Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America

by Sam Tanenhaus

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.

Genres: Biography, History, Politics, Nonfiction, American History, Biography Memoir, Audiobook

1040 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2025

About the author

Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of both The New York Times Book Review and the Week in Review section of the Times. From 1999 to 2004 he was a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where he wrote often on politics.

His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications. Tanenhaus’s previous book, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

What to say about this book which I have been waiting to read for so long and which I was able to read before its publication day (tomorrow)? It was long and dense. In many ways fascinating and even entertaining. But it was also slow and frustrating and near maddening at times.

There is an inherent tension that is never resolved as Tanenhaus could never see the world through the eyes of a conservative and so even as he charts WFB's life he is constantly critiquing nearly everything he does and believes. He praises his writing, his generosity and his gift of friendship (but even that is offset by the deeds of his close friends and those he sought to help) but his anti-statist, anti-communist, pro free market, pro faith and freedom passions are all seen as surrounded by kooks and conspiracy theorist, by racists and con-men.

At times Buckley comes off as talented and entertaining but fundamentally as just PR and marketing for others; not someone who helped build and lead a movement. The book offers little to explain the revolution of the book's title except by way of the resentments of whites, southerners, blue collar laborers, and middle class suburbanites. The "heroes" are the experts on voting data and the politicians who skillfully used their knowledge to get elected.

The weird juxtaposition is that you finish with an understanding that WFB was famous and connected by unsure of why he was so influential and successful. The author fundamentally doesn't seem to respect the ideas Buckley cared about and so they play very little role in the story except as background for the politics and journalism.

I learned a lot from this book but was frustrated with its tone and style, and why it allocated so many pages to things that do not seem central or explanatory. I will have to wrestle with this a bit more and read others to get my thoughts together but such was my initial reaction.

[Stetson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was equally anticipating and dreading the greatly delayed arrival of Buckley's authorized biography. I was eager to see a towering 20th century figure, whose impact is widely known yet still remains understated and underappreciated, profiled in an honest, thoughtful way, yet I was concerned Tanenhaus' portrayal of his subject would be similar to Nicholas Buccola's The Fire Is upon Us* or veer into attempting to draw parallels between Buckley and the Trump phenomenon.** Tanenhaus strikes a middle course balancing praise of Buckley's charisma and wit and political accomplishments with the common left-liberal criticisms of Buckley: superficiality, bombast, mendacity, bigotry, etc.

After making it through this enormous text, I find it hard to immediately take a strong position. There are aspects of the work that I found incredibly interesting and novel (something hard to do with a well-known figure like Buckley - at least to a reader like me who is very familiar with Buckley's work and roll in modern right-wing history). Alternatively, the biography is poorly paced, rushing through Buckley later years (after the Reagan revolution). It is perhaps true that Buckley's import to political outcomes faded after this moment, but it still leaves much of Buckley's contribution, especially via National Review and his public presence, out of the book.

This is nonetheless a useful biography, though I wish Tanenhaus spent time highlighting Buckley's positive accomplishments in public interviews. Tanenhaus doesn't accurately represent his actual biographical writing on Buckley in public appearances, kindling the ambient negative caricatures in order to get left-liberals to pick up copies.

--
*In the Buccola's book, Buckley is generally characterized, at his core, as a biological racist and apologist for segregation whose later-in-life defenses of Civil Right legislation were insincere and the result of political convenience. Tanenhaus' more thorough and comprehensive biography reveals Buccola's book was sloppy smear. Buckley's racial positioning, albeit not up to Tanenhaus's uber-liberal standards, was not genuinely retrograde but rather patrician and practical. Buckley's evolution on the subject of race is also treated as genuine as Tanenhaus is able to support this with examples from Buckley life, including his treatment of interview subjects like Muhammed Ali and Jesse Jackson.

**Trump is essentially absent from the book, but Tanenhaus does dedicate a great deal of focus of Buckley's father anglophobia, antisemitism, and isolationism (e.g. "America First" positioning). Tanenhaus doesn't completely tar Buckley with these things, but clearly sees Buckley's father as an important early influence on Jr. What Tanenhaus makes less clear is how Buckley then becomes a passionate handmaiden for foreign policy positions like "rollback" which is decidedly associated with neoconservative (aka not isolationism) today. As readers, we're left to believe the evolution was simply due to Buckley's stronger opposition to communism.

[Logan Kedzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The aphorism goes that if there are seven people seated at the table, and six of them are Nazis, there are, in fact, seven Nazis at the table. This biography suggests an adjunct to that where anyone can be accused of bigotry, and anyone can be cleared of an accusation of bigotry with convincing proof, but if it keeps happening, even if the proof is always there, maybe further examination is in order?

This is a biography of the pundit William F. Buckley, Jr.. Buckley was a conservative political commentator, the epitome of pundit and total lexiconizing crush-object for anyone like me. The only thing that kept me from full blown fanboyism is my dysthemia and I am still trying to do his shtick. Starting with Buckley's first book, God and Man at Yale, the Ur-text of all books on campus controversies, he would start the National Review in his goal to create an insurgent political magazine and alternative to the more leftward high-class reporting. He would go on to host Firing Line, a political editorializing interview show that is so deeply in the genes of the modern media landscape as to be invisible, and wrote On the Right, a popular syndicated column. Buckley is the architect of the contemporary U.S. political Right, while also in so esteemed a position that he could operate as a critic of it.

Buckley has a legacy of being the adult in the room, the principled and erudite branch of the conservative party, particularly in contrast to the washed-up performers who make up the corpus of contemporary commentary. The biography dismantles all of that. It is a dry text, but it seems so out of necessity. If I understand correctly this project has been in the works for over a decade, and it shows with the sense of the need to impart volumes of information. This overrides any particular them about the subject of the biography, excluding that the author likes the Uno Reverse Card school where a virtue or vice must be followed in immediate succession by its opposite.

The author gets into Buckley's anti-Semitic and anti-Black background (via his family) and the way that the National Review and his writing projects were about pulling the Republican party further right in things like his adoration of McCarthy and hatred of Eisenhower, through to his surprising and somewhat covered up part in Watergate. Buckley's later career breaks with the consensus that put him more in the radical centrist school (much like David Brooks, whom he trained), and there is something of a running theme about how much he has changed his views as opposed to his methods. Buckley on race, and trying to discern what changed, if anything changed, is a topic for the future.

I cannot call a 1000 page book too short and still look myself in the mirror, but the closing part of Buckley's career gets a quick glance as compared to the rest, to the point that I feel it suspicious. It reads as pathos, the Cold Warrior trying to hold by moving into writing Tom Clancy fan fiction, but it also provides a thesis for his career: Buckley had shockingly crude comments about AIDS, that are then contrasted with his personal treatment of queer people and how same thought about him and his opinions as worthwhile. Like you want to be able to say that this was a person who was master at separating out the private and the political, who could perform at being a jerk while then being a square dealer after the fact. Instead, it leaves the feeling that his life is a ruse. Buckley is the swamp in a populist sense. He affirms the idea of The Establishment as a thing by virtue of the way that he was able to freely move within it. That he was also a segregationist is a feature, not a bug.

As such, the book shakes up the usual routine of him as the elevated form of pundit that would later be replaced by bombast and grift. Instead, Buckley is we have Matt Walsh at home. It is a totally different sense of profound disappointment than I expected, and not a factor of the ultimate quality of the book, though, perhaps misgivings about what the book treats insufficiently. In general, I think it a strong book as evidenced by the volume here. Faced with so many topics that could be books of their own it still manages an explanation that covers a topic like the National Review as a whole, Buckley's variability on race, or his story-worthy family in a comprehensive way.

My thanks to the author, Sam Tanenhaus, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Random House, for making the ARC available to me.

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fair and detailed overview of the life and times of WFB, containing pretty much everything you could possibly want to know about this towering, ubiquitous, and strangely ephemeral figure (a public intellectual whose reputation has become posthumous two decades before they died…many such cases).

Tanenhaus, who authored a similarly comprehensive account of Whittaker Chambers’ life that was a cornerstone of my National Review-reading rightoid early 20s, does yeoman’s work here, apportioning praise and criticism as fairly as one can imagine under the circumstances. The book contains some truly excellent assessments of Buckley’s dashed-off nonbooks and quickie columns — he would proudly cop to both things — as well as a lot of grappling with Buckley’s far-right views on homosexuality, many homosexual friends, and the assorted rumors about him.

Robert Caro on Robert Moses or Boswell on Johnson it ain’t, but highly recommended nevertheless.

[JerryDeanHalleck · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very long (860 pages of text), yet very unbalanced biography of William F. Buckley, best selling novelist, editor of the National Review, and leader of the conservative movement.

Tanenhaus takes 791 pages to get from 1925 to 1976. The rest of Buckley's life (almost 32 years) gets only 69 pages. Immigration and Buckley's attitudes toward abortion, unions, affirmative action, "Free" trade, and the Middle east are rarely discussed. We do however get a lot about racism, Adam Powell, antisemitism, Gays, and Joe McCarthy.

Typical of Sam's approach, he rarely mentions Buckley's deep and devout Catholic faith, except to write about the "Sex abuse Scandal" of the late 1990s.

Buckley, the person, isn't described in much detail. WFB's mother, wife and son (Chris Buckley) are given a couple pages. We're told that WFB smoked and drank in the 40s, but what about after that? We're told he loved to sail, but not why. Other hobbies/activities? Not clear. Quotes from his diaries and letters are non-existant.

Nor do we get much on the inner workings of Firing Line, the Conservative movement, or National Review. Some items not addressed: Why did WFB want to sell NR to Murdoch in the early 90s? Why was O'Sullivan fired from the editorship? Why did WFB constantly hire non-conservatives for National reivew and was he upset at people like Gary Wills? What was WFB's relationship with Pat Buchanan? Or Bush 43? Or William Rusher?

One gets the impression the real motive for publishing the book, was to find some "Smoking gun" proving WFB was a bigot. Perhaps some secret membership in the KKK or diaries and letters full of Anti-Jewish remarks. However, all Sam could find was WFB's father ran a newspaper in South Carolina supporting segregation in the 1950s.

Sam does get one thing right. WFB was no populist. He found George Wallace "repulsive" and loved Henry Kissinger. While WFB took a Coulter-like pleasure in poking "The Establishment" - he ultimately stood with the Establishment, not against it. Had the NYT's given WFB a place on its Op-ed page, made him their "Conservative Gadfly", National Review would've closed down the next day.

Probably the best parts of the book are his discussion of WFBs life up to age 26, and the WFB-Gore Vidal relationship. He shows how Vidal (and Jayne Meadows) lied about Buckley vandalizing an Espiscopalian church in 1944.

Interesting factoid: Bush was WFB's 2nd choice in 1980, and first choice in 1988. He also supported Ford choosing Rockefeller as his VP.

[Steve McFarland · Rating 3 out of 5]

worth the read for how James Baldwin kicked his ass

[Scot · Rating 5 out of 5]

It ought to be illegal to write a biography this entertaining and enjoyable about one of the most consequently awful figures in the last century or so of American politics.

[MikePeterS · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the July/August 2025 edition of Foreign Affairs Magazine, Charles King, reviewing Sam Tanenhaus’s “Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America,” wrote of the oft-forgotten but significant contribution William F Buckley Jr. made to modern conservative cultural and political currents—now seen in its most recent form as MAGA.

Given my recent exploration of political science and a desire to understand the history of conservatism in America, this was a book I was immediately intrigued to check out. I was interested to know how one man, whom I had never heard of, redefined conservative politics and branding.

Admittedly, I did no more research about the book and immediately ordered it when I found it was on sale. Little did I know, this was not a quick summary of Buckley’s main contributions to the movement; this is a full-fledged, from conception to death, biography of this man. As daunting a task reading a 900 page biography about a 1900s conservative commentator is, I relinquished myself to Tanenhaus’s comprehensive and detailed account of Buckley’s life.

Needless to say, Buckley, like all men and women, was complicated. His public-facing politics often flew in the face of the tolerance towards his private relationships. Despite the “good will” shown towards the black folks working at his parents’ estate during childhood to his secret-keeping of colleagues’ homosexuality at National Review, Buckley found himself embroiled in a defense of segregation during the Civil Rights era and radical, almost Holocaustian, measures during the AIDS epidemic. Not a great look.

Aside from these severe blunders, clearly Buckley changed the way conservatives interact with American culture at large. He showed that politics flows downstream from culture, and so that’s where folks ought to exert their energies. Buckley did try to test the waters of electoral politics when he ran for Mayor of New York City in 1965, but he found his true calling in commenting from afar on the political questions at hand.

This book, for me, was a great opportunity to do a deep dive into American politics from 1930-1990 through the lens of one man’s life. But, to my original thought when first wanting to read this book, it wasn’t just ONE man who lead to the contemporary conservative movement. No doubt, Buckley had a gargantuan influence, with connections across various levels of government, culture, and history, but at the end of the day he was one player among many. One will amongst the chaotic forces of history and events and circumstances. Tolstoy’s model continues to stand.

[Eric Mayhew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A deeply thorough interesting and often fascinating account of Buckley’s life and influence. What Tanenhaus does especially well is situate Buckley within the institutional formation of modern conservatism — you really feel the architecture of media, ideology, and personality solidifying over time. It’s serious, unsensational work.

If I have a slight reservation, it’s stylistic rather than substantive. I tend to love biographies that wander into larger historical digressions — the Caro-style deep dives where the world around the subject becomes as immersive as the subject himself. This book stays more tightly focused on Buckley, which makes it disciplined and clear, but occasionally less expansive than I personally prefer. However, given all that, it does wander enough that all the relevant side characters - McCarthy, Vidal, Baldwin etc - are at least introduced and situated appropriately in the Buckley milieu.

Still, an impressive, important biography — and essential for understanding how a certain strain of American intellectual life consolidated itself in the postwar era.

4.5 stars rounded up.

[Boone Ayala · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5-4?

This is a really fun book, and if you think you’d like to read 860 pages about the life of William F. Buckley, you’re probably right. What it is not is a terribly edifying book.

What takes the book down a notch for me is the mismatch of my own expectations. I was interested, I realize, in a history of the conservative movement using the intellectual life of William F. Buckley, Jr. as a lens. There is some of that in here. But Tanenhaus here does for Buckley what Buckley supposedly enjoyed about Tanenhaus’s biography of Whittaker Chambers: that book got “‘Whittaker off that damned pumpkin patch’ - that is, [it was] less about Chambers the HUAC and courtroom witness than Chambers the literary man and Cold War ‘poet’.” (841). This book, subtitled “the Life and the Revolution that Changed America,” is more about the life than the Revolution. Buckley here is charming and gregarious, a phenomenal personal friend to people across the political spectrum.

I’m not certain how much of this is Tanenhaus’s own interpretive lens versus the self-conscious separation of his life and beliefs that Buckley evidently mastered. Perhaps it is impossible to tell the intellectual history of American conservatism through the life of a man who was not really a serious intellectual force. Buckley failed to write his one great work of political philosophy, The Revolt Against the Masses. He was, writes Tanenhaus, “more observer and sponsor than organizer” of the conservative movement (849). His great skill was not in his own ideas, but in his capacity for presenting the ideas of others.

With National Review, Buckley brought together many strains of postwar American conservative intellectuals and helped to create a platform for the movement. Through publicity stunts like his run for mayor of New York in 1965 and elegantly managed television performances like Firing Line, he became the charming, affable face of conservatism to the American public. His well-timed denunciation of the leaders of the far-right John Birch Society helped to set the boundaries and, perhaps, to soften the movement’s public image. Buckley, the elite, effete, charming socialite, was the conservative who could worm his way into the hearts of liberals. His genius was not in ideas, but in public relations. I wish that Tanenhaus had explored this element of Buckley’s impact in greater depth, perhaps added some numbers or liberal testimonials to show how Buckley not only tapped into stewing conservative forces but helped to legitimize them. The history of a journalist which doesn’t explore his impact on readers cannot help but feel incomplete. In a word, the AUDIENCE RESPONSE to Buckley is what I think is missing here.

The impression one gets in Buckley is of a man riding astride historical forces that he does not really control, a sponsor and observer of a movement that he did not really build. At its worst, the book reads like Forrest Gump, a narrative of a man who repeatedly finds himself present at momentous historical events but who is on their periphery. Yet Forrest Gump is fun, and Buckley’s life certainly makes for fascinating and adventurous reading. It’s also fast-paced. Tanenhaus’s style has the breezy confidence of the professional journalist - I soared through this 860 page tome, and it was a pleasure to read throughout. It was just very different from what I expected, partly because I didn’t understand its subject, and partly because the focus was too narrowly on Buckley the man and not enough on his impact. Tanenhaus clearly cares deeply for his subject, and the acknowledgements make clear the bonds of friendship (if not love) which he built up with the Buckley family over the past 35 years. But perhaps he was too close, too charmed by Buckley the man to let himself step back and center Buckley’s influence. Tanenhaus cannot resist the delightful anecdote, the charming witticism, the shenanigans of high-society, but he does not try to give these things historical or explanatory significance in Buckley’s life or movement. If you are looking for a deeper explanation of conservative intellectual history, this is not the place for it.

In the end, this book was more sizzle than steak - perhaps the most worthy tribute to the life of a dilettante.

[Desirae · Rating 2 out of 5]

Title: A Contrarian Case for Contrarianism — or Just 1,000 Pages Too Many

Sam Tanenhaus has given us Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, a colossal 1,018-page biography of William F. Buckley Jr. that purports to trace the birth of modern American conservatism through the life of its supposed architect. The book is comprehensive, meticulously researched, and rich in archival detail — which also means it is, to deploy a charitable phrase, excessively long. For a reader like me, self-identifying as a proud liberal who picked up this tome in good faith to better understand an ideological adversary, the result is confusion bordering on befuddlement: after devoting literal days to this narrative behemoth, I am left with one honest question — why did anyone think this book had to be 1,000 pages long?

Let’s begin with the man: William F. Buckley Jr. At age 25, he burst onto the national stage with God and Man at Yale, a polemical attack on his alma mater’s “secular orthodoxy” that galvanized a nascent conservative intelligentsia. In 1955 he founded National Review, a magazine that aimed (and succeeded) in unifying disparate conservative factions — traditionalists, libertarians, anti-communists — into something resembling a movement. For over five decades he wrote, debated, and otherwise pontificated, becoming host of Firing Line, a PBS fixture where his erudite style — Ivy League accent, tweedy vestments, and all — made right-wing polemics look respectable. Buckley mentored younger conservatives, lent his imprimatur to Barry Goldwater and, later, Ronald Reagan, and becomes a fixture in American political life up through the end of the 20th century.
If that sounds significant, it was — but it also wasn’t terribly revolutionary in the sense of reshaping the country without enormous forces already pushing in that direction. Buckley was less a rocket booster and more a dwarf moon in the conservative solar system: gravitating toward larger bodies — Joe McCarthy early on, Richard Nixon later — ever orbiting their gravity wells but never escaping to make his own unique mark. Standing beside corrupt or deeply problematic figures — be it McCarthy’s reckless anti-communism or Nixon’s Watergate-tainted legacy — does not make one a hero; it makes one complicit in a larger conservative mythology that mythologizes its own triumphs while eliding its worst failures.

This is one place where Tanenhaus does his painstaking job: he does not whitewash Buckley’s ethical blind spots. The biography documents episodes of Buckley’s early sympathies toward segregationist outlets and his (initial) defense of Jim Crow era positions, including involvement with a pro-segregation newspaper in South Carolina in the 1950s, a chapter so troubling it has become a focal point of contemporary coverage.

Yet for all this, there is an absurd imbalance in Tanenhaus’s storytelling. Nearly 800 pages are devoted to Buckley’s life through 1976 — leaving just a few dozen pages for the remaining 30 years where Buckley was arguably better known to most Americans thanks to Firing Line, cultural shifts around conservatism, and the rise of the New Right. Book reviewers and everyday readers alike have noted this lopsided structure: exhaustive in buildup, rushed in denouement.

Which brings me back to the rhetorical heart of this review: as someone who finished this book having read every word, I find myself perplexed. The book wants very badly to justify its subtitle — The Life and the Revolution That Changed America — and yet it rarely interrogates what that revolution was, beyond the obvious (conservatism became electorally powerful). The narrative gives us the nuts and bolts of Buckley’s conversations, pleas, feuds, and even occasional CIA escapades, but the sense that Buckley himself sparked a revolution in the sense of transforming American society on his own terms feels overstated at best.

In practice, Buckley’s “revolution” looks more like this:
-Unrealized political candidacy (he ran for NYC mayor in 1965 and came in a distant third).
- A magazine that helped define conservative discourse but always rode the coattails of larger national forces (Cold War urgency, backlash to civil rights, anti-liberal cultural sentiment).
- A television persona that made elite right-wing rhetoric palatable to moderates, without generating substantive policy innovations of his own.

If you squint, yes, he was important. If you actually read 1,000+ pages about him, you may find yourself wishing he had done something more than National Review plus Firing Line plus historical footnote status in conservative intellectual history.

An honest liberal reader — or any reader predisposed to questioning narratives of conservative triumph — will also be struck by how Buckley’s legacy enables contradictions within the movement itself. Early on, he sought to purge the far right (e.g., denouncing the John Birch Society) and to present an image of decorous, cultivated conservatism. Yet that project simultaneously helped mainstream impulses that would later fracture the movement, leaving behind populist, anti-elitist strains that Buckley himself — cultured, elitist, and smooth-tongued — would find baffling at best and abhorrent at worst. Accounts from commentators suggest even some conservatives believe Buckley would hate much of today’s Republican Party.

This is where the book’s subtitle feels most like a bait-and-switch: the revolution that changed America was not so much Buckley’s doing as it was an accumulation of forces that Buckley narrated better than he created. This is a critical distinction that Tanenhaus’s narrative sometimes obscures beneath the detail.

And oh, the detail. If a hundred pages immerse you in archival memos, letters, and clippings — fine. A thousand? At times, Buckley feels like the historical equivalent of a VHS tape you fast forward through because it’s ten minutes too long… but in this case, it’s five hundred pages too long.

The book’s greatest strength — its thoroughness — thus also becomes its greatest weakness. Tanenhaus has assembled an admirable repository of material, but the prose rarely rises above the level of meticulous transcription. For a subject who rarely lived outside his own ivory tower of privilege, this often translates into passages where every nuance of every conversation is rendered in painful detail. Some readers may find value in that; others, like myself, may wonder whether one truly needed to know Buckley’s every cable and counsel notes from 1961 to get the gist of his influence.

So, what is the point of this book? That depends on your ideological lens. For conservative scholars, this is a definitive resource — a locus where nearly every Buckley anecdote and archival breadcrumb has been gathered and annotated. For historians of 20th-century American politics, the book functions as a valuable touchstone connecting postwar conservatism to present day. For everyone else — especially readers who don’t already worship at the altar of the right (or at least admire its architects) — the book tests your patience and your willingness to sift through excess.
As a proud liberal who genuinely wanted to engage across the aisle, I came away with a clarified understanding of Buckley as a figure, but not with a sense that his life alone justifies a 1,000-page biography. He is more a contextual prism — a window into the conservative movement — than a man whose own biography saturated American political life in a vacuum.

Ultimately, Buckley is worth reading if you are fascinated by the conservative movement’s genealogy or if you enjoy being immersed in exhaustive archival biography. But if you were hoping to encounter a revolutionary genius who reshaped America with unparalleled force — and if you hoped to encounter a humane narrative that decants that significance into a comprehensible, relevant argument — you might find, like I did, that this book is at least 900 pages too long.

[Mason · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’d been looking forward to this book for years before it released. Listening to Tanenhaus interviews where he was happy to talk history but not to commit to any release date. When announced, it was preorded and the street date was regularly double-checked in anticipation.

Well, it lived up to expectations. I can’t think of what else one would want from a biography. Always familiar, often compassionate, and rarely uncritical; the book truly walks through the life and times with such great detail and insight. As someone who reads a lot of 20th century American history, there were constant details that colored so many areas you think you know. It earns every page of the length.

[Patrick Ashurst · Rating 5 out of 5]

a civilization gone with the wind.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and lengthy look at Buckley’s life and, to a lesser extent, the conservative revolution that he led. The author focuses on the granular detail for decades of his life in an extensive almost daily journaling of his life up to about the mid-1970s. Curiously he then glosses over the Ford through Regan years and barely even mentions what Buckley did, if anything, through the 1990s. It’s an odd choice given the culmination of Buckley’s efforts in the Reagan victories of 1980 and 1984, which he covers very quickly, and then barely mentions the Bush I presidency. Given the incredible, at times almost inane, detail of his earlier life I was very much looking forward to the discussions from Ford on and was disappointed to have them curtailed as if the publisher had the author on a deadline that had run. All in all a solid book that loses a ⭐️ for the abbreviated ending.

[Shannan Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sam Tanenhaus created a detailed biography on the the life and career of William Buckley Jr. He begins with the history of Buckley's parent's relationships and businesses. He spend the first third of his book on his early childhood including his life in Mexico and Europe. He eventually repatriated back to the United States to the state of Maine. In Maine, he completed his primary education in the elite private schools in the area. After graduation, he matriculated at Yale and was active in debates during his time at Yale found that he had a gift. He was also a very talented writer and would go on to be the head of the National Review which gave rise to many people in the Republican Party. His Roman Catholic faith was very influential in shaping his political views, along with his the mentorship of his father. Though his family started out as Democrats, they changed over to the Republican Party as the platforms switched. The author presented Mr. Buckley in a very interesting way it was very engaging and not dull. He did emphasize other things more than others but it did not deter my enjoyment of the material in this 900+ page book. I would recommend this to fellow political junkies because the author thoroughly researched the life of William Buckley Jr down to every last detail. I would recommend this to anyone who is passionate about politics and the rise of the current Republican party platform.

[Carlos Valladares]

Here it is: the birth of U.S. conservatism in the 20th century, through the lens of a thoroughly repulsive, slickly polite, shambolic, camp-friendly, mediocre, and compellingly awful celebrity/media mogul who haunts us today for the reactionary world he successfully engineered into being via opportunism, a brilliant manipulation of media like TV and “journalism” to brainwash millions of consumers (without the tragedy of Buckley, we don’t get the farce of a neocon mealy-mouthed fraud like Bari Weiss), a nasty preference for entertaining with debate over reasoning with logic, (though ironically, the two most important and publicly disseminated debates of his age, against far smarter and wittier men of the Left — James Baldwin and Gore Vidal — he lost, and on his homeground of TV no less), and the smooth, intricately worked-out patter that would force a snake-oil hawker back to business school. I don’t even know where to begin with the disastrous stupidity of his involvement with the Edgar Smith case, which must be read to be believed… By the time Buckley was in his 80s, the old coot of a neocon began to soften, as he was forced to face the monstrous citadel he had created — Bush had just invaded Iraq, Trump was but a gleam in his eye. By 2003, he was too late; no op-ed could save Darling Bill. The wheels of history were once again in motion — and Little Bill Fauntleroy was left behind, left to wonder whether his friend Pinochet really did know what was gonna happen to that man with the glasses and the mustache...imagine the end of Scorsese’s THE IRISHMAN or Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST to see how history deals with so-called Great Men like William F Buckley, Jr.

Edgar Smith to Bill Buckley, 1979: “I’m beginning to suspect that the reason you and I got along so well is that we were/are so damn much alike — we’re both suckers for a sad story and neither of us learn from experience.”

[Andrés Pertierra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like most biographers, you can tell that the author has some affection for his subject. And, seeing as Max Boot endorsed the book, I went in unsure if I was starting a serious work or a hagiography. I’m pleased to report it is very much a case of the former.

This biography does a great job of illustrating, at once, why Buckley was so beloved and effective, on the one hand, and also fails to hold its tongue on his numerous flaws and ethical failings. This makes it widely useful because the criticisms will doubtless prove eye opening for many conservatives while the illustration of his strengths and human side will help to show those negatively disposed towards him (including me) a critical dimension of his person that would have been lost if the author had just excoriated him throughout.

[Ronald J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came to this biography as a lifelong admirer of William F. Buckley Jr., a subscriber to National Review since college, and someone who has read a great deal of Buckley in his own voice. So I did not need Sam Tanenhaus to introduce me to WFB. What I wanted was a deeper historical record of the man, the movement, the contradictions, the battles, the friendships, and the revolution he helped launch.

On that score, this book delivers.

Tanenhaus gives us Buckley as a prodigy, polemicist, Catholic, editor, sailor, debater, socialite, ideological entrepreneur, and movement-builder. He also gives us Buckley as a flawed man: wrong on race for far too long, too indulgent of McCarthy, occasionally careless with facts, blind to certain family and movement pathologies, and not always as rigorous economically as his admirers might wish. But the portrait is not a hit job. It is too deeply researched, too fair-minded, and too alive to Buckley’s gifts for that.

The great theme of the book is that Buckley did not merely write about conservatism; he created a home for it. Before National Review, the American Right was scattered among libertarians, ex-Communists, Catholic traditionalists, Southern reactionaries, anti-Communists, and eccentrics. Buckley’s genius was not that he reconciled all their contradictions. He didn’t. His genius was that he gave them a magazine, a language, a posture, and ultimately a movement.

Tanenhaus is especially good on Buckley the editor. He understood that politics is downstream from opinion, and opinion is shaped by institutions, magazines, books, debates, jokes, style, and social permission. Buckley made conservatism intellectually interesting, socially glamorous, and rhetorically dangerous. The Right had known thunder. Buckley added wit, style, and charm.
I did find some of Tanenhaus’s editorializing grating, especially on economics. His treatment of supply-side economics, Reagan deficits, and federal revenues deserved more discipline and fewer left-of-center assumptions. Congress taxes and spends, not presidents. Revenues did not simply “plunge” in the way he suggests. And the claim that “the theory was fiction” [supply-side economics] needs evidence, not attitude. I also found some of the speculation about sexuality, especially William Rusher, thinly supported and unnecessary.

But this is still an important biography. Tanenhaus has done the archival work. He digs into Buckley’s family, Yale, the CIA, God and Man at Yale, McCarthy, the founding of National Review, the long struggle over race, the break with the Birchers, the Goldwater insurgency, Firing Line, Reagan, and Buckley’s late-life reflections. The result is not the definitive Buckley—no single book could be—but it is a serious and valuable Buckley.

The book reminded me why I admire him so much. Buckley was not always right. But he was courageous, funny, learned, generous, industrious beyond belief, and one of the most consequential public intellectuals America has ever produced. He built something that lasted. He changed the weather.

And for a man who stood athwart history yelling “Stop,” he ended up moving history.

Memorable

William F. Buckley Jr.
"Now what I ought to sound like? You tell me."
–Buckley explaining his accent after growing up speaking Spanish, French, and English.
"It stands athwart history, yelling Stop."
–The most famous sentence Buckley ever wrote.
"I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."
–One of Buckley's greatest lines because it combines epistemic humility with anti-elitism.
"My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them."
–A Buckley credo.
"Why does baloney reject the grinder?"
–Buckley's explanation for why Robert Kennedy declined an invitation to appear on Firing Line.
“I always said it was a good thing The Communist Manifesto wasn’t well written. Or we would have lost Buckley.” ––William A. Rusher on WFB
“You ahrr too intelligent to believe in Gott.” ––Ayn Rand on first meeting WFB
"For William F. Buckley, genius at friendships of the kind that passes all understanding."
–He was conservative in his politics, but remarkably ecumenical in his friendships and intellectual interests.

“The right-wing’s grassy knoll.”

Marcel Proust
This may actually be the most important quote in the entire book because Tanenhaus deliberately places it at the beginning as a key to understanding ideology, politics, religion, and human nature:
"Facts do not penetrate the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished. They did not engender those beliefs and are powerless to destroy them."
—Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

Murray Kempton
One of the finest descriptions of Buckley ever written:
"For William F. Buckley, genius at friendships of the kind that passes all understanding."
—Murray Kempton
[WFB fought ideas ferociously while treating many of their advocates with curiosity, respect, and affection.]

Dean DeVane (Yale)
"The paper was alive and could not be ignored…. It was read eagerly because significant things were said and important issues debated."
––That's about as high a compliment as any publication can receive.

Paul Weiss
A wonderful observation about Buckley's intellectual gifts:
"He was very good at discussing books he hadn't read."
—Paul Weiss
Funny because it's partly true.

William F. Buckley Sr.
This one is really the seed from which the entire Buckley movement grew:
"Bolshevik Russia was an infinitely greater threat than Nazi Germany."
––Historically controversial, but enormously important for understanding the family's worldview. Nazis lasted how long? And USSR how long?

Alan Freed
"Makes ten times as much as I make, and he still calls me sir." —Alan Freed speaking about Elvis Presley

John Kenneth Galbraith
"Give it up."
Then:
"The whole thing. National Review, journalism, television, radio, lecturing."
And later:
"It is only books that count."
—John Kenneth Galbraith to Buckley
Buckley rejected the advice, but it raises a profound question:
What work actually endures?

Whittaker Chambers
The line Buckley considered prophetic:
"I am leaving the winning side for the losing side."
–That sentence shaped Buckley's understanding of conservatism for decades.
"To live is not to hold the lost redoubt," Chambers advised. "To live is to maneuver." The counterrevolution Buckley dreamed of "lacks one indispensable: it has no program...[and] it will not face historical reality."
–This is one of the most revealing moments in the entire biography. Chambers, unlike many conservatives of the era, was not a restorationist. He did not believe the New Deal could simply be repealed and the clock turned back to 1925. He was essentially telling Buckley: You don't conserve by standing still. You conserve by adapting.

Ronald Reagan Era Quotes
These are fascinating because history proved many of them spectacularly wrong:
Reagan was "nothing more than a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda."
—Howard Phillips
"December 8 will be remembered as the day the Cold War was lost."
—George Will
[George Will was reacting to the signing of the INF Treaty (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty) on December 8, 1987, at the Reagan-Gorbachev Washington Summit. The treaty eliminated an entire class of nuclear missiles: the U.S. Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles, and the Soviet SS-20s and related systems].

My disagreements with the author
Tanenhaus claims supply-side theory was “fiction.” Really? Any evidence?
He says federal revenues “rapidly plunged.” Incorrect. Look at the numbers!
He blames Reagan for the “largest deficits.” Congress is in charge of spending and taxes, not presidents.

[Justin Cohen · Rating 3 out of 5]

For initial context, this book was intended to be a continuation of my effort to better understand American conservatism (particularly cultural conservatism) and to see if I agree with any aspects of it. As was my conclusion when I read GAMAY and (for some odd reason) Buckley’s last book about his relationship with Reagan last year, the answer is generally no.

That judgement does not affect my 3 stars for the book. I found the book very enjoyable and a shockingly quick read (considering its absurd length), but like many people who have reviewed here, I did find it strangely paced (effectively two chapters for the final 20-30 years of Buckley’s life, vs 48 for the previous 60ish). I also think that sometimes Tanenhaus became notably repetitive, particularly when chronicling some foundational aspects of the broader conservative movement (likely because I’ve read somewhat better analyses of the particulars of how it shifted during this time period in classes and on my own, although I did find it serviceable) and the more negative aspects of Buckley’s personality (I read that he was bad at math/financial management wayyyyy too many times).

For me, the first half of the book is 5/5 (everything about Buckley from birth to graduation from Yale is amazing) while the later half is closer to a 2/5. Equals out to a solid 3.5 in my view.

[Robert Sparrenberger · Rating 4 out of 5]

I knew absolutely zero about Bill Buckley other than he started the National Review magazine. After reading 860 pages, I’m not sure that I know him any better. I didn’t feel like the author got inside his head to provide the deep insight I was looking for. I wish there had been more samples or brief excerpts of his writing at the beginning of a chapter and then expanded on after that. The things I did learn were the following:

1. Bill thought it would be funny to publish fake pentagon papers in his magazine.
2. He and Howard Hunt were good friends and Bill stuck up for his friend after Hunt had told him in confidence how bad the watergate situation was.
3. Bill had friends across the political spectrum. He may have gone after them in print and on tv but they enjoyed his presence in a social setting(except for Gore Vidal).

As I was reading this, I was trying to decide what Bill would say about the Donald. I’m not sure.

Worth a look if you are into heavy political books and policy.

[Chris Borden · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came to this book with much anticipation, having thoroughly enjoyed Tanenhaus's "Whitaker Chambers." Sadly, I have finished this book with some disappointment.

Part of the disappointment is my fault. Tanenhaus reveals Buckley's many faults and some I am saddened to learn.

My main disappointment, though, is with his misappropriate "spacing." In an 800+ book, Tanenhaus devotes most of his attention events prior to the 1980 election of Ronal Reagan. I found the chapters devoted to Reagan and Bush frustratingly thin. There was no mention of Buckley's response to the fall of the USSR, the Berlin Wall, or Bill Clinton's defeat of his good friend, George H.W. Bush. Did Tanenhaus run out strength to finish or was he afraid to vindicate Buckely?

Furthermore, in the closing pages Tanenhaus again debates Buckley's sexuality, a specious comment on the man's closing years of life. Having examined the issue earlier--Buckley's love of music, his odd mannerisms, his preference for male companionship--and having dismissed it, why on earth did Tanenhaus feel the urge to bring this up again near his death when he had already said in the same work it wasn't true?

I don't begrudge Tanenhaus's treatment of Buckley early life and politics, I just wished he had applied the same energies to the middle and end of his life.

[Abhi V · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like with Kotkin, such long books are impossible to review, or really even comment on. I will say that its end was unexpectedly very sad and moving, and have put me in a philosophical mood....

I half-read it (thank you to the Yale Conservative Party for giving me a copy) and half-listened, and I have made many, many notes, and maybe (although of course I always say this), I will collect them all, or synthesize my thoughts about them. But much of it also feels so personal and poignant... how could I write anything, without blocking people I know on here?

[Luke LeBar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very very long, but incredibly well written biography. A testament to the genius and rigor of its author Sam Tannenhaus, who spent 20 years writing this tome. He ended it well, reminding the reader of Buckley’s virtues of imagination, generosity, and personal kindness. But Buckley’s legacy speaks for itself. He was midwife to so many ideas that have been so damaging for so many people in this country. He never could move beyond many of his resentments towards a higher plane of thought or action, until the very end of his life. In this way, he is a warning to us all.

[Mike Troilo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sam Tanenhaus provides an entertaining, informative portrait of the most important American conservative of the 20th century. Whatever your politics, you are sure to enjoy this book if you enjoy history. This account of Buckley’s life is laden not only with the complexities of the man but also the development of the Left and the Right. The discussion of the alienation conservatives felt in the 1950s is eerily prescient.

[E · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are a million things to say about this William F. Buckley biography, it would take many paragraphs to write. I’ll keep it short: Sam Tanenhaus dispels many myths about Buckley, including his reputation as a moderator within the movement, and parts of his life that remained obscured like his sexuality. However, Buckley was two things: a conduit of dark conservative impulses in the postwar era and a master of theater. It’s hard not to see his impact on the contemporary Republican Party as it aligns itself with racist, paleo-conservative positions and finds ways to entertain and distract the public into normalizing its extremism.

[Alexandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to learn about the rise of the modern conservative political movement in the U.S. and also about a half a century’s worth of U.S. history, you must read this book. So honored I get to work with Sam. He’s such a meticulous researcher and more importantly a kind soul.

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

review tk

[Sarah Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tremendous intellectual subject but somehow feels like it neglects the intimacy of its subject. I wonder why he didn’t quote from his son more but than that might have been another 100 pages. Regardless, a fascinating portrait of an even more fascinating man who embodies the contradictions of conservatism.

[Jackie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very entertaining, thoughtful, and objective. Was a nice read for reading a portrayal that sold on human interest while still sticking to good journalistic principles about how to discuss the topic.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good! Wish I could’ve joined Bill and Jim when they drank martinis, took some acid, and went to the porno theater…bad dude though Ahem.