Our Boy Bill
Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America
by Sam Tanenhaus ,Random House; 1040 pp., $40.00
If ever there was something that could coherently be called an American conservative movement, William F. Buckley, Jr. was its most important tribune.
Hero to a generation of would-be commentators who mimicked his slouching posture and sesquipedalian linguistic predilections, Buckley became the face and form of American conservatism in the second half of the 20th century. From Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show couch to the surprisingly resilient swivel chair on the set of his long-running program Firing Line, from the columns of nearly 400 newspapers to his own magazine, National Review, not to mention the pages and covers of virtually every major magazine of note, and from a bookcase-sagging array of memoirs, essay collections, and spy novels, Buckley represented a particular vision of American society and its role in the world.
But what was that vision? Ay, there’s the rub. As the foremost exponent of conservatism, Buckley built his reputation on policing the boundaries of the movement. His rebukes of John Birch Society founder Robert Welch and the novelist Ayn Rand shaped postwar American conservatism in the early 1960s, just as his hedged and halting rebukes of alleged anti-Semites and extremists in the 1990s burnished his reputation as gatekeeper. That reputation has only grown since his death. Even those who would never call themselves conservatives invoke his shade to shame opponents to their right. Nevertheless, Buckley never quite explained his vision. Although he had begun work in the mid-1960s on his “big book,” provisionally titled The Revolt Against the Masses, he quickly abandoned the project, recognizing his own limitations as a thinker.
Buckley was not even quite sure at first what to call his position, experimenting with terms such as “individualism” before settling on conservative. Others, such as Frank Meyer, advocated “fusionism” to link economic libertarians, anti-communists, and traditionalists into a single movement. Buckley was essential to that fusionist project, but not as a font of ideas. As Sam Tanenhaus argues in this long-
awaited biography:
Buckley’s function had never been to give theoretical substance to the movement. He was not its best or most serious thinker. He was its most articulate voice.
When discussing Buckley, one cannot help but be reminded of the famous quip by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. after meeting the young Franklin Roosevelt. Describing his callow but ambitious visitor, Holmes pronounced him a “second-class intellect. But a first-class temperament.” The first half of that comment may be unfair to Buckley, whose precocious intelligence entranced teachers and fans, while infuriating critics who preferred their conservative opponents to be monosyllabic and troglodytic. But the general contrast certainly applies. Buckley was the Conservative Prince of Vibes, a debater and counterpuncher who certainly enriched American public discourse by presenting views that otherwise would have been neglected by the guardians of the liberal consensus. But he always struggled to provide more than a general sense of what he thought conservatism meant. “Then as later, Bill was best on the attack, dismantling the other side, poking holes in their logic,” Tanenhaus writes, describing Buckley’s success as a college debater. “His instinct was to negate, to finger the soft spot in arguments.”
In an early attempt at self-definition, his 1959 book Up From Liberalism, Buckley summed up his philosophy:
I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.
His temperament was on display in that comment, but it raises as many questions as it answers. Which ancestors is Buckley citing? His Irish Catholic forbears? His father, the individualistic, bilingual, anti-Semitic oil wildcatter? His mother, the Southern belle? His mentors, Communist apostates Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham? What about those truths that occurred to him after decades of living among the moneyed cosmopolitans of New York? For Buckley, the answer was all of them some of the time, and some of them all of the time.
He was a man of contradictions. The young Buckley styled himself a radical, disdaining “the so-called conservative, uncomfortably disdainful of controversy” who “seldom has the energy to fight his battles” in favor of the radical who “exerts disproportionate influence because of his dedication to his cause.” But such radicalism clashed with traditionalism throughout his career. For all his mischievous youthful iconoclasm, by the 1970s Buckley had accepted both formal appointments and informal political direction from the Nixon administration. He had become a company man. (And when it came to his former employer in Langley, a lifelong “Company Man.”)
Initially inspired by his father’s celebration of the individual businessman and the notion of a Remnant rising above the crowd, as described by his father’s friend Albert Jay Nock, the wealthy Buckley was clearly part of the political and social elite. A Yalie and Bonesman who once attended Truman Capote’s celebrated Black and White Ball, Buckley was to the manor born. Nevertheless, the would-be author of The Revolt Against the Masses also flirted with populism, famously quipping that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard University.
For all the skill of his performance, Buckley’s legacy is clouded. He may have built a movement, but was always aware of how ramshackle it was. It didn’t outlive him.
Author of multiple memoirish essays (including two books, Cruising Speed and Overdrive, that each chronicled a week in his life), Buckley never wrote a full-scale autobiography. His high public profile nevertheless guaranteed that his life would attract authors. John Judis, a moderately sympathetic observer from the left, wrote the first full-length objective biography in 1988. Since then, Buckley has not only been the subject of at least three other more or less hagiographic biographies, but also of a longer book tracing his connections with Republican presidents since 1968.
His importance as a touchstone for the conservative side of the 1960s has led to scholarly works tracing Buckley’s relationship with Norman Mailer (with whom he had a surprisingly warm private friendship) and James Baldwin (with whom he had a very memorable public debate in 1965), as well as a biographical public television documentary and an award-winning film about his relationship with Gore Vidal, whom Buckley notoriously threatened to “sock” in his “godamn face” in one their legendary television debates during the 1968 Democratic convention. Even more broadly, a scholarly treatment of Firing Line attests to his importance in American media history, just as other recent works on the conservative movement, both admiring and condemning, continue to highlight his ambiguous legacy as convener and gatekeeper.
Many of these works have appeared in the time since Sam Tanenhaus became Buckley’s official biographer, a position he owed to Buckley’s admiration for his impressive biography of Buckley’s friend Whittaker Chambers. Over more than 20 years, Tanenhaus had unrestricted access to all of Buckley’s papers as well as introductions to everyone in his life. The result is a book that Buckley fans will certainly find fascinating, and that anyone interested in contemporary American political history should read. Tanenhaus helps readers understand the course of Buckley’s career, his rise to national prominence, and aspects of his personal and business life.
One learns a great deal from the book, especially about Buckley’s education and political apprenticeship, as well as about the political activities of his family (including their role in funding a pro-segregationist newspaper in their winter home of Camden, South Carolina). Tanenhaus adds welcome insight to familiar stories, such as the conflicts with Welch and Rand, the founding of National Review, and Buckley’s 1965 run for mayor of New York, as well as imperfectly understood episodes, such as his investments in the ill-fated Starr Broadcasting and his even more ill-fated relationship with death row inmate Edgar Smith.
Tanenhaus also offers intriguing details on Buckley’s relationship with his former CIA superior, E. Howard Hunt, whose role in Watergate allowed Buckley to see more of the background to that scandal than he would have preferred. Tanenhaus also cuts through some of the pious fog about Buckley’s relationship with Ronald Reagan, noting Reagan’s allergic reaction to the insinuation that he owed his success to Buckley’s role as “ventriloquist” for the conservative movement.
It is probably churlish to suggest that a volume of more than 1,000 pages of text and footnotes is too short, but in this case such a suggestion is unavoidable. The book takes more than 800 pages to reach the 1980s, which is essentially where the Judis book ended. Judis had already concluded that by then Buckley was a spent force intellectually, forsaking systematic discussions of conservatism in favor of broad celebrity and political influence. Tanenhaus takes the story somewhat further, but makes no real effort to contradict that conclusion. It may very well be that Tanenhaus was just worn out from the two-decade slog, or that his editors at Penguin demanded that the book appear in a single volume during Buckley’s centenary year, but it is nevertheless unfortunate. The lack of sustained attention to the last two decades of Buckley’s life undermines Tanenhaus’s effort to judge Buckley’s legacy and its relevance for the present.
Buckley’s last books repeated his greatest hits, reflecting on his relationships with Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, retreating into the past rather than offering any clear vision of his preferred future. In his last years, he broke with the Bush administration over the Iraq War and displayed some disdain for pre-Golden Escalator Donald Trump, but one looks in vain for clear pronouncements on where conservatism should go or whether he approved of its actual direction. So, it’s just as well that Tanenhaus avoids certainty on that score.
It is nevertheless unfortunate that the book ends as it does, since one does not have to rely on vibes and speculations to learn something about Buckley’s relationship to the current political climate. Indeed, two developments in the late 1980s and 1990s, as Buckley dealt with two of his most important acolytes, National Review colleagues Joseph Sobran and Richard Brookhiser, offer possibilities for analysis that Tanenhaus misses.
The Sobran story may be more familiar to readers of Chronicles, where he wrote a column after Buckley fired him from National Review. Sobran was one of Buckley’s greatest discoveries, plucked from relative academic obscurity to become one of the most important voices in the magazine’s successor generation. By 1985, Sobran, unlike his patron, had even written a philosophical treatise on conservatism, Pensées: Notes for the Reactionary of Tomorrow, which Buckley praised so highly that he devoted an entire issue of National Review to it. Sobran espoused a cultural conservatism largely divorced from both quotidian politics and Buckley’s urbane milieu.
It was an ultimately uncomfortable collaboration. Sobran and Buckley fell out over the former’s increasing criticism of Israel and American Jewish groups after the 1985 Bitburg controversy, caused by President Reagan’s visit to a German World War II cemetery that contained some graves of SS soldiers among other war dead. Sobran eventually drifted into murky associations with organizations such as the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review. By the early 1990s, criticism of Sobran from neoconservatives and Jewish groups had become so unbearable for Buckley that he felt compelled to fire his former protégé, an action that still earns him enmity from Sobran’s paleoconservative friends.
The Brookhiser story is less dramatic but no less revealing. A teenage Brookhiser so impressed Buckley with an article on the anti-Vietnam War movement in his upstate New York hometown that Buckley published it. After he graduated from Yale, Brookhiser became the youngest Senior Editor in National Review’s history. By the late 1980s, Buckley even tapped Brookhiser to succeed him as the magazine’s editor in chief and proprietor, only to reverse that decision a short time later with little explanation. There was no public formal break as with Sobran, but Buckley’s change of heart about the magazine’s future reflected his continuing ambivalence toward the movement he founded.
Tanenhaus regrettably only touches lightly on the Sobran saga and not at all on Brookhiser. Those stories could have offered more understanding of the conservative movement’s future than even the best-written speculation about how Buckley would have voted in 2016.
The most important insight of the book, however, comes in Tanenhaus’s discussions of Buckley’s skill at identifying rising literary stars and his own talent for friendship, which allowed him to build and maintain an impressive network of patrons, protégés, and colleagues. As the recipient of both a letter and an autographed book in response to a fan letter from a teenage admirer, this author can attest to Buckley’s astonishing and admirable skills as a correspondent.
When faced with the sheer volume of words he produced in both publications and correspondence, Buckley’s inability to produce “the big book” fades into relative insignificance. Buckley relished good writing and intellectual exchange. His discoveries and protégés include such conservative apostates as Joan Didion and Garry Wills, as well as George Will and David Brooks. That admirably catholic appreciation of style perhaps ran against any effort to enforce ideological uniformity. As William Rusher, the long-time publisher of National Review, once quipped, “I always said it was a good thing the Communist Manifesto wasn’t well written, or we would have lost Buckley.”
That the ramshackle movement Buckley helped create has proven unwieldy in the years since his death should not be much of a surprise. It also does not vitiate his historical interest. He was a man of his time, more interesting than most. His fame is subject to the same vicissitudes of all literary heroes, which is no shame. His collections of columns jousting with long-faded boldface names may feel rather dated; his books on sailing and his decreasingly inventive novels now appear quaintly unmemorable; his chronicles of a life well-lived belong to an age that feels more distant with every passing day. Glory fades, but even faded heroes retain some interest for those who stop and look, and contain lessons for those who need to be reminded of the fleeting nature of fame. Buckley’s wit, drive, and force of personality sparked something that, these days, feels over. Look on his works, ye righties, and despair.