This detailed biography of William F. Buckley, who was, for 50 years, one of the largest figures in American conservative political life, is daunting: 1018 pages long, with 256 pages of notes. Tannenhaus has been attacked by both the right and the left for this portrayal of Buckley. I was intrigued.
Listeners know I usually discuss books concerning Alabama or more widely, the American South, and so I am. Buckley, graduate of Yale, editor of the “National Review” with offices in Manhattan, host of “Firing Line,” with an estate in Connecticut, in many ways was very much a Southerner. His father, a lawyer and oil speculator, grew up in Duval County, Texas. His mother was a debutante in New Orleans who, it was rumored, turned down 14 marriage proposals before accepting William Sr.
William Jr., their sixth child of twelve, was born in 1925 after his parents had moved to Sharon, Connecticut and established Great Elm, their estate with swimming pool, horses, all of it. An important part of that childhood, however, was spent at the family place in Camden, South Carolina, where, Tannenhaus tells us they were embraced as “Southerners.” They secretly owned the “Camden News,” a racist rag.
Early on, Buckley became fixed in his ideas of Social Darwinism and elitism. He also became a vehement anti-collectivist: any hint of socialism, welfare, redistribution of wealth, New Dealism, government interference of any kind infuriated him. Tannenhaus is fairly explicit that Buckley held positions that were segregationist and anti-semitic. As the years passed, Buckley would oppose the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, felt the Rev. King was a rabblerouser, a “shifty fellow,” and misrepresented the Selma March in the “National Review.”
A fervent cold warrior, Buckley was briefly in the CIA, friends with Howard Hunt. Joseph McCarthy was a hero. He opposed detente and Nixon’s opening with China. Republicans sometimes disappointed. Even in office, they seemed unable to achieve lasting national power.
At one point, however, he perceived that the positions of many Southern Democratic politicians—especially Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats, on rapidly changing economic and cultural issues—were very much like that of northern Republicans and what he saw as the silent American middle. Could those entities join forces? George Wallace’s campaign successes in the Midwest showed the way—and the Southern Strategy was born, a strategy which expanded to the Sunbelt, to Goldwater and then to Reagan and to the present alignment of political parties in the South.
That is a little piece of Buckley’s complex political life. He was also a genius, a generous man, a brilliant debater, a graceful and prolific writer of columns and memoir. He learned to sail, to ski, and to write spy novels and soon became a master at all of it. And most people interviewed, of all persuasions, agreed he was the most charming companion imaginable.
