“Modern American conservatism has two founding fathers: Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley Jr.” The description is Charles Krauthammer’s. There are other paeans. David Brooks said of Buckley, “He legitimized conservatism as an intellectual movement.” George Nash wrote, “He was the most consequential public intellectual on the right in the twentieth century.” Margaret Thatcher: “He shaped a generation not only in America, but wherever the defense of liberty was required.” Ronald Reagan wrote to him in a letter, “you rolled back the Red Sea and made it dry land for the march of freedom.”
Sam Tanenhaus is critical of Buckley from the very beginning of his new biography, Buckley, picking apart this, that, everything: his time at Millbrook and Yale, his dealings with Senator Joe McCarthy, and on and on.1 Buckley fans have been dreading this book, fearing it would not be flattering to this amazing man. But at the end, the very end, Tanenhaus acknowledges Buckley’s greatness.
Tanenhaus starts with descriptions of life in the household into which Buckley was born. His father was an oil entrepreneur, a gambler in a sense, who had a long winning streak and spent money like a successful man. They lived a rich life, in the United States and abroad, and the style clearly became second nature to Buckley (hereinafter sometimes “wfb”).
But early on Tanenhaus (hereinafter sometimes “ST ”) focuses on Buckley and blacks. ST quotes the young Buckley as saying, “If the poll tax is abolished the political machines will buy up the Negroes’ vote for their own use,” a danger since “most of the negroes are not fit to vote . . . . scientific tests have proved that the negro has a 10 percent lower I.Q. than the whites.”
Buckley was, however, not anti-black; he was against people with low IQs voting. As Buckley left his famous debate with James Baldwin at the Cambridge Union in 1965 at which he had said blacks (he actually said “negroes,” the term of the day) should not be allowed to vote, he can be heard (on the televised recording of the event) saying that many whites should not be allowed to vote either because they also are uneducated. The young Buckley clearly lacked faith in the ability of the “common man” (i.e., uneducated man) to cast a wise ballot. It is not an outrageous consideration. But, as time went on, he gained more faith in the wisdom of the common man—who, among other deeds, helped elect his brother James to the U.S. Senate in 1970. (And who can forget his early 1960s quip that he would “sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University”?)
After graduating from high school, Buckley joined the army before going to college. It was an eye-opening experience, his “introduction to his fellow citizens en masse,” as ST puts it. Buckley grew up in the army, as many others had done before, and have done since. After serving in the army, he entered Yale, and, “By the time he and Yale were finished with each other, neither would be the same.” Just so.
But he was, or became, a gambler, not unlike his father. He learned to fly and with some friends bought a secondhand plane that didn’t have any instruments. One night in college, his friends were concerned when he had not shown up on time at the appointed place. He had been flying back to Yale from Boston. Given the lack of instruments, he simply followed the railroad tracks back to New Haven (not bad!). Subsequently, when he flew up to the Ethel Walker School, the boarding school from which his sister was graduating, he crash-landed the plane on campus, completely destroying the aircraft.
A small incident, perhaps, and, obviously, one he survived. But it captures an essence of Buckley: a risk-taker, whose exploits did not always end perfectly. He sailed boats the same way he flew. “Over the years, my father took out sections of docks up and down the Eastern seaboard. His crew bestowed on him the nickname Captain Crunch,” his son Christopher said.
ST chronicles the production of wfb’s first book, God and Man at Yale (1951), but writes: “Buckley’s first book, like so many that followed, felt at once dashed off and padded out. At the age of twenty-five he was already a skilled practitioner of the corner-cutting non-book.” That’s a bit harsh for the book that put Buckley on the map.
Also we get this snark: “He had outgrown his father’s hatred of the Jews.” It’s not clear that his father hated Jews; they were simply “other people” that his father, and a cross section of America, alas, eschewed. Discrimination? Certainly. Hatred? Not proved. There is danger in applying today’s standards to yesterday.
There are pages and pages on Buckley and Senator Joe McCarthy. They can be read quickly and need not be studied (except for the last page) for a history of the “McCarthy era.” Readers curious about that time should read M. Stanton Evans’s Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (2007). ST concedes, at the very end of his treatment of Buckley and McCarthy, “This time his side had lost badly. But he and a handful of others had prolonged the battle, and for much of that time, though far outnumbered, had put their adversaries on the defensive. Out of this defeat victory might yet come.” Indeed.
Buckley, like millions of other Americans, may have been, as ST describes, a latecomer to civil rights. That should not surprise, given his partially Southern upbringing. But he came around, even to the point of saying in the 2000s he would support the Civil Rights Act.
Still, it is worth noting that the era of civil rights was a disaster for blacks. The statistics on black illegitimacy and crime paint a grim picture. In 1960, the illegitimacy rate among blacks was 22 percent. Today, it’s about 69 percent. And after the Civil Rights Act, black-on-black crime soared. Thomas Sowell has noted that from 1954 to 1964, the number of black professionals in the United States doubled. Sowell has suggested that President Johnson’s Great Society programs may even have impeded black progress. And the modern Democratic Party has tried to distort the Civil Rights Act to cover their transgender nonsense. All of that is the danger of too much government interference in the affairs of men—precisely what Buckley was opposed to. Tanenhaus seems oblivious even to the problem.
Tanenhaus is also critical of Buckley’s coverage of South Africa in the pages of National Review. Commenting on a Buckley piece, Tanenhaus writes (the words in quotes are Buckley’s):
The threat came from the “beady eyes of the Communist propaganda machine,” which was cynically stirring the smoldering embers of “black racism.” This left [South African Prime Minister Hendrik] Verwoerd only one sensible option, cracking down on dissidents. For in “such an eutectic situation it is necessary to maintain very firm control. Relentless vigilance and relentless order” were necessary because “the eudaemonic era has not yet come to Africa.” Eutectic, eudaemonic. The tongue-twisting syllables could not obscure the rawer facts: Seventy percent of South Africa’s population was Black, and eventually that majority would assert itself and challenge white dominance, similar to what was happening in the American South.
Yes—and look at South Africa today, after the black majority has asserted itself. It’s a disaster, as even back then Buckley could see it would be. Tanenhaus seems not to see that even now. Sixty-three years later, the eudaemonic era for South Africa seems farther away than ever. In 1969 Buckley wrote, “We need a black president.” Well, we got one, and he was by many accounts awful. Civil rights, it turns out, is complicated.
Tanenhaus spends an inordinate amount of space on homosexuality and Buckley’s run-in with the homosexual Gore Vidal on national television during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The day before, when a Coast Guard cutter sped past on a rescue call, Buckley had fallen on his boat, breaking his collarbone. He was left unconscious for five minutes, and in the studio was in pain and on high-powered drugs. There was a verbal slugfest between Buckley and Vidal, and it bothered Buckley ever afterwards. In the decades that followed Buckley would almost never discuss the event with anyone. Yet some saw it as a Buckley triumph: Buckley being properly disgusted and outraged at disgusting and outrageous behavior. Tanenhaus writes:
But [Buckley’s aversion to homosexuals] could seem blurry to outsiders who watched Bill and other men plunge naked into the pool at Stamford or strip down in close quarters on his boat [why the superfluous “close quarters”?]. No one really knew what intimacies happened at Bones gatherings [Skull & Bones was a club Buckley belonged to at Yale] or at the Bohemian Grove [a fancy California club Buckley belonged to, as did the noted homosexuals Herbert Hoover, Walter Cronkite, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush], though there was much speculation. For Buckley himself the boundaries were distinct but elastic.
That’s shameful. It seems that Tanenhaus is bending over backwards to raise questions about Buckley’s sexuality. But really! Swimming naked in a pool or off a boat? Shocking, perhaps—to people who have never served in the army. But those who have, those of us who have, tend to be less squeamish about such things. Look it up.
Buckley also got involved in a radio-station enterprise, Starr Broadcasting, that found itself in trouble. In the late 1970s, the Securities and Exchange Commission chased Buckley around the block several times and finally reached a settlement with him—and provided the opportunity for what may be wfb’s greatest, if least well known, bit of repartee (which Tanenhaus does not report; he must not know of it). sec Chairman Stanley Sporkin, after the sec had collected what they considered to be the goods on Buckley, offered him a deal: they would let him off without any penalties if he would agree not to serve on the board of a public company for five years. At the speed of light Buckley replied: “Make it ten and you’ve got a deal.”
Tanenhaus spends pages and pages on Watergate. That was probably inevitable. Buckley was intimately involved in the aftermath. He was a longtime friend of Howard Hunt (one of the Watergate “plumbers”): Buckley had met Hunt when as a young man he had served in the cia, and he wasn’t just a friend but was godfather to Hunt’s children. Watergate was a scandal, but not the way the Left portrays it: the Left finally got even with Nixon (to Democrats, the Trump of that era) for beating California Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas in the U.S. Senate election held in 1950 by comparing Douglas’s voting record to that of Vito Marcantonio, a congressman with alleged communist ties; and for nailing, with the assistance of Whittaker Chambers, their darling Alger Hiss, accused of spying for the Soviets.
Tanenhaus paints a picture of Buckley with a lot of emphasis on recklessness—his flying, his finances, his business ventures, his sailing, and his skiing. But you probably can’t take away the daredevil gene and still have the writer-journalist Buckley who could fire, with no time to plan, “Make it ten and you’ve got a deal.” That daring gene, whatever its ephemeral downsides may have been, enabled Buckley to see a new politics for the country that became modern American conservatism (a defense of limited government, free markets, and the Western tradition) and influenced politics in English-speaking countries and beyond.
Despite this reviewer’s criticisms, this is a must-read book for anyone who wants to know about Buckley’s life. This is the most complete biography of Buckley that will be written. Not all of his fans will like it, or like all of it. But it tells almost the whole story, though admittedly from Tanenhaus’s point of view.
Was Buckley a perfect man? Who is? The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. Let it not be so with Buckley. Whatever Tanenhaus’s faults are in this biography, perhaps most can be forgiven because of his very last paragraph:
In clearing so large a place for himself, he left a vacuum no one since has been able to fill. This is the absence so many feel today—adversaries and apostates as well as advocates and admirers. A founder of our world, he speaks to us from a different one, beyond our reach but hovering near, if only we can discover in ourselves the imagination and generosity, the kindness and warmth, that Bill Buckley demonstrated time and again in his long and singular life.
Yes. Play it again, Sam. It’s difficult to be too critical of someone who has written those lines about Bill Buckley.
Megalegomena
Few people who have finished an eight-hundred-plus-page biography are likely to say, “Please sir, I want some more.” And yet, there is more, more that Tanenhaus may not even know: Buckley’s greatest gift.
One evening a number of years ago, a dozen or so young people were chatting with Milton Friedman after dinner when he asked them: “What is Bill Buckley’s greatest gift?” “His greatest gift is for journalism,” one said. Another argued instead for wfb’s gift as a novelist. One argued that wfb’s greatest gift was for debate, another that it was for television, still another that it was for public speaking, citing wfb’s dozens of appearances each year at college campuses. One even argued for wfb’s avocations, arguing that his greatest gifts were for sailing and playing the harpsichord. As Friedman listened, he smiled, shaking his head to indicate disagreement with each of the answers. At last Milton himself answered. “You’re all wrong,” he said. “Bill Buckley’s greatest gift is for friendship.” Exactly.
Buckley once remarked, “Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once told me that he was very selective about choosing his friends. I told him that I regarded everyone as a friend until they proved otherwise.” No wonder he had so many friends.
Buckley once sent a friend (we’ll call him Lawrence B. Blake) a watch. The friend lost it. He sent another. Larry lost that one too. He sent a third and had engraved on the back, “last watch from wfb to lbb.”
Once he had lunch with Ernest van den Haag, who had written for National Review for years. Van den Haag was old by then and told Buckley that he missed terribly being able to go to his health club and use the rowing machine. A few days later, an enormous box arrived at Ernie’s front door. It was, of course, a rowing machine.
Buckley’s sister Trish Bozell, whom Tanenhaus describes as the most musical of the ten Buckley children, told Buckley how much she missed having a piano to play. A short time later, a Bösendorfer (often called the Rolls-Royce of pianos) was delivered to the Bozell household.
One day in May 1993, at a lunch at the free Chinese embassy in Washington, Buckley sat next to a friend and, pointing to his friend’s watch, said, Bobby [not his real name], that’s a pretty watch. Do you have one like this?—and showed him his Omega Seamaster watch. The answer of course was no. A week or so later a Seamaster watch arrived in the mail from “the flossiest watch emporium in the country” (wfb’s description) and engraved on the back was “poor watchless bobby.”
So, yes: Buckley was the founding father of modern conservatism, the man who legitimized conservatism as an intellectual movement, shaped a generation, rolled back the Red Sea and made it dry land for the march of freedom, and left a vacuum no one will be able to fill. That’s the way history will remember Buckley.
But this man who for decades indefatigably promoted freedom always had time to be a friend, a great friend, to so many of the people he met in the course of his amazing life.
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