I was perhaps 12 years old when I first sought to strike up a correspondence with William F. Buckley Jr., knowing from the Notes & Asides column in his magazine that the iconic conservative columnist received a Santa Claus-like volume of letters and was, at times, given to respond to them.

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Like a missive sent to the North Pole, my fanmail to Buckley contained quite the list of wishes: requests for anecdotes about Ronald Reagan, his insights into the late stages of the Cold War, and for my own personal preteen column in National Review. You know, typical suburban Massachusetts schoolboy stuff. 

My reluctant pen pal eventually wrote back a short reply on National Review letterhead. The day it arrived in the mail, I overheard my father tell my mother I had received a letter from the John Birch Society. She was not pleased until I pointed out the error. This was many years ago now, but it was also decades after the Buckleyites read the Birchers out of the mainstream conservative movement.

The moral of the story, aside from confirming the old saying that children should be seen and not heard, is that movements look different to outsiders and insiders. What might seem obvious and deeply important from one perspective carries little distinction from the other. Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus and The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer by Daniel J. Flynn are both ambitious, painstakingly researched books. But one is a book unmistakably written from outside the conservative movement, the other from inside.

Tanenhaus is a former editor of the New York Times Book Review and a staunch liberal. Flynn is a senior editor of The American Spectator, a man in the tradition and of the temperament described in his previous book Blue Collar Intellectuals, and a lifelong movement conservative. (As a disclosure, I have known Flynn for years, while I have had one brief but friendly conversation with Tanenhaus.)

An outsider perspective can be valuable, of course. Tanenhaus became Buckley’s official biographer in no small part because of the open-minded approach he brought to his acclaimed 1997 book Whittaker Chambers: A Biography. Between his Chambers and Buckley books, Tanenhaus published The Death of Conservatism in 2009, which was fairly quickly overtaken by the Tea Party, the Republicans’ 63-seat gain in the House during the 2010 midterm elections, and, eventually, Donald Trump.

Where The Man Who Invented Conservatism benefits from Flynn’s discovery of a vast amount of archival material, Buckley probably suffers from how long it took to write (27 years) and the vicissitudes of electoral politics over the life of the project. The book began when Bill Clinton appeared an invincible and important political figure, and was published during Trump’s breakneck second term, when both parties appeared to have abandoned the Clintonian centrist project. Buckley himself died in 2008. Many of the luminaries who attended his funeral — Henry Kissinger, George McGovern, Ed Koch, P.J. O’Rourke — are now dead themselves. But Tanenhaus’s book has seen the light of day before his subject’s 100th birthday in November. 

There was a period of time when Buckley was conservative media. He founded what was its flagship magazine, National Review, in 1955. He began writing his widely syndicated column, On the Right, in 1962 and launched his PBS television debate show Firing Line in 1966. His writing appeared in outlets such as Esquire, and he gave interviews in seemingly hostile territory like Playboy. (He spoke to Playboy, he later explained, “In order to communicate with my 16-year-old son.”)

At the time, there was no Fox News. There was nothing like the conservative talk radio that existed by the 1990s, nor could there have been under the existing broadcast regulatory environment. The dominant media was already viewed as liberal. There were only little magazines and one big man available to combat it.

That man was Buckley. He became a dominant figure in pop culture during the counterculture’s heyday of the 1960s. He was the conservative movement’s first real celebrity (Reagan had been a Hollywood actor first and was a New Deal liberal Democrat at the peak of his film career). He was seen as an intellectual, with a Yale pedigree and penchant for using thousand-dollar words, at a time when conservatism was regarded as hopelessly lowbrow. (Some things never change, a conservative insight.)

Frank Meyer was never so famous. Born in 1909 to an affluent Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, Meyer was some 16 years Buckley’s senior. Despite being a precocious student, he was unhappy at Princeton University and eased out after only three academic terms. In 1932, he earned his bachelor’s degree from Oxford University, where he became an ardent and active communist. “Communist theory is powerful not because it is true; most obviously it is not,” Meyer wrote years later. “It is powerful because it is believed.” Meyer would go on to be at the center of a conservative social circle when he settled with his wife in Woodstock, New York, and joined up with Buckley at National Review right from the beginning.

Both Buckley and Meyer served in the Army during World War II. It was during this time period that Meyer began to become disillusioned with the collectivism of his youthful Marxism. Buckley was not a convert to conservatism or Catholicism, having always kept the faith. But he did undergo something of a conversion of his own from pre-World War II noninterventionism — he joined the America First Committee at 14, a good age at which to hector prominent newspaper columnists — to a steadfast Cold Warrior by the 1950s. Buckley would also go on to serve in the CIA.

Tanenhaus is judicious in his treatment of this period of Buckley’s life. “The isolationist movement is remembered today for its anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi associations. Those strains were powerful, but not all-encompassing,” he writes, “particularly not among the combat-age young. They were more aware of the horrors of the Great Wars, its carnage and waste, the arrogance of empires.”

The same is mostly true of Tanenhaus’s coverage of Will Buckley, the Texas oilman, father of his subject. Buckley Sr. supported a racist newspaper and held cranky views about Jews and Protestants. (Some of this is discussed in the younger Buckley’s “In Search of Antisemitism” during the early 1990s as he quarreled with Patrick Buchanan and Joseph Sobran.) Tanenhaus doesn’t flinch from any of this, but he does note the testimony of black people who worked for Will Buckley in then-segregated South Carolina and recalled his great personal charity and kindness. 

Similarly, Tanenhaus writes about Buckley’s reluctance to support the Civil Rights Movement and, as one must, National Review’s infamous 1957 editorial “Why the South Must Prevail.” But while Tanenhaus clearly shares the liberal suspicion that racism is a larger animating factor in modern American conservatism than the post-1970s record supports, he does note Buckley’s gradual revision of his racial views, his antipathy toward segregationist George Wallace (by no means universally shared by conservatives, or even those in Buckley’s personal orbit, in the 1960s), and of course his seminal role in purging the conservative movement of bigots and cranks. 

This last bit is an important part of Meyer’s story as well. Never a segregationist himself, though he objected to the most sweeping federal civil rights legislation on libertarian and constitutionalist grounds, and someone who personally experienced the sting of antisemitism, he was also indispensable in advising Buckley to distance National Review from the likes of the John Birch Society for the good of the nascent conservative movement. This wasn’t as easy as it may seem in retrospect.

“Breaks from [Revilo] Oliver, [Willmoore] Kendall’s close friend and a visitor to Woodstock, and from M. Stanton Evans’s father demonstrated how pain accompanied the extrication of the right from its fringe,” Flynn writes. “Friendships ended. Bitterness ensued. No congratulatory note awaited Buckley from his fashionable critics for jettisoning his uncouth allies. Only a sadist could enjoy the process.”

While the early conservative movement does deserve criticism for its slowness and often failure to appreciate the immorality and injustice in how black Americans were treated, it has since evolved into a far more consistent defender of race neutrality and individualism over group rights than contemporary progressivism. Buckley was himself an important part of that evolutionary process. And ultimately, at least some of the Right’s fears about what certain provisions in civil rights law would do to the constitutional order were borne out, as Christopher Caldwell documents at length in his 2020 book, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.

Despite Buckley’s thousands of columns, hundreds of magazine editorials, dozens of books, numerous public speeches, and countless television appearances, he is found wanting for his failure to write any definitive defense of conservatism at a theoretical level. Tanenhaus isn’t necessarily unique in this regard. Joe Sobran, after his split with National Review in the early 1990s, wrote that Buckley “belongs more to the world of Phil Donahue” than that of Samuel Johnson. “Gravitas was finally swallowed up in celebritas,” the columnist complained bitterly.

God and Man at Yale, published in 1951, virtually began the genre of modern conservative complaints about the academy. Firing Line set a standard for high-minded political debate seldom seen in today’s polarized political climate. Yet for all Buckley’s immense talents, it’s true he wasn’t primarily a political theorist. He was an entrepreneur, an eloquent popularizer and public defender of principles, and as everything from a TV star to a 1965 candidate for New York City mayor, good at generating publicity for a once-obscure political movement.

“National Review’s editor-in-chief morphed from conservative gadfly to multimedia celebrity during his mayoral campaign,” Flynn writes. “He held no chance of winning and a solid chance of denying the Republican victory, so the press treated him better than it ever did.”

Buckley also held together a quarrelsome group of thinkers who were accomplished theoreticians and political strategists, many, such as James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers, older than he, while bequeathing his magazine to a much younger generation. That’s no small feat. In this eclectic group of thinkers, few were more important than Meyer.

Meyer’s Principles and Heresies column in National Review and his 1962 book In Defense of Freedom did spell out postwar conservative political philosophy as systematically as any writing aimed at more or less a general-interest audience could. Meyer did this while editing a wildly eclectic and wonderfully written “Books, Arts, and Manners” section in National Review, where he conspicuously did not play the role of ideological enforcer. For that, readers of Joan Didion and Gary Wills, some of the writers he gave early commissions to, should be grateful. 

But Meyer was vitally important ideologically as the thinker who helped balance the competing tensions within American conservatism: freedom versus order, individualism versus the community, traditionalism versus libertarianism. Meyer’s “fusionism” is often confused with the political coalition that conservatism came to represent by the 1980s, the “three-legged stool” of economic, social, and national security conservatives. That may not be the essence of conservatism, but fusionism does derive some of its staying power from the fact that it deals with contradictions within American conservatism at a human and electoral level.

In his first speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference as a sitting president, Reagan praised Meyer, by then dead nearly a decade, for fashioning “a vigorous new synthesis of traditional and libertarian thought – a synthesis that is today recognized by many as modern conservatism.”

“It was Frank Meyer who reminded us that the robust individualism of the American experience was part of the deeper current of Western learning and culture,” Reagan continued. “He pointed out that a respect for law, an appreciation for tradition, and regard for the social consensus that gives stability to our public and private institutions, these civilized ideas must still motivate us even as we seek a new economic prosperity based on reducing government interference in the marketplace.”

That’s certainly a far cry from when former President George W. Bush, according to former speechwriter Matthew Latimer, responded to a draft of his own CPAC speech by saying, “Let me tell you something. I whupped Gary Bauer’s ass in 2000. So take out all this movement stuff. There is no movement.”

Yet the tension that Meyer recognized between liberty and virtue is more important to a proper understanding of fusionism than any synthesis, and certainly any combination of Republican tax cuts and abortion restrictions. That’s why fusionism is less moribund than many younger conservative thinkers believe. How many “common good” conservatives supported the COVID-19 lockdowns? Not many.

Buckley, like Reagan, was a thorough fusionist. A Catholic social conservative who could subtitle with some justice one of his books “Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist,” a man who was somehow simultaneously deeply irreverent and intensely devout. 

EDWIN J. FEULNER JR., 1941-2025 

Flynn and Tanenhaus’s books are best read together. Despite concentrating on Meyer, Flynn actually does the better job of covering National Review’s formative years and Buckley’s political machinations. He also avoids weird asides, like Tanenhaus’s bizarre drive-by speculation, offered without any evidence, that Buckley might have been gay. This unfortunate bit of innuendo, which is not particularly representative of Buckley as a whole, has colored many conservatives’ perceptions of the book’s motivations. Yet Tanenhaus brings to the table a valuable perspective from outside the movement and sheds more light on Buckley’s early life.

Let a thousand pages bloom.

W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.