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.
The journal’s early years reveal Buckley’s genius for synthesis and his understanding that successful political movements require both intellectual foundations and popular appeal. Under his editorship, National Review assembled a remarkable constellation of thinkers who would define postwar conservatism. The “new conservatism” that emerged in the 1950s differed fundamentally from its predecessor in several crucial respects. First, it was genuinely intellectual, grounded in serious engagement with philosophical questions rather than mere defence of economic interests. Second, it has a populist viewpoint that appeals to the common sense of ordinary Americans rather than elite opinion. Finally, it offered a positive vision of limited government and traditional values instead of opposing liberal ideas and innovations. The new conservatism was represented by the political theorist and historian Russell Kirk and his cultural traditionalism, Friedrich Hayek’s free-market economics, and James Burnham’s anti-Communist realism. This synthesis, which Frank Meyer would later codify as “fusionism,” created a conservative coalition broad enough to challenge liberal hegemony while maintaining sufficient intellectual coherence to govern effectively. More importantly, this new conservative movement wisely discarded the conspiracy ravings of the John Birch Society and isolationist instincts of Charles Lindbergh, once greatly admired by Buckley. What united these diverse voices was not partisan loyalty but a shared conviction that conservative politics required serious intellectual foundations. Buckley understood that conservatism could not survive as mere opposition to liberal policies; it needed a coherent worldview capable of explaining both human nature and political arrangements. Buckley held that a conservative mind included trust in free markets, a deep spiritual and moral conviction in a Christian God, while accepting the imperfection of human nature, opposing the liberal idea that good policies lead to good people. If conservatism were to win the battle of ideas, it must out-write, out-think, and out-argue liberal intellectuals. National Review wasn’t only a magazine, as Tanenhous writes, “It was the point of the spear.” Despite his conservative principles, Buckley had a remarkable trait for making and keeping friends, even those on the political Left. His love of ideas kept him in close touch with writers and thinkers. He was equally at ease with Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy, while maintaining friendships with John Kenneth Galbraith, liberal historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Noam Chomsky, and Norman Mailer. He also greatly admired John F. Kennedy. Of course, there were exceptions: he detested Gore Vidal. National Review’s influence extended far beyond its circulation numbers. Tanenhaus demonstrates how the magazine provided an intellectual framework for the Barry Goldwater campaign, the Reagan revolution, and the broader conservative movement’s eventual capture of the Republican Party. More importantly, it established the template for how conservative ideas would be developed, disseminated, and implemented for generations. He even pioneered the idea of political debate as entertainment, hosting over 1500 episodes of Firing Line on, ironically, public television. But one of his greatest passions was taking the message of conservative ideas to students, doing over 70 lectures a year. He knew the culture wars of politics were won or lost on college campuses. There was hope that Buckley would write the definitive conservative manifesto. He never got around to it. Bill wasn’t cut out for a life of hard thinking or scholarship. He was too busy living his life, skiing and writing in Switzerland, sailing around the world, and running off to some lecture or other. Christopher Hitchens complained that Buckley never found time to socialize even over a drink after one of his interviews on Firing Line. When he and his wife Pat were invited to the White House for a dinner with the Bushes, Buckley looked at his watch and said, “Mr. President, it’s been very pleasant. I’ll say goodbye now. Thank you very much.” He was also a man of great confidence and ego. In one incident, while vacationing in Europe, his friend, the actor David Niven, introduced Buckley to the great painter Marc Chagall. Niven was appalled when Buckley insisted on showing Chagall his own paintings. Chagall glanced at his work and said, “The poor paint.” Tanenhaus’s book, which runs almost a thousand pages, and written over the span of nearly 30 years, can be read not only from the perspective of Buckley’s upbringing in a wealthy Catholic Irish family of 10 children whose father made a fortune in the oil business in Mexico and Venezuela, but also as a political history in post-Second World War America. Tanenhaus is a master writer and brilliantly weaves Buckley’s personal history and the history of America’s political times over half a century. Buckley never experienced a political transformation. He was a stalwart conservative as a youth. He never much wavered in his politics (though while he stood against aspects of the Civil Rights movement for much of his life, he did change his views on the issue later on) or his Catholicism, opposing Pope John XXIII’s Vatican II doctrine of liberal reforms and Pope Francis’s declaration that the death penalty is forbidden in all circumstances. In the one case where he opposed the death penalty, it ended in tragedy. For bizarre reasons, Buckley took up the cause of Edgar Smith, a death-row inmate and convicted killer of a 15-year-old girl. Buckley secured his release, along with financial support, believing Smith was reformed and flattered that he was a reader of National Review and a follower of conservative ideas. With no surprise to anyone, Smith was back in jail after attacking another girl. The story was long and sordid, but Buckley never took responsibility for his poor judgment, believing to the end that Smith was an innocent man. The enduring question Would Buckley have voted for Trump? I venture to say he would have approved of Trump’s immigration policy and even his tough stand against elite universities. And I’ve no doubt would have delighted in the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that ran wild through academia, government and the corporate world. The traits Buckley hated in a politician were vulgarity, narcissism and demagoguery. It wasn’t that a president should be well-read or even educated, two virtues lacking in Trump, but his personal corruption and an ego that craves constant adoration. He said of Trump, “When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection.” Had Buckley lived to see Trump elected, I expect he would have levelled his greatest disdain for the American voter who cast a vote for such a candidate.
