William F. Buckley Jr., who died in 2008, needs no introduction to older readers. He founded the conservative journal National Review in 1955 and hosted the PBS program Firing Line from 1966 to 1999, setting the US television record for the longest-running public affairs show with a single host.
Sam Tanenhaus’s new biography, carrying the one-word title Buckley, checks in at just over 1,000 pages. But Buckley’s eventful life and colorful personality justify the length. Comedians parodied the way he slouched in a chair, rolled his eyes, and hung out his tongue. He also spoke multisyllabically with a distinctive Europeanized drawl reflecting Texas roots and early influence of a nanny and Parisian schools, through which he learned Spanish and French.
Buckley was rich, initially through his father’s entrepreneurship, and loved spending on lavish accommodations, sleek boats, and fine food and drink. Those who remember the movie Chariots of Fire could think him a cousin of Lord Lindsay, who practiced for a track event with glasses of champagne precariously perched on hurdles. Buckley never wanted to show sweat, but he wrote approximately 5,600 newspaper columns, as well as 40 nonfiction books and 10 spy novels.
He was also very smart. When atheist Ayn Rand met him, she said, “You are too intelligent to believe in God.” But Buckley did—and said so. He also believed in marriage, enjoying a good one that lasted 57 years. One of 10 children, he and his wife had just one, author Christopher Buckley. Never holding political office himself, he had independent instincts but also an affection for being close to power.
In 1936, when Buckley was 10, his tutor wrote, “If he can conquer his impatience and hastiness he should go far.” Tanenhaus concludes he “did not conquer either, then or later, but went far anyway.” But in what direction? Tanenhaus describes how, at times, “the worlds Buckley straddled—of journalism and advocacy, of personal friendship and ideological principle, of high motives and low connivances—were tearing him apart.”
Buckley’s early fame came at Yale University from 1946 to 1950. He was a champion debater. Tanenhaus describes him “rising on his toes, his shirttail tugging out over his belt (he favored big silver Texas buckles), as he delivered the cutting phrases.” He excelled on the Yale Daily News, finishing first in a two-month-long “heeling competition” that remained standard on the college newspaper for the next several decades. (Reporters, sometimes treated like dogs, had to go through obedience training.)
Buckley became top dog, handing out reporting assignments just after lunch (bacon-and-peanut-butter sandwiches) and working away until sometimes past midnight: He would “scream and yell at the younger kids,” his managing editor recalled. “He was so superior, so commanding,” one student said.
Soon after graduating, Buckley turned that ferocity against the school’s faculty in his first book, God and Man at Yale. The book, which became a bestseller, took aim at professors “who will tell us that Jesus Christ was the greatest fraud that history has known … who will tell us that morality is an anachronistic conception, rendered obsolete by the advances of human thought.” The resulting fame helped catapult Buckley into the court of Senator Joe McCarthy, who said Communists had captured not only campuses but also the federal government.
McCarthy was a liar who eventually drank a quart of liquor a day. Some reporters were complicit in hiding this fact, fearing that a truthful story would get them fired. As Tanenhaus notes, “A journalist who had knocked on McCarthy’s hotel door for a 7:00 A.M. appointment found ‘Mr. Anti-Communist’ sprawled naked on the bed gulping down a pitcher of martinis. He had not written the incident up.”
But in a book he coauthored, McCarthy and his Enemies, Buckley concluded that McCarthyism was a positive force “around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.” The book minimized the first part of the title to maximize the last: The enemies were so evil that McCarthy was the “virtuous disrupter,” and it didn’t matter that he wasn’t virtuous.
Buckley also found that attacking “American intellectuals and the liberal press” got him mentions in newspapers and helped book sales. He kept saying that those who depicted McCarthy accurately were displaying a “cynical attitude of malice.” As McCarthy imploded in 1954 on that new medium, television, “other supporters fell away, [but] Buckley grew more loyal.”
That was the first time Buckley acted as if character didn’t count, but not the last. He at one point dismissed complaints about U.S.A. Confidential, a publication Tanenhaus describes as “gutter journalism,” because “It’s on our side. … And anyway, you’ve got to write that way to reach a big public.”
As editor and owner of National Review, Buckley had editorial freedom but financial chains. He was rich but not so rich that he could overlook hundreds of thousands of red-ink dollars. National Review itself was intellectually classy but, as Tanenhaus writes, “For every page that sang, two or three were ponderous, pedantic, arid.”
Buckley implored his writers: “We have got to make National Review more readable.” Tanenhaus writes, “You could go through an entire issue and find much analysis but very little open-notebook reporting. … Writers limited themselves to theories, arguments, first principles.” Abstract principles and some racism led National Review to miss “the intricate humanity” of the civil rights movement as it editorialized, “Why the South Must Prevail.”
The magazine also isolated itself from moderate conservative support against the advice of staunch anti-Communist Whittaker Chambers, who saw a need to build coalitions. The Tanenhaus summary of Buckley in 1960 is “He had gone from boy wonder to aging enfant terrible: the author of a book of conservative argument rejected by three publishers … the editor of a little-read ultra-rightist journal drowning in debt.”
In those hard circumstances Buckley at first relished funding from wealthy businessman Robert Welch, one of a Boston group calling itself God’s Angry Men. Buckley responded to thousand-dollar checks with a National Review encomium: “Robert Welch is an amazing man, who runs a business, writes books … and is as conservative as they come.”
Welch, though, founded the John Birch Society, which asserted—among other oddities—that President Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist. Scholar Russell Kirk advised Buckley to speak out against “follies and frauds [and] loonies.” Buckley, showing he had learned from his McCarthy experience that immediate payoffs were not worth long-term infamy, attacked the Birchers’ “paranoid and unpatriotic drivel.”
Many donors and readers protested. Buckley said only two of the 200 letters he read agreed with him. Nevertheless, Buckley persevered. He made staff writers better. Critic and novelist John Leonard, who at age 19 had been Buckley’s assistant, hated “the condescension which people show toward Buckley. … When I was at NR I learned.”
In the 1970s Buckley had disappointments. He supported Maryland governor Spiro Agnew’s rise to become Richard Nixon’s vice president. Agnew resigned in 1974 after pleading guilty to tax evasion to avoid prosecution for bribery, conspiracy, and extortion. Buckley saw how sin had consequences more than personal: “It is a terrible irony that at the moment in history when liberalism is sputtering in confusion, empty of resources, we should be plagued as we are by weak and devious men.”
Buckley was godfather to the first three children of Watergate felon Howard Hunt, a friend during Buckley’s brief time in the CIA after college. Hunt told him what had happened, but Buckley “disclosed nothing, save in elliptical allusions in his column—quasi-confessions offered to the God he knew was watching.”
Tanenhaus writes that Buckley “drew a sharp line between his ideological commitments and his social life. He could afford to do this, afford to float above what to others seemed mortal dangers. … When the new drug was LSD, Buckley and Jim Burnham each took a tab and went off to see the sex film I Am Curious Yellow. (On that occasion they both had martinis beforehand and fell asleep.)”
He kept running into financial problems. Buckley lived in 10 elegant rooms at mega-expensive 778 Park Avenue in Manhattan. He bought a 60-foot schooner even though “the price was more than he could afford.” A standard lunch was pâté de foie gras, stuffed roast pheasant, and Château Margaux wine. Buckley may have cut corners to buy bottles: He had to pay more than $1 million after the Securities and Exchange Commission ruled that he had violated antifraud law.
Buckley always had rejoinders to criticism. When writer Kevin Phillips in 1975 “mocked Bill for the vintage wines he took on his boats, Bill pointed out the clumsy social error. Every experienced sailor knew better than to take ‘vintage wines on a small sailboat’; they wouldn’t stand up to the pitching and tossing.” Tanenhaus doesn’t specify the size of the boat Buckley was then sailing.
One rejoinder expanded his audience beyond readers and PBS viewers. When ABC paired Buckley in 1968 convention commentary with Gore Vidal, the gay writer called him a “pro or crypto Nazi.” Buckley responded, “Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your g— face and you’ll stay plastered.” Vidal, his baiting successful, responded, “Oh, Bill.”
Tanenhaus exhibits mixed sentiments about his subject. He ties his big package with a bow at the end, describing “the imagination and generosity, the kindness and warmth, that Bill Buckley demonstrated,” and that praise rings true. But Tanenhaus takes seriously the criticism of Gary Wills, who worked for NR in its early days but in 1979 complained that Buckley had become too much of a showman: “Intending to strike blows, he is applauded for striking poses.”
One of Buckley’s 50 books has the title Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith (1997), but those who look within it for deep discussion will be disappointed. He was a cradle Catholic who relished being cradled, with theological questions reserved for priests. He got right what’s basic: “The best way to put it is that God would give His life for us and, in Christ, did.”
Buckley became estranged from his brother-in-law and early coauthor, Brent Bozell, when Bozell became a pro-life crusader who attacked Geoge Washington University’s student clinic, swinging like a club a five-foot-high wooden cross. Bozell was convicted, and Buckley agreed he had taken his convictions too far. Buckley’s writing about abortion was safe, legal, and rare.
Bozell, writes Tanenhaus, “spent long hours at hospitals, prisons, and shelters and volunteered at Mother Teresa’s AIDS hospice—washing, dressing, and helping to feed the dying patients.” Later he was dying with a heart condition, severe back pain, and early-onset dementia. Buckley threw a banquet for him and at one point rose to speak “with the text he had prepared; but partway through, the avalanche of history crowded in on him, and he burst into tears. Unable to go on, he returned, still sobbing, to his seat.”
In 2007 Buckley had trouble walking but kept writing. He died in his office in 2008, a serious man who took joy in intellectual combat.
Marvin Olasky is executive editor of news and global at Christianity Today.
