Buckley, a book review
I’ll admit up front that I’ve always considered William F. Buckley Jr a pretentious gasbag. I recently finished reading “Buckley: The life and the revolution that changed America” by Sam Tanenhaus. I found little in this long and detailed biography to change my mind. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed this book. And I learned a great deal about the subject. For example, English was Buckley’s third language, after Spanish and French. He spoke Spanish exclusively until age six. For his entire life, he was a devout and unswerving Roman Catholic. He was born into wealth, and while his magazine National Review struggled financially for its first decades, he didn’t take a salary and subsidized the journal by his outside writing and speaking fees. Buckley was a man of appetites: sailing, skiing and writing. Reading, not so much. He very rarely changed his mind. The most notable exception was on civil rights. Late in life he admitted that federal intervention was necessary to secure minority rights...