The Buckleys: a family examined

by Charles Lam Markmann

The Buckleys are acknowledged, almost without dispute, as the real heart and brain of the growing respectable Right in the United States. As Michael Harrington is quoted in this "The Conservative Party is a very serious development that could be a portent of significant changes in American political life. And The Buckleys are the first family of this not inconsiderable phenomenon." The Buckleys is the first book to be published about this large, fascinating, and important family. It examines their beliefs, their practices, their formation, and what the author believes to be the mere commencement of their impact on the United States-an impact that in his view is the more dangerous precisely in proportion to those qualities of the Buckleys that are the most their intelligence, their decency their genuine culture, and their total lack of hypocrisy. And while the book concentrates, necessarily, in good part upon William F. Buckley Jr. and Senator James Buckley, it is concerned too with the entire family and its history, beginning with the arrival of the first Buckley in this country toward the end of the nineteenth century. The Buckleys details the growth of the family fortune; the education and maturation of the many children of William F. Buckley Sr.; the early emergence of William Jr. as the chief spokesman for the family's belief in the responsibilities of the aristocracy and his later fame as author, television personality, friend of Whittaker Chambers, foe of Gore Vidal; and the politically significant election of James Buckley to the United states Senate. Based in part upon personal interviews with some members of the family and with family associates and in part upon research among primary and secondary sources. The Buckleys is a first-rate study of a family in action, living its beliefs, expounding them, full of passion and self-contradiction. It is a valuable and complete book on its subjects as there is likely to be...

365 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1973