Conservatism rooted in civility, decency and faith — how William F. Buckley Jr.’s revolution changed America

William F. Buckley Jr. was “the intellectual leader of the modern conservative movement,” writes Sam Tanenhaus in the opening of his 1,000-page biography published this week.

From Buckley “came an entire political movement,” Tanenhaus said in an interview with the Deseret News. “He’s the creator of a huge world. How does he do it? It’s fun to tell that story.”

“Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America” chronicles the life of the charismatic intellectual who brought to the mainstream a political ideology that was anathema to the “New Deal” government that defined much of the century. Through his magazine, books, TV show and political efforts, Buckley’s brand of conservatism became a force within American politics.

Tanenhaus got to know Buckley, who died at age 82 in 2008, while writing a biography of Whittaker Chambers in the mid-1990s. In order to tell that story, he realized that he would need the help of Buckley, who was Chambers’ “last patron and most eloquent champion,” Tanenhaus wrote. The two men had worked together at National Review and were great friends. Despite his initial hesitation, Buckley was extremely generous with his time, and he liked the Chambers book so much that he chose Tanenhaus to write his biography.

Nearly 30 years later, the biography has been published by Random House. It includes previously untold stories about Buckley’s life and plenty of fresh insights about the man that many consider to be the 20th century’s greatest conservative. Despite its length, it’s a page-turner, providing new perspectives into some of the past century’s biggest political moments, and surprising elements about Buckley’s life, including his ties to the CIA and his family’s influence in the deep South, including support and management of a South Carolina newspaper that was staunchly pro-segregation.

Tanenhaus recently spoke with the Deseret News about the contradictions in Buckley’s public and private persona, his outsized insistence upon civility and decency as a result of his deep faith, and how he would have responded to the rise of MAGA.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Deseret News: What were the big surprises that you encountered while doing your research?

Sam Tanenhaus: Today people don’t understand how big his public self was because they don’t remember how famous Buckley was. I meet people all the time who’ve never heard of him — people in their 50s who don’t remember who he was. In my day, he was arguably the most famous intellectual in America.

One surprise was getting to know the quieter, more private Buckley. When I learned his first girlfriend had been this young woman he’d met in San Antonio and how his parents didn’t approve of her because she made a grammatical error, that opened up a lot about Buckley’s background. ... He was very bright and sincere. He had a lot of emotion about him. He was more a man of feeling than of intellect, is what I discovered.

The big discovery was that the family’s basically Southern. They’re not Connecticut Yankees — they are Catholics, from two very Catholic parts of the country: the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, which is mainly Tejano, and New Orleans, where his mother was from.

The other one was the business failures. The risk that man took on the stock market, buying boats he couldn’t afford, and he got it from his father. You know, his father was an endless risk taker. And that’s how Bill Buckley approached everything — the family empire, the oil empire, the conservative movement, the financing of National Review.

Everything was done in a very bold, gambling way. There were big wins and big losses. Yes, he’s a great talker, a good writer and absurdly articulate — the most articulate man of his time, probably — but he’s a gambler. That’s when I saw this as a story about a larger-than-life person. It’s not just a story about the founder of “this” and the architect of “that,” the mentor and tutor to Reagan and Goldwater. Yes, this was a guy who lived a big, American life in the 20th century.

DN: Do you think that he would see the MAGA movement as an extension of what he started?

ST: What Buckley’s great contribution was, the pioneering brilliant insight is, these are not fights about policy and politics. They’re fights about culture. Who owns America? Who belongs in America? What does it mean to be an American? That’s what the fights were about then, and it’s what they are about now.

I’m careful with the word “genius,” but it’s a kind of genius for provocation and debate. So if he looked around, what would Buckley say? Well, he’d look at a book like Chris Rufo’s book on the academic left (“America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything”), and I think he’d find little bits and pieces he could support, but it might be a little difficult.

He would never want these people in his house, I’ll tell you that. I don’t think he would invite a lot of MAGA people over to Stamford (Ct.) or to Manhattan to listen to the latest Bach performer. It’s not a question of snobbishness — by the way, Buckley was not a snob. People always say that about him, but it’s not true. He was open to all kinds of people.

DN: Do you think that Buckley would recognize the term “conservative” in the way that it is being used today?

ST: He was much better at saying what he and like-minded people were opposed to, than what they were for. A conservative could easily say, as WFB often did, “Well, these are all the things we opposed and if we got rid of them, we’d have a free and better society.” Which is fair enough, except it puts you in the position of not really formulating the way you’re going to go forward. That was a problem they really struggled with — he and others on his side.

What he became instead, in his own mind and publicly, was a commentator and critic on what was going on in the world; he was really good at it. He could dismantle liberal arguments better than anyone. He could see all the contradictions.

Buckley was really erudite and, especially as he matured, really humane, open-minded and intellectually curious. Those things, we’re not finding a whole lot of today.

But here is one thing — early on in the late ‘50s, he was asked by Mike Wallace, “What’s your idea of the counter revolution?” Buckley said, “Overturning the New Deal and the worldview that came out of it.” Well, you can look at what’s going on right now and see (Trump’s first 100 days) in reverse and say, to some extent, that’s what’s going on in the movement. What’s different is the humane and embracing quality Buckley took to it.

A good example of that was how his ideas on civil rights and race evolved. Here is a guy who came out of the deep South and yet, what happened? He has this great interview with Muhammad Ali and brings the Black Panthers on television. There was this idea that you could have the conversation in a really unrestrained way. There were mistakes, and Buckley would learn from those things, too. That’s what was really different: he had enough confidence in what he believed that he thought, give us a chance, give us a hearing, and we will find the points of agreement. Now it’s warfare all the time.

DN: Civility seems to be a hallmark of his character, something so far from being a priority in modern day politics. Do you think that he would take any umbrage with the way modern politics have evolved to be somewhat indecent?

ST: Yes, he would. I asked him once about Bill O’Reilly. He said, “I don’t like him, he’s a bully.” I thought, “Well, that’s interesting, because people used to say that about you, Bill Buckley.” But he evolved beyond that, and he just thought you should treat people with courtesy.

That’s why he was able to have those great interviews with Black Power advocates and militants ... because the way the Buckleys were brought up (is) when you’re face to face with someone, you treat that person as your equal. That hostility would go away. In print, he’d be very tough on them. He was very tough on Jesse Jackson, but he really liked Jackson. When he would come to New York, they would have lunch and he’d bring other National Review people. He just thought they should get to know him. That was the civility that, in theory, could bring all people together.

DN: You detail several of Buckley’s father’s risky business ventures and point out that he acted much the same. I don’t think of that behavior as in step with conservative principles. Is that a wrong way to think about it?

ST: That is a 100% right way to think about it. That’s the great paradox. He did not have a conservative temperament. He’s a man of conservative belief, of orthodox, Catholic, conservative belief, who’s got a very liberal temperament. The key there was to look at who his friends were. Most of his good friends — the people he really felt at ease with — were liberals, because the politics didn’t matter. What he liked was the joie de vivre that Norman Mailer or Ken Galbraith had. There’s a great guy named Claudio Velez, who was a favorite sailing companion of WFB. He told me once that he said to him, “Why do you have me sail with you all the time, when I’m a liberal, I don’t agree with you about anything?” And Buckley said, “That’s why.”

Also, he is a club man, which is really important. Skull and Bones, Bohemian Grove, CIA, upper realm of the Republican Party. He loved being a part of the club, and he loved the secret knowledge you have as a member. He was very good at guarding people’s secrets. That’s why powerful people trusted him — Kissinger, Nixon, Reagan, Howard Hunt. I did not realize how deeply involved in the CIA Buckley was because until fairly recently no one understood how far the reach of the CIA went. Major publications were being subsidized by them, and Buckley was really doing CIA work. It wasn’t cloak and dagger work, but he was doing CIA propaganda when he worked for Nixon.

To my mind, that’s when the decline started. Once he got inside the Nixon administration — which turned out to be what we thought, until recently, was the most corrupt in history — he found himself in a real awkward position and was tied up because he prized personal loyalty. He didn’t care about Nixon, but he cared about his friend Howard (Hunt). He wanted to protect him.

One reason Bill Buckley became so large a figure was that he classically fit the profile of a literary star and celebrity in the 1960s. He’s a great-looking guy, he has these fancy parties, he travels, he’s an outdoor athlete. Next to Mailer, Capote, John Updike and Tom Wolfe, Buckley was the one conservative and he knew it. And he used that in a brilliant way to expand the public’s understanding of what a conservative might be.

Like that great memoir “Cruising Speed” — probably his best book — he’s telling the public, you do not have to be like Richard Nixon to be a Republican. You can be like me, Bill Buckley. You can mingle with literary people. You can have a fun celebration for your magazine. You can have lunch with great musicians. You can travel with the world of the arts, have a lot of gay friends. You could do all of this. You could be a socialite and still be a conservative. That was really important to do back then. It’s why people came to admire him so much.

DN: What gave Buckley the confidence to have so much cultural crossover between the high-society art world and the conservative movement? Could that happen today?

ST: Part of me has this optimism, and I think I got it from WFB ... he was a why-not guy. Why couldn’t you do the things he did, if you’re willing to take the hit and get name-called? They’re gonna come after you, because if you deviate one degree from the party line, you’re persona non grata. We’ve seen it. But if you put up with that and have confidence in the public ... ? He was convinced he could break through and that people would listen to him, and that came out of his faith.

You cannot underestimate the significance, the value and the richness for William Buckley of his Catholicism. It opened up a locker and it made him think you could talk to anybody, anyone could be your friend. It comes right out of the Bible. In that sense, yes, somebody could do it if they would take the risks he did and be willing to suffer the consequences he did. Yeah, they’re gonna call you names, write you off, ridicule you, but if you can handle yourself with composure and believe in what you’re doing, I don’t see why it couldn’t happen.

In his last years, Buckley became an admirer of Martin Luther King. He’d been merciless toward him when he was younger, but he came around on that. Why? Because Dr. King had brought spirituality into politics, and he really admired that. Bill Buckley gave a speech and he said, “Dr. King brought religion, he brought God into politics in the best way. He brought the spiritual connection.”

DN: There’re certain parts of Buckley’s character that, in a 21st-century context, would make it easy to write him off. But his civility and decency were so evident in your book.

ST: I met law students at Yale because a professor invited me in to talk specifically about the race chapters in the book. He distributed the ones about (the newspaper in) Camden, South Carolina, and that’s the big news in the book.

The thing I noticed when I spoke to the college students — they’re mainly in their 20s and many people of color — I asked, “Well, what did you make of Buckley?” They were surprisingly open to him. They saw that Buckley was a guy who, in his own mind, thought he was being incredibly charitable and generous. It’s an older, paternalistic view. It has overtones of the old plantation South. There’s no denying it and it’s foolish to try to wish it away, but it doesn’t mean that on a face-to-face level he couldn’t look someone in the eye, listen to what they said, invite them on his television program and open up a platform for them. That feels so different from where we are now.

DN: How did Buckley, and how do you, reconcile his more unfavorable characteristics with some of his best, most charitable ways of interacting with the world?

ST: I do not think you can reconcile the different sides of William F. Buckley Jr. He’s a really complicated person. This was the biggest surprise of all. For somebody who was so whole-seeming, so complete a specimen in the outward sense, he was a very complicated, self-contradictory, ambiguous person. If you look at the picture of his Stamford office at the end of his life, it is an unholy mess. It’s an absolute, chaotic mess. He’s disciplined, but not organized. And the contradictions in himself ... He never tried to reconcile. He left them out there for us to try to sift through. They’re irreconcilable differences. The mystery of Bill Buckley defies explanation. His best friend said this about him: They never thought they really knew him.

Correction: A previous version of this article made reference to William F. Buckley Jr.’s Stanford office. The office was in Stamford, Ct.