Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America

by Sam Tanenhaus Narrated by Malcolm Hillgartner

Overview

“A magnificent achievement-a long, gripping, and enthralling account of the life of America's premier conservative polemicist of the twentieth century.”-Max Boot, author of Reagan: His Life and Legend

“A rich, immersive biography exposes the roots of the modern conservative movement through the life of the firebrand writer and commentator who shaped it.”-The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (SO FAR)

In 1951, with the publication of God and Man at Yale, a scathing attack on his alma mater, twenty-five-year-old William F. Buckley, Jr., seized the public stage-and commanded it for the next half century as he led a new generation of conservative activists and ideologues to the peak of political power and cultural influence.

Ten years before his death in 2008, Buckley chose prize-winning biographer Sam Tanenhaus to tell the full, uncensored story of his life and times, granting him extensive interviews and exclusive access to his most private papers. Thus began a deep investigation into the vast and often hidden universe of Bill Buckley and the modern conservative revolution.

Buckley vividly captures its subject in all his facets and phases: founding editor of National Review, the twentieth century's most influential political journal; syndicated columnist, Emmy-winning TV debater, and bestselling spy novelist; ally of Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater; mentor to Ronald Reagan; game-changing candidate for mayor of New York.

Tanenhaus also has uncovered the darker trail of Bill Buckley's secret exploits, including CIA missions in Latin America, dark collusions with Watergate felon Howard Hunt, and Buckley's struggle in his last years to hold together a movement coming apart over the AIDS epidemic, culture wars, and the invasion of Iraq-even as his own media empire was unraveling.

At a crucial moment in American history, Buckley offers a gripping and powerfully relevant story about the birth of modern politics and those who shaped it.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Buckley is a magnificent work of history as well as of biography, and is as relevant to these parlous times as it is revelatory of Buckley and his times. Beautifully written.”—John Banville, The Times

“A smart, stylish, and clear-eyed portrait of a complicated man—and of the rise of American conservatism, with Buckley in a starring role.”—The New Yorker

“Painstakingly researched and beautifully crafted, Buckley is a capacious and incisive history of the modern conservative movement’s formative years, seen through the eyes of its intellectual leader—a man who, in Tanenhaus’s hands, is enthralling and infuriating by turns, but never boring.”—The Washington Post

“[A] well-written, and intelligent take, both critical and admiring, on a complicated man.”—The New Yorker

“A biography not just of a prominent influencer but also of a potent movement . . . a milestone contribution to our understanding of the American Century.”—The Boston Globe

“Not so much a stranger to our times as a precursor to them . . . a rich chronicle.”—New York Times Book Review

“Marvelous, decades-in-the-making . . . offers a deeply affectionate portrait of Buckley’s personal life . . . [and] also methodically surfaces the darker strains of the movement.”—The New Republic

“Fascinating, with new and startling revelations . . . about American conservatism as a whole.”—The Weekly Dish

“An enjoyable and fascinating romp through American political and cultural life in much of the 20th century.”—The Telegraph

“A magnificent, absorbing work about a man known as the father of postwar American conservatism.”—Chronicles Magazine

“Shows a rare familiarity with its subject and his times. . . . Tanenhaus is to be congratulated for his achievement.”—The Spectator World

“A lively, balanced and deeply researched book . . . engrossing.”—The Guardian

“A chronicle of the life of a man but also a history of the era he helped to shape . . . worth the wait.”—The Washington Free Beacon

“Buckley moves fast, propelled by Tanenhaus’ prose, his jeweler’s eye for fine detail, and the frankly incredible episodes he includes.”—Unpopulist

“A grand biography . . . magnificent.”—The Washington Monthly

“Meticulous . . . unlikely to be bettered anytime soon.”—The Financial Times

“Superb . . . Tanenhaus discovered some parts of the story that were largely unknown . . . fair and balanced story of a life of purpose, one that was actively lived and whose echoes are still felt today.”—The Christian Science Monitor

“Runs to more than 1,000 pages—yet is not a word too long.”—The Economist

“Monumental, honest, fair-minded, and spectacularly enlightening.”—Foreign Affairs

“Stunning [A] stunning new biography . . . [Over] pages that fly by thanks to his lively writing, Tanenhaus chronicles Buckley’s . . . sprawling career as a right-wing revolutionary.”—Nicole Hemmer, Democracy Journal

“Unfurls a remarkable canvas . . . a vivid portrait of a singular man.”—Law and Liberty

“William F. Buckley forever changed America, and Tanenhaus’s Buckley will forever change how we understand America.”—John Ganz, author of When the Clock Broke

“A superb biography. Writing a life is harder than it looks. Sam Tanenhaus’ contribution is up there with Robert Blake’s classic Disraeli.”—Niall Ferguson, author of Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist and The House of Rothschild

“Sam Tanenhaus . . . has illuminated the often ugly ideological origins of our present predicament.”—Jonathan Alter, author of His Very Best

“A stone-cold masterpiece . . . Buckley is a brilliant portrait of man, movement, and age.”—Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of Rule and Ruin

“Buckley is all that a biography could and should be: penetrating, deeply researched, respectful but critical.”—Beverly Gage, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of G-Man

“Writing with superb insight into celebrity culture, Tanenhaus nails Buckley for many lapses of judgment, while also revealing his countless acts of unpublicized generosity.”—Richard Wightman Fox, author of Lincoln’s Body

“Tanenhaus is clear-eyed about Buckley’s many failures but also does justice to his eccentric charisma, humanity, and wit.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Kirkus Reviews

2025-02-01
Comprehensive biography of the conservative stalwart who held great sway over Republican presidents.

William F. Buckley, whom formerNew 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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940194726868
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	06/03/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

Connecticut Yanquis

William F. Buckley, Jr., the intellectual leader of the modern conservative movement, rightly saw himself less as founder than heir. Everything he learned, and all he became, began at home.

It started with his father, William F. Buckley, Sr., a lawyer, real estate investor, and oil speculator who grew up in the brush country, the scrubland frontier, of Duval County in South Texas. He was thirty-five and had made his first fortune when, on a visit to New Orleans, he met twenty-two-year-old Aloise Steiner, the eldest of three sisters of Swiss and German background—“the very essence of old New Orleans charm,” said one of the many men smitten by her. She had a year or two of college, played Mozart on the piano, and told captivating if not always quite credible stories—for instance, of the fourteen marriage proposals she claimed to have turned down before W. F. Buckley began courting her in the spring of 1917.

The physical attraction was immediate, almost electric. Many years later the couple’s children remembered the “frisson” that connected their parents. The couple also shared a deep and abiding Catholic faith. After the wedding ceremony at the Steiner family’s parish church, Mater Dolorosa on South Carrollton Avenue, on December 29, 1917, the Buckleys began their married life in Mexico. W. F. Buckley had been living there since 1908. He had apartments and law offices in Mexico City as well as in Tampico—the oil boomtown on the Gulf where, after building a prosperous law practice writing oil leases, he had gone into real estate and then into oil, borrowing substantial sums to sink five wells on the banks of the Panuco River.

Oil speculation was always a high-risk venture, but especially in Mexico. It was in the throes of the twentieth century’s first great revolution, its ten-year-long “bloody fiesta,”  which ended in 1920 with the rout of the right-wing faction Buckley had supported and the election of a new president he despised. It was a stinging defeat, and he would never get over it. Yet he also could say, and often did—to his children most emphatically—that although he had lost, he had done so on his terms, without giving an inch to the opposition. Other oilmen, including some far wealthier and more powerful than he, had submitted to the new order and made lucrative deals with each fresh regime. W. F. Buckley refused to do it. He left Mexico—in fact was expelled by order of its government—with debts totaling one million dollars. In later years he showed his children a treasured souvenir from those times, an architect’s sketch of the grand palacio, with private chapel, which W. F. Buckley had planned to build on substantial property he had purchased in Coyoacan.

Bankrupt at age forty, Buckley would have to start all over. He had a family to support, his wife and three small children, now living with his mother and two sisters in Austin, Texas. But there was a new opportunity. In fact, having to put Mexico behind him might be for the best. The oil fields in its Golden Lane were nearly tapped out. The great new oil patch was in Venezuela. Once again there were large profits to be made but also many hazards—in this case “hostile Indian tribes,” as well as malaria and fatal “liver and intestinal disorders.” Visitors were advised to stay no longer than a few weeks.

For W. F. Buckley admonitions were a goad. He went to Venezuela, stayed a full six months, and came back in 1924 with leasing rights to three million acres surrounding Lake Maracaibo, spreading east and west, a complexly organized checker-board whose squares “in practically every instance adjoin properties that are being actively developed by major American oil companies,” it was reported at the time. The concession was “rated among the most valuable in Venezuela.”

Buckley, now based in New York, formed a new company, Pantepec (named for a river in Mexico), and with the sponsorship of the Wall Street broker Edward A. Pierce floated stock shares and secured investments from two California majors: Union Oil and California Petroleum. Matching wits against some of the finest legal minds in the United States, W. F. Buckley worked out the terms for an innovative “farm-out.” In return for gaining temporary control of a third of the holdings, the two behemoths would cover the costs of exploration and drilling and reap most of the profits once oil was struck. W. F. Buckley would be allotted a tiny fraction of those profits, and he now had funds to send teams of engineers and geologists to explore the remaining two million acres.

Remade as a Wall Street speculator, W. F. Buckley bought a suite of offices on lower Park Avenue and furnished them sumptuously, the better to impress investors. He also bought an apartment building nearby where he stayed alone during the week. Jazz Age Manhattan, with its speakeasies and fleshpots and lurking criminal element, was no place for his wife and growing family. They lived on his third shrewd purchase, a large estate in the rural northwest corner of Connecticut.

On Fridays, the work week finished, W. F. Buckley walked a few blocks uptown from his office to Grand Central and rode the train home to his family, three full hours through exurban New York—Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess counties—all the way to Amenia, where a Buick sat idling with the Black “houseboy,” James Cole of New Orleans, behind the wheel in a chauffeur’s cap. Together they drove three miles along a country road and, if daylight remained, enjoyed the vista—the wooded Litchfield Hills and the dipping valley, the bright quilt of dairy farms—and then crossed the Connecticut state line at Sharon, a picturesque village of fifteen hundred, incorporated in 1739 and named for the fertile Biblical plain. A favorite weekend and summer getaway for wealthy New Yorkers, Sharon was famous for its narrow elongated green, originally grazing land, which gracefully stretched for more than a mile from its north end—with storefronts and wooden walkways where in summer elms arched overhead, the branches on either side touching to form a canopy—to South Main Street. There, near the town hall and the Hotchkiss Library, stood what is still today Sharon’s chief landmark: a granite-and-brownstone clock tower, forty feet high with a pyramid roof, built in the 1880s by the same firm that designed Theodore Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill estate on Oyster Bay, Long Island.

On either side of South Main, set back from the street, were large and imposing manor houses. The Buckleys lived in one of them, Number 32, called the Ansel Sterling House after its first owner, a lawyer and judge twice elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1820s. Sterling had purchased the property in 1808 and then torn down the original brick, replacing it with a Georgian frame structure. Over time the tenacre property had tripled to thirty acres, beautiful and lush, with thick stands of oaks and sugar maples, outbuildings including barn, stables, and icehouse, and horse trails that wound through the rolling pastures and up into the gentle hills beyond. Today Ansel Sterling’s house still stands, though much enlarged by W. F. Buckley. Its handsome entrance with pediment and pillars stares across Main Street at Sharon’s two historic churches: little Christ Church Episcopal, with its witch-hat spire, and the Congregational church, the town’s oldest.

In 1923, when W. F. Buckley first toured the property and rented it for the summer, its most striking feature was the elm that towered up from its front lawn. It had been planted in colonial times by Sharon’s most illustrious forefather, the Congregational minister Reverend Cotton Mather Smith, a descendant of Cotton Mather. It was now the largest elm in the entire state, its immense trunk measuring eighteen feet around. In 1924, the same year Main Street was paved for motor traffic, Buckley bought the estate outright and renamed it Great Elm.

This was the new life Buckley had conjured in a few short years, seemingly pulled out of thinnest air, for his wife and growing family. So promising did the future look that when a sixth child was born on November 24, 1925, husband and wife agreed that this son, their third, should be his father’s namesake: William F. Buckley, Jr.

It was always an event when “Father” came home. The children who were not away at school or upstairs in the nursery crowded in front of the house to greet him. “We’d wait there for his car to come,” one of his six daughters remembered, “and make bets on which car would be Father’s.” He was delighted to see them, but even happier to see his wife. “He’d kiss us all and he’d say, ‘Where’s your mother?’ Mother would come and say, ‘Darling,’ and the two of them would walk out together.” 

No one felt these currents more keenly than Billy Buckley, who had the middle child’s fear of being overlooked, lost in the crowd. And the Buckley siblings really were a crowd: ten in all, many of them very close in age, five born ahead of Billy and four after. With servants added, as well as tutors, workmen, groomsmen for the horses, and later a riding instructor and his family, the household numbered more than twenty and was alive with pranks, schemes, hilarity, and strife.

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