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In 1951, a 25-year-old oil heir with an unplaceable accent declared war on Yale University — and modern American conservatism was born. 

William F. Buckley Jr. understood what few politicians grasped: Politics was becoming theater, and ideological battles would be won on cultural battlefields.

How did we get here? How did the Republican Party transform into MAGA? The answer lies with Buckley — he was the engine that drove this evolution.

On this WhoWhatWhy podcast, Sam Tanenhaus, former editor of The New York Times Book Review and the author of Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, discusses his monumental 1,000+ page biography of Buckley, a project 30 years in the making. Through meticulous research, including previously unknown family archives, Tanenhaus reveals how Buckley became the original conservative-coalition builder — simultaneously maintaining elite respectability while appealing to grassroots activists.

Tanenhaus explains that Buckley’s genius lay in understanding how to bring together anti-communists, racial conservatives, libertarians, John Birchers, McCarthyites, and fringe conspiracy theorists under one umbrella. He was both aristocratic elitist and populist performer, a charming dinner companion and a strategic pragmatist willing to support questionable allies when necessary.

From his support of Joe McCarthy to his family’s secret activities during the Civil Rights era, from his role in Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign to his influence on Ronald Reagan, virtually everything we see in today’s conservative movement can be traced back to Buckley’s vision and methods.

Tanenhaus’s exhaustive research reveals the contradictions and complexities of the man who gave respectability to fringe ideas about governing philosophy and made extremism entertaining.

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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)

[00:00:14] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. Picture this, a 25-year-old heir to an oil fortune, speaking in an accent no one can quite place, stands before the American public in 1951 and declares war on Yale University. Not just any war, a holy war against what he sees as the godless, collectivist corruption of America’s elite universities. The young man’s weapon? Words. His battlefield? The emerging media landscape of post-war America. His name? William F. Buckley, Jr. In that moment, modern American conservatism was born not in the halls of Congress or the boardrooms of business, but in the mind of a performer who understood with prophetic clarity that politics was becoming theater. Fast forward to today, when Tucker Carlson pounds his fist on the table and declares Buckley one of the great villains of the 20th century. When the movement Buckley created seems to have devoured its own founding principles. When the careful balance he orchestrated between respectability and radicalism has shattered into something he might not recognize, or perhaps something that was always latent in his vision. For nearly three decades, Sam Tanenhaus has been excavating the life and contradictions of William F. Buckley, Jr. The result is not just a biography, but an autopsy of American conservatism itself. In a thousand pages of meticulous detail, Tanenhaus reveals Buckley as the original American influencer, a man who built an empire on television debates, best-selling books, and a magazine that transformed fringe ideas into governing philosophy. But here’s where it gets interesting. Buckley was simultaneously the architect of modern conservatism and its first prisoner, a devout Catholic who defended the indefensible, a champion of Western civilization who opposed democracy, a generous friend who could be manipulated by sociopaths, a Yale man who made his fortune attacking Yale, a son of the South who lived like a Connecticut aristocrat, complete with limousines, yachts, and a harpsichord maker with Parkinson’s. Through it all, Buckley performed, always performed, with a wit that could charm his enemies and a certainty that never wavered. I never had doubts, he once told the priest, not about his faith, not about his politics, not about anything. Today, as American conservatism wrestles with its own identity, as the Republican Party splits between its establishment and populist wings, as we debate the very nature of democracy itself, Buckley’s ghost haunts every discussion. Did he save conservatism or doom it? Did he give the moment intellectual respectability or merely teach it how to make extremism entertaining? My guest today, Sam Tanenhaus, former editor of the New York Times Book Review and the author of the definitive biography of Whitaker Chambers. In his new book, Buckley, The Life and the Revolution that Changed America, he doesn’t just tell the story of a remarkable life. It forces us to confront an uncomfortable question. What happens when a movement’s greatest success becomes its original sin? Because in the end, Buckley’s revolution did change America. The question Tanenhaus poses, and that we must answer, is whether that change was a triumph or a tragedy, or perhaps in the most Buckley-esque irony of all, both at the same time. It is my pleasure to welcome Sam Tannenhaus here to the Who, What, Why podcast to talk about Buckley, The Life and the Revolution that Changed America. Sam, thanks so much for joining us.

[00:03:52] Sam Tanenhaus: Jeff, what a great introduction and summary that was. Thank you. There’s been a lot, as you know, written about this book and written about Bill Buckley. I don’t think anybody has distilled it just as well as you did there. I’m a little blown away, so give me a moment to recover, and then we’ll keep talking.

[00:04:12] Jeff Schechtman: Well, thank you very much. I want to talk, in a general sense, you worked on this project. You’ve been dealing with Buckley for almost 30 years now. Certainly, a lot has transpired with respect to American politics, American conservatism, the perception of Buckley. So much has transformed in that period. Talk a little bit about the process of working on this in a world that was constantly changing with respect to everything that Buckley touched, and the perceptions of him.

[00:04:45] Sam Tanenhaus: Well, to give you an idea of that, Jeff, consider I signed the contract for this book in 1998, and at that moment, it seemed as if the Buckley vision in the largest and most capacious sense had been a triumph. Why? Well, because the most brilliant and gifted politician he mentored, a guy from California named Ronald Reagan, had been elected in 1980 and worked these large changes in America. In the telling of some, it’s always more complicated than the tellings of some, he’d won the Cold War. And then his next most gifted successor, his immediate successor, George Bush, George, the elder George Bush, had closed out the Cold War. That’s when the Soviet Union ended, and the new idea of order had been created, the New World Order, as George Bush called it, much to his later chagrin. Then he was succeeded by Bill Clinton, and that was a key figure, Jeff, because Clinton was the Democrat who essentially extended the Reagan vision of what we now called neoliberal economic policy, and also the idea of America as the great enforcer of global democracy. Much in the way for listeners who were interested in this sort of thing, Dwight Eisenhower, when he’d been elected in 1952, had more or less confirmed the New Deal version of his Democratic predecessors, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. That’s the moment in which I began writing this book. Buckley was still very much alive. He’d retired somewhat. He’d been closely supportive of the Chambers biography that you mentioned, biography of Whitaker Chambers. And I thought, here will be the book that tells the story, Buckley, of the great conservative who won, who triumphed. And then over the next years, all that history changed in just the way you described. So here I am as a biographer, sifting through the record, his enormous archive at Yale, which is the size of a presidential archive. Jeff, the man, received and answered 600 letters a week, in the days when people actually wrote letters and put them in the mail. At the same time, I discovered there’s a second life. The Buckley family led, his nine siblings and his parents, in South Carolina at the time of the Civil Rights Revolution. And I uncovered new materials there that showed how closely the Buckleys had been involved in what was then called massive resistance to the civil rights movement in the South. And I realized Buckley, the great anti-communist, who’d been the visionary for that belief that communism could be defeated, was at the same time building a movement that was racially driven and tried to reinforce the old, really pre-Civil War ideas of race in America. And so when those two collided, we also got the political movement we had today. And to my surprise, and many other people, as they read the book, Bill Buckley was at the center of that revolution too. So that was the story I had to tell, even as I uncovered the facts of his remarkable and brilliant personal life and career.

[00:08:23] Jeff Schechtman: And part of the brilliance of his politics early on was his ability, and this relates to what you were talking about in terms of what you discovered, was his ability to build and to see coalitions, that he brought together the anti-communists, the racial element, the libertarian element, that he saw a way in his conservatism to bring all of this together.

[00:08:49] Sam Tanenhaus: Yes, because he was a builder of coalitions, as you say, also someone who lived his life in these very large orbits of friendships and companionships, partly because, Jeff, he was the sixth of 10 children growing up in this enormous, beautiful estate in what’s called the Northwest corner of Connecticut. When the Roosevelt’s were critic, when the Buckley’s were criticizing the Roosevelt’s at the time of the New Deal, that was the Buckley’s criticizing their near neighbor, Franklin Roosevelt, who went to the horse shows where Bill Buckley and his siblings competed, equestrian competitions. It was an inside world of the privileged and elite. Well, they had this second home, as I’ve described, in an antebellum mansion in South Carolina. So Buckley was already from the beginning, he’s a northerner and a southerner. His family was Catholic, but they weren’t the defensive kind of immigrant Catholics that was familiar in that era, the no-Irish-need-applied Catholics. His father came from the south of Texas. His mother came from New Orleans. Those were Catholic regions of the country. So Buckley thought of himself as a kind of Catholic aristocrat, which is really unusual. One of his friends said, Bill Buckley’s not a conservative, he’s a Spanish aristocrat. Well, Mexican was a little closer. That’s where his father made his fortune. So Buckley grew up speaking several languages, French, Spanish, and English. He knew people who came from all different corners of the globe. He goes off to Yale after World War II, and he’s the king of the campus. He’s the biggest man on campus in days when that term BMOC really meant something. And he’s a brilliant writer and debater, and his professors treat him as an equal. And so he’s tremendously elevated in this world of clubbiness and elite prestige at the same time that his politics are totally reactionary. So how do you combine those two? Well, to be the charming, ingratiating guy everybody wants in their club and everybody wants for dinner on Friday or Saturday night, at the same time that you make sure of the grassroots activists in your movement, like today we call them MAGA. Back then they were forgotten Americans or members of the John Birch Society. You keep all those people together. And Bill Buckley did it through the brilliance of his mind and his verbal flair, which is off the charts. I urge your listeners just to go on YouTube and watch Bill Buckley’s firing line discussion, his conversation with the great Muhammad Ali in 1967 when Ali had been stripped of his heavyweight crown, and to see the mutual respect, wit, and humor between these two larger-than-life figures who could not disagree more about politics. See the respect Buckley shows him and how Ali is amused by that, and he’s amused by Buckley. See him talk to Jesse Jackson a few years later on firing line. The same thing is going on. And you think, how can one guy contain all this in himself? Well, that’s the big American story, isn’t it? Containing multitudes. That’s what Buckley was about.

[00:12:18] Jeff Schechtman: And talk about it with respect to conservatism itself, because Buckley created his own kind of conservatism, really, it seems, out of this coalition. He didn’t follow necessarily in the traditional British conservatism of Oakeshott or Birch before that. What Buckley created was something really entirely different.

[00:12:41] Sam Tanenhaus: Yes, it was. And those are important names to bring up, Jeff, because, of course, Buckley did know writers like Michael Oakeshott, who was a favorite of Buckley, one of Buckley’s many mentors, James Burnham, and Edmund Burke, certainly, and other conservative thinkers, too. But what Buckley began with was this idea that he got from his father, a self-made oil millionaire, of the entrepreneurial drive and energy of the unregulated economy. We may be getting to that again soon. Well, Buckley saw that, but what he really saw, which you said in your great opening remarks, is that ideological battles were going to be fought on cultural battlefields. That’s why he went after Yale. Set aside the economic theory. Yes, that’s important. We know what economics we favor. If you’re Buckley, you want fewer taxes and you don’t want a big centrally governed state. We get all that. But where the battles are going to be won and lost is over things that we call the culture war. And Buckley saw that very early. And that means finding who the enemy is. So one way you bring the coalitions together is to say, who do we agree that we don’t like? Who do we agree on about that? And you look at it today, you can say, well, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, let’s say, seem very dissimilar characters. And bring in Steve Bannon and Elon Musk, and you’ve got a strange mix of people. What do they agree about? They agree about the enemy. They agree that the enemy is a kind of culturally liberal or left wing elite who’s gone to the Ivy League and has ideas about, say, sexuality and gender that feel new and revolutionary and frightening in some way. And you say, we may disagree about all these other things, but we know those are the bad guys. We want to get the guys off the campuses who seem to be too pro-Palestinian, we would say today, or who teach left wing ideology, as they did in Buckley’s day. And by circling the wagons against that common enemy, then you have the cause that your movement can advance. The problem, Jeff, and you raised it very early on, is what happens when you win? And it’s your turn to govern. It’s your turn to run the society. Buckley’s National Review, the great magazine he founded in 1955, had a notorious remark in it early on after Reagan won, which backfired badly against Bill Buckley. They said, we have a nation to run. Oh, really, you’re going to run a nation out of a little magazine office on East 35th Street in Manhattan? It was that kind of self-aggrandizing belief that they were in control of the culture now. And we see this happen time and time again on the American right, partly because they don’t have a very clear set of forward-looking principles they can sell to the public. That’s why you get a bill like the one you have today. But what’s it really about? Is it about decreasing the tax burden on the wealthy? Or is it about disenfranchising the poor? Or maybe it’s about both somehow put together. And then you think, well, what’s the larger vision here exactly? And that was a problem Bill Buckley found himself wrestling with time and time again. That’s why he liked the company of liberals, because he thought if he could get into a conversation with them, he could spell out his position in a more coherent and attractive way, as he did when he ran for mayor of New York in that remarkable campaign in 1965, which rescued the Republican Party at a time when its prospects looked really dim. If he could do it that way, if he could get in a debate with guys like you and me and talk things over and win the debate, not every time, but maybe 9 out of 10 times, he’s making some inroads.

[00:16:41] Jeff Schechtman: And the real laboratory for this, it’s interesting because it reinforced where Buckley was going. The real laboratory for this was in 1964 in the Goldwater campaign, when he got to see what didn’t work. That if you ran just on ideology and focused just on ideology, you’ll lose 49 states.

[00:17:00] Sam Tanenhaus: Yeah. No, that’s right. They saw that. He saw that Goldwater wasn’t going to win. He wasn’t going to win. Really, once President Kennedy had been assassinated, that election was over. But they also saw, because they’d been campaigning for years to get Goldwater the nomination, one of the stories I really enjoyed telling is the early campaign that built around Barry Goldwater. Long before that 1964 campaign, in 1960, he was already being put forward as a candidate who would combine Sunbelt entrepreneurial ideas and the racial ideas of the deep South, of the Jim Crow South. And the guy who put it all together was not Buckley himself, but his equally brilliant brother-in-law, a guy named L. Brent Boesel. We know that name, Brent Boesel, today because his son became an important media figure on the right, and his grandson was arrested on January 6th during the insurrection in the Capitol. Well, the elder Boesel, who was Buckley’s brother-in-law, saw that the way to present Goldwater at that point was not to make it about a man, but to make it about a set of arguments. And that worked very well in a book called The Conscience of a Conservative, which I argue is the most influential campaign book in modern history because it launched Goldwater. Goldwater was not able to win in 60, or he did get the nomination in 64, but then they went down, and they realized they had to make that broader appeal to the middle of the country, both geographically and ideologically. What came to be called Middle Americans, then later called Reagan Democrats, today we call them the MAGA group. They’re people who were kind of alienated from politics itself. The radical center was a big term for them, too, in the 1970s. And the first politician who actually seized on that, Jeff, was someone Buckley and his companions at the National Review didn’t like or trust. That was Richard Nixon. Nixon was the one who saw you could make appeals to different sectors, different parts of the country by stressing the things they were anxious about. And Reagan did this later, too, the things that made them feel they were either not welcome in their own country or that their status was threatened, their position in the society was threatened, which is analogous to the arguments we see today. And if a politician came forward who articulated those fears while at the same time offering assurances that this large group of Americans would be protected, then you get candidates like first Nixon and then Reagan. And I think some could very plausibly say President Trump right now, that whatever you think of the rhetoric and style, that he connects in a very powerful way with a large group of Americans. What Buckley had to do, as you indicated early on, was kind of overcome his own gentility, you know, and accept that politics. But he’d done it very early. His first favorite candidates, politicians, one wasn’t a candidate, was Charles Lindbergh, the America First movement, which opposed intervention in World War II. That was the very young Bill Buckley’s first cause as a teenager. And then after he graduated from Yale and had written that famous book, God Man at Yale, he became a very close ally of Senator Joseph McCarthy. And he saw the effectiveness of McCarthy’s politics to stir people up, to appeal to that kind of democratic politics that we don’t talk about so much today, which is a mistake. And that’s the democracy of the mass movement. It’s not the democracy of our very carefully calibrated system of separation of powers and checks and balances. It’s more the mentality of the group or the mob. And Buckley, the aristocrat, saw the uses of the mob figure in politics. And that’s the paradox that you were referring to and raises that question of when is somebody leading a movement and when does he become devoured by it? The one we’re dealing with right now, today, as you and I speak.

[00:21:38] Jeff Schechtman: Right. It’s so interesting the way Buckley balanced those two things, the elitism on one hand and his anti-democratic impulses, along with the populism that he understood had validity. I mean, this was a guy that said he’d rather be governed by the first 500 names of the Boston phone book than by the faculty at Harvard. But at the same time, he was a complete elitist.

[00:22:01] Sam Tanenhaus: I know. People ask me about that all the time. And I remind them of something. You’ll find it in the end notes to my book, is that what Buckley originally said was he would sooner be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Garden City, Long Island telephone directory than the 2,000 members of the Harvard faculty. Because he’d given it, those remarks at a speech in Long Island, in Garden City, which is Long Island, not far from Queens, New York, out of outer borough, New York. And that’s where the votes were. And Buckley understood that was the basis of the movement. And then when Kennedy got elected, he cleverly switched it over to Boston and he had one of the most famous comments, remarks, or witticisms in modern political history. And yet you’re right. There are two things going on there. The very quick take on it is, well, this is an anti-intellectual who’s denouncing brilliant people at Harvard. But if you read further in Buckley’s remarks, it’s quite an elegant speech. He says something different. What he says is the people who run Harvard University also think they can run this government and run this society, but there are things they don’t know that maybe common citizens and ordinary people do know. Maybe ordinary people are able to judge character a little better. Maybe they know whom to trust and whom not. It’s interesting when the Democrats were able to win in 2020, who’s their nominee? Who’s their candidate? It’s Joe Biden, who kind of comes out of the background Buckley’s talking about. He’s a Catholic who didn’t go to a fancy university. He can look working class people in the eye and they feel he’s one of them, or at least he understands what’s on their minds. And that’s where the battles are won and lost. That’s where elections are won and lost. So Buckley had that pragmatism. One of the first great profiles of where he met Buckley, magazine profiles, was written by a brilliant cultural critic who typically then became Buckley’s friend, Dwight McDonald, who was a critic of culture and literature and also politics. And he saw that Buckley, he said, has this capacity or this weakness for getting involved with what he called low company. And that low company turned out first to be Joe McCarthy and then a succession of other alliances Buckley formed with really questionable people. Then you’re thinking, well, what’s he doing? Well, McDonald’s answer to that was that Buckley was both a fanatic and a highly practical person. And putting those two things together is unusual to have extreme views on the one hand, but also a very pragmatic way of how you gain and hold on to power. So what I found with Buckley was, for instance, he never liked Richard Nixon. And my single favorite quote in a book with lots of quotes is one from George Will, the very famous columnist for The Washington Post, who was one of the original National Review writers. Yes. And one of the many Buckley protégés. And George Will said they didn’t really like Nixon at National Review until it was clear he’d become a criminal, which sounds familiar when we look at the trajectory of our current president and how the right adapted to him. Well, what what George Will saw was that if their guy was really whoever the Republican was, whoever the leader of the movement was, was really in a corner, well, then Buckley and company were going to support him. Same thing that had happened with Joe McCarthy. But also in this was the idea Buckley had that you are going to stay with your guy as long as you can. And then when things aren’t working, you bail. So what happened? Buckley, whose older brother, James, became the first conservative party member ever elected to the Senate from New York, I would add, in 1970, when New York and California had roughly comparable populations were kind of jockeying back and forth, which is the biggest state in the union. Jim Buckley, Bill Buckley’s older brother, gets elected to the Senate. And after as a Nixon Republican, and then after Watergate is going too far, Bill Buckley calls him aside and says to Brother Jim, as they would call each other, Brother Jim, we’ve got you’ve got to read him out of the movement. He’s got to resign over Watergate. And James Buckley became the first conservative Republican to call for Richard Nixon to resign during Watergate. And so when you look at that strategic thinking and larger sense of what politics requires, what your obligations as a senator are, or as a great commentator, Buckley’s on television, his newspaper columns being syndicated all across the country. He’s always listened to, he’s respected, and they make the call that things have gone too far. And sometimes we look around now and we say, well, who’s going to make that same call for us?

[00:27:24] Jeff Schechtman: It’s interesting, because an earlier example of the same thing from Buckley is when he decided to keep out the John Birch Society from the movement.

[00:27:34] Sam Tanenhaus: It’s interesting. You’re right, because it took him a while to do it. At first, he thought this fringe group, which, as you know, very well had a strong foothold in California. Nixon was convinced they’d almost destroyed him, ruined him politically when he ran for governor 1962. So he’s very wary of the Birchers. He continued to call conservatives the Birchers. He called Ronald Reagan a Bircher, Nixon did. He couldn’t get it out of his head that right-wingers had actually not wanted him to be elected governor, when Nixon was a pretty conservative guy, you know, California Republican. Well, Buckley went along with Robert Welch, the leader of the Birch Society, for quite a number of years. Welch, who came from Belmont, Massachusetts, and made some money in his brother’s candy business, candy manufacturing, had been an early supporter of National Review when it was founded in 1955. He’d written checks for the magazine at a time when other rich guys would talk a good game but never write the check. Not a problem today. The rich guys are all too happy to write political checks or ideological ones for causes. Then Welch again went too far. You know, he had this crazy conspiracy theory that the two leading communist agents in America were, at the time, President Dwight Eisenhower and his brother Milton, the university president. And all this stuff was crazier and crazier. At first, Buckley said those are his nutty ideas. Who cares what the leader of the movement thinks? They’re rank-and-file Birchers. There were some 20,000 of them. They’re just conservative activists. They’re going to show up on primary day. They’re going to deny Richard Nixon, you know, the big win he wants in the primary because he’s not conservative enough. They’re just good political folk. But then what happened was it became easier and easier for liberals to tar the entire movement as being extensions of this nut job Robert Welch. And at that point, Buckley, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and another thinker on the right, Russell Kirk, who was a real historian, wrote a famous book, The Conservative Mind, about the growth and evolution of conservative thinking over several centuries. They all got together and sat in a secret meeting. Reagan wasn’t at the meeting. The other three were. And then Reagan got on board later. We’ve got to get rid of this guy. And so Buckley wrote this devastating critique of Robert Welch. And even this was in 1962. And even then, Buckley, ever the gentleman, sent a note to Welch. And he said, I know you think this is personal. It’s not. I hope we can maintain a cordial friendship. Buckley would do things like that all the time. You could say, well, he wanted it both ways. The other way of looking at it would be, well, he doesn’t want politics to intrude on kind of common courtesy and decency. I think many of us would say, well, I’ll take that right now. I’ll take a little more courtesy and decency from my opponents.

[00:30:47] Jeff Schechtman: Yeah. I mean, that column that what he wrote in 62 about the Birch Society was also incredibly helpful in getting Goldwater the nomination in 64. I mean, F. Clifton White, I think, needed that in what he did to get Goldwater the nomination.

[00:31:06] Sam Tanenhaus: Yes. No, that’s right. That’s right. It was really carefully planned out what they had to do. And another formative member of the group that got Goldwater the nomination was the publisher of Natural Review. Buckley was its editor, and the publisher was a guy, William Rusher, Bill Rusher, who lived his last days in San Francisco last year. And they had a very carefully calibrated campaign. They looked at election returns in 1960. They’d seen there was a shift within a certain constituency. Again, this forgotten Americans group. That is people who had been more or less rescued by the New Deal, but now thought they were going to lose their gains under Kennedy and Johnson and their new big programs, the New Frontier and the Great Society, that were aimed at spreading the wealth to other groups. And they thought, well, we’re going to lose out if this happens. So Goldwater’s campaign was calibrated to say, no, we’re not going to roll back the New Deal. We just don’t want any more New Deals. And that was strategically a really smart move. Even if ideologically, Buckley didn’t love it. He was more of a purist. He went along with it. And that was where the accommodations got made. And Buckley’s important role was to be able to articulate this, not to come up with the original arguments. That’s not what he did. And I think I know some readers of my book have been a little surprised to see, to learn that Buckley was not an original thinker. He didn’t write great books about conservatism. He was a brilliant arguer and presenter of positions. And so he figured out, OK, this is what we do with Goldwater. We present him as a guy who’s one of us, but who also is, I think he refers to his supernal American savvy and charm. He’s a guy with the iron jaw and the movie star looks people will feel comfortable with. Buckley had the detachment to say, yeah, we’ll go with this guy and not with another one.

[00:33:18] Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about Buckley and race, because it’s a very complex issue and very much a part of the Buckley legacy.

[00:33:26] Sam Tanenhaus: Yes, that was the big discovery. Look, people knew people who follow all this stuff knew that back in the mid 50s, 1957, to be precise, when the first modern civil rights bill was making its way through Congress under the stewardship of Lyndon Johnson and other allies in the Senate. Eisenhower really wanted to sign it. It was a reaction to the horrific Emmett Till lynching and murder in the Deep South. They really wanted to do something about it. They wanted to give black Americans voting rights, which they didn’t have in the South. People really have to understand this. They had only recently ended the all white primary, the whites only primary, because the Supreme Court had had ruled that it was unconstitutional. So while all this is moving forward, Buckley and National Review is absolutely siding with the old South, what they called the South, which meant the white South. They were making the case that the white Southerners were perfectly justified in not letting black people vote. OK, all this we knew. What we didn’t know was at the same time Bill Buckley was editing this unusual and brilliantly written magazine, National Review, and just so listeners understand, early contributors to National Review included writers like Joan Didion, right? That’s how good a magazine it was, OK? At the same time Buckley was doing that, his family in South Carolina, when they were wintering there and spending more and more months there, had founded another publication that the Buckley family more or less kept secret. It was known about in the South but never mentioned in the North, and it was called the Camden News. The town they lived in was Camden, South Carolina, and that newspaper was a weekly that was created and published and edited to support segregation in the South. At a time when in that small town, as I learned, Camden, South Carolina, which had a colony of wealthy Northerners, that’s why Buckley’s and others were often there, black churches were being burned to the ground. There were violent assaults not only on black citizens but on whites who were sympathetic to what was to civil rights. They were being attacked physically. One man known to the Buckley family was almost murdered, and these stories were being reported throughout the country about Camden, South Carolina. Somehow nobody knew the Buckleys were right at the center of it. When I learned that, when I went to do this kind of work that I do, you go to the archive and you read the microfilm of the newspaper, and you read the family documents that showed how it was founded. Then my wife and I, my wife who helped me with research, and I interviewed people in Camden, South Carolina, black and white alike, and saw that the Buckley family itself was held in the highest esteem because of the kindnesses and generosity they showed to many people, including their black help in the term that was used back then. There was this complex thing where they were on the one hand more generous and sympathetic to the black people around them than almost anybody else in Camden, admired to this day by someone I interviewed who’d worked for the family, a very accomplished man named Edward Allen who became a union leader, sent all his kids off to college, admires the Buckleys to this day. He didn’t know the Buckleys were putting out this newspaper. And so that’s the complexity of the Buckley story. And you know, I’ll hear from readers, Jeff, and they’ll say, well, I was so disappointed to read about that. And I’ll say, yes, but from my mind as a storyteller, that’s one of the richest parts of the book because it’s a way to get inside that older world and see what the tensions were. And they really haunted Bill Buckley for many years until he really began to confront it in a way few of us ever do. And he did it on his television program Firing Line. So I tell people, if you want to know what the Black Panther leaders actually talked like in 1972, you have to watch Bill Buckley’s Firing Line because he had them all on as guests. Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, there they are. And I mentioned before Muhammad Ali and Jesse Jackson, not Panthers, obviously, but strong advocates for Black power, Black enfranchisement. And Buckley says, talk to me, you know, let everybody hear what you want to do. And that was how he was able to bring those different sides of his self together.

[00:38:44] Jeff Schechtman: Yeah, there was also in the early to mid 60s, the degree to which National Review was so supportive of the apartheid regime in South Africa.

[00:38:55] Sam Tanenhaus: Buckley really thought apartheid was not only defensible, but a kind of heroic system of racial separatism. I was really surprised when I saw that. But it’s in his writing. You can find it. And that was going on at the time he had his very famous debate with James Baldwin, which he lost miserably. You know, Cambridge University. Baldwin was a magnificent speaker. Buckley was good. Baldwin was on another level. He’d been a childhood preacher. And he was at that time, probably the most honored Black writer in the world, read and admired by everyone, including Buckley. Buckley knew how great a writer Baldwin was. And at the same time, he’s taking Baldwin on in Cambridge. Black people are being brutalized in the South. The March on Selma is happening in Alabama. And these regimes, colonial regimes in Africa, are beginning to come apart. The apartheid doesn’t work. And Buckley’s very good friend, the great writer Rebecca West, was shocked by Buckley’s defenses of apartheid. She’d been to South Africa for months. Buckley just went there for two weeks, got a kind of state-sponsored tour by the white government there, and came home convinced that they were doing their best to be humane people. Well, Rebecca West, who was a real journalist in the way Buckley was not, had spent months there. And she scolded him for this. And what are you doing? You’re defending this totally inhumane system. But Buckley would persuade himself that it was really OK, just as he had persuaded himself that his own family was representative of what all white people in the South were like. And he would overlook the evidence that didn’t fit his thesis. And a lot of us are guilty of that. Buckley, with his brilliant mind, knew better is what I believe, but just kind of talked himself into these attitudes because he thought that’s what he’d grown up with. In some ways, he remained his parents’ son until the end of his life. And could not accept just how wrong they were. And there we get to another aspect, Jeff, we probably don’t have time to talk about. And that’s Buckley’s Catholicism. If you were truly devout Catholic, as he was, you believed the rewards came in other places, through the charity, personal charity you showed people. And in the afterlife, Buckley took black servants to church with him in his car. And his Mexican and later Cuban help. They all sat in the pews together and worshiped because that was the view that you had as a believing Christian. So it’s a very, very complicated and rich story. And I tell people, don’t just be put off by it. Try to enter that world. That’s what I tried to do as I wrote about it.

[00:41:51] Jeff Schechtman: The other part of it, and as you say, we’re just about out of time, was the retinue that surrounded Buckley. There were a lot of really interesting people in Buckley’s world, in the National Review world, that had an influence on him.

[00:42:06] Sam Tanenhaus: I’m so glad you mentioned that because one thing I found interesting, we’ll say, and a little frustrating when I got a glance at all the commentaries in the book, people are so fascinated by Buckley himself, they don’t talk about all the other great characters in his world. We mentioned one, in addition to George Will, there was the great Gary Wills, who was the apostate, as Buckley always called them, that he was most wounded to lose. You know, the great historian and Catholic writer Gary Wills, whose books, you know, so many of us know, Lincoln and Gettysburg and Nixon Agonistes, I think the greatest of all modern political books, became a kind of horse whisperer on this project for me, because it was very close to Bill Buckley personally, but kind of shocked by his politics. So Gary, who’s still alive, I read my book very closely, gave me notes on it, we talked back and forth, and he helped me see how charitable and ingratiating and welcoming a person Buckley was, including to young people. When I first met him, I was writing working on a book about Whitaker Chambers, I was in my 30s, I was kind of a slow starting, nobody from nowhere, and Buckley treated me as if I was someone worthy of his interest, and not just as someone he was going to help in a superior way, but somebody he thought he could learn from. And he was always that way, and that’s why Joan Didion admired him, one of my predecessors, as you know, I was the editor of the New York Times Book Review for a number of years, and one of my predecessors in that job was John Leonard, a great literary journalist, who was another one of Buckley’s protégés. And then we have the mentors, James Burnham, who wrote the classic book, The Managerial Revolution, which inspired George Orwell’s 1984. One of Orwell’s most famous essays is an attack on Burnham, and he called Second Thoughts and James Burnham. These other figures, some of them from Yale University, these very brilliant original thinkers, whose arguments and ideas are still part of our conversation, only we don’t like to say so. We don’t like to acknowledge them so much, but they got at some of the tensions in American democracy. And Buckley saw them as teachers, and also as people he could sponsor through his wealth and connections. So he was, at once, their protégé and their sponsor. They’d be 20 years older than he was, but it was Buckley who would pay their bills and forgive them just the most unacceptable personal trespasses. They’d denounce him and lie about him and call him names, and Buckley never seemed ruffled by it. He had a first-class temperament. That’s what really struck me. You know, when you do journalism as I do, it’s just natural that you meet a lot of powerful people. It’s one of your jobs to report on them. Buckley was the first one I met who treated me as if I was as interesting a person as he was. The only other time I’ve encountered that is in another one of my heroes, the great Linda Ronstadt, when I got to interview her for The Times a number of years ago. And she opened the door herself and sat me down and said, who are you? What are you about? Buckley would do the same thing, and it was really something to experience. And that’s how he brought, as Bill Rusher said, the lions and tigers and bears all together in that movement, is through the charm of Buckley and his wonderful wife Pat, who was, you know, this great socialite in Manhattan, great wit, raconteur. And the two of them together presided over this kind of magical home, or several homes they had in Connecticut, New York, and also in Switzerland, where they went every winter. So it was a kind of high-flying, high-society, charmed life, filled with humor and wit. And that’s what attracted both the old and the young to Bill Buckley.

[00:46:04] Jeff Schechtman: You know, the word influencer gets used a lot today, but Buckley really was a convener of his day.

[00:46:09] Sam Tanenhaus: Yes, he was. And I’ve noticed that influencer used a lot. And there’s an argument to be made that that’s really what he was. But I think it does miss this other thing you’re talking about, which is the bringing people together. He was a kind of impresario. You know, he was quite a good musician. You know, he played the piano and harpsichord. Not as good as he wanted to be, but he’s pretty good. And he really admired the great orchestra conductors. One of the thrills of his young life was when he, as a child, he got to see Arturo Toscanini conduct the famous NBC Orchestra. Buckley’s piano teacher took Bill and one of his sisters to see him. And Buckley was a kind of conductor in that same way. You know, he knew when to point the baton toward the strings, or when you’re bringing the brass, when you need somebody hitting the bass drum. He kind of knew all the different parts you wanted to have together. And he had the ability to delegate. Sometimes he delegated too much, I suggest, in the book that he was not as attentive as he might have been to some of the things going on, because he had so many things happening at once. If you ever set foot in his office, you’ll see a couple of pictures of it in the photo insert. You can’t believe what an unholy mess it was. You think a man who’s doing that much must be incredibly well organized. Well, he was disciplined, but he wasn’t especially well organized. He had secretaries and assistants who kind of ran his life for him. But he was very good at cutting to the heart of arguments and debates, judging people’s talent. He was not the best judge of character. We haven’t gotten into the murderer. He sprang from the Trenton State Prison and then went on almost to kill somebody else. Came within an inch of murdering her in California. So he was not the best judge. You know, Howard Hunt, the Watergate felon, was one of Buckley’s best friends. He’d been his boss in the CIA. There are all these things we haven’t touched on that you can’t possibly. But he was a really good judge of talent. Like he knew when somebody was writing good prose. That was really important to him. And so he could find these really talented speakers and writers and give them platforms and always took pleasure in their success. He never, as far as I know, envied anybody. And boy, that’s an attribute I wish I had. He was absolutely not petty in his in his personal life. And everybody I talked to who knew him confirmed that. That whatever you thought of him, whatever you thought of his politics, whatever you thought of his ideology, his style of debate, which was often very personal, ad hominem, in his personal dealings with you, they never met anyone kinder or more generous.

[00:48:46] Jeff Schechtman: Sam Tanenhaus, his book is Buckley, The Life and the Revolution that Changed America. Sam, thank you so much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.

[00:48:56] Sam Tanenhaus: What a pleasure. I really enjoyed it, Jeff.

[00:48:58] Jeff Schechtman: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate