Buckley is the splendid, long-awaited biography by Sam Tanenhaus, former editor of the New York Times Book Review.
William F Buckley was the leading right-wing intellectual of the post-second World War United States and helped take the conservative movement from the margins to the mainstream of American politics. He was the founding editor of National Review, which Ronald Reagan once declared his favourite magazine.
For nearly a half-century, Buckley wrote a syndicated newspaper column, On the Right. He also hosted the television talkshow Firing Line for decades.
Buckley jnr learned his conservative politics at home from his father, who had made his fortune speculating on oil deposits in Latin America. Junior shared his father’s isolationist view that the US should not become involved in the second World War on the grounds that communism was a bigger threat than fascism.
As a larger-than-life patriarch who had big ambitions for his large family, Buckley snr resembled his contemporary, Joseph Kennedy. Yet, unlike Kennedy, he had little regard for his Irish heritage or identification with the oppression of Irish Catholics.
Like the Kennedys, Buckley made his way as a Catholic through elite Protestant-dominated institutions. After graduating from Yale University, he established himself as the enfant terrible of the American Right in his first book, God and Man at Yale, in which he denounced the institution’s liberalism and irreligiosity.
Buckley was more than just a writer, though. He helped to capture the Republican Party from the right, to secure Barry Goldwater’s nomination as presidential candidate in 1964 and ultimately to inaugurate the Reagan Revolution.
Buckley inspired a new generation of conservative activists and made right-wing politics respectable. He also made conservatism fun. He was a new kind of figure, a “performing ideologue” who was equally comfortable in the worlds of high ideas and mass media.
He was a remarkably quick writer and thinker and well known for his wit. When he ran for mayor of New York City in 1965 to protest the Republican Party’s liberal candidate, he was asked what he would do if he won the election. “Demand a recount,” he replied.
At more than 1,000 pages, Buckley is both too long and too short for its subject. A more concise version would have invited the larger readership that this book deserves. And yet the book races too quickly through the final three decades of Buckley’s life, including the period in which he was at the apex of his influence during the Reagan years. It bears the mark of an author who spent nearly three decades working on it and at some point needed to bring it to a finish.
In all other respects, though, Buckley is a model biography. It is both insightful and a pleasure to read. It nicely balances discussion of Buckley’s private life, public life and broader political and cultural contexts. It is a masterclass in showing rather than telling, which allows readers to draw their own conclusions about Buckley and the conservative movement he led.
For this reader, however, the book amounts to a damning portrait of its subject. Buckley was wrong about so many things. He was one of Joseph McCarthy’s most prominent defenders and warned ominously that the witch-hunt would be extended beyond communists: “The patience of America will at last be exhausted, and we will strike out against Liberals.”
He defended apartheid and racial segregation, declaring that the “South Must Prevail” because the “White community is ... the advanced race”. (On this issue, however, his views did eventually moderate.) He defended the Vietnam War to the end and was responsible for bringing together a tandem of war criminals in Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. He defended Nixon during the Watergate scandal, despite knowing early on about the complicity of top Nixon officials.
As a propagandist, Buckley aided the CIA in its overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. He defended the brutal dictator who replaced Allende, Augusto Pinochet, even against mounting evidence of his brutality.
Overall, Buckley had a reckless disregard for the truth when it suited his interests. And, despite (or perhaps because of) persistent rumours about his own sexuality, Buckley promoted hatred of gay people, most infamously during a televised 1968 debate in which he threatened writer Gore Vidal: “Now, listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face.”
In the age of Trump, it is easy to be nostalgic for a conservative of an earlier vintage such as Buckley. He genuinely engaged with ideas. He listened to those with very different perspectives from his own. His exchange with Vidal aside, he usually engaged politely across the political spectrum.
And, yet, given where the American Right has wound up, no one should pine for the days of Buckley. His charm and civility were merely a veneer hiding the noxious politics that have now so deformed the United States.
Daniel Geary is Mark Pigott Professor in US History at Trinity College Dublin
