Buckley’s Life on the Firing Line

When William F. Buckley Jr. died in 2008, the United States lost its most articulate champion of conservative ideas. Over the course of a 60-year career in the public eye, Buckley did just about everything: published books and articles, lectured, wrote a newspaper column, edited a national magazine, advised politicians, and even ran for office. He was fortunate to live long enough to see the hopes he nourished as a young man come to pass when, after long and patient work, conservatives captured the Republican Party, elected a conservative president, and, most of all, promoted the policies that brought about the collapse of communism.

This new biography by Sam Tanenhaus captures this theme by juxtaposing events in Buckley’s life against the evolution of the conservative movement from 1950 to the early years of the new century. The book is at once a chronicle of the life of a man but also a history of the era he helped to shape.

Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America has been 30 years in the making and now appears on the 100th anniversary of Buckley’s birth. Tanenhaus, former editor of the New York Times Book Review and author of a biography of Whittaker Chambers, worked closely on the project with Buckley himself, who may have expected it to appear during his lifetime rather than 17 years after his death. The book bears the marks of a long gestation: It runs to 860 pages of text, plus more than 100 pages of notes. Nevertheless, it was worth the wait. Tanenhaus’s biography is a lively chronicle of Buckley’s life that far surpasses in depth and detail all previously published efforts along these lines.

There has long been a puzzling contradiction at the heart of Buckley’s life and career: He grew up in an atmosphere of European-style conservatism, aristocratic in outlook and disdainful of the masses, yet he launched a movement that sought to rouse the public against a corrupt establishment. Buckley, though drawn to politics, was not a popular leader: His eccentric style could never go over in a union hall or at a mass political rally. Still, he declared in the 1950s that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone book than by the collected wisdom of Harvard’s faculty. Buckley looked upon the conservative movement that he founded with a degree of ambivalence, approving its victories but perhaps not entirely comfortable with the means by which they were achieved.

One source of this tension may be found in Buckley’s family life, particularly in the influence of his father. Bill Buckley Sr. was a Texas-based oil man who built a fortune by acquiring oil patches first in Mexico, then in Venezuela. Buckley’s mother, Aloise Steiner, came from a prominent New Orleans family of Swiss and German descent. Both were devout Catholics who passed those religious convictions along to their 10 children. Buckley Sr., after securing oil properties, relocated from Texas to New York City to attract investments in his new company from speculators and established oil companies. With this wealth, he acquired an estate in Sharon, Connecticut, called “Great Elm,” where in the 1920s he settled his wife and growing family.

In those years, Buckley took his political education from his father, who held staunch anti-communist and anti-statist views by virtue of revolutionary upheavals he saw in Mexico and Venezuela. When Bill Jr. grew older, his father brought in the famed libertarian writer, Albert Jay Nock, to provide further instruction in politics. Nock attacked the New Deal and democratic politics in general, and held out hope that a “vital remnant” of elites would eventually come to power when democracy crashed in an inevitable catastrophe. This was an American version of European-style conservatism.

Buckley entered Yale in 1946, eager to make up for lost time (he had spent the previous two years in the Army) and to catch up with his brother, Jim, who had already graduated. He landed a spot on the debate team, alongside fellow student Brent Bozell, and by his third year was appointed editor of the Yale Daily News, where he published critical articles on the left-wing tilt of the faculty that got him into hot water with the administration. He would soon turn those articles, along with copious notes, into a best-selling book, God and Man at Yale, published in 1951 (after his graduation). The book claimed that Yale professors, in the name of academic freedom, were undermining Christianity and promoting collectivism by teaching Keynes and other liberal thinkers. He called upon alumni to withhold donations unless and until the university changed course.

The book was a sensation, as Tanenhaus writes, especially so for a young man with no other books to his credit. It was widely reviewed—McGeorge Bundy, a Yale graduate, wrote in the Atlantic that he found the book “dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author.” Others weighed in along the same lines. Buckley was unfazed and enjoyed the furor surrounding the book. He saw, as did others, that the critics missed the main point: The popularity of the book was due to its attack on the professional elites at Yale and elsewhere who pretended to be neutral and open in outlook but were in fact selling a point of view—namely, liberalism.

Buckley followed up with a new book, McCarthy and His Enemies, written jointly with Bozell, and published in 1954 just as McCarthy’s career was about to collapse in censure by the Senate. The book was not so much a defense of McCarthy as it was an attack on the security system in the State Department (and elsewhere) that allowed communists and fellow-travelers to penetrate the U.S. government. Critics panned the book because they disliked McCarthy, but that was partly the authors’ point: The communist issue was much larger than McCarthy.

With two controversial books under his belt, Buckley was by this time the acknowledged leader of a loose band of conservative writers that included Russell Kirk, James Burnham, Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendall, and Whittaker Chambers. There was no political home for writers who were at once anti-communist and anti-statist. They were not welcome in the universities, certainly, nor in the Republican Party: Eisenhower had pushed aside their favorite (Robert Taft) for the presidential nomination, and once in office declared his support for the main themes of the New Deal and the containment doctrine favored by his Democratic predecessor.

In this circumstance, his friends prevailed upon Buckley to launch a new magazine that would at once articulate these two themes—anti-communism and anti-statism—and also unite the disparate band of conservatives around a single publication. They looked to Buckley as their leader for obvious reasons: He could debate; he had a name by virtue of his books; and, importantly, he had access to money through his father and his father’s friends. Buckley agreed to be editor of the weekly publication. The inaugural issue of National Review appeared in November 1955 with a bold statement of purpose from its editor: “[National Review] stands athwart history yelling Stop, at a time when no other is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

Buckley would serve as editor of National Review for the next 35 years, writing weekly columns, supervising the editorial pages, serving as referee for disputes among his writers, and, as Tanenhaus writes, trying to wall off unsavory elements (bigotry and anti-Semitism) from the magazine. Buckley denounced the John Birch Society, erstwhile allies in the anti-communist cause, for extremist claims—for example, that President Eisenhower was a communist. He leaned heavily for editorial and intellectual advice upon Burnham, the deepest thinker among the magazine’s stable of writers. The magazine lost money every year and depended for its solvency upon generous annual subsidies from the Buckley family. Within a few years, financial pressures led to a cut back, from a weekly to a fortnightly publication.

Buckley through these years thought about writing a major book on democracy, to be titled, The Revolt against the Masses, a riff on another book, The Revolt of the Masses, written in 1930 by José Ortega y Gasset. The book would develop the opposite theme—that the tide was turning against mass democracy in favor of leadership by informed and responsible elites. This was, indeed, a long-standing theme in Buckley’s thinking: that the right to vote should be limited to a narrow slice of informed citizens.

Yet Buckley was never able to make progress on that proposed book and eventually dropped it altogether. Tanenhaus suggests why: Buckley was an “arguer” but not a thinker; he was quick, but not deep. But there may have been another reason: Buckley understood, as he thought about it, that the conservative movement was arrayed against liberal elites in charge of government, journalism, and the universities, and its success depended upon mobilizing the public against them. For conservatives, a revolt of the masses might not be an altogether bad thing.

Tanenhaus writes that Buckley’s career was at a crossroads at the end of the 1950s. National Review struggled to make ends meet; he was stymied in trying to write his big book; his writings were dismissed by critics; he could not duplicate the success of God and Man at Yale. He was no longer the “boy wonder” of conservatism. “Instead of standing athwart history, he seemed stalled and off-track, while the liberal express barreled ahead.”

Buckley rescued his career in the 1960s, transforming himself from a marginal figure to a full-blown celebrity whose conservative views and eccentric manner were elements in his new popularity. There were several factors in this reversal of fortune. Buckley played a behind-the-scenes role in Barry Goldwater’s capture of the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, thereby putting conservatives on the map as a potent political force. Buckley ran for mayor of New York City in 1965, sparkling in debates against his over-matched foes, and then wrote a popular book about the experience, The Unmaking of a Mayor. He won many friends, but not many votes, in that escapade.

Time magazine featured Buckley on its cover in 1967, under the title, William Buckley: Conservatism Can Be Fun. Buckley, the article said, was noted for his wit, wide travels, many liberal friends, and enjoyment of intellectual combat. He was, as Time wrote, “a contradiction in terms, a popular polemicist.” The magazine also described him as a “solitary sniper,” without much of a following, since few could understand him.

Tanenhaus criticizes Buckley and the writers at National Review for their defense of segregation and opposition to civil rights laws in the 1950s and ’60s. National Review expressed consistent opposition to the civil rights movement and supported Sen. Goldwater when he voted against the Civil Rights Act in 1964. These views provoked some of the magazine’s writers, notably Garry Wills, to break ranks with Buckley.

Later, in a televised debate with James Baldwin in 1965 before the Cambridge Political Union, Buckley defended the American system, pointing to progress blacks had made in previous decades, but was challenged by Baldwin’s descriptions of the burdens heaped upon blacks by the accumulated history of slavery and bigotry. Buckley, Tanenhaus writes, “seemed unable to grasp the reality of America’s racial history,” skillfully and emotionally described by Baldwin, and lost badly to his adversary in a vote of the Cambridge audience. Some years later Buckley expressed regret for taking these positions, as he and National Review came to embrace the ideals of a color-blind society.

Tanenhaus writes candidly about Buckley’s association with Richard Nixon, and its semi-tragic denouement a few years later. Buckley, and National Review, endorsed Nixon in the 1968 campaign, in light of Nixon’s anti-communist background, his role in the Hiss case, and his friendship with Chambers. Buckley and the magazine would later break with the president in 1971 over his opening to communist China, engineered with the aid of Henry Kissinger, now a close friend of Buckley’s. Buckley well understood the strategic rationale for that policy, but could not countenance the sudden compromise with a totalitarian communist state.

The Watergate episode represented a final fissure in the relationship with Nixon. Howard Hunt, one of the masterminds of the operation, had been Buckley’s mentor two decades before at the CIA, and the pair had remained friends, with Buckley serving as godfather to Hunt’s children. Buckley phoned Hunt to express his condolences shortly after Hunt’s wife was killed in an airline crash in December 1972 while carrying $10,000 in cash (thought to be part of a payoff for his silence from the Nixon campaign). The next week Hunt visited Buckley and shared with him details of the Watergate operation, including an earlier burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office and plans to assassinate Jack Anderson, one of Nixon’s critics. Due to this relationship, Buckley did not write about the Watergate affair during this period, nor did he attend editorial meetings of National Review during which the issue was discussed, preferring to maintain his silence until the affair unraveled on its own.

After allocating more than 700 pages to Buckley’s life up to the end of Nixon’s presidency, Tanenhaus briefly glides through the events of the last three decades of his life. Buckley supported Ronald Reagan’s campaign for the presidency and visited frequently as a White House guest during his eight-year stint. Reagan was his “favorite president,” as he said, and rightly so, not merely because he read National Review, but because he engineered the fall of the Soviet Union, thereby bringing to fruition the chief goal of the conservative movement. Tanenhaus accepts the criticism that Reagan’s tax and spending policies created a new “Gilded Age,” with great disparities between rich and poor, but fails to acknowledge that those policies revived the American economy, tamed inflation, brought down interest rates, and set off the stock market on a 40-year bull run.

Tanenhaus says little about Buckley’s other activities in these later years—for example, his writing on anti-Semitism in the 1990s, or his opposition to the war in Iraq, which he called a Wilsonian adventure that was unlikely to succeed. He suggests that by the end of his life, with the rough edges worn off by time and the fall of communism, Buckley became something of a caricature of himself. “In his last years,” he writes, “he came to seem less ideologue than public institution and at times a figure of fun.”

But after all is said and done, after all possible holes are poked in Buckley’s reputation, the truth is still there in the subtitle to Tanenhaus’s sympathetic biography: Buckley led a revolution that changed America. He concludes with this fitting, and thoroughly accurate, coda: “In clearing so large a place for himself, he left a vacuum that no one since has been able to fill.”

Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America
by Sam Tanenhaus
Random House, 1,020 pp., $40

James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.