Review of Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America (Random House, 2025), by Sam Tanenhaus.
The irony would not have been lost on William F. Buckley Jr. Seven decades after his 1951 God and Man at Yale—that brash manifesto against academic orthodoxy—elite American universities find themselves under assault once again, this time from a Republican administration wielding federal funding as a cudgel. This contrasts with the sharp arguments and irresistible charm of a young, bold, handsome Yale graduate with a talent for debate, wit, and exotic vocabulary. As one critic noted, “young men didn’t want to follow him, as to be him.”
Bill Buckley, who died in 2008, didn’t live to see Donald Trump elected president, leaving many to wonder whether he would have approved. But there’s little question that the conservative movement he articulated changed the landscape of American politics and, in some ways, prepared it for a Trump victory. Yet, his persona has slowly disappeared. Ask almost anyone born after 1980, and you’ll get a blank stare if you mention his name. At best, they might recall the late Joe Flaherty’s hilarious impression of Buckley on Second City TV. Today, young conservatives tend to prefer the low-brow provocations of a Charlie Kirk or podcaster Joe Rogan, where you might be entertained but rarely enlightened and hardly educated.
President Donald Trump is joined on stage with Turning Point USA Founder Charlie Kirk as he finishes speaking at Turning Point USA Teen Student Action Summit at the Marriott Marquis in Washington, Tuesday, July 23, 2019. Andrew Harnik/AP Photo.
After Yale, a traditional life in the law or academia wasn’t in the cards for Buckley. He needed a wider life of the mind that led him to start a conservative journal in 1955, with the proud, if not audacious, mission statement that National Review “…stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” The magazine became far more than a political publication; it was an intellectual laboratory where serious conservative thought could develop and mature.
Sam Tanenhaus, former editor of The New York Times Book Review, whose previous biography of Whittaker Chambers established him as conservatism’s most perceptive chronicler, has now produced what may be the definitive portrait of the movement’s most influential architect. Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America arrives at a moment when the conservative coalition Buckley assembled appears to be fracturing, raising fundamental questions about whether his intellectual project can survive in Trump’s populist America.
