Did Bill Buckley Really Lead a Successful Revolution?
You can hear echoes of Buckley's early career in more than one MAGA crusader's rhetoric today. That's not a sign of a man who won.
Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America, by Sam Tanenhaus, Random House, 1,040 pages, $40
For decades, William F. Buckley Jr.—journalist, editor, novelist, television host, mayoral candidate, high society bon vivant, and former CIA agent—was the undeniable intellectual head of the American right. Until the rise of Rush Limbaugh in the 1990s, Buckley was likely the right's most genuinely popular exemplar as well: By no means restricted to the pages of National Review, the conservative magazine he founded in 1955, Buckley had a 33-year, 1,504-episode run of his TV show Firing Line and a syndicated newspaper column that at its height appeared in 350 publications.
Fewer than 20 years after Buckley's 2008 death, few influential American conservatives act as though they are more than vaguely aware that he existed, at least from how often his spirit or words are explicitly invoked. But a careful read of Sam Tanenhaus' Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America, a new biography that was nearly three decades in the works, suggests that more than one contemporary right-wing figure is in many ways recapitulating Buckley's early career, whether consciously or not.
Tanenhaus does not spell that out explicitly. Buckley's position vis-à-vis the contemporary American right is not an obvious concern of this book, which mentions the name Donald Trump exactly once, in the future president's role as a real estate entrepreneur and supporter of Roy Cohn. But it's easy to come away from this book wondering just how many truly lasting victories William Buckley ultimately won.
Buckley's father, who grew up in Texas but lived for many years as an oil wildcatter in Mexico, imbued his kids with a Catholic old-time conservatism that mistrusted the state and communists—and Jews, an enmity that led four of his kids (not young William Jr.) to burn a cross in front of a Jewish resort in 1937.
The junior Buckley's first public speech, written in February 1941, was "In Defense of Charles Lindbergh." Specifically, Buckley defended the airman from accusations of Nazi sympathies while Lindbergh was agitating to keep America out of World War II. Buckley's first book, and first New York Times bestseller, was God and Man at Yale (1951), which denounced the regnant institutions of American liberal culture for turning their back on religious faith. God and Man attacked, as the conservative journalist John Chamberlain explained in its introduction, an "elite of professorial Untouchables" who were wedded to an "unadmitted orthodoxy" in the guise of objectivity: "agnostic as to religion, 'interventionist' and Keynesian as to economics, and collectivist as applied to the relation of the individual to society and government."
Buckley, a free speech absolutist for those who wanted to keep the U.S. out of World War II, adopted a more authoritarian mindset in the Cold War, and had colleagues who thought espousing communism should be straight-up illegal, though Buckley did not go quite that far. But in his second book, co-written with his brother-in-law Brent Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies, he predicted that even liberals in America would someday find "the patience of America may at last be exhausted, and we will strike out against" them. He cooperated with the FBI in investigating the feared communist presence at Yale. In 2025, this sounds like a prototype for the academic activist Christopher Rufo, or maybe the podcaster Ben Shapiro: Like them, young Buckley decried and strove to defeat a smug intellectual elite barricaded into educational institutions that he accused of annihilating American values.
Buckley's early days also summon thoughts of the neo-reactionary writer Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. "Mencius Moldbug." Both men feared what Yarvin calls "the Cathedral": a complex of institutions and ideas trying to convince the world that only progressivism can be tolerated. In a 1949 speech, Buckley complained that "hundreds of thousands of students leave the universities every year, and their influence pervades the entire country. They get jobs with the government, with newspapers, with the civil service. In a very few years the intellectual collectivist drive of the universities is translated into legislative and public policy." In a 1950 speech at Yale, he declared the university "is very, very allergic to criticism from the liberal, who is the absolute dictator of the United States today." In God and Man, he wrote that "there are limits within which [Yale's] faculty members must keep their opinions if they wish to be 'tolerated.'" He wondered "how long a person who revealed himself as a racist, who lectured about the anthropological superiority of the Aryan, would last at Yale."
Buckley was also a premature exponent of worries about the sinister machinations of a "deep state." McCarthy and His Enemies defended Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R–Wisc.). As Tanenhaus notes, McCarthy's "vigilante crusade went after a second group—not Communists (everyone already knew about them) but the much bigger universe of treasonists, shadowy functionaries in the State Department, the CIA, even the U.S. Army—what later came to be called the 'deep state'—always abetted by their handmaidens, the 'intellectuals and the "liberal press."'" Especially the press: "It was the lords of media who put the most vivid pictures in people's heads and expertly applied the instruments of social pressure to shape and direct public opinion."
In a pre-publication fundraising letter for what became National Review, Buckley argued, Yarvin-style, that opinion makers "control the elected," by which he meant "not merely our political office-holders" but "everyone who administers any form of public trust, such as government, schools, churches, civic organizations, and our channels of communication, information, and entertainment." Though in this case, Tanenhaus notes, Buckley perceived "not a secret conspiracy but a coordinated duplicity of the like-minded."
Buckley's patrician reputation and his ability to befriend intellectual opponents have led some to think he'd disapprove of Trump. But it seems unlikely that the Buckley of the 1950s would have felt that way.
When National Review launched, one of Buckley's most influential mentors was Willmoore Kendall, who then was a political philosophy professor at Yale. Kendall helped turn the firebrand who started his public career as a critic of American involvement in overseas wars into someone who thought the battle against communism was the highest public policy concern—and that it might demand, in Buckley's own words, "native despotism" and nuking millions of innocents. For Kendall, McCarthy exemplified "the true American tradition…less that of Fourth of July orations and our constitutional law textbooks, with their cluck-clucking over the so-called preferred freedoms, than, quite simply, that of riding somebody out of town on a rail." That's Trump's stance on immigrants and leftists right there.
It was easier for Buckley to seem like the king of American conservatism before National Review–era conservatives started achieving real-world political victories. Their first major win was the ascension of Barry Goldwater to the GOP nomination in 1964—followed by his crushing defeat in November, which many assumed was the death of the American hard right in the party.
Buckley knew better than to put all his project's weight on Goldwater; he doubted the Arizona senator's intellectual and ideological bona fides and thought the man wasn't "smart or educated enough to be president," as Tanenhaus summed it up. (Goldwater believed the same about himself.) Buckley wasn't comfortable getting fully behind him with an endorsement until after he won the California primary in June 1964.
But Goldwater's political success, such as it was, put a fire in the belly of a new generation of conservative activists, many organized under the banner of Young Americans for Freedom, famously born in 1960 at Buckley's Connecticut home. Buckley, who believed his was a fully oppositional movement when he launched National Review to "stand athwart history, yelling stop," was amazed to find the activists who arose around the Goldwater campaign "talk about affecting history."
Buckley's crew was generally not very excited about Richard Nixon, the 1968 Republican nominee. They hadn't even officially endorsed him in his first go-round as the Republican nominee, back in 1960. But Buckley came around in 1968, becoming a major media defender bordering on lackey to Nixon and his foreign policy maven Henry Kissinger. (He was then bitterly disappointed when President Nixon, who he thought was at least staunchly anti-Communist if not sufficiently conservative at home, opened relations with China.) Bozell, who became a Catholic traditionalist, saw the embrace of Nixon as the death of the original Buckleyite conservatism. As Tanenhaus paraphrased Bozell, under Nixon "all the old targets—big government, Keynesian economics, 'compulsory welfare'—had been left untouched. And all the high values—states' rights, 'the constitutional prerogatives of Congress,' a militant anti-Soviet foreign policy…had been betrayed."
But Ronald Reagan's ascension to the presidency in 1980 felt like the apotheosis that Buckley had been working toward: an anti-Communist who espoused free markets now ruled America. Curiously, that's exactly when Tanenhaus' narrative momentum falls apart, with the last 27 years of Buckley's life getting 30 pages after Reagan strolls into the Oval Office.
While this book is very long, and very long in the works, it could leave devotees of American right-wing history wishing Tanenhaus had reported more on, say, the relationships between Buckley and other National Review staffers over the years, or how the flagship conservative magazine's concerns and approaches changed during the years Buckley managed it.
One could also wish Tanenhaus gave us more details about Buckley's relationship with the CIA, where he officially worked—under the tutelage of future Watergate burglar Howard Hunt—from July 1951 to March 1952. Specifically, it would be good to either reinforce or dispel suspicions about how much, if anything, the CIA had to do with Buckley's later choices as a public figure and as editor of National Review. (Hunt, as various figures suspicious of Buckley have noted, had a career largely devoted to clandestine psywar and disinformation.) During his time on the CIA payroll, Tanenhaus reports, the agency assigned Buckley to seek out student activists in Mexico "to lure away from Communism and into the non-Communist left. It was not the ideal task for Buckley, who deemed liberals 'far more dangerous' than Communists."
Tanenhaus does take the time to explicitly reject the suspicion, nursed even by the early and important National Review contributor Frank Meyer, that Buckley's magazine was essentially a CIA operation. But he also notes that in the 1970s, as the agency was tarred by a series of scandals, "Buckley supported the CIA in its growing time of crisis, publishing essays by former operatives who not only defended the CIA at every turn—even after reports of illegal domestic spying— but also drew on information and arguments supplied by the Agency."
Tanenhaus is out to tell stories about his subject, not to sit in judgment. Still, he devotes a thick throughline to Buckley's attitudes about African Americans. The Buckley family appears to have treated black people decently on a personal level. (When a black schoolteacher wanted to buy some land from William Sr., he gave it to him as a gift.) But in 1957, Buckley infamously argued for denying black southerners meaningful electoral participation, declaring that "the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage." He took a long time to stop downplaying or ignoring the violence inherent in efforts to keep African Americans down, and to stop blaming Southern racial troubles on outside agitators.
Buckley, his former protégé Garry Wills once wrote, "could turn any event into an adventure, a joke, a showdown." This book's tone and feel rarely hit with the best of Buckley's fizz or verve. Despite its length, it feels too thin rather than too thick when it comes to the question of whether Buckley did in fact effect a revolution in America.
Decades after Reagan won office, America's current president is a trade-hating Republican who is consistently soft on the Soviet Union's heir, Vladimir Putin. Given that, one might question whether Buckley truly had enough lasting impact to warrant a book this size. The best of Buckley's ideas—restraining much of the government and protecting market liberties—do hopefully have a future. The worst, such as his attitudes on how to wage war and how to handle America's racial troubles, we can only hope remain a part of the past.