Buckley The life and the revolution that changed America

The conservative activist William F. Buckley helped make the American right a respectable rival to liberalism in part by making peace with liberal doctrine, according to this searching biography. Journalist Tanenhaus (The Death of Conservatism) recaps Buckley's career as founder of the National Review, host of the talk show Firing Line, author of splashy cultural critiques, and Republican Party kingmaker. Tanenhaus's Buckley is a charming and good-humored man; a sharp debater and facile writer, though a shallow and often factually challenged thinker; and a loyal friend but a bad judge of character. (He once helped free a National Review reader jailed for murder who went on to attempt murder again.) A scion of oil wealth, Buckley built bridges between plutocratic conservatism and the populist New Right, a fusion that helped propel Ronald Reagan to the presidency. In Tanenhaus's telling, Buckley embodies a gradual, grudging conservative accommodation with liberal fundamentals, moving from pre-WWII isolationism to support for anti-communist interventionism, from genteel apologias for Jim Crow to an acceptance of the civil rights revolution, and from denunciations of big government to tacit acknowledgment that big government was here to stay. Tanenhaus is clear-eyed about Buckley's many failures but also does justice to his eccentric charisma, humanity, and wit. This elegant, capacious character study shows how Buckley's spadework opened many of the fault lines that still fracture American politics. (June)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.