Did the Buck Stop with Buckley?

William F. Buckley’s patrician trappings didn’t keep him away from the mud, writes Greg Barnhisel in his review of Sam Tanenhaus’s biography of the conservative intellectual.

By Greg BarnhiselOctober 2, 2025

• Politics

• Biography & Autobiography

SAM TANENHAUS worked on his new authorized biography of William F. Buckley Jr. for almost 25 years. The result, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, bears every mark of a book intended to be definitive and enduring, not merely a sidelong commentary on a political issue of the moment.

It covers Buckley’s life from cradle to grave, draws on an enormous body of research from published, unpublished, and interview sources, and remains scrupulously evenhanded about a figure who delighted not just in inserting himself into any controversy he could find, but also in lighting fires and watching things burn. It’s also around 1,000 pages long. The handfeel of the brick brings its own authority.

But it’s just not possible to read Buckley today except through the lens of Donald Trump and MAGA. That’s probably not to the book’s detriment. It will certainly boost sales and help Tanenhaus place op-eds in The New York Times, where he used to work as the Book Review’s editor. While being much more than this, Buckley is a slyly insightful prehistory of Trumpism (which it carefully never mentions), both as an ideology and as a strategy. The experience of reading the book in 2025 oscillates between surprising correspondences and ironic inversions. But everything is colored by that question: Is MAGA his fault?

Like the current occupant of the White House, William F. Buckley Jr. was the favored son of an ambitious empire builder with an autocratic side. But in one of those inversions, Buckley Jr. primarily spoke Spanish for his first six years and maintained a great affection for Mexico and Mexicans (at least the rich ones) his entire life. His father was an oilman based in Mexico City and Veracruz, but by the mid-1920s had made an investment in a Venezuelan oil field that was lucrative enough to allow him to return to the United States, where he set himself up as a “Wall Street speculator” with an apartment in the city and a family home in silk-stocking Sharon, Connecticut. It was here that Bill grew up and, after some European schooling, developed the baroquely patrician accent that would become as much his brand as Trump’s coif and orange complexion are his.

Tanenhaus makes much of the profound stamp that the Buckley family put on young Bill. There were a lot of them: 10 children in total, of which Bill was the sixth. And they were talented, loquacious, and competitive. Their wealth isolated them, but more importantly, they were devout Roman Catholics in an East Coast upper-class environment that mistrusted Catholics. The Buckley children struck back, committing small vandalisms and pranks against the town’s proper Protestant churches and clergy. The household was a “colony all their own,” Tanenhaus notes: “Buckleys against the world.”

Buckley’s warm feelings about authoritarianism, sympathies that would later color his conservative movement, also came from his family. Bill’s grandfather John Buckley had been sheriff of Duval County, Texas, making him the sole arbiter of the law in a vast expanse of South Texas. William Sr. had close ties to Victoriano Huerta, the Mexican military dictator who was ousted in 1914 by Mexico’s first democratic government. And of course, the pre–Vatican II Catholic Church, which was the cornerstone of the Buckley family’s orientation to the world, was autocratic.

Buckley’s inchoate social and religious feelings became politics in 1940 when, as a precocious 14-year-old, Bill joined the America First Committee, the isolationist and antisemitic movement that started at Yale, where Bill’s older brother Jim was studying. Bill’s debut as an eloquent provocateur and nimble debater came in his prep school’s debate club, when he attacked not just the idea of intervention but also Great Britain itself. His instinct was always to escalate, never to find common ground—“he wanted both to fluster his opponent and pique his audience,” Tanenhaus writes in words that sound like coverage of Trump’s appearances in the 2016 Republican primary debates.

From there, Buckley served in the army and then studied at Yale, of course, where he was widely acknowledged to be the most accomplished member of its largest and most memorable class. Even in a group swollen with fellow war veterans, he was “the uncrowned king of the Yale campus,” Tanenhaus claims. As chairman of the Yale Daily News, he reveled in hitting wasps’ nests with baseball bats. Fame came a year after graduation with God and Man at Yale (1951), his attack on his alma mater’s “liberal” faculty and on “the superstitions of ‘academic freedom.’” In 1954, he and his Yale buddy and brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell Jr. produced McCarthy and His Enemies, a case less for Senator Joseph McCarthy than for McCarthyism, which they described as “a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.” (Bozell’s son, fun fact, has been nominated by Trump to be ambassador to South Africa, a nation whose former apartheid system Buckley fiercely defended.) McCarthy himself was uncouth and perhaps not always entirely truthful, but his fierce drive to fight for a sacred cause outweighed any of his personal flaws.

A pattern, even a schtick, was born. A slashing attack on one of the temples of the liberal cultural consensus, and a loud endorsement of a grimy fellow traveler who also wanted to burn it down: These were the two prongs of Buckley’s approach, which for decades he deployed through his magazine National Review, his widely syndicated newspaper column On the Right, and the television debate show Firing Line (1966–99). It was hard work, but it attracted millions of converts. While Buckley is often credited as the father of the modern conservative movement, Tanenhaus makes it clear that this didn’t mean Buckley was much of a thinker or theorist. (James Burnham and Albert Jay Nock, among others, fulfilled those roles.) Instead, he was an irresistible character, conservatism as camp: one read or watched or listened to him just to see what this strange and unique creature would do and say, even if one found everything that came out of his mouth and keyboard repellent. The accent and affect were equally irresistible and icky, a combination of Thurston Howell III and King Edward VIII.

After a stinging defeat in 1964 (Bozell was the ghostwriter of Barry Goldwater’s Buckleyan campaign manifesto, 1960’s The Conscience of a Conservative) and his deep disappointment in the too-liberal Richard Nixon presidency, Buckley’s conservatism fully took over the party, and the nation, with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan—another conservative icon who brilliantly leveraged a media-friendly persona.

Although Buckley was often willing to change his position on minor issues, he stuck to his key stances. These didn’t always age well, and his defense of segregation in the South well into the 1970s led to his most indelible public humiliation, the 1965 Cambridge Union debate against James Baldwin, where Buckley’s haughty ad hominem jabs came across as not just petty but also morally obtuse.

Buckley is a massive book, but it doesn’t read like one; Samuel Johnson’s cutting assessment of Paradise Lost—“none ever wished it longer than it is”—doesn’t apply here. Given just how much there was to Buckley’s life, and how he lived that life almost entirely in public, many readers will find themselves wanting to hear more about this or that dispute, relationship, or theme that they remember. The book is said to have been twice as long originally. While the old publishing practice of splitting big biographies into more than one volume is now anachronistic, this one may have deserved the multivolume honor.

Tanenhaus makes a Homeric catalog of the yachts that were Buckley’s obsession, the seat-of-his-pants hustling (and often unwise investments) that made Buckley’s seemingly effortless aristocratic life possible, and strange incidents such as Buckley falling under the sway of the sociopathic murderer and con man Edgar Smith. The prose in Buckley rarely strays from the workmanlike. But how could anyone compete with Buckley’s arch voice and rococo vocabulary? Better to stand back and let the peacock preen, although I would have liked a few more polysyllabic quotes from the master.

Buckley’s twice-weekly column was an earlier, and more genteel, version of Trump’s constant generation of new material to keep people watching. Buckley used eloquence and charm where Trump relies on blunt-force hamminess, but it’s all about provocations. One subtext of Buckley, perhaps not one Tanenhaus intended, is that the American conservative strain flowing through Buckley to Goldwater to Reagan to Newt Gingrich never was the kind of sober Burkean movement that it often claimed to be; despite the self-presentation of its media leader, it was always more Queens and Selma than New Haven, more Archie Bunker than Whittaker Chambers. The ideas were retrofitted to match the impulses, the instigations, which were themselves expressions of a character (who, yes, did have a core of stable beliefs and ideas). Buckley makes it clear that what has become Trumpism, even its most autocratic manifestations, was always there in Buckleyan conservatism, despite its outward libertarianism.

And so here we are. The conservative insurgency that Buckley inspired and led, and that became the dominant force in the Republican Party by the 1980s, has today become an openly authoritarian, even fascist, force. He always knew there were demagogues on his side who leaned this way; he loathed some (like George Wallace) and aligned himself with others (like McCarthy), and always understood how they could be useful to his movement. But Trumpism has entirely captured the Republican party, with the old Buckleyans and Reaganites self-exiled, silenced, or at least outwardly converted. And with the sole exception of the upward transfer of wealth, its ideas—where they can be distinguished from mere impulses or drives—are entirely opposed to at least the outward trappings of Buckleyan conservatism. Or was the authoritarianism always the real core of his beliefs? Tanenhaus, who clearly admires the man, avoids taking an overt stance on this—as he should, for this biography will certainly outlast the spasms of Trumpism.

The supremely self-possessed Buckley almost never broke character, and one of the only times he lost his cool in public was during a 1968 televised debate, in which the novelist Gore Vidal, a frequent sparring partner and by then true enemy, called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” for cheering on police brutality during the Chicago Democratic National Convention that summer. (Buckley’s response: “Now listen, you queer […] I’ll sock you in the goddamn face!”) What once seemed like vitriolic hyperbole now has a proleptic ring of truth, given that the Republican Party that Buckley did so much to shape today doesn’t just continue to celebrate state violence against dissenters but now also welcomes actual Nazis into its sphere of influencers.

Buckley wasn’t a Nazi—and yes, he ejected the John Birch Society from his movement—but Tanenhaus implies that the ugly sides of what he believed, and suffered to remain in his conservatism, were only kept in check because the characters that Buckley and Reagan played traded on control and self-possession. The Trump “gimmick” (as wrestling personae are called), on the other hand, prizes dominance above anything else, and thus, as president, he has allowed those fringe elements of the Right the power to “go wild” on their pet grievances, so long as they remain submissive to him. Tanenhaus’s magisterial work leaves us genuinely wondering what Bill would think of this. Would he experience it as a nightmarish return of his repressed? Or, Buckley suggests under its breath, might he glory in this unleashing of the Right’s (and his own) darkest id, just as so many of his intellectual inheritors have?