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 for African Americans. He also pivoted from being an early supporter of the John Birch Society to abandoning and attacking first its founder Robert Welch and then Welch’s followers. On the other hand, he was a lifelong supporter of Joe McCarthy, a fellow Catholic anti-communist. He also supported the disastrously unsuccessful Barry Goldwater and the unfortunately successful Ronald Reagan.

Tanenhaus describes a man who valued his personal friendships, including with many of his political and public opponents. He supported financially his less affluent siblings and their children. He recognized and recruited a long list of talent to write for NR, including Joan Didion and Garry Wills.

Tanenhaus is an excellent writer. Like a good playwright, he shows rather than tells. While I gained no more respect for Buckley as a person, the book gave me a good appreciation for the man behind Firing Line and other Buckley media brainchildren. The picture that emerges is a man of stout convictions and prodigious energy who was surprisingly lazy intellectually and was content to trade on affect over substance, often confusing prolixity for erudition.

I backed into reading this book when I read about and ordered a book about the debates Buckley had with James Baldwin. I decided that before reading that book, I needed to learn more about Buckley and Baldwin, so I purchased biographies of both men. I’m looking forward to reading more about Baldwin now.