God and Man at Sea

In 1949, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote a book defending liberal democracy. It was called The Vital Center. In it, he asked, “Why has American conservatism been so rarely marked by stability or political responsibility?”

Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus Random House, 1,040 pp.

Two years later, Regnery Publishing released a slender book by a self-proclaimed “radical conservative” that almost seemed designed to confirm Schlesinger’s misgivings. It was called God and Man at Yale. The book appeared as Yale celebrated its 250th anniversary, and its depiction of the campus as a hotbed of “atheism” and “collectivism” created a furor. Writing in The Atlantic Monthly, for example, the Yale alumnus and Harvard professor McGeorge Bundy dismissed its author as a “twisted and ignorant young man.” 

The young man was delighted. In New Haven, William F. Buckley Jr.’s rhetorical prowess had made him what his classmate Gaddis Smith, later a Yale historian, deemed “almost a God-like figure.” Now his best-selling book not only catapulted him to national fame—Time called him a “rebel in reverse”—but also spawned a new and lucrative anti–Ivy League genre, from Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals (1990), and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education (1991), all the way up to Christopher Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution (2023). Buckley’s influence on generations of conservatives can hardly be overstated. He was the St. Paul of the movement, a tireless proselytizer for the true faith. His activities—he wrote thousands of newspaper columns, published dozens of books and novels, worked as a CIA agent, founded the National Review, debated James Baldwin and Gore Vidal, championed the political fortunes of Joseph McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan, befriended leading liberals such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Murray Kempton, and presided genially, if often lethally, over the popular television show Firing Line—were legion. What to make of it all?

Enter Sam Tanenhaus. In a grand biography, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, Tanenhaus closely traces Buckley’s remarkable odyssey from a cossetted Catholic childhood to titular leader of the conservative movement. Tanenhaus is a former editor of The New York Times Book Review and the author of a widely hailed biography of Whittaker Chambers that appeared in 1997. Tanenhaus explains that even before completing his study of Chambers, a former Soviet agent turned anti-communist who testified against the State Department official Alger Hiss in a famous spy case in 1948, it occurred to him that the obvious bookend to his life was a work about Buckley’s. Though this is not an authorized biography, Tanenhaus, who spent several decades researching Buckley’s life, received his full cooperation, conducting numerous interviews with him and his associates as well as performing prodigies of research in Buckley’s private papers. 

Like not a few conservatives, Buckley idolized Chambers. But Buckley never heeded Chambers’s warning that his hero Senator Joseph McCarthy—“a raven of disaster”—would bring discredit on the fledgling conservative movement. Tanenhaus skillfully excavates much revealing material about Buckley’s political stances—toward McCarthy, the civil rights movement, gay rights, and South Africa—to highlight that he often spectacularly misfired in his judgments. Above all, he shows that Buckley, who repeatedly attempted to make a coherent intellectual case for conservatism, could never articulate what it was supposed to consist of apart from owning the libs. Though Tanenhaus does not himself explicitly seek to draw a line from the conservative past to the present, his chronicle suggests that radicalism has been the political right’s natural habitat.

Buckley, who was born in 1925, inherited much of his buccaneering temperament from his father, William F. Buckley Sr. A larger-than-life figure—a staunch Catholic, lawyer, real estate investor, and Wall Street speculator—W.F. was expelled from Mexico in 1921 for his support for counterrevolutionaries. He experienced bankruptcy at age forty and recouped his fortunes with an oil concession in Venezuela. In 1924, he purchased an estate in Sharon, Connecticut, that he renamed Great Elm. An anti-Semite and a foe of the New Deal (which he saw as tantamount to Bolshevism), W.F.’s reactionary beliefs were echoed by his third son, Billy, who strove to show that he was loyal “to any of Father’s opinions.” 

Chief among them was the conviction that aiding Great Britain in its battle against Nazi Germany would be a colossal mistake. The household hero was, of course, Charles Lindbergh, the famed aviator and head of the America First movement (which was founded in 1940). Lindbergh had accepted the Service Cross of the German Eagle from Hermann Goering in 1938. Three years later, in a notorious speech in Des Moines called “Who Are the War Agitators?,” Lindbergh blamed Jewish influence for trying to push America into World War II. He and his followers asserted that a Fortress America was the way to go. According to Tanenhaus, “W.F. Buckley’s view, and thus his children’s, was that America’s business with foreign nations should be restricted to business in the most literal sense: trade and investment of the kind Buckley Sr. himself had pursued throughout his career.” At Millbrook, a prep school in New York, a 15-year-old Buckley delivered his first public speech, “In Defense of Charles Lindbergh,” a denunciation of the critics of the Lone Eagle for blackening the name of a true patriot whose final mission—warning Americans that a Nazi triumph in Europe was inevitable—should be heeded rather than scorned.

Buckley not only absorbed isolationist thinking but also imbibed Social Darwinist precepts. He was thus spellbound by Albert Jay Nock, a close friend of Buckley Sr.’s and frequent visitor to Great Elm who wore a cape, carried a walking stick, and wrote an influential book in 1935 whose lapidary title said it all—Our Enemy, the State. In Nock’s view, only something he called “the Remnant”—a conservative aristocracy—could safely steward America’s future fortunes. In 1943, Buckley Jr. wrote an essay that was very much in the Nockian spirit at Millbrook, lamenting that the “great defect in our democracy” was the “ultra-democratic” system of suffrage that allowed all citizens to vote. It was a conviction that he never entirely shed.

At Yale, which he entered in 1946 after serving in the U.S. Army, Buckley discovered a new mentor, Willmoore Kendall. Kendall was a riveting figure on campus, at least for a select few—a brilliantly talented professor of political theory with a choleric temperament, he relished debating (and molding) his young charges. In his short story “Mosby’s Memoirs,” Saul Bellow observed that Willis Mosby, who is based on Kendall, had “made some of the most interesting mistakes a man could make in the Twentieth Century.” A former Trotskyist turned anti-communist, Kendall—“an out-and-out conservative,” as Bellow put it—saw liberals as an internal enemy that needed to be suppressed.

Buckley, too, was an out-and-out conservative. Like Kendall, he admired McCarthy as someone who could administer vigilante justice and, incidentally, bring the nascent conservative movement to power. Once upon a time, Buckley had defended the free speech rights of Lindbergh and pooh-poohed the Nazi threat. Now that communism menaced America, the rules of the game had changed. The moment had arrived to exile the infidels who had effectively revoked their right to American citizenship. “The true American tradition,” Kendall wrote, “is less that of Fourth of July orations and our constitutional law textbooks, with their cluck-clucking over the so-called preferred freedoms, than, quite simply, that of riding somebody out of town on a rail.” Buckley and L. Brent Bozell Jr.—his closest friend at Yale and future brother-in-law—would eagerly spread that message for years to come. 

Tanenhaus puts his finger on the Buckley phenomenon: He “might or might not be the best new conservative writer and talker, but he was fast becoming its most entertaining—and possibly represented a new kind of public figure: not precisely a journalist or commentator or analyst but a performing ideologue.” Buckley, you could even say, pioneered a kind of shock therapy against liberals. After God and Man At Yale, his next great opportunity to needle them arrived with a book co-
written with Bozell. It was conceived under the direction of Kendall, whom Tanenhaus vividly describes as “pacing the living room with a tumbler of whiskey and dropping cigarette ashes onto the carpet” as he “expounded on the ‘theoretic aspects of McCarthyism.’ ” When it appeared in 1954, the best-selling McCarthy and His Enemies insisted that McCarthyism formed “a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.” 

McCarthy was baffled. He said that the book was “too intellectual” for him to comprehend. But its thrust was clear enough. While Buckley and Bozell were careful to play up the domestic communist peril, they noted that another group of Americans would eventually come into their gun sights—“Some day the patience of America may at last be exhausted, and we will strike out against Liberals.” Such were the “theoretic aspects of McCarthyism” as defined by its youthful adepts.

Buckley was a key part of McCarthy’s circle, as was Bozell, who worked as a speechwriter for him. In 1954, at a banquet at the Waldorf Astoria, Buckley praised McCarthy’s former aide Roy Cohn (a future mentor to Donald Trump) as someone who “chose not to observe the Racquet and Lawn Club rules for dealing with the Communists in our midst.” 

During Watergate. George F. Will, who had become the National Review’s Washington correspondent and a fierce critic of Richard Nixon, mordantly observed that Buckley and his colleagues “didn’t really like Nixon until it became clear he was a criminal.”

All along Buckley had recognized that McCarthy offered an essential glue for the fledgling conservative movement. Buckley never deviated from his fealty to McCarthy, writing a novel, The Redhunter, in 1999 that lauded his unstinting efforts to expose communist subversives working in the highest levels of government. According to Tanenhaus, “The carnal hunt for enemies within, the unmasking of their apologists and allies, real and more often fanciful, brought together diverse factions of a weak and fragmented movement in the growing war against the New Deal and its aftermath.” Bashing Ivy League professors was one thing. But targeting the larger universe of functionaries in the State Department, the CIA, and even the U.S. Army was another. If executed with sufficient rigor, it offered the chance to carry out a cultural and political revolution to subvert the subversives—what the right now refers to as the “deep state.” 

In 1955, Buckley, together with a crew of ex-communists that included Willi Schlamm and James Burnham, founded the National Review. It was an exercise in right-wing revanchism, flaying the Eisenhower administration for appeasing the Soviet Union, decrying liberal journalists and academics and complaining about an unelected ruling class that controlled government, schools, and entertainment. One contributor, Karl Hess, recalled, “At the time, I’m not too sure that any of us thought there was a lunatic fringe.” The essayist Dwight Macdonald astutely noted that the magazine was “not a conservative magazine precisely because it doesn’t stick to tradition, to conservative principles, but simply expresses the viewpoint of the Buckley type of anti-liberals, which are much too close to McCarthy for my taste.”

There was another issue on which Buckley and his chums separated themselves from the Eisenhower administration. That issue was race. In one of his most absorbing chapters, Tanenhaus scrutinizes Buckley’s experiences in Camden, South Carolina, where his family owned an estate called Kamschatka that had been the residence of the famous Civil War diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut. Tanenhaus reveals that in October 1949, Buckley’s father attended a secret meeting at the New York University Club that had been convened by the reactionary businessman Merwin Hart, an admirer of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and a virulent anti-Semite. The men Hart had assembled, Tanenhaus writes, “were looking ahead to a new domestic insurgency built on the campaign to preserve legal segregation in the South.” After the 1955 Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision, the Buckley family singlehandedly financed a weekly called the Camden News that opposed the desegregation of the South, disseminating the same themes as a local “Citizens’ Council” that was opposed to “race mixing.” Tanenhaus devotes much attention to the slippery arguments that the National Review engaged in to justify southern recalcitrance. It went from embracing majority rule to expel communists from America to endorsing John C. Calhoun’s abstruse constitutional defenses of the rights of the minority, which were centered on his nullification, or states’ rights, doctrine. Buckley viewed the issue of states’ rights as providing an “immensely rejuvenating theoretic substance” for the conservative movement. In 1957, he wrote an editorial headlined “Why the South Must Prevail.” In 1960, Kendall argued that Black Americans were actually a privileged class because they lived better than “most of the population of the world,” while Buckley argued that giving African Americans the right to vote would in essence disenfranchise whites. “In 1959,” Tanenhaus writes, “Buckley’s solution was the same one he had made as a teenager writing about the great ‘defect’ in democracy.” 

In his later years, Buckley remained capable of stirring up indignation, writing an op-ed in 1986 in The New York Times that anyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm to “prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.”

Buckley’s cavalier approach to democracy manifested itself once more during Watergate. George F. Will, who had become the National Review’s Washington correspondent and a fierce critic of Richard Nixon, mordantly observed that his colleagues “didn’t really like Nixon until it became clear he was a criminal.” Buckley, who was a close friend of the CIA operative Howard Hunt, knew more about Watergate than almost anyone outside the White House. He knew that the crimes had started with Attorney General John Mitchell. He knew that they reached the White House. Like a loyal clubman, Tanenhaus writes, Buckley adhered to a code of silence, disclosing nothing to Congress or the Justice Department.

With the rise of Ronald Reagan, Buckley’s movement conservatism was at its zenith. But Buckley himself had long since peaked. He never received a cabinet position, and Reagan dissed him by failing to show up for the National Review’s annual dinner at the Plaza Hotel in 1980. “He had become the Upper East Side poster version of Reagan’s America,” Tanenhaus notes, “and seemed to be living not so much in a bubble as in a luxuriously appointed helium balloon.” His former protégé Garry Wills concluded that Buckley had become “unwillingly a dandy, a Nock, after all.” 

He remained capable of stirring up indignation, writing an op-ed in 1986 in The New York Times that anyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm to “prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.” Buckley also supported Patrick J. Buchanan’s call for a culture war at the 1992 Republican convention in Houston. When it came to the National Review itself, Buckley blundered in 1997, appointing Rich Lowry (rather than David Brooks or David Frum) as editor solely because he “thought it would be wrong for the next editor to be other than a believing Christian.” 

Tanenhaus does not speculate on what Buckley would have made of Donald Trump, who has revivified many of the populist themes that Buckley and his pals had enunciated during the 1950s, when McCarthy served as their battering ram against the deep state. Instead, he concludes on an elegiac note. “Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, a writer he admired and identified with,” he writes, “Buckley was loath to give up his unwariness—an aspect of faith and also, as he found repeatedly, of faith’s dark twin, delusion. He was not always able to distinguish one from the other, but in that he was far from alone.” In so gracefully charting Buckley’s career and foibles, Tanenhaus’s magnificent work about Buckley goes a long way toward answering the query that Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. originally posed in 1949. Anyone searching for a stable or politically responsible American conservatism should look elsewhere.

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