Law & Principles

Buckley’s revolution: The life and legacy of a conservative icon

August 6, 2025

Christopher H. Owen

William F. Buckley, Jr. was “the country’s greatest conservative.” So concludes Sam Tanenhaus in his masterfully researched authorized biography, Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America. 

Once called “the greatest conversationalist in the world,” the photogenic and silver-tongued Buckley dazzled in person and sparkled on television. His public support was vital to the political success of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Bill Buckley raised conservatism from a querulous band of misfits into a disciplined movement prepared to exercise political power. Anyone interested in American political history should read this book. 

A distinguished journalist, Tanenhaus served for many years as editor of The New York Times Book Review. Buckley, admiring Tanenhaus’s acclaimed biography of the anticommunist Whittaker Chambers, selected him to write his life story. It’s been a long road. Tanenhaus researched the book for decades. He draws deeply on archival materials, published scholarly works, legal documents, video recordings, newspapers, and personal interviews. Such prodigious research often pays dividends in his narrative. When the author lays out the facts of various controversial situations, his case is generally impossible to refute. Reading his well-honed prose, however, readers will discover that Tanenhaus is quite critical of Buckley and of American conservatism.

Buckley was driven. For more than 30 years, he served as the editor of National Review. Three times a week for 46 years, he produced his syndicated newspaper column “On the Right.” From 1966 to 1999, he hosted more than 1,500 episodes of Firing Line, discussing events of the day with prominent public figures. He wrote dozens of books, including detective novels and volumes on boating and travel. He was constantly on the road giving speeches for conservative causes. He engaged in frequent public debates with prominent political foes and tirelessly organized conservatives to take over the Republican Party. Hard for a biographer to keep up with all that, even with 25 years of research.

Tanenhaus tries valiantly. Readers get a good picture of Bill. Raised in a wealthy family of 10 siblings by his oilman father and devoutly Catholic mother, he was a good sailor, horseman, and pianist. He attended an elite private school, served stateside in the army during World II, then zoomed off to Yale. A champion debater, he served as chairman of the Yale Daily News, joined the Skull and Bones society, and was the biggest man on campus for the class of 1950. He soon published God and Man at Yale, which became a bestseller by suggesting that Yale was promoting anti-Christian ideas and socialism. He briefly served in the CIA, got married, and became a supporter of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Using family money, Bill started National Review in 1955. With a witty and intelligent team of writers, and closely edited by Buckley, the magazine critiqued liberals and communists. It criticized the Eisenhower administration for its tepid anticommunism and refusal to downsize federal programs. By the late 1950s, National Review supported U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater as a real conservative. In 1960, Buckley created the Young Americans for Freedom. Its “Sharon Statement,” signed in Bill’s boyhood home, called for limited government, free markets, and defeating communism, and acknowledged individual liberties to be God-given.

In 1964, Buckley supported the Goldwater campaign, and in 1968, he put aside his previous reservations and supported Nixon’s election. He strongly defended Nixon throughout the Watergate investigation. Thereafter, he served as a key supporter in Ronald Reagan’s rise to power. Buckley became a key power broker as Republicans built their majority in the late 1970s. Many of his associates found employment with the Reagan administration as dedicated conservatives finally took power. After Reagan’s election in 1980, a triumphal National Review said it was giving up on humor because it had “a nation to run.” Buckley retired as editor of the magazine in 1988. He still wrote but was less engaged in politics. So Tanenhaus does not cover these later years in much detail.

The very depth of the author’s research sometimes leads to difficulties, as the narrative takes on an episodic quality. Tanenhaus deals definitively with various events and aspects of Buckley’s life, then moves on to another episode. He proves without doubt, for example, that Will Buckley, Sr. was antisemitic and that he supported efforts to maintain segregation in South Carolina, where the family kept a second home. He details how Bill’s sisters vandalized a nearby Protestant church in Sharon, Connecticut. A couple of chapters focus on Bill’s spat with writer Gore Vidal as accusations of Nazism and homosexuality flew back and forth. Readers also hear how Watergate planner E. Howard Hunt shared enough details of his crimes with Bill to make the latter an accessory after the fact. All these tales are well-documented, compelling in their own right, and irrefragable. But together they, on occasion, make for choppy reading.

A more fundamental issue is Tanenhaus’s critique of Buckley’s conservatism. He dwells at great length on how racism contributed to the development of conservatism, including Buckley’s. Readers hear much about Bill’s admiration for Charles Lindbergh and about Lindbergh’s antisemitism. Yet there is little evidence that such sentiment affected Buckley’s own political efforts. More serious were links between the growing conservative movement and southern segregationists. And, indeed, disaffected white southerners, motivated partly by racial bias, did gradually switch over to the Republican Party. By pursuing this “Southern strategy,” Tanenhaus shows that Buckley, Goldwater, Nixon, and others helped the GOP achieve national parity with the Democrats. Fair enough.

But the author then expands these facts to argue that racism was the chief reason for conservative success. Calls to limit government or to fight crime were smokescreens to disguise the racial animus of the new “Dixie-Republican” alliance. The “old cry of white supremacy,” claims Tanenhaus, “had been absorbed into fresher language of libertarian principle.” That big government or high crime might pose real problems, outside this racial matrix, receives scant consideration from the author. All efforts to limit federal authority, in this telling, become “Calhounite.” More generally for Tanenhaus, liberals appear to have the right solutions. Refusal to accept these solutions meant that Buckley and his conservative friends were “stubbornly unseeing” and wrapped in “delusion.” By resisting same-sex marriage, for example, Bill remained “trapped in the coils of sexual prejudice.” Tanenhaus is a fair-minded scholar. He tells the story truly as he sees it and credits Buckley’s many talents and genuine kindness.  

But the author’s progressive predisposition causes him to overstate the influence of liberal proteges (such as Garry Wills) on Buckley and to underestimate the impact of conservative stalwarts (such as Frank Meyer). In related fashion, a certain provinciality affects the book. Validation and truth for Tanenhaus, and to some degree for Buckley himself, derive from acceptance by “prestige” institutions of the Northeast. Publication in The New Yorker, a puff piece from 60 Minutes, or an honorary degree from Yale are taken as measures of success, as proof one has escaped the conservative “ghetto.” Meanwhile, those outside this happy clime too often inhabit “fever swamps” and are prone to the allure of “populist demagogues.” 

Though a long read, Tanenhaus’s biography is often powerful and persuasive. It answers many questions about Bill Buckley and the rise of American conservatism in definitive fashion. Any reader will learn much from it. However, one might first want to get to know Buckley by viewing old episodes of Firing Line, many of them available online. Anyone watching Bill do battle with Hugh Hefner, or Jesse Jackson, or George Wallace, will immediately understand his greatness.

[Photo: William F. Buckley, Jr. (at left), Dr. Tom Coburn, Gov. Frank Keating, and OCPA chairman Dr. David Brown are pictured on March 28, 2001, at the OCPA Citizenship Award Dinner in Oklahoma City.]