How William F. Buckley Jr. Shaped Conservative Politics in America

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Now, William F. Buckley Jr. is widely known as one of the architects behind modern conservatism in America. As a prominent right-wing commentator and writer, he was a close political ally and friend of President Reagan and would often feature Reagan on his show “Firing Line.” Over the course of nearly three decades, author Sam Tanenhaus has been crafting the intellectual’s biography titled “Buckley: The Life and The Revolution That Changed America.” And he joins Walter Isaacson and to discuss how Buckley’s legacy fits into today’s politics.WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Bianna. And Sam Tanenhaus, welcome to the show.

SAM TANENHAUS: Oh, it’s great to be here, Walter. Thanks.

ISAACSON: So, William F. Buckley. Is he the founder of modern-day populist conservatism that we now see? Or would he be appalled by it?

TANENHAUS: He would, he – both. He is a founder of the conservatism we see now – notice I say “a founder,” he didn’t do it alone – but I think he might be a little dismayed by how it looks and sounds now. And by that, Walter, I mean, you knew Bill Buckley. And he was very much a man of language arguments and ideas, rigorous debate where you listen to the other side. I’m not sure he’d be so comfortable with how the politics works today.

ISAACSON: But what about the populism, the anti-elitism? There was, of course, a whiff of elitism to William F. Buckley, Jr.

TANENHAUS: Well, there you’ve captured the paradox of William F. Buckley, because he was himself, seemed to be almost aristocratic patrician. We remember the voice, the style, the language, the books. But he was involved with political figures like Joseph McCarthy. He was very close to him. One of the discoveries I made in uncovering his life, which included many long interviews with him, was how devoted he remained to Joseph McCarthy. Why? Because if you are an elite patrician like Bill Buckley, and you don’t just want to be heard, you wanna win the battle, which increasingly looked like a cultural battle, than politicians like McCarthy might be useful for that.

ISAACSON: Well, you got Joe McCarthy. You also have Roy Cohn, who’s of course the pugnacious lawyer. Two people you would’ve thought would’ve repelled Buckley. Why did he remain loyal to them to the end?

TANENHAUS: Walter, one of the aspects of the conservative movement that even now we have trouble wrapping our minds around, was how much it was against rather than for. So in the famous book Bill Buckley wrote with his brother-in-law, “McCarthy and His Enemies,” published at the very peak of the McCarthy Controversy in 1954. There’s not a great deal about Joe McCarthy. There’s a lot about his enemies. And Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy and others, they included Rush Limbaugh, whom Buckley sponsored in the 1990s were on the same side in that cultural battle.

ISAACSON: But the through line is that they’re strongly anti-communist. And of course, Buckley is very – it’s almost his animating force. Did some of that come from his father, William F. Buckley, Sr.?

TANENHAUS: His father had been, was from the south of Texas. Both Buckley’s parents were from the South. His mother was from New Orleans. And they raised their children to believe that all, the New Deal was a counter revolutionary event catastrophe in America. But earlier still, Buckley’s father who made his first fortune in Mexican oil, lost it during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920. And Buckley, Sr. William F. Buckley Sr. Was convinced it was a Bolshevist plot. Those were his words that carried all the way through into American politics in the 1930s. And then at the time of World War II, when the great debate over intervention began, Bill Buckley, the young Bill Buckley’s, first cause as a teenager,

ISAACSON: You’ve talked about Eloise Steiner, his mother from New Orleans and William F. Buckley, senior. Both are very Catholic, but an interesting type of Catholic ’cause they’re in places where the Catholics, or to some extent the elite rather than the outsiders. Did that inform the younger Buckley’s Catholicism?

TANENHAUS: It did very much. One of the amusing lines that runs through the Buckley family’s life is they were always competitive with the Kennedys. These two very wealthy, attractive families of New England Irish Catholics. And there were differences. Bill Buckley had some funny lines about the Kennedys. He said, “I don’t know why people keep comparing us with the Kennedys. Joseph Kennedy Sr. was devoted to Ireland. The first time my father set foot in Ireland was, you go to the Dublin Horse Show in 1939.” They pulled a kind of class rank on the Kennedy’s, which was very amusing once Jack Kennedy was elected president. Because now you have these two powerful families in opposition who came up from the same roots.

ISAACSON: You do a good analysis of “God and Man at Yale,” his first book when he comes out of Yale. I remember reading that book and I couldn’t figure out is he a product of Yale or a rebel against Yale?

TANENHAUS: He’s both, that’s the genius of it. Look Walter, many people have been attacking the Ivy League. You’re an Ivy League man, and you know, from the 1930s, if not earlier, there were attacks on the Ivy League, oh, from Congress, people in HUAC, the House Committee and un-American Activities, from a populist journalist, some of the attacks we see now. What set Buckley apart was he was the biggest man on campus in his year at Yale, the year he graduated in 1950. He was tapped, as I said, for all the clubs. He was the last man tapped for skull and bones, the highest accolade you could achieve. He was voted into all the best fraternities. He was famous for his work on the Yale Daily News. It’s possible to argue William F. Buckley Jr. was the greatest campus journalist of the 20th century. He became famous while he was still at Yale writing editorials.

So all of that made Bill Buckley. And then he climbed up and that platform he’d built for himself and denounced his professors for being too left wing in economics and for being atheists. And the key to the book was not only that, he named names in it, a book published at the peak of McCarthyism 1951. He had two solutions to the problem. One is that alumni should step in and fire the faculty they didn’t like. And the second was that donors should stop contributing to fund drives. And in 1951, all the people around him, including mentors and friends, close associates, said, Bill, do not write that ridiculous last chapter. But Buckley knew that’s where he would touch the nerve. And lo and behold, all these years later, it’s not shocking to hear that same approach, if you’re familiar with this, to the Ivy League universities today, only they’re coming from the president himself.

ISAACSON: One of the things I found really disconcerting in the book and surprised me ’cause he’s such a genteel man, was not only that he was a segregationist, but there was a racism that carries through what he does. In 1957, the National Review – I’m gonna quote you some – had an editorial entitled “Why the South Must Prevail.” And he said, “White communities in the south, the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail politically and culturally in areas where it does not predominate numerically. Because for the time being, it is the advanced race.” And even after the ‘64 Civil Rights Act, it was something in the National View he did, “Negroes, Intelligence and Prejudice.” And he argued for separate education.

TANENHAUS: He did, he did. All the way up and through the, until the late 1960s when something happened to him. He actually got to know some very charismatic and persuasive black leaders, including the very young Jesse Jackson, whom – one of the advantages, one of the great things about Bill Buckley was he was open to the argument in a new idea. If you could beat him in debate or even if he won, he still wanted to hear what you had to say. Early on in that earlier period you’re talking about, and viewers should, should understand when that editorial was written in 1957, that was at the moment that the first modern Civil Rights Act was being deliberated on in Congress. The one that Lyndon Johnson and Senator Richard Russell tangled over and was signed under Eisenhower. And what was missing from that bill, as you know very well, was the protection of voting rights.

And Robert Caro in that wonderful book, “The Master of the Senate,” walks us through all the steps. Buckley and company really believed black people did not deserve to vote. And he continued saying this for many years without apology. A surprise for me, Walter, is that people were less shocked to hear that than you might expect them to be. You would think that a great liberal like Arthur Schlesinger would be appalled by that. No, he would just say, well, Buckley’s in with the segregationists on that and move on to the next point. That I – it is not to justify or excuse it, but to show you in that climate, Buckley could make assertions like that and not seem a disreputable person.

ISAACSON: So we’ve established that he was pretty much not just a segregationist, but somewhat racist. He’s very anti-communist supports Joe McCarthy. He’s also isolationists with Charles Lindbergh against intervention in World War II, even antisemitic in some ways, and yet he’s known for trying to purge the conservative movement, of its ”extremists, bigots, kooks, antisemites and racists.” How do you square that?

TANENHAUS: Well, he was, for one thing he learned, he actually grew. And the Buckley of age 40 is not the same as the Buckley of age 30. One important thing that happened was a mayoral campaign he was involved in. In some ways it was the greatest thing he ever did. It really helped transform politics. When – on the conservative line that he created a conservative party he created in New York in 1965, he challenged the liberal Republican, John Lindsay, a congressman who decided to run for mayor. And a clubhouse democrat from Brooklyn, Abe Beame. Buckley ran as the conservative. Nowadays we would say he ran as the base candidate against the RINO who would be John Lindsay. And what happened was, Buckley was a listener and observer, and he loved meeting people. And as he went out on the campaign trail, he began to meet all kinds of people, including black voters.

And he realized, no, you can’t put them all in a block and assume they’re going to vote one way, which was a basis, the justification for those early racist editorials. No, you have to take them at, on his individuals. After all, Bill Buckley’s a big supporter of individualism. So that means you cannot make assumptions about anyone. And with his television program Firing Line, he wanted to have lively debate. So I’ll suggest to viewers go on YouTube and watch Bill Buckley’s conversation with Muhammad Ali in 1967 when Ali was stripped of his heavyweight crown and threatened with imprisonment because he wouldn’t serve in the Vietnam War. And you hear Buckley very respectfully engaging with Muhammad Ali, not about whether Ali was right to do that. He respected the courage Ali had shown, in another debate, Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam. Because Buckley found himself defending Malcolm X against Muhammad Ali. <Crosstalk>.

ISAACSON: He also had Eldridge Cleaver then over to his apartment. He’s a very social person when this happens.

TANENHAUS: That’s right. No, and Buckley didn’t agree with a word. He would ridicule them in columns and print and then he’d say Eldridge, you wanna have a drink? Come over to the house, to the Maison, and Park Avenue and we’ll have a drink and bring your friend Timothy Leary, the LSD <laugh> experimenter. That’s how Buckley lived.

ISAACSON: He wrote 50 books. He wrote three columns a week. He launched the show Firing Line. He did a whole lot. But in your book, there’s an implicit question, almost a criticism, which is, he was always on the surface in a way doing so many things. One of the lines you used to explain this way he did things, just dashing off columns in the back of a car, dashing off books that were hardly edited, is that he didn’t go deep because he was enjoying himself too much. I think those are your words. What did you mean by that?

TANENHAUS: In a time – it was the great columnist George Will, who was one of many proteges of Bill Buckley, whom I discussed this with. What George suggested was in these terrible years of Watergate, Vietnam, the Nixon years, which you know so much about, and all the strife and polarization, similar to what we’re feeling today, Buckley was going to live out what he called the conservative demonstration. That was a term he came up with when he was quite young.

TANENHAUS: That is to say, if you read or listened to Bill Buckley, saw him on the move, heard his voice, was brought into his world, heard his conversation, that would make you more open to the arguments he had to make, rather than presenting a really complex, beautifully argued philosophical treatise very few people are going to read, he was a man in the public world. He became famous when he was in his twenties. He imagined himself facing large audiences. And he often did. Thousands of students would show up to hear him lecture in the early sixties. That’s how much a celebrity he was. And he thought if he could reach young people and help them think, argue, maybe one of them would become the thinker and prophet that he knew he didn’t have it in himself to be. So in the end I saw that as kind of a generous self-assessment, which more of us could, could stand to make probably.

ISAACSON: So in some ways you call him “a performing ideologue,” a performative and that phrase, people pick that up from your book. How does that relate to today where so many people who are ideolog on both sides are simply doing it in 140 characters in a performative way? Is that was, what he was doing?

TANENHAUS: You know, I’m asked what would WFB–William F Buckley Jr-have done on Twitter? And I say he just would’ve burned it up. He would’ve had more tweets out there than Donald Trump and Elon Musk combined. He was so facile, so quick, he loved the one-liner. He’s famous for his one-liners. I think in some way he did create that. And one of the effects that his story has had now that it’s being discussed again, is that it makes the whole trajectory of the American conservative movement and conquest look very different. Because now if you think of the touchstones as being Joseph McCarthy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Buckley, and Donald Trump, what they all have in common, they’re masters of the media, they’re masters of performance. They don’t so much come out of politics as conquer it. They conquer it from the outside, their cultural figures and culture and politics intertwined. Buckley was the first to see it. It. And with that, all our history and our current politics looks very different. We think we give Presidents license to do things the Constitution does not allow for. And Buckley seemed to feel that’s where things were going. He intuited it. He was a man of perception, with long antenna that picked up where the culture was going.

ISAACSON: Sam Tanenhaus, thank you so much for joining us.

TANENHAUS: What a pleasure.