Here it is, at long last, Sam Tanenhaus’s great white whale of a biography about the conservative author (rocking the ivy walls with the publication of God and Man at Yale at the wunderkind age of 25), magazine founder, television host, slice-and-dice debater, mayoral candidate, sailing enthusiast, spy novelist, social diarist (Cruising Speed—read it; it’s fun), and spirited harpsichordist, William F. Buckley Jr. Here was a man of so many facets that he couldn’t help but dazzle.
Tanenhaus has been working on this life for more than a quarter of a century, following the surprise best-selling success of his biography of Buckley’s melancholy mentor Whittaker Chambers, in 1997, its profile improbably boosted by cowboy-hatted radio host Don Imus, who touted it incessantly on-air until his sidekick, Charles McCord, finally snapped: “Whittaker Chambers is dead! Alger Hiss is dead! Richard Nixon is dead! I wish I was dead!”
Imus is no longer among us, and Buckley (the single-name title packs authority) will have to fend for itself in this fickle world. Logging in at 1,040 pages and weighing more than three pounds, it’s not a book to cradle in one’s hand or balance on one’s head at parties. Reading it requires commitment and elbow room, an avid desire to grab a knife and fork and dig in.
As a suburban kid dropped off from a flying saucer, I was hooked on Buckley’s Firing Line, its unpredictable array of smarty-pants guests, and the host’s lordly introductions and Restoration fop’s armory of mannerisms. I was a semi-faithful reader of his magazine the National Review, despite its slowpoke politics, and would later interview Buckley in the National Review’s offices about his racy debut spy novel, Saving the Queen; even though I was there on behalf of the scruffy, heathen Village Voice, he couldn’t have been more cordial. This much-vaunted charm wasn’t aristocratic mimicry, as detractors claimed, but democratic ease evenly distributed, which enabled him to be friends with those on the other side of the volleyball net, caustic liberals such as Murray Kempton and John Kenneth Galbraith.
So I may be more receptive than most to the vast breadth and encyclopedic detail of the biography, its populous cast (which includes Roy Cohn, E. Howard Hunt, Clare Boothe Luce), and the now somewhat tarnished silver of the Buckley mystique. Temperamentally, he had a tonic effect that was new to conservatism then and nearly extinct today. Garry Wills, one of Buckley’s notable finds at the magazine, along with John Leonard, Arlene Croce, and Joan Didion, recalled, “Things lit or dimmed at NR with the coming or going of that pleasantest of neighs, Bill’s laugh.”
It was all the more glaring, then, when the grinning mask of gentility cracked and his serpent’s tongue lashed out. This would happen in public arenas where Buckley was evenly matched or overmatched in his opponents and couldn’t resort to the usual thrust and parry of “civilized discourse”; instead of rising to the occasion, he went for the low blow. In the 1965 Cambridge Union debate with James Baldwin, Buckley, losing badly, falsely accused Baldwin of affecting a British accent to pander to the audience. This didn’t go over well. “Murmurs of disapproval rose in the hall, and then loud hissing.”
More infamous were the verbal fireworks on live television during the embattled Democratic convention of 1968, when Buckley blew his cool against opponent Gore Vidal, clenching his fist and threatening to punch the author of Myra Breckinridge “in the goddam face”—“Now listen, you queer … ” Later in life, Buckley was remorseful over the flare-up, mortified when Charlie Rose showed the clip during Buckley’s last appearance on the program. He was dogged by a sense of shame, while Vidal remained vainglorious until the end, which says something about both of them.
In its debut issue, the National Review proclaimed its editorial mission to stand athwart history, yelling “Stop!” History barreled ahead, paying no heed. Feminism, gay rights, civil rights, rock music, and the sexual revolution rumbled on regardless. It was in electoral politics that the Buckley project found success, fostering Barry Goldwater and paving the yellow brick road for Reaganism—a once formidable legacy that has been knocked asunder by marauding Trumpism. A resolute Cold Warrior, Buckley would have been appalled by the curtsying to Vladimir Putin and, as a free marketeer, aghast at the glandular imposition of tariffs, a violation of his Adam Smith principles. Buckley-style conservatism has become an antiquarian creed.
But as Kingsley Amis once wrote, “Importance isn’t important,” and what fastens the Buckley of Buckley in our imagination is the heightened contradictions of his character. A traditional Catholic and conservative espousing propriety and probity, Buckley possessed a personal streak of recklessness that scattered bystanders. At the helm of a boat, he was a maritime menace. His son, Christopher, whose memoir Losing Mum and Pup is the perfect companion to this volume, recalls, “Over the years, my father took out sections of docks up and down the Eastern seaboard. His crew bestowed upon him the nickname Captain Crunch.”
Buckley’s insouciance about risk extended to others. A ski buff, he insisted that his wife, the imperious Pat, who had the comic bark and hauteur of a Bea Arthur, take up skiing despite her hesitation. First time out, she had a harrowing accident, shattering the bone in her lower leg into pieces. “[She] would be on crutches for two years and would suffer with severe recurrent pain for the rest of her life.” Multiple hip replacements as well.
Perhaps the greatest contradiction unfolded in their Park Avenue maisonette. While Buckley made himself a public enemy with his op-ed proposal during the AIDS epidemic that those infected be tattooed on the wrist or buttock for identification, Pat, one of the doyennes of New York philanthropy, hosted AIDS fundraisers that made her a beloved heroine in the gay community. Whatever the differences and domestic tempests, they were an inseparable couple who addressed each other as “Ducky” and set everything around them into grand motion.
When Pat died, in 2007, at the age of 80, Bill was undone and done in, his lightsaber already dimming with age. He didn’t entirely disengage from the opinion sphere—dissenting from his conservative brethren, he had grave doubts about the invasion of Iraq and condemned the gleeful sadism on display at Abu Ghraib—but he heard the bell tolling.
“He signed up for Google Alerts so he could track mentions of his name,” which Christopher read aloud to him, Tanenhaus writes. Perhaps Buckley needed reassurance, afraid of being forgotten. This bulwark of a book ensures against that.
James Wolcott is a Columnist at AIR MAIL. He is the author of several books, including the memoir Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York
