[Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus (Random House 2025)]

Friend and foe alike of William F. Buckley, Jr. will find themselves disappointed in the contents of Sam Tanenhaus’s Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America. Tanenhaus spent nearly thirty years working on the Buckley-commissioned biography, a time which saw the second Iraq War, Buckley’s death, the rise of Donald Trump, and half of the less-than-roaring ’20s. The unique challenge of a biography of such a titan figure as Bill Buckley is one must avoid it becoming another history of National Review and the other titan figures that surrounded it. The other rocks to run against are the temptation to avoid it all together. Tanenhaus appears to choose a secret third path—of seemingly not speaking about Buckley at all at times.

Now, there is much to be praised in this nearly 900-page book (860 to be precise, with more than two hundred pages of notes, acknowledgments, and index added). The primary strength lies when Tanenhaus remains a biographer, which is best seen in the first two sections of the book that describe Buckley’s childhood and his time at Yale. Here we are introduced to a Buckley that is tangentially related to the later Buckley, a Buckley that is a stark follower of his father, Buckley Sr. We are gifted a glimpse into the life of a man of the Old Right in Buckley Sr., an adoring fan of Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee—a cause that Buckley Jr. also adopted. It places Buckley in the context of a pre-war, anti-New Deal “conservatism” that eventually becomes the hawkish Fusionism of the Cold War. Buckley will not be the only one to make this journey from Old Right to New, the difference being that Buckley will soon lead that movement.

It is also this era that we are allowed a glimpse into the pre-God and Man at Yale Buckley, a man cutting his teeth against what is an increasingly liberalizing academia. Buckley is portrayed as a young man at war, at war with the faculty and his fellow student as he spearheaded the Yale Daily News. Here we can see the whispers of the later Buckley, as editor and as whip. Buckley was a publicist as much as a thinker and his desire to act as a gatekeeper shine in the fights he has on the Yale campus.

It is here where Tanenhaus’s story begins to weaken. Buckley is shown to be writing God and Man at Yale, but in his process of doing so, the ideas and thoughts he undergoes don’t appear fleshed out. Much more focus is given to Buckley’s time in the CIA—though one should certainly give due attention to this as Murray Rothbard often did. More focus is given to his second book, with L. Brent Bozzell Jr., McCarthy and His Enemies but not the due which it might be given. We are shown short glimpses into the inner workings of National Review as it begins but less and less as the story progresses. Focus is often given the writers around Buckley, not an unworthy task to undertake, but at times it seems to wander too far from Buckley himself.

It appears that Tanenhaus has decided to make use of this rare opportunity of access to the personal papers of Buckley to cast an indictment—not for the gatekeeping that Murray Rothbard would accuse him of—but as being the progenitor of Donald Trump’s movement.

Buckley, the fusionist, is the supposed throughline from Buckley Sr., to Merwin Hart of the National Economic Council, to Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, Nixon, George Wallace, Reagan, Gingrich, and then Donald J. Trump. Never mind that Buckley’s fusionism is sharply opposed to the more populist Nixonianism that Donald Trump adopted from the former President and his speechwriter Pat Buchanan, Buckley is responsible. Tanenhaus spends much of the book getting lost in the weeds of American electoral politics and electoral theory, something that certainly can complement the analysis, but appears to become the analysis for large swaths of the later book. At times the reader may become lost as Tanenhaus weaves through the power brokers that orchestrated Nixon’s elections and Reagan’s primaries of Gerald Ford. A specter that Tanenhaus seems fond of dangling in front of Buckley is Strom Thurmond and George Wallace (though Tanenhaus makes it clear that Buckley did not like Wallace).

Tanenhaus seems keen to borrow from Sam Francis and Donald Warren’s theory of the “middle American radical” for much of the book, claiming that Buckley’s movement catered towards the middle American. Lost is much of the nuance, of the reliance of these MARs on the government Buckley claimed to despise, of their alienation from property and ownership, and their resentment of social engineering. There is a case to be made of Donald Trump inheriting this movement, but hardly from Buckley. Buckley’s fusionism is an ideology that offers two of the pillars—laissez-faire economics and social conservatism—on the altar of the third—hawkish foreign policy; it is an ideology of moderation, not of radical proletarianism.

The last three decades of Buckley’s life is skimmed over in a hundred pages: Reagan’s election and administration; the ’90s that saw the battle between neoconservatives and paleoconservatives; the Bush years and Iraq; and Buckley’s death. Thirty years is condensed into such a short frame, especially for a biography that took thirty years to write. In those pages, Tanenhaus spends more time talking about Buckley’s stance on AIDs and “gay rights” than about the Reagan administration. It appears that Tanenhaus is more interested in speculating on Buckley’s sexuality than in discussing how Buckley interacted with the movement that had grown around and in reaction to him.

For libertarians, Murray Rothbard is mentioned a total of twice: not in the early years of National Review or the 1990s, but once about the America First Committee (which Tanenhaus is surprisingly fair to) and again in reference to the Panama Canal Treaty in the mid-70s. One might imagine that an author who has written about the conservative movement in this biography and elsewhere would pay more attention to how Buckley interacted with the Godfather of Libertarianism. National Review’s war with Ayn Rand is not mentioned at all and Tanenhaus’s theory of why Buckley excommunicated the Birchers is shallow. The only interesting aspect, that may only stand out to the most attentive of amateur historians of libertarianism, is the mention of Neil McCaffrey and Arlington House during the Nixon years—the man who was good friends and colleague with both Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard.

Anyone who has long waited for the arrival of the definitive biography of William F. Buckley, Jr. is sure to leave disappointed by Sam Tanenhaus. Though clearly a skilled writer, his narrative is initially tight but loosens as the story progresses and becomes more of a liberal’s opportunity to air his grievances with Buckley. There may be benefits to reading the first section of the book for anyone interested in understanding Buckley’s childhood, but seemingly little elsewhere. Thirty years have not been well spent for the product we have received.