Conservatives have been waiting for Sam Tanenhaus’s official biography of William F. Buckley Jr. for too long. Twenty-seven years, to be precise. The last line of text in the acknowledgments on page 868 quotes Buckley shortly before his death, “I know I won’t see my biography.” So much procrastination and delay on the part of the author indicate a divided mind and an inability to focus on the project. Things change over 27 years, including authors, potential audiences, and even the public memory of a figure like Buckley. This disappointed reader must ask: Does the biography give us Buckley, or rather, a disconnected series of reflections about who the American liberal mind needs Buckley to be?
Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America is a work of immense research and thorough study, replete with archival work, oral interviews, and an exhaustive examination of the subject’s life and career at every turn. Tanenhaus had untrammeled access to Buckley’s personal papers and calendar, and other materials. He presents a picture of the man enmeshed in a complex web of cultural, familial, educational, social, political, and interpersonal contexts. In certain respects, the reader now possesses more of Buckley than perhaps was wanted, or that even most closely informs what Buckley believed was his life’s mission. Almost no stone is left unturned in Buckley’s parents’ and siblings’ lives either.
One of the problems is that the book is not proportional to Buckley’s life. In a tome of almost 1,000 pages, fewer than 100 are devoted to the momentous period in Buckley’s life and the conservative movement, ranging from Reagan’s election to the presidency in 1980 to Buckley’s death in 2008. The one thing most needful is lacking, that is, an appreciation and evaluation of the precise contours of the Revolution that the author identifies in the subtitle as Buckley’s chief contribution to American life. What was this revolution? On that crucial topic, Tanenhaus seems reluctant to offer an opinion.
Since Tanenhaus took decades to write the book, one must take note of the significant shift in the American Left over the last few decades. Did this change in left-liberalism influence the biography that Tanenhaus ended up writing? The Left in America has moved from existing as a relatively benign force routed by conservative victories in the 1980s and 1990s and therefore content to manage the welfare state, keep tax rates reasonable, and ensure stable economic growth, to becoming a revolutionary force incapable of affirming American citizenship, race-neutral policies, or even articulating the biological differences between men and women. Race and plasticized gender became its calling cards, weapons wielded to fashion an America in the image of egalitarian humanism. Crucial political, educational, and cultural institutions, most crucial to constitutional democracy, have been locked into racial stories, struggle sessions, or patriarchal oppression plays. Because the book is rooted in race, family, culture, and historical sweep as opposed to the distinct presentation of Buckley’s ideas, it is not an easy question to dismiss. Did a similar movement permeate the mind of Sam Tanenhaus?
Historically, conservative readers loved Tanenhaus’s magnificent 1997 biography of Whittaker Chambers, which became a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. A former editor of The New York Times Book Review and a liberal in good standing with the ideology’s professional accreditation unit, Tanenhaus, while researching the book, had reevaluated many of his convictions about anti-communism and the somewhat dismissive or complacent attitudes that liberals had long held regarding communist infiltration into the federal government during the New Deal and World War II. In the biography’s thorough examination of Chambers’s sources and files, he came to know the truth and realized that Chambers had told the truth about the espionage accusations against Alger Hiss, and much more besides. The strength of this biography, plus the favorable opinion of his son, Christopher, convinced Buckley that Tanenhaus should write his biography.
Tanenhaus avoids the evidence and the seriousness of thought and purpose that a man like Buckley put into a lifetime of forging the American conservative movement.
In 2009, Tanenhaus authored The Death of Conservatism, a post-George W. Bush-inflected account of how movement conservatism was spent. The book’s thesis was that conservatives had held power and brought the country to the brink of domestic and international ruin. (He also hubristically argued that conservatism should only serve as a modest corrective to ascendant liberalism and not a real alternative.) It now fell to the Obama presidency to rearticulate America’s meaning and purpose in a second New Deal policy matrix. Ironically, six months into Obama’s term, the Tea Party emerged, and the Obama presidency, following a pyrrhic victory on healthcare, was reduced to administrative state machinations. Tanenhaus had fallen in love indiscriminately with a moment in time and was badly exposed, having opened himself to being attacked by reality checks.
A few years later, Tanenhaus penned an essay asserting that American conservatism was one long footnote to the concurrent majority thesis of former vice president and political theorist John Calhoun. In his works of political theory, Calhoun conceived of additional limits on the Constitution’s requirements for passing legislation in order to further protect certain minority interests, including those of slaveowners. In arguing that conservatism should only be understood in a Calhounite context, Tanenhaus was saying that the effectual truth of conservatism in America is that it is a heretical, ahistorical, and cloaked attempt to grab rights and liberties for various subgroups like greedy corporations, racists, and religious fanatics by exploiting supermajority requirements in the federal government’s constitutional architecture. Tanenhaus’ message: The country would be better off without it. And Tanenhaus was already not so subtly playing the race card.
These points are worth mentioning, not merely to criticize Tanenhaus, but because they provide the background for understanding a book about a man of ideas, politics, and high culture who is reduced in many respects to the mere product of family and historical circumstances. In short, Tanenhaus seems fundamentally incapable of grasping that conservatives believe that ideas have consequences, that they take shape through the interaction of men’s minds with reality, nature, and God, and that we can articulate a philosophical foundation for American constitutionalism and the morality that underpins it. Tanenhaus, as a good American liberal, bows, however “moderately,” before the altars of class, race, and gender. These become the deft arrows he repeatedly shoots into Buckley’s oeuvre, rendering it a corpse instead of a foundational work capable of intelligently guiding future efforts.
In this biography, Buckley’s revolution remains undefined, not because of Buckley’s inability to limn its definition but because of Tanenhaus’s intellectual limits. The book opens oddly with an epigraph from Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way:
Facts do not penetrate the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished. They did not engender those beliefs and are powerless to destroy them. They can inflict on them continual blows of contradiction and disproof without weakening them. And an avalanche of miseries and maladies succeeding one another without interruption in the life of a family will not make it doubt either the benevolence of God or the competence of its physician.
From that opening encounter, the discerning reader knows that this biography is not just about Buckley but also about Tanenhaus and his intellectual prejudices. And what of the line about family never doubting or seeking a physician, refusing to seek any other source of wisdom? Did Buckley not let facts intrude upon his thinking and action? Should we only understand Buckley within the context of his family? Tanenhaus’s words diminish Buckley—the man who lived a life arguing, writing, speaking, interviewing, and attempting to rebuild the principles of faith, freedom, patriotism, and a commitment to the highest ideals of western civilization—to a figure ultimately lost in impenetrable prejudices and belief structures that remained impervious to the finer points of emergent reason and logic.
Praised and read by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Barry Goldwater, Henry Kissinger, among other leading statesmen of his day, a man who founded National Review in 1955, whose thousands of syndicated columns and essays, numerous books and novels, and years of his famous PBS Firing Line program elevated the status of American discourse and made conservative thought a non-negotiable force in American life is ultimately sealed within his time, incapable of being a living presence to future thinkers and political actors. Nonetheless, Tanenhaus does praise Buckley at the end, adding: In his death, many gathered “in affectionate remembrance of one it seemed natural to speak of as a great man.” He had been “the country’s greatest conservative,” and “left a vacuum no one since has been able to fill.” But this is all too little and too late.
The book is organized mostly along chronological lines. It begins with William F. Buckley Sr. and his ill-fated attempt to build an oil empire in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Mexico. He succeeded, only to have the socialist revolution confiscate his business, leaving him with almost nothing. Determined to strike again, he successfully did—this time in Venezuela. The family was Southern and devotedly Catholic, with Buckley Sr. from the border region of Texas and his wife, Aloise Sterner, from a New Orleans family. They would have eleven children, with Bill Buckley as the fourth child. They split time between an imposing estate, “Great Elm,” in Sharon, Connecticut, and “Kamschatka,” a restored plantation in Camden, South Carolina.
Tanenhaus repeatedly reminds the reader of the father’s antisemitism, and his less-than-enlightened attitude about race and equality for blacks. He does note that the Buckley family’s attitude was also characterized by Christian charity, although this charity did not fully extend to advocating for civil rights and full legal equality. To his credit, Tanenhaus quotes Edward Allen, a former black servant in the Buckleys’ South Carolina home, who observed the decency and warmth of the family, including Buckley Sr., towards its mostly black servants. Allen noted that a white man once attempted, right in front of his father, to take his father’s job as a groundskeeper at Kamschatka. Buckley Sr. responded forcefully, “I wouldn’t hire ten of you.” Telling the man, “Get off my place.” Years later, after the Buckleys had sold Kamschatka, Allen, by then in his eighties, said that he remembered the Buckleys well. Sometimes he said he strolled past their home, and “every time, I look up to the heavens and thank God for the Buckleys.”
Seemingly, Tanenhaus’s overall purpose in writing this part is to link Buckley, National Review, and conservatism within a web of Southern racism. He spends entire chapters detailing race and the Buckleys. He reveals, for instance, that Buckley Sr. encountered and approved of the earliest manifestation of the infamous “Southern Strategy,” (at the time, a Republican electoral strategy meant to increase votes among the white electorate by stirring up racial anxiety about social change) and one that the family knew from its connection to South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond who ran on the “Dixiecrat” ticket in 1948. Quoting Buckley’s father as saying in 1949, “I can’t exaggerate the interest in the East in a combination between dissident Southern Democrats and the Republicans,” Tanenhaus proposes that much of the opposition in the South to the New Deal and its economic program was rooted in racism, and the fear that the regulatory power of the government would lead to integrated workplaces and greater economic equality for blacks. In short, the through line for Tanenhaus, as it is for most liberal observers, is that the Southern Strategy and its incipient racism drove conservative politics to the present day, and helped create Goldwater, Wallace, Nixon, and Reagan, with Buckley riding the wave.
Tanenhaus notes that Buckley made racialist comments about blacks and intelligence at his prep school, Millbrook Academy, in the 1930s. He apparently opposed an interracial dance as an undergraduate in the 1950s at Yale, but supported the social event. Tanenhaus reminds us that National Review originally did not support civil rights legislation, although its stance would change as later thinkers, such as Harry Jaffa and Charles Kesler, among others, influenced the publication. Willmoore Kendall, Buckley’s academic mentor at Yale and a legendary early editor of National Review, also reversed his position. Tanenhaus does mention that Buckley later regretted and admitted fault for opposing the Civil Rights Act, but is unable to resist the temptation to add (his own personal view) that some of Buckley’s famous editorials on race and the South, most prominently “Why the South Must Prevail,” continue to make it difficult for many to take conservatism as a set of ideas not informed by racial animus. Really?
Tanenhaus goes too far here and fails to recognize how Buckley and the larger conservative movement he led became a salutary force on this issue, right up to the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Harvard v. Students for Fair Admissions, where the Court ruled that affirmative action violated the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act. Liberals on the Court, in the academy, and from their various cultural perches denounced the decision. Dividing people up by race has become their core ideological position. Conservatives repaired to the Declaration to recover truthful thinking on race, while liberals further uncovered their progressive ideology rooted in group rights, collectivism, and the rejection of the American Founding’s constitutional principles. The results speak for themselves. Tanenhaus can’t even bring himself to admit this. He approaches race and racism in a hopelessly Manichean way.
Buckley apologized and changed his mind about the issue. Conservatism itself would become the only significant force in American politics advocating for a color-blind constitution. But it’s not enough for Tanenhaus. The undertone of the book is that Buckleyite conservatism and racial discrimination are as thick as the morning dew on the South Carolina grass.
Another driving impetus of Buckley’s conservatism, Tanenhaus opines, was the “America First” antiwar movement led by Charles Lindbergh. The Buckley family rapturously followed Lindbergh, until Pearl Harbor. They were opposed to America entering the war and assisting the British. They believed that involvement in Europe’s war would lead to grave ills at home. Buckley followed his father’s lead, of course, and he was in prep school for most of this period. He later served as an officer in the Army, but never saw combat or left the United States. Tanenhaus’s rooting of Buckley’s conservatism in the America First movement seems a strange choice, completely belied by a deeper consideration of the ideas and the actions Buckley took after World War II.
While Buckley and his entire family were a part of the Lindbergh movement, so were many others in America. It was not an exotic position. That tune changed dramatically for everyone when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Moreover, far from isolationist politics, what Buckley expressed after the war, when the Soviet Union rose in opposition to the US, was a belief that America must defeat its communist foe. He believed in the rollback of communism globally. Tanenhaus documents at length Buckley’s defense of the principles behind Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist pressure campaign, which he expressed in a 1954 book, McCarthy and His Enemies, jointly authored with his close lifelong friend, Brent Bozell Jr. (who was also his brother-in-law, married to his sister, Patricia Buckley). Both Buckley and Bozell were more supportive of the galvanizing anticommunist thrust of McCarthy’s program rather than his tactics and bruising personality.
Does the biography give us Buckley, or rather, a disconnected series of reflections about who the American liberal mind needs Buckley to be?
There seems to be little here linking pre-World War II America First-ism with the postwar conservative movement that Buckley brought into being. Buckley closely hewed to the counsel of former New York University professor and famous public intellectual James Burnham, who was National Review’s chief foreign policy theorist. Both favored “psyop” campaigns against communists and domestic sympathizers to create the right images in people’s minds of what they were fighting against during the Cold War. Opposition to communism was one piece of glue uniting figures as diverse as Milton Friedman, Russell Kirk, and Frank Meyer, with Buckley the winsome leader of it all.
What we hear even less of in the book is Buckley’s opposition to the real revolution within the nation, that of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in 1932 and his dramatic expansion of government, dismissal of separation of powers, blurring of the lines between government and business, and the creation of a welfare state in America. The opposition to the principles undergirding this progressive constitutional and economic project was the other main source of unity for the disparate band of libertarians, anticommunists, classical liberals, and religious and cultural conservatives that Buckley assembled in the pages of National Review. This practical fusion of thinkers, forged in anticommunist fervor and the need to roll back domestic power in the federal government, is crucial to understanding Buckley’s legacy. Its reason for existing was not in racism or America First-ism, but in a collection of ideas, principles, and actions that loosely cohered intellectually and were forged together in the fires of national political combat.
Tanenhaus faults Buckley repeatedly for failing to write a theoretical conservative treatment that could stand the test of time, and seems to use this to relieve himself of any serious appraisal of the principles at stake in the conservative revolution. While Buckley attempted to do so, writing a few chapters in a book that would have been titled The Revolt Against the Masses, it wasn’t Buckley’s comparative advantage. As most readers know, the conservative movement has never really been at a loss for theorists. Their names and books are well known and remain worthy of study and reflection. If we are in doubt about Buckley’s principles, perhaps this statement from Up from Liberalism (1959) offers guidance: “freedom, individuality, the sense of community, the sanctity of the family, the supremacy of conscience,” and “the spiritual view of life.” These pillars come into full view when “political power is decentralized.”
The liberal mind can easily relativize and dismiss the quote above, but for Buckley, each term is thick with theological, philosophical, anthropological, and constitutional content. In various ways and with different emphases, Buckley would draw on these pillars throughout his career. Conservatism is not an ideology or a rigid interlocking program of action with coin-in-the-slot answers, but is rather the attempt to preserve the Good, that which is bigger than man’s will or the momentary interests of a group or generation. “Each age must find its own language to represent an eternal meaning,” Whittaker Chambers poignantly stated. This definition, offered by one of Buckley’s closest friends and confidantes, one that Buckley admired, represents conservatism at its best. To pretend as Tanenhaus does that “in his time, as in our own, no one really could say what American conservatism was or ought to be. Buckley himself repeatedly tried to and at last gave up” is to avoid the evidence and the seriousness of thought and purpose that a man like Buckley put into a lifetime of forging the American conservative movement. It is both wrong and ungenerous.
The supremacy of conscience and the spiritual view of life were the most important principles of Buckley’s life, emanating as they do from his profound Roman Catholicism. Tanenhaus never really considers Buckley’s faith, a faith that directed his life in full. What kind of biography misses the essence of its subject? Perhaps Buckley’s attempt to fully integrate his life with the teachings of Christianity is a bridge too far for a secular liberal to grasp, much less analyze. Buckley even wrote a book about his Catholic faith, Nearer, My God, the contents of which are barely mentioned, though it traces back to his familial origins. Strange, then, that Tanenhaus wouldn’t evaluate it.
Sharper bones must be picked here at the end. Included in a book meant to be about William Buckley’s conservative revolution, inexplicably, Tanenhaus repeats the rumor that William Rusher, an early publisher of National Review, was gay, and avers that Buckley was considered by peers and enemies to exhibit gay attitudes and tendencies despite his opposition to homosexuality. All without a scintilla of hard evidence produced to support these insinuations. This calumny seems out of place and indicates a lack of sophistication when writing about a man and his family who were equally at ease in New York’s high society or the smoke-filled rooms of political discussion.
This book will come to be seen by many as the final word on the life of William F. Buckley Jr. It should not. In the end, it is dishonest, ungenerous, and unworthy of its subject.
