Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America

The revolution that William F. Buckley, Jr., set into motion itself remains far from complete. In truth, and in Buckley’s mind, the main idea was actually to create a counter-establishment that would eventually produce not a revolution, but a “counter-revolution.”

Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, by Sam Tanenhaus (1018 pages, Random House, 2025)

An accounting of the “life and revolution that changed America” might well have justified nearly 900 pages of text, but that was not the life of William F. Buckley, Jr. To be sure, his was a very consequential life, as well as an entirely fascinating life, not to mention a very full, if sometimes frustrating life to boot.

The result here is itself thoroughly fascinating, quite full, but occasionally frustrating as well. The phrase “if only” seems to apply, as in “if only” Buckley’s had actually been a revolutionary life….

To be sure, this is the life of a brash thirty-year-old conservative who founded a magazine that insisted that it was time to “stand athwart history yelling stop.” And yet here we are seventy years later, conservatives of all ages, still standing—or reeling—against history, while still yelling—or at least pleading—stop.

For that matter, Buckleyite conservatives are still waiting for, and working toward, the peaceful revolution that is both very much needed and might yet come, or the revolution that might well change America and renew and restore America all at the same time.

Did Buckley himself think that his had been a revolutionary life? If so, he either didn’t tell Sam Tanenhaus or Tanenhaus prefers to remain silent on the subject. Does Tanenhaus think so? Once again silence reigns. Would Tanenhaus have approved of such a revolution? Silence still reigns.

That said, the author of a generally sympathetic biography of Whittaker Chambers has given us a generally sympathetic biography of William F. Buckley. Clearly, Tanenhaus likes Buckley. And just as clearly Buckley liked a lot of people, including many, if not all, of his political opponents, Gore Vidal being a glaring, and in many ways a very singular, exception.

The Buckley predisposition to like people was an endearing Buckley quality, if a less than revolutionary one. The same goes for his liking of various things, not to mention the money—or the prospect of money to come–that things could buy. Yes, his was a highly political life, but his was never a life that was fully consumed by and with politics.

He also liked good writing, no matter its source. Buckley ally William Rusher once joked that it was a “good thing The Communist Manifesto wasn’t well-written or we would have lost Buckley.”

While it’s true that Buckley possessed what Tanenhaus calls an “inborn talent” for arguing about politics, he also had a well-developed talent for listening to what his opponents had to say. In fact, the headmaster of his prep school described the youthful Buckley as “thoughtful, kind, tender in feeling and closely attuned to others.” In other words, this unusual youngster was not exactly a budding Leninist, even if he might well have been a television host/combatant in the making.

For that matter, Buckley never lost those very traits as he grew older. Throughout the book Tanenhaus seems to feel a need to remain on hand to remind the reader of the difference between the public Buckley and the private Buckley. In truth, the private Buckley was “utterly different” from his public counterpart, and in any case he was always able to “detach personal feelings from ideological passions.”

If it could be said that Buckley was sometimes consumed by politics, it might also be said that he could also be consumed with sailing or skiing or music (for which he had a “profound passion”) or writing–or celebrityhood. In other words, this so-called revolutionary had many lives beyond politics. And Sam Tanenhaus gives a good deal of attention to all of them.

More than that, William F. Buckley also had his loves. He loved his wife and family. And he loved his God and country. It might even be said that he loved many of his friends, as well as his lives at sea and on the slopes–and perhaps even his life as a celebrity as well, maybe even especially his life as a celebrity.

In sum, this revolutionary took pleasure in many things and in many others, but his biographer wants us to know that his subject seemed to derive the “most pleasure” from bringing others into his life and involving them in one or more of his many “enthusiasms.”

He even took a measure of rueful pleasure in his “apostates,” meaning those he discovered and nurtured before they began to move (but perhaps not grow) politically leftward. Here the prime, but far from lone example, was Garry Wills.

During the 1960s the double whammy of the war in Vietnam and the overpowering issue of civil rights drove a wedge between Buckley and many of his disciples. According to Buckley, the most painful break was with Wills. Nonetheless, Buckley did not lose his sense of humor, rueful though it was. What was National Review running, he wondered, if not a “finishing school for apostates.”

When it came to politics, his involvement was invariably a rear-guard action, whether fighting against the Soviet empire or against the encroachments of the federal government. For Buckley, these were necessary and good fights, save in retrospect his opposition to the effort of the federal government to dismantle state-imposed systems of racial segregation. Years after the fact, Buckley would concede that this dismantlement did require federal action.

And the fight against international communism? Whether fighting with or for Joe McCarthy, whether praising Richard Nixon (for outing Alger Hiss) or criticizing him (for sins domestic and foreign, but especially for the opening to China), whether operating in the CIA or for his ex-CIA pal of Watergate infamy, E. Howard Hunt, Buckley knew that the Cold War had to be fought and won. In fact, it seems that victory in that war was much more important to Buckley than rolling back the welfare/administrative state at home.

And after the Cold War was won? Of course, Buckley was pleased, as he should have been and deserved to be. But in a sense everything after that was anticlimactic. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, William F. Buckley, Jr., had two more decades of life. To be sure, there were more Blackford Oakes novels to write, more Firing Line episodes to tape, and many, many more columns to write. But in a very real sense this Buckley seemed to sense that the major purpose of his life had already come to an end.

Sam Tanenhaus seems to agree. After all, he devotes barely a handful of pages to the final quarter of his subject’s life. Nonetheless, one gets the feeling that the William F. Buckley could easily have led a full and happy life quite apart from politics and political affairs. As it was, he was always making room for as much fun as possible, not to mention as many hijinx as were doable, or at least as dream-upable. And of course time would always have to be made for the non-political and even the apolitical.

This would-be revolutionary was never the intellectual leader of the conservative movement. Nor was he ever a major, much less its dominant political leader. More than that, and more to the point, he never wanted to be either one. He apparently lacked both the discipline and the desire to write the tour-de-force of a book that others claimed he was always going to write. And he probably lacked the proverbial fire in the belly that is required for a serious run for elective office.

Yes, he did run for the office of mayor of New York City in 1965. But he did so more to block and frustrate John Lindsay than anything else, save for the lark that it would be and the book that he likely intended to write, win or lose. And what would be his first act, if he did somehow manage to win? “Demand a recount” was his immediate reply. It was all classic Buckley.

In sum, he must have had as much fun living his life as Sam Tanenhaus must have had writing about it. Not that Buckley’s life was devoid of tragedies and failures. Far from it. And to always varying extents, the Buckley family fortune was often a house of cards. Sometimes it was there, and sometimes it wasn’t. But no matter, Bill Buckley always thought that something was there–or at least he did his best to pretend that was such the case. Besides, he was eventually making real money all on his own with Blackford Oakes, Firing Line, and those innumerable columns.

And just what does Sam Tanenhaus think of it all? For that matter, what does Tanenhaus think that Buckley might think about things today? This, after all, is the William F. Buckley, Jr., who once claimed that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than by the Harvard faculty. Hints are here and there, but only hints, which is as it should be and only could be.

Hinting at those hints returns us to that quixotic run for mayor in 1965, and to this matter of a past and possible future American revolution. That would be the “revolution” that Tanenhaus wants us to believe that Buckley long ago engineered versus the revolution that might well be in the offing, thanks in no small part to one WFB.

One of the surprising discoveries of the Buckley mayoral campaign was the support it received from the city’s working classes, or as Buckley aide-de-camp Neal Freeman put it, “the people who made the city go.” Who was speaking for them, but the patrician Buckley, amazingly enough? And who were they, if not future MAGA Republicans? Furthermore, as Tanenhaus himself puts it, Buckley, the “disciple” of the libertarian Albert J. Nock, may have been slow to see himself as a leader of the “forgotten Americans.” But he gradually became “exactly that.”

To be sure, Buckley played a key role in reviving a moribund conservatism, both political and intellectual, in the aftermath the New Deal, World War II and the defeat of Taft Republicanism. He gave the movement two “P” words, well, one and a half. He gave it a Place at the table and what might only be called Pizzaz.

In opposing Eisenhower and promoting Goldwater, he seemed determined to “wreck the Republican party in order to rule the wreckage.” At least that was the estimate of the inestimable Walter Lippmann at the time. Tanenhaus deems Lippmann to have been “half-right.” In a few other Tanenhaus words, Buckley may well have reduced the existing GOP to ruins, “but he had also willed a new one into being.”

Here Sam Tanenhaus himself is half-right. Yes, Buckley played an important role in transforming the GOP into the winning party of Ronald Reagan. After all, Reagan initially had come to him. Not so in the early sixties when Buckley approached Goldwater, even though he suspected that the Arizona senator was a “lightweight.” (According to Tanenhaus, Goldwater suspected the same thing about Goldwater; hence his decision to have Buckley brother-in-law and Yale debating partner Brent Bozell draft The Conscience of a Conservative, all in the name of trying to “save” an America that Bozell and Buckley refused to “abandon.”)

In all likelihood, what has been called the “Reagan Revolution” was the revolution that made its way into the subtitle of this biography. If so, that revolution is far from complete. It may be somewhat closer to completion today, but it still remains far from complete. And standing in its way is a left that is not only much further to the left than the left of Buckley’s heyday, but very, very powerful as well.

In any case, the revolution that William F. Buckley, Jr., set into motion itself remains far from complete. In truth, and in Buckley’s mind, the main idea was actually to create a counter-establishment that would eventually produce not a revolution, but a “counter-revolution.” The first successful stage was the Reagan presidency. The second successful stage was the remaking of the Republican party into the party of the American working class. The third successful stage might well prove to have been the Trump presidencies. It’s still too early to tell. Meanwhile, it might have been better, if a little clumsier, to subtitle this biography, “the life and counter-revolution that someday might fundamentally restore and renew the America that might not be saved, but should not be abandoned.”

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