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 wasphotographedworking at a typewriter in the back of a limousine as a dog looked on. In Aladdin (1992), Robin Williams’s geniedoesBuckley 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 asDonald Trumpremakes 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 theTrump 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. Hedefendedsegregation 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 byendorsingaffirmative 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 distinctaccent, 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 notorious1968 incidentin 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 studyingthemall 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.