When the 28-year-old Bill Buckley wrote to his new pen pal, Whittaker Chambers, asking permission to come and meet him for the first time, Chambers, recovering at his Maryland farmhouse from another heart attack, replied cheerily, “By all means come. Come anytime of the day.” The letter included driving directions and what Sam Tanenhaus calls “a taste of Chambers’s signature gloom.” Chambers could not sign off without noting, “The score, as the points are chalked up, clearly and boldly, more and more convinces me that the total situation is hopeless, past repair, organically irremediable.”
By the “total situation” he referred not merely to his own ailments, though Buckley found him in bed and forbidden by the doctor “even to raise his head.” No, Chambers meant the whole situation of modern man, especially in the West. As he wrote in his invitation to Buckley, “Almost the only position of spiritual dignity left to men, therefore, is a kind of stoic silence, made bearable by the amusement of seeing, hearing, and knowing the full historical irony that its victims are blind and deaf to, and disciplined by the act of withholding comment on what we know.”
Nonetheless, “the young man of the right and the aging one settled into easy conversation,” Tanenhaus reports. Chambers grasped immediately Buckley’s grace and promise, which the ex-spy’s historical pessimism did not obscure. As soon as Buckley had departed, ushered out by the patient’s anxious wife, Chambers told her: “He is something special. He was born, not made, and not many like that are born in any time.”
“I am a heavy man” (Ernster Mensch), Chambers would later write to Buckley. Buckley was light on his feet, tall (a little over six feet), “handsome and blue-eyed,” and as Tanenhaus put it in his award-winning biography of Chambers, “Bill Buckley brought to the American right qualities no one could remember its ever having possessed: glamour and style, the heedless joy of privileged youth. He was already a celebrity who had catapulted himself toward controversy, blazing out of the consensus fifties as an authentic radical, a firebrand at war with the prevailing orthodoxies of his day, orthodoxies that happened to be liberal.”
Buckley in 1954 was also a year away from the inaugural issue of National Review, and eager to hire a staff. His ulterior purpose in seeing Chambers was to invite him to join up. To his surprise, Chambers said he very well might, before changing his mind the following year, and then changing it twice again. The underlying problem was that “stoic silence” was not the vocation to which Buckley and his magazine felt called. In his Publisher’s Statement in the first issue, Buckley inscribed this oft-quoted line: “National Review…stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one else is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” Yelling Stop. Nor did he share his ex-Communist friend’s confidence, left over from his years as a Marxist-Leninist, that history was a rational process that could be understood and mastered, with the ruling class (whatever it would call itself) enjoying “the full historical irony” and everyone else suffering through it unknowingly, as oppressed victims.
It was Sam Tanenhaus’s beautiful work in Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (1997), the research for which Bill had promoted in numerous ways (while always maintaining “a tactful distance from my work,” Tanenhaus acknowledged) that probably led Buckley to commission his own biography from him a year later. That, and his son Christopher’s encouragement. After more than a quarter-century, Tanenhaus, the editor of The New York Times Book Review from 2004 to 2013 and now the U.S. Writer-at-Large for Prospect magazine, has completed that commission, honorably, resoundingly, massively. Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America clocks in at 1,040 pages, marked by a lively style but an uneven pace. It is a heavy book, not light on its feet, though it has some lovely passages and is, undeniably, the product of prodigious research, far outshining in that category any of the other interesting but narrower accounts of WFB that have appeared in recent years—especially, Lee Edwards’s William F. Buckley, Jr.: The Maker of a Movement (2010) and Alvin Felzenberg’s A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley, Jr. (2017).
Any book whose composition is so protracted (27 years) raises certain questions about itself. What took so long? is the obvious one, though it may be harder to answer than one might think. It takes years to do the kind of interviews and archival research Tanenhaus undertook, as he explains in some detail in the Acknowledgments. The psychological toll of such an enormous project is another factor, about which he says little, other than a poignant mention of Bill’s last words to him, less than three weeks before WFB died in February 2008: “I know I won’t see my biography.” This year will mark the hundredth anniversary of Bill’s birth, and Tanenhaus must feel that centenary approaching. More difficult to estimate is a third factor: how did the shifting currents of politics between 1998 and 2025 change the perceived significance, or influence the author’s interpretation, of Bill’s life and times? To take a singular instance, Bill probably never heard the words “President” and “Trump” used together, except perhaps in a fever dream. What Bill would have thought of the current chief executive or of the direction he has taken conservatism and the country is, therefore, a matter for conjecture, though not for that reason nonsensical. It’s a natural enough question to ask. The only manner in which Tanenhaus could answer it in this book, however, would have been by a close, sympathetic, and faithful interpretation of Bill’s principles and how he reasoned about them in the context of the circumstances of his times, as he saw them. To disparage Trump by comparison with Buckley, or Buckley by comparison with Trump, may be tempting but is too simplistic.
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