On April 25, 1969, William F. Buckley Jr. strode into an auditorium at Brandeis University. The 43-year-old conservative writer, National Review editor and popular television commentator was facing an anti-Vietnam War audience opposed to virtually all of his views.
That didn’t stop Buckley from arguing, in his inimitable drawl, that protesters weren’t being sufficiently punished for civil disobedience.
The confidante of President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger told the Brandeis students that breaking the law had become a “lifestyle,” that the Great Society’s social goals were “unrealizable,” that sending police to enforce the law on campus was fine because “force can be liberating in certain circumstances” and that one lesson of Vietnam was that “the United States is inexperienced at losing and should probably devote more attention to winning.”
But it was a question from the audience that got to the heart of Buckley’s appeal as a speaker.
The master of arcane vocabulary had used the word “nugatory,” prompting a student to ask him what that meant.
“Exiguous,” Buckley fired back.
His verbal sleight of hand dazzled, even though it crumbled under scrutiny: nugatory (useless) isn’t a synonym for exiguous (scanty).
Liberal students didn’t applaud any of Buckley’s politics, but they also couldn’t help being wowed by his quick mind. He gave the appearance of an intellectual who brought originality to the rigors of contemporary debate.
When Buckley ran for New York City mayor in 1965, author Norman Mailer had a similar question for him. Mailer wrote to Buckley, “what the hell does emunctory mean?” (An organ that removes waste.)
Sam Tanenhaus cites Mailer’s letter in his absorbing new biography, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America. He makes no reference to the Brandeis event, which I covered as a reporter for the student newspaper The Justice. But that’s not surprising since Buckley made hundreds of such appearances at college campuses.
To anyone interested in the politics of mid-20th century America, the 868 pages (not including notes) of Tanenhaus’ book fly by. While appreciating Buckley’s gifts as a writer, activist and bon vivant, he isn’t afraid to call out his blindspots, particularly on issues of race, and his enthusiasm for noxious characters like Sen. Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and convicted murderer Edgar Smith.
From Buckley to Bannon
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the book is that it explodes any pretension that Buckley was a thinker with a coherent worldview.
Instead he emerges as a provocateur, a mischievous architect of the decades-long effort by far-right conservatives to reclaim the cultural sway they lost when President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal revolutionized the size, scope and rationale government played in the lives of every American.
It is not a huge leap from Buckley to Patrick Buchanan to Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and J.D. Vance. Liberals and liberalism were Buckley’s main targets. Fighting the liberals (in later years, conservatives would focus on “owning the libs”) was a far more important goal than staying true to the facts or formulating a real philosophy of conservative rule.
In a review of Buckley’s book Up From Liberalism in February, 1960, Murray Kempton pointed to the problem: “I am afraid that there has never been a serious body of conservative thought in America.” Buckley’s objective was to evict the prevailing liberal ideology from the throne of culture without thinking through what should replace it. And the weapons employed in this revolution were all about entertainment, not enlightenment.
Some right-wing conspiracy theories went too far for Buckley (especially those of John Birch society founder Robert Welch). But a conspiracist mindset got Buckley’s support at crucial moments.
Buckley might well have been a sharp critic of Donald Trump’s two presidencies — he had criticized Trump several years before his death in 2008 — but for decades, he nurtured and even led the radical conservative movement that eventually gave birth to MAGA.
Here was the germ of the populist takeover of the Republican Party that we’ve seen in the past 10 years. Its features included: the appeal to the “forgotten men” of America, the willingness to spread lies, the conspiracy theories about liberal “elites” and the name-calling. (Buckley calling Gore Vidal a “queer” after Vidal called him a “crypto-Nazi” on national TV during the 1968 Democratic convention was one of the lowest moments of Buckley’s career.)
In a recent appearance on Firing Line, hosted by Margaret Hoover, Tanenhaus said Buckley “certainly cleared the space for the attack on elites” but can’t be held responsible for Trump.
Sailor, skier, risk-taker
As he presided over conservative politics, Buckley indulged his passions for sailing, skiing, music, wine and writing, living large on a Stamford estate overlooking Long Island sound, a ten-room duplex apartment at 778 Park Avenue, a rented chateau in the Swiss Alps, the yacht Cyrano and the baronial family manse, “Great Elm,” in Sharon, Connecticut.
Risk didn’t deter him. (“Buckley’s only fear in life is the fear of being bored,” one associate noted.)
He was naive about finance. Buckley invested unwisely and only narrowly avoided bankruptcy.
He insisted on docking his boats dangerously:
“Instead of gently guiding the boat in, Buckley kept his sails full as he charged ahead, sometimes standing on the helmsman's seat and steering the wheel with his foot, the ruddy prow of his spray- and wind- roughened face creased in a delighted, almost lascivious grin, as the boat banged home with a jarring thud and sent dockside bystanders scrambling,” wrote Tanenhaus.
His son, the brilliant writer Christopher Buckley, recalled, “what vivid memories I have of people scattering like sheep at our approach. One time, someone actually leapt off the dock into the water….over the years my father took out sections of docks up and down the Eastern seaboard. His crew bestowed on him the nickname Captain Crunch.”
Buckley would steal lobsters from traps set out by lobstermen in Maine, leaving behind two bottles of Johnnie Walker Black in the traps to assuage the anger of their owners.
In seeking out risky ventures, Buckley was following in the footsteps of his father, William F. Buckley, an entrepreneur who made an unstable fortune drilling for oil and selling stock on Wall Street.
Buckley was the sixth child among the 10 his parents raised at their estates in Sharon, Ct. and Camden, South Carolina. “With servants added, as well as tutors, workmen, groomsmen for the horses, and later a riding instructor and his family, the household numbered more than twenty and was alive with pranks, schemes, hilarity, and strife,” wrote Tanenhaus.
Buckley had “the middle child’s fear of being overlooked, lost in the crowd” and with “the icy fire of his blue eyes, and his excessive energy” he engaged in a “struggle to keep up with his older siblings and win their approval.”
One of the family’s pastimes was to commit what they viewed as “pranks” but which included setting a cross on fire in a nearby town and desecrating an Episcopal church. Bill Buckley wasn’t present for either of those two shameful episodes, which were staged by his siblings. But in later life, he wasn’t above orchestrating pranks, some with damaging consequences.
The grandeur of Great Elm made it an unforgettable place. When the future poet Sylvia Plath attended the coming-out party for Bill’s sister Maureen, she wrote to her mother, "How can I ever, ever tell you what a unique, dreamlike and astounding weekend I had! Never in my life, and perhaps never again, will I live through such a fantastic twenty-four hours."
Bill Buckley was the “quickest and the cleverest” among his siblings, but “also the least diligent.” He excelled at riding horses, winning a trophy that got him admitted to the national equestrian show at Madison Square Garden, where Edward Albee and Jacqueline Bouvier also competed.
Young Bill Buckley was “fiercely loyal” to his father’s views, Tanenhaus wrote. W.F. Buckley was an arch foe of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, and later in the 1930s, an isolationist, opposing involvement in a new European war.
The elder Buckley “despised Jews with an intensity he made no effort to conceal.” In this, he was at one with the views of Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch of the family that would produce a president and two United States senators.
“Kennedy's views were reflective of the sentiment of many Irish Catholics of his generation,” Thomas Maier wrote in his book The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings. “For decades, Irish immigrants found themselves competing for jobs and social opportunities with Jews, whose assimilation into American society was often faster and more successful. Unlike the Irish, who created their own cultural isolation, Jews generally embraced America's public school system and were more willing to adapt to their new environment. Feeling left behind, the Irish sometimes lashed out.”
W.F. Buckley’s antisemitism had practical consequences. He instructed his son Bill to end a romance between his sister Jane and Bill’s Yale classmate Thomas Guinzburg, who was Jewish. “We don’t want a Jew in the family,” the father told his son. Guinzburg would go on to become a major publishing executive.
As an adult, Buckley largely overcame antisemitism, but it was telling that when he decided to step down from the editorship of the National Review, he pointedly rejected two likely Jewish successors, David Brooks and David Frum, in favor of a Christian, Rich Lowry. "I thought it would be wrong for the next editor to be other than a believing Christian," Buckley told the magazine’s board.
‘Subtle music’
Buckley spent part of his childhood living with his family in Paris and London. Later he would briefly enroll in a school in England, a stint that came to an end with the start of World War II.
Buckley learned his first language, Spanish, from his Mexican nursemaid. He would attribute his distinctive manner of speech to this polyglot background. “What to some seemed an affected British accent,” Tanenhaus noted, “was actually a subtle music of influences—a languorous hesitating drawl combined with the shapely vowels of a childhood speaker of Continental tongues.”
At 14, Bill Buckley joined the “America First Committee,” an isolationist group supported by his father. He eagerly attended the October 30, 1941 rally at Madison Square Garden at which aviator Charles Lindbergh urged a cheering crowd to oppose U.S. entry into what he forecast would be a “devastating conflict” with Nazi Germany.
At Millbrook, a boarding school in New York’s Dutchess County, headmaster Edward Pulling endorsed Buckley’s college applications, writing that he was “an extremely interesting boy with great potentialities. At the moment I should say his mind is almost too sharp for his own good. He tends to be egotistical and intolerant.”
As Tanenhaus observed, “When facts he wanted were within easy reach, Bill Buckley happily used them to support his case. When they proved stubborn, he made up others more to his liking or repeated what his father told him.”
Drafted into the army near the end of World War II, Buckley earned a commission as a second lieutenant but didn’t have to serve overseas. His next stop was Yale. Buckley excelled at debate and at student journalism. He was elected chairman of the Yale Daily News.
But as a Catholic, from a “new money” family and a graduate of a less prestigious prep school, he fell outside the “closed circle of upper-class Protestant privilege,” Tanenhaus wrote. Buckley would later learn that Yale had an admissions quota for Catholics as well as for Jews: They were each limited to no more than 13 percent of the entering class.
Friend with a message
At Yale, Buckley’s gift for friendship emerged: he was “kind, funny, spontaneous, quick to laugh, slow to judge, less guarded and stingy with affection than many other men,” wrote Tanenhaus. But he was fierce in debate and in print.
“Once he wheeled a clean sheet into the carriage of his desk-model Royal, he seemed to know exactly what he meant to say.”
“His colleagues soon grew used to the sound of the keys clacking furiously as Buckley sent yet another poison-tipped shaft into Yale's complacent liberal heart.” As the newspaper’s chairman, he was responsible for the editorials.
One of Buckley’s pieces enraged many. It was an attack on a popular sociology professor who rejected Christianity. Raymond Kennedy had told his class of a debate he once had with Jesuits in the Philippines about the Eucharist.
“I’ll tell you how you can convert me and the rest of the world overnight,” the professor said he told the missionaries. “Submit the wine to a chemical analysis after consecration and then see if you’ve got hemoglobin out of the grape juice.”
Buckley, a devout Catholic, said the remark was funny but “blatantly unintellectual” and “biased.” It was inappropriate for a professor to teach his students in that way, he argued. The editorial provoked widespread protests, and the newspaper’s board distanced itself from it.
But that episode was the germ of Buckley’s immensely influential first book, published when he was 25: God and Man at Yale.
Buckley declared:
I propose, simply, to expose what I regard as an extraordinarily irresponsible educational attitude that, under the protective label ‘academic freedom,’ has produced one of the most extraordinary incongruities of our time: the institution that derives its moral and financial support from Christian individualists and then addresses itself to the task of persuading the sons of these supporters to be atheistic socialists.
Professor by professor, course by course, Buckley vilified the Yale faculty for discarding absolutes, making “impossible any intelligible conception of an omnipotent, purposeful, and benign Supreme Being who has laid down immutable laws, endowed his creatures with inalienable rights, and posited unchangeable rules of human conduct.”
God and Man at Yale had an unusual publishing history. Henry Regency said his firm Regnery Publishing was running out of money, and he proposed a kind of negative advance — rather than pay Buckley money in advance for the right to publish the book, he asked Buckley for a $3,000 loan to keep his company afloat. Buckley’s father came through with the funds.
National Review
It was also family largesse that was to float Bill Buckley’s big project through its challenging early years. Buckley had decided he didn’t want to work for a magazine edited by someone else, nor did he relish the idea of toiling at a place like TIME where he would have to subordinate his opinions to a collective voice.
So he started his own magazine National Review, and the Buckleys subsidized the publication through its first 25 years to the tune of six million dollars.
In editorial terms, Buckley made the most of that investment. The magazine became a must-read for conservatives and helped launch the careers of Garry Wills, Joan Didion, John Leonard, George Will and Arlene Croce.
Its first issue declared that the magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one else is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.... Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by the Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those on the well-fed Right.”
Buckley helped fund his lifestyle through paid public speaking. Among conservatives, he was “a new kind of public figure: not precisely a journalist or commentator or analyst but a performing ideologue,” Tanenhaus wrote. “Buckley sensed, ahead of just about everyone else, that politics was becoming a large public spectacle.”
McCarthy
Buckley never gave up his support for the red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy, despite ample evidence of McCarthy’s deceit and the alcoholism that soon led to his downfall. “Bill did not merely defend McCarthy,” Tanenhaus wrote. “He extolled him. He was the heir to the ‘abolitionists of a hundred years ago,’ a courageous voice of freedom in an age of encroaching Communist enslavement.”
What explains Buckley’s backing of McCarthy? Tanenhaus wrote:
George Will, who worked for a time under Bill Buckley in the 1970s, later said the danger of McCarthy, ‘casualness about truth,’ was obvious from the beginning, as the possible costs should also have been. ‘When he stood up there in West Virginia,’ said Will, ‘he did not really have a list of however many Communists he said were in the State Department. And that was the anticipation of something we live with daily now.’ Why did the falsehoods not trouble … Bill Buckley, then or later? ‘I don't know the answer,’ Will said in 2019. ‘I think it's grounded in the oppositional mentality. The feeling that we are a church militant in an unconverted world and we have to watch our back.’
Buckley “knew exactly who McCarthy was and what his uses were,” Tanenhaus observed. “The carnal hunt for enemies within, the unmasking of their apologists and allies, real and more often fanciful, brought together diverse factions of a weak and fragmented movement in the growing war against the New Deal and its aftermath.” The right would be animated by its opponents — not only the people who ran the State Department, Army and intelligence agencies, but also the liberal media.
The “selling memo” written by Buckley and Schlamm at the National Review’s birth said America’s ruling class wasn’t business, but “opinion makers” — the media, professors, preachers and others in the professional class.
It’s precisely that hunt for “enemies” among the “opinion makers” that has animated MAGA as it strives to villainize liberals.
The Buckley family worked quietly but actively to undermine Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court ruling banning segregated schools. The Buckleys funded an anti-integration publication, the Camden News for four years.
National Review asked “whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race....”
Power broker
Through his control of National Review, his television interview program “Firing Line,” his controversial appearances on major networks and his spy thrillers, Buckley kept his profile front and center in the public mind. But behind the scenes, he was also a power broker, providing support and advice for Republican politicians Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
And once, he even ran for office in his own right — for mayor of New York City, losing to John V. Lindsay. Buckley knew he would lose. “When asked at his second news conference what he would do if elected,” Tanenhaus wrote, “a stricken-looking Buckley said, ‘Demand a recount.’”
In one area, he was ahead of his time, by suggesting the creation of bicycle lanes on major roads.
Candidate Buckley seduced the media. New York Times city editor “Abe Rosenthal had to keep putting new reporters on the Buckley beat as he charmed them all in turn, and their copy got softer.”
Buckley’s politics began to mellow in the 1970s. “Bill Buckley, who in 1959 deemed it just that the entire Black population in the South should be kept from voting,” wrote Tannehaus, “now said in print and in interviews, ‘We need a black President’ and that electing one was something ‘worth working for.’”
His personal geniality persisted. “Essential in the pages of his magazine as well as in the office—and on his boat—were forbearance and genial spirits,” wrote Tanenhaus. “His own instinct was to find compromise and lighten the mood.”
Murray Kempton, an astute critic of Buckley, also became one of his best friends. “They loved a worthy opponent,” said Steven L. Isenberg in Another Sage of Baltimore: An Appreciation of Murray Kempton. “They weren’t looking in their friendship to find something of themselves; they wanted a true other.”
Buckley “had the virtue, rare among American intellectuals, of never talking down to his listeners, no matter who they were,” Tanenhaus noted. “He confidently assumed — knew from experience — that audiences were alive to his particular music: the arcane vocabulary and ornate syntax, the fanciful imagery, the irony, the weave of logic and sophistry.”
The “weave” is something President Donald Trump also employs, though in a much coarser way. “You make a speech, and my speeches last a long time because of the weave, you know, I mean, I weave stories into it,” Trump told podcaster Joe Rogan last year. “If you don’t — if you just read a teleprompter, nobody’s going to be very excited. You’ve got to weave it out.”
Tanenhaus concluded his book by writing that Buckley left a void, the role of the country’s greatest conservative, and the author wished that we can find in ourselves “imagination and generosity, the kindness and warmth” that Buckley demonstrated.
In his personal life, Buckley manifested those qualities.
The problem is that in his political persona, he largely did not — and those prominent conservatives who have followed in Buckley’s wake have cast off almost all inhibitions.
