lessons.
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Throughout the Roaring Twenties William F. Buckley Sr, or Will, raked in a fortune on Wall Street, diversifying his portfolio wisely; the family navigated the Depression in suburban comfort. A skinny, sickly boy with a passion for music, Bill stood out with his gift for gab and yen for combative debate. The Buckleys were adamant isolationists, anti-New Deal, scorning financial regulations and programs for the poor. Bill followed his older brothers to Millbrook, a boarding school, then a stint in the military at the tail end of World War II, which entrenched his commitment to caste. At Yale he soared as scholar and impresario, a quick study. “Those who got to know Buckley noticed the disjunction between Buckley the ideologue and Buckley the friend,” Tanenhaus notes. “He was unsparing in debate, harsh, even malicious, but during those contests ‘he got rid of all his aggressions, said a classmate. And what was left over, among friends, was very mellow.’”
From these opening chapters the narrative flows briskly: Tanenhaus streamlines decades of research and interviews, punctuated by episodes such as Bill’s courtship of Vancouver heiress Pat Taylor: taller (in heels), wealthier, and more right-wing than her husband, the Anglican queen to his Catholic king. The author’s account of their extravagant wedding carries a whiff of the society columnist, dutifully chronicling the soirées that bookended the ceremony. Their son Christopher, born in 1952, rounded out the family.
Journalism beckoned: in 1955 Buckley debuted the National Review, a weekly free-markets doppelganger to the Communist-adjacent Partisan Review and forum for exchanges on government, economics, foreign policy, and what the founder envisioned as the voice for a proper hierarchy. As befits a former editor of the New York Times Book Review, Tanenhaus meticulously depicts the high tide of postwar print reportage, writers poised for celebrity, ready for their close-ups — Buckley protégés like Joan Didion, Gary Wills, and David Brooks.
The lavish set pieces are all there, familiar yet graced with fresh insights: Buckley’s espousal of McCarthyism; his meddling in the Eisenhower administration; his hot-blooded feud with Gore Vidal; his failed New York mayoral bid; and famously, his debate with James Baldwin at Cambridge University in 1965. Baldwin spoke first. His “words were as much sermon as argument,” Tanenhaus observes, his “description of the capitalist uses of slavery was grounded in historical fact. The audience was hypnotized into silence … Buckley had been sitting by, writing notes on his yellow pad. For years to come he would maintain that the debate had contrasted his exercise in high logic with Baldwin’s emotionalism. But to many present that day it seemed the opposite … [Buckley’s] snarling words were distinctly ad hominem, a direct attack on Baldwin himself.”
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The Kennedy administration offered novel assaults on liberalism. The reactionary Buckleys mirrored the progressive Massachusetts dynasty — Wall Street tycoons as patriarchs, a rough-and-tumble household, heated discourse on global events — but with conflicting views on public service. (Bill was just four days younger than Robert F. Kennedy, a champion of racial equality.) When the Republican center of gravity migrated toward the Sun Belt, Buckley embraced Barry Goldwater, sensing the Arizona maverick was shifting the Overton Window.
Those Great Elm affectations did not always fit amid a party whose emerging power brokers tried to connect with middle- and working-class white voters. As Tanenhaus writes, “Bill Buckley had been a great figure. But that time had passed. A new ideological battle was forming — rather, a new cultural battle” among the ranks of the GOP, the genteel National Review “outmoded,” “Blue Bloods” receding before “Blue Collars.” Yet this realignment presented unexpected opportunities for the ruling caste, “through pro-business policies of deregulation and reduced corporate taxes.”
Tanenhaus’s Buckley is less an ironclad ideologue than a professional contrarian, performative to his core. His beliefs evolved; after the Six-Day War he walked back overt antisemitism, for instance, and fervidly advocated for Israel. Clear-eyed about its protagonist’s merits and moral defects, “Buckley” is, of course, a biography not just of a prominent influencer but also of a potent movement, fomented in both National Journal and Bill’s long-running PBS show, Firing Line, a precursor to podcasts. He remained vigorous until his death in 2008, and if alive today would no doubt opine fulsomely on divisive issues, as Tanenhaus links the Cold War’s disinformation campaigns with social media, Buckley’s brand of blacklists and censorship with the current pall over prestigious institutions such as Yale, Harvard, and Columbia.
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At his best Buckley was an audacious provocateur, a shock to a complacent system; yet his story is incomplete without the rancor he spread like gospel. Tanenhaus is fair to this complicated pundit — more than fair — and the payoff is worth it. “Buckley” is a milestone contribution to our understanding of the American Century.
BUCKLEY: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America
By Sam Tanenhaus
Random House, 1,040 pages, $40
Hamilton Cain is a book critic and the author of a memoir, “This Boy’s Faith: Notes from a Southern Baptist Upbringing.”
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