Larger-Than-Life Life, Vigorously Lived: Bill Buckley

William F. Buckley, Jr., in his book Airborne, interrupted tales of a trans-ocean sailing trip to deliver a lucid lesson on celestial navigation. It was delivered by a guy who equipped his yachts with the latest gadgets for tracking location and climate.

As detailed in Sam Tanenhaus’ massive, 900-page Buckley: The Life and The Revolution that Changed America, his navigation talents extended to land, politics, and television. Buckley was instrumental in birthing the modern conservative movement in America and playing the long game.

He created a succession of groups such as the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), founded and used his magazine National Review to assemble disparate voices on the right, and became the witty, genteel debater on his Firing Line TV show for more than three decades. 

Buckley had a vast network of contacts including luminaries from the left. The liberal economist-ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith was his skiing buddy in Switzerland each winter. When not on the slopes, Buckley would pen a spy novel in four to six weeks.

Buckley was the ultimate multitasker, as when he agreed to run as Conservative Party candidate for Mayor of New York City. Writes Tanenhaus about that madcap race, “He would not interrupt his already crowded schedule. He had a magazine to edit, three columns a week to write, lectures to give — there was, in just a week, a sailing race to Halifax.”

Yet Buckley found time to write “all his speeches and all his position papers,” and to shine as a deeply prepared debater. Running for mayor in 1965, at the high tide of liberalism in America and Manhattan, he copped 341,000 votes and made blue collar inroads that were signs of political upheavals to come. The Democrats’ base of support was showing cracks, as Trump was to expoit.

Time magazine put him on the cover with a headline “The Sniper,” and he was just that for much of his public life. Asked what he’d do if victorious in the NYC mayoral election, Buckley replied he would “ask for a recount.” The devoutly Catholic columnist took out after a social justice encyclical of Pope John XXIII as “a venture into triviality.”

There was none of the sentimental Irish or cultural Catholic in him. “Buckley’s Catholicism was theological and spiritual, not ethnic or tribal,” writes Tanenhaus. In later years, Buckley would gather up servants at his Connecticut home and head out to the Sunday afternoon Latin mass he had persuaded a priest to offer.

The author of this timely new biography is at his best discussing contradictions and distinctions of a very public life. Buckley burst on the scene in 1851 with God and Man at Yale, coauthored with brother-in-law Brent Bozell, arguing that his alma mater was a hotbed of leftism, anti-American and anti-Catholic teaching. He suggested that alums exert pressure by withholding money.

Yet, he was wealthy, edited and wrote for the Yale Daily News, and was popular enough to be tapped for Skull and Bones, Yale’s elite social fraternity.  Both Bush presidents would be Bonesmen, a snobby institution wickedly satirized by fellow Yalie Gary Trudeau in “Doonesbury.”

“Bill was himself a member of the innermost clubs,” writes the author. “An America without Yale was an America Bill Buckley could not imagine and did not want. He also continued to be increasingly friendly with the other side, even its extreme figures.”

Buckley was to the manor born, the son of an oil speculator thrown out of Mexico for opposing that country’s secular revolution, and who subsequently made his money in Texas. The Buckleys were one of those families whose estates had names, Great Elm (Connecticut) and Kamchatka (South Carolina). The future Mrs. WFB, Patricia Taylor, was a Vancouver, B.C., heiress, raised in a mansion named Shanzon, where the movie Best in Show would be filmed.

The book underplays Pat Buckley. Bill became an erudite champion of blue collar belligerence, coauthor (with Bozell) of a book, McCarthy and His Enemies, which defended the Red-baiting excesses of Tailgunner Joe. Mrs. Buckley became an acclaimed hostess at the couple’s Park Avenue “mansionette” and fundraiser for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

She also raised money for AIDS research. WFB was a public homophobe, having sneered at writer Gore Vidal as a “queer” in a famous convention debate on national television. He called on those testing HIV positive to be tattooed “in the buttocks to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.”

In the meantime, Pat Buckley had a legion of refined gay-guy friends and shared a social escort, Jerry Zipkin, with Nancy Reagan. Bill and Pat nurtured generations of young protégées, many of them gay men.

The so-called “laissez fairies,” closeted LGBTQ conservatives, are a significant part of this book. National Review publisher Bill Rusher, original theorist of the GOP Southern Strategy, was gay, as were Bob Bauman, YAF leader who sponsored the Family Protection Act in Congress, and Marvin Liebman, the name atop many a rightwing front group in the 1960s and 1970s.

As America’s “first intellectual entertainer,” Buckley made contacts, brought people together and put himself “atop a political empire composed of interlocking posts.” The conservative empire began to grow with courtship of the segregationist South after the 1962 midterm elections. Buckley was a states-rights champion who spoke of the “advanced” superiority in the white race. The Buckley family had financed a racist South Carolina newspaper, the Camden News, which championed the segregationist Kershaw County Citizens Council. Three black churches in Camden were torched during its run, along with a cross burning.

It was Clarence “Pat” Manion, ultraconservative Notre Dame law dean, who flagged Sen. Barry Goldwater as a conservative comer and movement standard bearer. Buckley was privately unimpressed at the Arizonan’s smarts and shoot-from-the-hip style. But Goldwater had charisma and was a character and the remedy. Brent Bozell wrote a book, The Conscience of a Conservative, published under Goldwater’s name, which became a best seller.

Buckley’s National Review rallied support under the common banner of anti-communism. Goldwater challenged conservatives to take back the party, which they did in 1964. As presidential nominee, Goldwater lost by a 16-million vote margin and carried only six states, five in the Deep South.

It was the beginning of a long climb with Buckley as guide and Sherpa. Writes Tanenhaus: “Bill Buckley did not make Barry Goldwater. It was Goldwater and his ghostwriter, Brent Bozell, who made — or remade — Bill Buckley, rescued him and the conservative movement from the margins of  American political life.”

The movement would triumph in 1980. A onetime liberal Democrat, actor Ronald Reagan, swept into the White House culminating a political journey begun with a galvanizing 1964 speech for Goldwater. Buckley cheered as the federal government was cut back and Soviet communism was rolled back and relegated to the dustbin of history.

The movement and rightwing media today have a party line as rigid as the Third Reich and Soviet Union. Not so Buckley, who was unafraid to say his own side was wrong and to disagree with Reagan, a longtime friend. He advocated for the Panama Canal Treaty, opposed by the Gipper.  He took on the far-right John Birch Society, fearful its founder Robert Welch would discredit the movement. (Welch had alleged that Dwight Eisenhower was a “conscious agent of the international communist conspiracy.”)

Buckley experimented with drugs, a cigar smoker who sampled marijuana. Hilariously, he dropped acid in company of stern Cold War intellectual James (The Decline of the West) Burnham.

Buckley is an authorized biography but often critical and unflattering toward its subject. One aspect of praise is indisputable. Bill Buckley had an enormous capacity for friendship, generosity, connecting, and mentoring, while Donald Trump demands obedience and commands groveling. By contrast, Buckley delighted in disagreement and debate. He eventually softened on civil rights, with his views about black intellect shattered by debates with James Baldwin and Jessie Jackson. Buckley argued that there was no moral or constitutional right to deny the vote.  

Tanenhaus, former New York Times Book Review editor, has done justice to a compelling life and a nation’s rightward transformation. To cite some faults: Not enough treatment of Buckley siblings, some influential and others troubled by alcoholism; and the author neglects Bill’s sister Priscilla Buckley, managing editor of National Review and den mother to generations of young writers.

Patricia Taylor Buckley was as formidable as her spouse, and created the venues in which he worked, networked, and persuaded. She refused to convert to Catholicism and remained Anglican. She managed multiple households and kept up intellectually with luminaries who left the mansionette well fed. The Buckleys were a power couple who called each other “Ducky.”

In 2026, eight years after his death, National Review ran an issue entitled “Against Trump.” It pointed out that “the Donald” stands for everything Buckley opposed. WFB stood for limited government, not an imperial authoritarian presidency. He advocated for division of powers and a presidency overseen by Congress. He championed individual liberties.

He also decried political retribution. Trump is boorish, bullying, and professes hate; Buckley was witty and civil.  On-air Trump acolytes, from boorish Sean Hannity and insipid Laura Ingraham down to Jason Rantz, harbor no disagreement and engage in invective and crude sarcasm.

Buckley came in for a soft landing, writing checks to his protégés and kibbitzing on projects with son Christopher.  A distinguished pianist once visited the Buckleys’ Park Avenue digs to play Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

Unlike Trump, Buckley remained loyal to his many friends. Liberal ex-Sen. George McGovern, although extremely frail, traveled from South Dakota to the Buckley memorial service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. So did Kitty Galbraith, JKG’s widow, supported by her sons. Senator and fellow Bonesman John Kerry was on hand, and Henry Kissinger was principal eulogist.

It all adds up to a larger-than-life life, an influential life vigorously lived. Fittingly it is now the subject of a 900-page page-turner.