"'Buckley' is very clearly the result of slow thinking and methodical research, which makes it precisely the sort of work that its subject could never produce." defector.com/william-f-bu…
— Defector (@defector.com) July 18, 2025 at 3:59 PM
Even if (like me!) you’re not a sports fan, Defector is absolutely worth price of a subscription. Political fads tend to age like a dead fish in the summer sun, and the National Review is a publication whose inception was as ludicrous as its current much-mocked state. Here’s Brandy Jensen with a book review:
Perhaps the highest praise I can offer a book that took 27 years to complete and runs over 1,000 pages is that I can see why, and that it doesn’t feel like it. Sam Tanenhaus’s extremely long and anxiously awaited biography of the man who founded National Review, and is often regarded as the architect of modern American conservatism, arrived with a resounding thud on my doorstep. There is no way that a book the size of Buckley: The Life and The Revolution that Changed America could arrive quietly. It is, in many ways, a remarkable accomplishment: exhaustive but not tiring, serious yet lively, both affectionate and suspicious. It is almost dizzyingly populated with recognizable characters—the result of Buckley’s famed and enormous social influence—which offers regular satisfaction both to readers who like knowing what Sylvia Plath thought of the Buckley family home, and ones who yearn to learn more about cranky Viennese ex-Leninists. Most of all, Buckley is very clearly the result of slow thinking and methodical research, which makes it precisely the sort of work that its subject could never produce.
William F. Buckley Jr. went for quantity instead. He wrote dozens of books, including non-fiction and a bestselling series of spy novels, both of which were mainly dashed off while on skiing vacations in Gstaad. He also produced three columns a week for decades, generated prodigious written correspondence, and appeared in 1,504 episodes of Firing Line, all while editing the magazine and accepting regular speaking gigs. For years, Buckley promised to write a serious work of political theory—he managed to produce thousands of words railing against his liberal enemies, but was ultimately thwarted by his inability to offer a coherent elaboration of what conservatives were really about…
For that deep thinking, Buckley relied on his frequent collaborator and brother-in-law, Brent Bozell, along with mentors like Whittaker Chambers (the subject of Tanenhaus’s previous, much-lauded work of biography) and protégés-turned-apostates like Garry Wills. These were the men with the ideas; Buckley provided the packaging, and a singular talent for holding together groups with potential disparate motivations under the banner of a revived conservative movement. Or, anyway, this is the received wisdom: Buckley the gatekeeper, yoking these headstrong types together in common cause while expelling more distasteful elements like the Birchers, in service to lacquering the American right-wing with a sheen of respectability. It is a strong brand, but it has some visible wear and age on it by now.
Buckley’s legacy has been somewhat troubled since Tanenhaus first began work on this book, years before the first episode of The Apprentice would air; reading it today, it’s tough to avoid the sense that Tanenhaus was caught in a bit of a bind. The man who gave us Reagan, as Buckley is often known, is a thorny enough historical consequence; Tanenhaus largely leaves alone the question of whether he paved the way for something worse. Reagan is elected president on page 824, and the remainder of Buckley’s life and legacy gets fewer than 50 pages. For all the minute attention paid to how Buckley did it, we are still left wondering what exactly he did.
To consider effects is also to search for causes, so we begin with the family. The father, William F. Buckley Sr., looms large, an almost physical presence in the pages of this book, while mother Aloise remains (pointedly, evocatively) distant. The fourth of ten Buckley children, Bill is raised devoutly Catholic; his early life is spent mainly in the family’s Sharon, Conn. compound, “Great Elm,” with brief international sojourns. William Sr. was a Texas oil prospector who was expelled from Mexico after engaging in counterrevolutionary activity, Aloise a debutante from New Orleans. While brother Jim is the second-most famous Buckley today, having served in the Senate, it is Bill’s sisters who come alive most compellingly in Tanenhaus’s hands. They are rendered bright, energetic, and beloved. All of the Buckley children yearn for the approval of their father, whose weakness for risky financial schemes is rivaled only by his strength of convictions: He is rabidly isolationist, anticommunist, and antisemitic. One evening, the four eldest children drove to a neighboring Jewish resort and left a burning cross on the lawn. Years later, Bill would recall “weeping tears of frustration” at missing out on this “great lark.” Recalling it again in 1992, he maintained this was “the kind of thing we didn’t distinguish from a Halloween prank.” The incident occurred in 1937, at which point Hitler had been in power for four years…
Again and again, while reading Buckley, one is struck by this sense of queasy recognition. After leveraging his elite credentials to launch an attack on the Ivy League, Buckley proceeds (along with Bozell) to craft a forceful defense of a brutish, slovenly, vengeful Republican leader on the grounds that, whatever his sins, his attackers are worse. That’s Joseph McCarthy in this case, but this Buckley-penned tune would inspire many, many cover versions. Buckley spends much of his public life riding into battle on behalf of a League of Extraordinary Assholes: Roy Cohn, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Strom Thurmond, Howard Hunt, and, in a frankly bizarre turn, Edgar Smith, the convicted murderer of a teenage girl with whom Buckley has become pen pals and for whom he launches a media crusade. Buckley’s loyalty was ferocious, and while Tanenhaus highlights its tender aspects when given to the lonely and abandoned (like Chambers), it is just as often a destructive force that relies on astonishing dishonesty.
This is among the great revelations of Buckley: its subject’s endless willingness to lie. Over and over we watch Buckley slander, deceive, withhold information, and defend the falsity of others. He lies with glee and without compunction; he lies willfully and by omission. He stands athwart history, yelling the wildest possible bullshit.
Another of the book’s revelations has to do with dishonesty as well, namely the extent to which the Buckley family was engaged in the segregationist cause. While regarded as a scion of the Northeast, Bill spent much of his time in the family’s second home in Camden, S.C., at a restored plantation manor called “Kamschatka.” While the Buckleys were segregationists of the genteel variety—Tanenhaus notes how well the family’s black servants were treated—the book reveals that Buckley money funded a paper, The Camden News, which espoused the views of the local White Citizen’s Council. National Review’s editorial from 1957, written by Buckley and titled “Why the South Must Prevail,” is notorious and well-known. In it, Buckley wrote that the question:
is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.
This family connection sheds new light on the depths of Buckley’s commitment, and further explains why he would dismiss the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution as “inorganic accretions to the original document,” or compare the federalized National Guardsmen deployed to desegregate Little Rock’s schools to the Soviet tank commanders in Hungary and Poland. Tanenhaus reports that William Buckley Sr. assured his friend Strom Thurmond that Bill “is for segregation and backs it in every issue.” …
Saturday Late Morning Open Thread
trollhattan
He seems nice.
A living pest much of my lifetime Buckley did seem omnipresent on the teevee machine. As to handling the guy, I lend my proxy to Gore Vidal.
Lapassionara
@trollhattan: that was compelling television. Still one of my most vivid memories.
Harrison Wesley
Quelle surprise! I’m an Old of the Buckley era and was taught how to address people:
– you stand tall before a man,look him in the eye and call him “Mister.”
– you look slightly down when talking to a lady and call her “Ma’am.”
– you shake your head when talking to Jonah Goldberg and call him “Doughy Pantload.”
p.a.
Talk about a punchable face…
Bill
Interesting recent article by the same author (Tanenhaus)
Another Scott
[ clap, clap, clap ]
Well done.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Martin
@trollhattan: Buckley was ahead of his time in the sense that he figured out the attention economy long before social media. The more places he showed up the more money he made – he only need to make as much sense as was necessary to get the booking.
azlib
Yep, Buckley was a racist and an anti-semite.
Harrison Wesley
Anybody else see the National Theatre production of Best of Enemies? I thought it was terrific.
Matt
That’s a revelation, that a right-wing loon was also up to his eyeballs in racism? And that he lied about it when it was convenient to do so?
Perhaps to folks who’ve spent the last 50 years pretending that the Republican Party wasn’t _actually_ the party of white supremacy and should be negotiated with, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone whose head isn’t buried in the sand.
Another Scott
I wish someday to be half as happy as this turtle on a skateboard, chasing a cat …
+1
Best wishes,
Scott.
Ohio Mom
My memory of Buckley is that the dad of my childhood BFF would watch Firing Line and laugh — Mr. Slater thought him an empty suit and silly.
Which was true on one level but missed how dangerous that empty suit was. I’m reminded of when I laughed when Trump stalked Hillary on the debate stage. It was so ludicrous, how could anyone take this man seriously? I rue my naivety.
peter
@trollhattan: Or James Baldwin, whose evisceration of the oh-so-smug Buckley is a thing to behold.
Cathie from Canada
On a side note, Defector had a subscription sale recently and maybe it is still on, if anyone is interested. Also you can sign up for a weekly newsletter without subscribing which has links to some of their stories.
trollhattan
@Another Scott:
Needs to be seen to be believed. Turtle even mastered brake technology. Whee!
TBF the cat knows what it did.
zhena gogolia
@Lapassionara: Me too! I saw it live!
JCJ
@Another Scott: That was excellent! Thank you!
piratedan
I think the most appropriate way to discuss WF Buckley begins with the phrase… “fuck that guy”.
Cathie from Canada
@Ohio Mom: Trump is The Golden Calf – he has no principles or philosophy, he just reflects people’s worst selves, and in worshipping him they are really just worshipping their own prejudices. The only time he gets into trouble is when his own weaknesses betray him by becoming visible.
HinTN
@Another Scott: That is truly silly (and adorable).
satby
@Another Scott: That’s awesome, thanks!
billcoop4
WFB? The one who made a pass at an old Professor friend of mine back in the late 50s, if Dave can be believed?
BC
Craig
Christ, what an asshole!
WTFGhost
Man. I guess it’s good to know that I can still feel the urge to punch someone in the face, and successfully tamp it down because I’m a truly civilized man.
“When Buckley says, white’s the advanced race, we say HEIL(raz)HEIL(raz) right in der Fuhrer’s face!”
Lapassionara
@zhena gogolia: Jaw-dropping TV.
Pete Downunder
My mother, something of a linguist, called Buckley’s peculiar accent Connecticut La de da. A footnote. I went to High School not far his home in Sharon, CT and one of my classmates was an absolute fan. Every bit as racist. Never met Buckley, fortunately
WTFGhost
@Cathie from Canada: Whoo – perfect description.
@Ohio Mom: We all have to face loss of innocence; and it’s never comfortable.
@Matt: I don’t want to falsely accuse a man of something this horrible, but I *think* Buckley’s the turd who said “if South Africa becomes democratic, they can’t do one man, one vote,” because, you know, one race is “advanced”.
Baud
Trumpism sure put an end to that dilemma.
cmorenc
I recall Buckley’s tv show “Firing Line” used as its intro and outro for each episode a movement from Brandenburg Concerto #2, in order to dress up his program in a high-brow, sophisticated cultural wrapper, to put a sophisticated intellectual patina to his racist, regressively elitist political arguments. I will give the late Jesse Helms perverse credit for putting his pre-Senate daily 10- minute editorial program (frequently containing unvarnished racist arguments) on a Raleigh TV station whose daily station sign-on and sign-off theme in the 1960s was “Dixie” rather than the “Star Spangled Banner.” Helms was at least honest about who he and his ideas really were rather than disguising them under superficially high-intellectual sounding words and music.
Baud
@Cathie from Canada: agree with @WTFGhost. Nicely put.
MattF
Via jwz, news from Dubai.
zhena gogolia
@Lapassionara: That could never happen now.
The Pale Scot
Murc could have saved him a lot of time
prostratedragon
@Cathie from Canada:
GMTA. Oval Office then and now.
Elizabelle
@Pete Downunder: Locust Valley Lockjaw?
kindness
Buckley was a white supremist. He didn’t shout the n word but he might as well have. He clearly disdained & thought ‘his kind’ were better than all minorities. He also blamed the poor for their lot. Such a renaissance enlightened guy.
prostratedragon
@Pete Downunder: Growing up in Chicago I would hear WFB on tv (couldn’t take more than a few minutes) and wonder if anyone really talked like that, you know, everyday. Then I went out East and learned:
Nobody talks like that.
hueyplong
I’m confused. Was there a time when people suspected Buckley might not be a racist?
Jeffg166
I remember Buckley had Allen Ginsberg on his show and Allen being Allen looked like he was giving Buckley a stroke.
RevRick
@Pete Downunder: Buckley had a place in my hometown of Stamford along Long Island Sound, and your mom’s description is spot on. His whole affect was snob. I watched Firing Line with my mom and I have vivid memories of him rolling out the pretentious word, rhodomontade, and thinking what a sneering jerk.
Eolirin
@hueyplong: I think a distinction is being drawn between racist and segregationist
There are many ways to be racist, but segregation, like slavery, is a specific policy. One can be opposed to them and still be racist as fuck.
different-church-lady
“An erudite man who arrived at all the wrong conclusions.” There, I just saved you hours of reading.
Jay
bsky.app/profile/jasondogwood.bsky.social/post/3ludjfm4nck2x
hueyplong
@Eolirin: In my (just one person, small sample size) experience, effort is required to find someone who was one and not the other.
Eolirin
@hueyplong: Many northerners, especially in north east were not segregationists, and the much of the North did not have segregation by force of law, but there were still tons of intensely racist whites in those areas. Their racism just took a different look
Just like many abolitionist whites were also intensely racist despite being against slavery as an institution.
Jay
@Eolirin:
Redlining, Sundown Towns and White Flight just to name a few.
Elizabelle
The bill never came due for William F Buckley. As it never came due for John C Calhoun, firebrand of South Carolina, either. He died in 1850.
Destruction and ignominy follows them.
Steve LaBonne
Chrst, what an asshole. If you have never seen the video of James Baldwin grinding him into a fine powder in their infamous Oxford Union debate, do so at your earliest opportunity. Should be easy to find on YouTube.
hueyplong
@Eolirin: I grew up in a former confederate state that shut down its schools for a year rather than consider an end to segregation. So to me the venn diagram of the two was a circle.
Mai Naem mobile
I did not know Buckley was Bozell’s BIL. What I remember most about Buckley was the Oxbridge affectation.
Omnes Omnibus
@Eolirin: Yes, I suspect that I would not care to hear the views on racial equality of my two great great grandfathers who fought for the Union. Luckily, I have never heard them and just know that they risked their lives for the Union cause (however they defined it).
Eolirin
@Jay: And yet many of the people who supported things like redlining and white flight or were at least happy to benefit from them without having to really pay attention to the fact they they were happening were horrified by and opposed segregation by law the way it existed in the south.
This is not to excuse northern racism as somehow lesser, but to point out that the book and it’s revelations about segregationist support are more specific claims that are more than just the obvious white supremacist leanings of Buckley.
Elizabelle
It’s a very good article from Defector. And thank you for highlighting this part:
WFB was the sixth of the ten children, all of whom grew to adulthood. WFB would have been about 12 at the time of the cross burning. His mother’s maiden name was Steiner.
Wiki informs his first languages were Spanish and then French, due to where his family lived during his early childhood. That would be useful.
Jackie
@Jay:
GOOD. He’s dead. May he B.I.H.
hueyplong
@Jackie: Not a moment too soon and possibly a bit late.
bbleh
@The Pale Scot: or Lionel Trilling
I remember seeing Buckley on TV when I was, I dunno, 10 or so, and thinking even then “omg what a pompous fake.”
John Revolta
-The Crazy Mashed-up Adventures of Buckley and Benchley, Revolta Press
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Or some shit talker with a big vocabulary who knew trolling was a way to gain media time.
lowtechcyclist
@hueyplong:
Which state was that, and when? It wasn’t Virginia at any point during the 1960s: I and/or people I knew attended Virginia public schools continuously from September 1960 to June 1972.
IIRC, at least one Virginia county did that. But not Virginia as a whole.
Dan B
@hueyplong: I have my mother’s Daughters of the Confederacy certificate signed by the President of the Arkansas Chapter, her mother. I have mixed feelings, amusement and sickening.
Martin
I would posit that most of the people who benefitted from redlining weren’t even aware it was a policy. They were in no position to support or oppose it. A great deal of discrimination works this way – by design. You don’t need to or even want to recruit the masses into the campaign, you just need them to unknowingly benefit from it at which point any effort the balance the playing field will be met with resistance because now you’re taking something away from them, without them knowing they were gifted it in the first place.
danielx
Backpfeifengesicht.
Freely translated: a face that cries out for a fist.
WaterGirl
PSA: Last call on raffle tickets – purchasing closes at 7 pm tonight.
NotMax
The other contemporaneous Buckley.
;)
hueyplong
@lowtechcyclist: I thought VA shut down in ’59 or so. Wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they talked big and then a single county actually did it.
My first year of (token) desegregation in VA was 1970-71, which was a moment or two after Brown v Board.
scav
@RevRick: & @bbleh: & no doubt others. Early exposure in my family lead us all to adopt the Buh-buh-buh-Buckley nose-in-the-air erudite stammer as a short-hand way to communicate the phrase spoken was errant RW nonsense and not to be taken seriously.
(Oddly enough, later to be automatically appended to any mention of the various Buh-buh-buh-Barr-ringtons around Chicago.)
Steve LaBonne
@scav: Thisis… William F. BUCKLEY, Juniah.
hueyplong
@lowtechcyclist: A 5 minute “doing my own research” effort on google doesn’t turn up any actual year-long, statewide closing at any time in Virginia. Looks like the closedown talk was in the “we’re not gonna take it” initial reactions, while litigation continued. VA settled for foot-dragging obstruction and not for a shutdown.
Westyny
@peter: I watched the debate at the time. It was indeed a smack down,
Ohio Mom
@RevRick: Mr. Slater found the ten dollar words particularly hilarious. He’d repeat them in Buckley’s accent and crack himself up.
Another Scott
Speaking of language, NREL’s Solar Calculator Page has a choice of 3 languages.
English
Spanish
Ukrainian
Best wishes,
Scott.
Just Some Flyover
@Jeffg166: Given some of the rumors I’ve read about Buckley he probably wouldn’t have minded Allen Ginsberg giving him….a stroke.
ColoradoGuy
I grew up in Japan and Hong Kong, and didn’t come Stateside until my senior year of high school. I was stunned to see this pompous fraud on Public TV. Over and over again.
In Hong Kong or the UK, he would have been laughed off the stage for pushing Nazi talk thinly disguised with 19th-Century verbosity. I couldn’t believe this faker had such a prominent position as an “intellectual” in the USA, while in reality he was an Ivy League Klansman with a posh (and obviously fake) accent and an archaic vocabulary.
In college, I discovered Ayn Rand was considered a “philosopher” in some circles … another fraud pushing crackpot theories, but backed by the billionaire class, so it kept getting pushed forward. I slowly realized the billionaire class in this country are quite poorly educated, and would fall for any pseudo-intellectual con that made them feel good about themselves.
Jay
bsky.app/profile/gottalaff.bsky.social/post/3lue2rpz4jc2i
Steve in the ATL
Buckley and my stepfather were classmates at Yale. Stepfather reported that Buckley was widely despised by both students and faculty. Not surprising!
Kayla Rudbek
@ColoradoGuy: I was always annoyed by the people offering college scholarships for reading/reviewing Ayn Rand, particularly when they were marketing these to Catholic high school and college students. I suppose that a proper theology/religion teacher would provide guidance on how to shred Rand’s position based on Catholic teachings. And yes, the granny-starver from Wisconsin and all his ilk should be excommunicated by Pope Leo.
anotherlurker
@Elizabelle: LOL! I’m from O.B and know exactly what you mean!
u
William F Buckley. Whenever the name of that asshole is mentioned, it should be pointed out that, in 1957, when black people were struggling for their rights in the South, Buckley wrote a column for his shitty “National Review” magazine praising the racial apartheid system in the southern states. It was his fucking magazine. Nobody forced him to do that. He was much worse than worthless as a human being.
Albatrossity
Although it was not penned by a jackal, I nevertheless nominate “a League of Extraordinary Assholes” for a rotating tag. That is perfection…
EthylEster
I was hoping to find out if Buckley did not choose David Brooks to succeed him at the National Review because Brooks was/is Jewish. Maybe somebody who reads the book will enlighten me.
TXSwede
My dad attended Yale on the GI Bill after serving in the Navy in WW2. A family fable is that Buckley gave a speech the day before graduation in 1950, trying out some of the themes of “God and Man at Yale” which he would publish the following year. My father, future union and civil rights activist, stood up in the middle of that speech, shouted “Fuck you, Buckley!”, and stormed out. Or so the story goes.
We take a lot of pride in the family fables.
The Audacity of Krope
@Pete Downunder: So I wondered “where can you hide a town full of robots? Connecticut!” /GlennClose
Cheryl from Maryland
@hueyplong: You are looking for Prince Edward County, VA, which shut down its public schools in 1959 – 1964. During that time, tax payer money was used to maintain Prince Edward Academy, a “private” school for white children. Some of my mothers’ family sent their children there.
Public schools were reopened in 1964, but the Academy lived on, only loosing its non-profit status in 1978. When the headmaster was interviewed in the early 80s, he admitted it had never had a black student, and how could it as blacks were less intelligent as whites.
It lives on as the Fuqua private school, somewhat integrated as many former segregation academies with blacks making up the majority of athletes.
I also know, based on my cousins, that it provided a misogynist in addition to a racist education, and that the its students were close to illiterate.