In the age of Steve Bannon and Bronze Age Pervert — the pseudonymous author acclaimed by young Trumpists — a biography of William F. Buckley Jr. seems almost quaint. Since his death in 2008, the aristocratic founder of the flagship conservative magazine National Review has been wreathed in nostalgia.
Especially as the Trump era dawned, there was a sense that somehow Buckley would have stopped it, even as National Review’s iconic 2016 “Against Trump” issue proved no match for the MAGA insurgency. At a moment without gatekeepers or even gates, it was said, Buckley showed how much we had lost: It was he who had kept out the crazies, the conspiracy theorists, the antisemites; it was he who had defined, even created, the respectable right.
Sam Tanenhaus’s immersive authorized biography partakes of this nostalgia, even as his portrait of Buckley dispels it. Tanenhaus, a former editor of The New York Times Book Review, concludes on an elegiac note, imagining Buckley trapped in a world different from ours, “beyond our reach but hovering near.” But the Buckley that emerges from his exhaustive, 1,000-page portrait is not so much a stranger to our times as a precursor to them. After all, Buckley made his name with “God and Man at Yale,” his slashing 1951 attack on his alma mater as a hotbed of leftism, complete with the suggestion that alumni withhold donations as a means of pressuring the university to remedy the issue.
Tanenhaus’s case for Buckley’s significance is mostly tacit, as the book curiously lacks a formal introduction; his keenest insight is to understand him as the right’s “first intellectual entertainer.” In his precocious youth, not only did Buckley realize that politics was becoming entertainment, but he helped make it so, branching off from magazines into television, spy novels and a stunt run for New York City mayor, all while befriending and advising the most powerful politicians of his day. More than a political journalist, Buckley was an unabashed activist who intuitively grasped the centrality of the media and the power of attention, and wielded both on behalf of his cause. American politics has never been the same since.
As Tanenhaus lavishly elaborates in the book’s early chapters, Buckley was to the manner born. His oil speculator father had spent years in Mexico — where he was involved in various counterrevolutionary intrigues until he was expelled in 1920 — and he recreated the country’s colonial aesthetic meticulously at Great Elm, his Connecticut estate. Late in life, Buckley once claimed he had been raised in Mexico. This was not the case, but Buckley and his nine siblings did grow up in a veritable hacienda, speaking Spanish, English, French as well as “a polyglot of their own invention,” and attended by a fleet of tutors, nannies and maids.
Drawing on family papers, Tanenhaus provides a rich chronicle of this unusual family, a strange outpost of Spanish Catholicism uneasily nested amid a town of New England Protestants. Yet for all the details, the emotional tone of this sprawling family is lightly explored, with the later descent of several Buckley siblings into alcoholism the only hints of turbulence under the surface.
Tanenhaus provides an important new account of the family’s other major influence: the American South. Just as formative as Mexico and Connecticut was Camden, S.C., where the family purchased a second grand estate, Kamschatka, spending large parts of the year there. Tanenhaus shows how the family’s Southernization went far beyond bringing Black staff members north to Great Elm. Buckley’s 1957 article on the civil rights movement in National Review has become notorious for its assertion that the “advanced race” should prevail in the South.
Less well known is that the Buckleys were the sole financial backers of The Camden News, a local paper launched to support the town’s all-white Citizens’ Council. During the publication’s four-year run, Camden experienced a cross burning and a vigilante beating, and three Black churches were destroyed by arson. By the end of Buckley’s life, Tanenhaus notes, he had repudiated his early skepticism of the civil rights movement, telling an interviewer that it would have been impossible to “evolve our way up from Jim Crow” without “federal intervention.”
A somewhat lackadaisical student early on, Buckley became a standout debater at Yale, stumbling into what would be his central innovation: politics as entertainment rather than as policy or profession. After graduation, he stirred up controversy with two books — the first his attack on Yale, the second a defense of Senator Joe McCarthy — and then founded National Review,relying on family money and his already formidable reputation.
From the start, Buckley understood the media as the primary battleground. In America, he wrote in a key memo, the “ruling class” was the “‘opinion makers’ — newspapermen, publishers, commentators, educators, ministers and members of the various professions.” It was this group that the magazine would target, intending to shape the views of those who ultimately “control the elected.” National Review conservatives would be serious, they would be smart, they would force the opinion makers to answer, if only to disagree. And the disagreement itself, Buckley realized, could be news.
Politics as entertainment, though, could also be deadly serious. Buckley ran for mayor of New York City in 1965 on a lark and promptly became an object of media fascination himself. “He is more fun to listen to than most professional comedians,” one journalist wrote. A more crucial constituency was blue-collar white voters, drawn to his attacks on welfare at a time of racial tension. These were the same voters who were attracted to George Wallace and Barry Goldwater on the national stage. Though Buckley stood no chance of winning, the contours of his support pointed toward the future Republican coalition. And the campaign made Buckley famous; in its aftermath he created the TV interview show “Firing Line,” which ran for nearly 34 years, first on a local station and then on PBS.
Tanenhaus ably covers Buckley’s central role in the emergence of postwar conservative politics. Less an intellectual than a convener, Buckley helped weld together a conservatism historians call “fusionism”: a blend of aggressive anti-communism, traditional values and libertarian economics. By the late 1960s he sat “atop a political empire composed of interlocking parts,” ranging from the youth group Young Americans for Freedom, founded at Great Elm, to the American Conservative Union and the conservative publisher Arlington House.
Even when Buckley had no formal role in these organizations, he exerted authority through sheer force of personality. Tanenhaus captures moments of foresight — such as when Buckley perceived that Goldwater could not win but that enthusiasm for him would leave a lasting mark on politics — as well as moments of honor, such as when Buckley rebuked the conspiratorial John Birch Society in National Review, angering subscribers. There were also ethical blind spots and lapses, most notably in the early days of Watergate, when Buckley stoutly defended his friend Howard Hunt despite knowing of Hunt’s deep involvement in the original burglary and subsequent cover-up.
Engaging if unsurprising as political history, as biography the book raises more questions than it answers. Tanenhaus strives to distinguish between Buckley the ideologue and Buckley the friend, but neither persona is fully rendered. Positioning himself as the leader of an intellectual movement, Buckley produced no original thought, despite a lifelong effort to complete a serious book of ideas. (It never materialized.)
As for friendship, Tanenhaus describes Buckley’s bizarre and disturbing “infatuation” with Edgar Smith, a man convicted of murdering a teenage girl. Believing Smith innocent in the face of considerable evidence that he was not, Buckley befriended him, profiled him for Esquire and helped him secure legal representation, eventually resulting in his release from prison, whereupon Smith brutally attacked and nearly killed another young woman. (Smith’s story was the subject of the true-crime writer Sarah Weinman’s 2022 book “Scoundrel.”)
Tanenhaus does his best to contextualize this episode, noting other midcentury writers like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer who were fascinated by criminals. But Buckley’s friendship with Smith had no apparent bearing on his literary or political ambitions, making it a striking example of the underexplored psychological dynamics threaded through the book.
And what of Buckley’s sexuality? More than any previous biographer (there have been at least two others), Tanenhaus documents how many of Buckley’s contemporaries suspected that he had a secret gay life. After Buckley threatened Gore Vidal and called him “queer” during a televised debate, even his wife, Pat, acknowledged the rumors. “Two hundred million Americans think William F. Buckley is a screaming homosexual,” she told a friend. Tanenhaus seems unsure how to handle this material.
He spends little time on Buckley’s marriage to Pat, a wealthy and glamorous New York socialite. Despite his background, Buckley constantly had money troubles, but perhaps there was a firewall between the couple’s respective finances, for we never hear of Pat lending him a dollar. She appears in the narrative to issue various edicts — that she’ll accept a Catholic wedding but will not convert; that Buckley must ghost a neighbor who led him into financial disaster. Their interests were complementary: Buckley liked the high life; Pat liked the glow of intellect and culture emanating from her husband and his literary connections, which helped make her a prominent hostess in New York. But even as Buckley wrote a notorious opinion piece in The Times calling for men with AIDS to be tattooed “on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals,” Pat was raising prodigious sums for AIDS awareness and treatment.
In the end, less important than Buckley’s particular views is the style in which he expressed them and the infrastructure he created for their propagation. Politics has always been a form of entertainment, of course; what Buckley did was to update the torchlight parades of industrializing America for a literate and white-collar world. Yet he did more than add conservatism to a pre-existing media establishment. He helped change the way that establishment operated. Tanenhaus calls Buckley the “intellectual leader” of American conservatism, but we might remember him more accurately as its original influencer.
Jennifer Burns is one of the nation’s foremost historians of American political thought and economic policy. An Associate Professor of History at Stanford University and Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, she is the author of Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative—named one of The Economist’s Best Books of 2023—and Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. With a gift for making complex ideas engaging and accessible, Professor Burns brings to life the thinkers who have shaped American capitalism, conservatism, and public debate. Her talks feel like your favorite college class—thought-provoking, relevant, and unforgettable. Jennifer Burns is represented exclusively by WWSG. To book her for your next event, contact us today.
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