Oh, where have you gone, William F. Buckley, Jr.?

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — American conservatism was not always a primary political force in the United States, nor were its ideals and principles well articulated for a mass audience. Then came William F. Buckley Jr.

With his precise Connecticut diction and boyish blond hair, Buckley’s firebrand form of intellectualism gave conservative ideology a face, name and energy in the decades following Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal America. During the latter half of the 20th century, Buckley was everywhere — on television and radio, his columns syndicated to hundreds of newspapers (he wrote some 6,000 over his lifetime), and he could even be found in the halls of power, including the White House.

Through the publication he founded, National Review, Buckley articulated his views cheerfully and with acerbic humor. His tenets were those associated with conservative ideology today — individual liberty, unregulated capitalism, traditional family values and the importance of faith — and he championed them while goodnaturedly sparring with his ideological opposites.

“Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view,” Buckley wrote in 1959, “it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.”

Buckley’s influence on American culture will be freshly examined with the June publication of a biography written by a writer that Buckley himself selected: Sam Tanenhaus, a historian and former editor of The New York Times Review of Books.

The two got along well after collaborating on Tanenhaus’s biography of Whittaker Chambers and, in the past 10 years of his life, Buckley gave Tanenhaus access to his personal papers as well as substantial interview opportunities. Twenty-five years later, “BUCKLEY: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America” will be released on June 3.

On Friday, Tanenhaus was at Buckley’s alma mater, Yale University, for a conversation at the Yale Review Festival.

“He’s not just an ideologue. He’s a very interesting, more-complicated person than you might think,” said Tanenhaus, whose book comes in at a door-stopping 1,040 pages. “I was never in the company of someone whose mind worked as fast as his. And he was just a step ahead of you.”

Interviewing Tanenhaus was Beverly Gage, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian and biographer of J. Edgar Hoover. A professor at Yale, she often interacts with Buckley’s personal archives, which are stored on the campus — the same school with which Buckley had, at best, a contentious relationship.

“One of the things that has always struck me in thinking about Buckley and teaching about Buckley is that he narrated himself as both an insider — he loved to be at the center of things… — and then he [was] this ferocious outsider: ‘the most misunderstood man of a movement that came from out in the wilderness to forge through the American consensus of the establishment,‘” Gage said.

Tanenhaus agreed. Though Buckley’s father was fiercely opposed to the New Deal, the family lived 30 minutes away from FDR and frequented some of the same social circles as the president. Buckley was a conservative who attended a college that taught liberal economic policies and he had religion professors who were atheists, and yet he still managed to become the chairman of the Yale Daily News and “a big man on campus,” Tanenhaus said.

Buckley’s first book, “God and Man at Yale,” was a scathing denunciation of the school.

The talk covered Buckley’s anti-communism, which first showed itself as support of Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator whose name is now synonymous with “The Red Scare” and the political persecution of supposed communists in the 1950s. Gage suggested that his commitment to anti-communism became “not only the central part of his worldview,” but allowed him to assemble the team of conservatives that became National Review and promote a common cause.

Tanenhaus suggested, too, that his defense of McCarthy forged one of the more effective arguments still used by some conservatives today. “So, you don’t like McCarthy. Does that mean you like communists better?”

In the years that followed, Buckley made a “transition from being the intellectual gadfly, to being someone who’s much more directly engaged in politics,” Gage said. He helped to nominate a prominent conservative onto the Republican presidential ticket in Barry Goldwater, then ran a mostly performative bid for mayor of New York that garnered significant national attention for his political views, which he used to create his television brand. His show “Firing Line” lead to a series of era-defining debates.

“The best thing he had was his ability to listen,” said Tanenhaus. “The way I call it, a ‘predatory attentiveness.’ He wanted to know what you were going to say so he could take it apart.”

He quickly rose to greater and greater spheres of influence, which culminated in the presidential election of 1979. By that November, Buckley had helped to usher in a new president in Ronald Reagan, whose platform was aligned with much that Buckley had argued for since his days at Yale. It represented a sea change in how America understood its values from the days of progressive politics and large-scale federal actions to one of smaller government, free markets and more traditional family values.

“Reagan was in some ways a creation of Bill Buckley, ideologically,” Tanenhaus said.

In the Q&A following the talk, an audience member asked Tanenhaus — who admitted that he doesn’t always agree with Buckley or conservative politics — if he had been co-opted by the charm and affability of Buckley.

“It’s very complicated,’ said Tanenhaus. “If you were in his company, no matter who you were, then you’d be treated with courtesy and dignity. I’d rather have more of that in a culture than less.”

He added, “Given all the options, all the ways things can go and have gone, I think we’re better off with him than without him.”