BUCKLEY

Comprehensive biography of the conservative stalwart who held great sway over Republican presidents.

William F. Buckley, whom former New York Times books editor Tanenhaus met in 1990 while working on a biography of Whittaker Chambers, was a man of ironclad conservative principles—up to a point. As a teenager, precocious and brilliant, he was a champion among the prep-school set of the isolationist America First movement. He opposed civil rights, championed white supremacy, and advocated a poll tax and intelligence testing. At Yale, infamously, Buckley badgered faculty members who were insufficiently religious—and even sicced the FBI on one—while decrying “the tendency by some teachers to utilize the classroom as a soapbox from which to impose upon their students not the great ideas of great scholars, but their own.” He was a committed McCarthyite (“McCarthy’s egghead,” one newspaper called him), a supporter of the John Birch Society until he wasn’t, and an engineer of much of the anti-federal sentiment that now courses through American politics. In short, although he styled himself a Yankee patrician, he was a neo-Confederate at heart. Yet, with the magazine he founded, National Review, Buckley could also change his mind; as Tanenhaus notes, whereas Buckley had once criticized Israel for “dredging up Holocaust ‘luridities’ such as ‘the counting of corpses and gas ovens,’” he became sympathetic to Israel, even suggesting that it be made an American state. On a timely matter, Tanenhaus observes that Buckley supported the Panama Canal Treaty, believing that “Panama had become a distraction from the true test of American power and resolve…to continue the struggle against global Communism.” Given the present Trump administration’s apparent resolve to retake the canal, it’s illustrative of how far Buckley’s conservatism lies from today’s Republican Party.

Monumental and instructive, albeit likely to find its chief readership among the last of the conservative old guard.