In the Review’s September 25 issue, Mark Lilla and Osita Nwanevu each review Sam Tanenhaus’s new biography of National Review founder, sailing enthusiast, political gadfly, and conservative firebrand William F. Buckley. As Nwanevu writes, “the stakes of Buckley—a book that was about three decades in the making and weighs it—are that it might help us make sense of the turn toward Trumpism and the character of the American right more broadly.” Or, as Lilla asks, “When did self-styled conservatives, whose tradition used to teach respect for institutions and modesty, start cruising for rough trade?”

Below, alongside Lilla’s and Nwanevu’s essays, are six articles and two letters from our archive about the man who Lilla calls “a counterintellectual, a protozoan ancestor of Stephen Miller and Christopher Rufo. A real stinker.”

Mark Lilla
Father Knows Best

Sam Tanenhaus’s biography of William F. Buckley helps explain how an elite intellectual could have seen less-educated voters’ distrust of intellectuals as offering the possibility of a new kind of American conservatism.

Osita Nwanevu
Conservatism’s Baton Twirler

The arrival of a Republican administration that wages war against immigrants and liberal colleges should be understood as the culmination of the conservative movement that William F. Buckley shaped and defined beginning in the 1950s.

Garry Wills
The Buckley Myth

Today’s renewed interest in William F. Buckley Jr. presents him as having an outsize impact on his time. Buckley did not make history. He made good copy.

—August 11, 2015

Pico Iyer
Morning in America

“The more you read, in fact, the more you come to see how much he has in common with his friend Ronald Reagan: a great gift for seeing the best in things, a determined refusal to be troubled by too much complexity, a readiness to let his assistants take care of the details, and a winning ability, once the team has completed its research, to come on-air or in print to offer a smiling reassurance and some eloquence.”

—October 10, 2002

John Gregory Dunne
Happy Days Are Here Again

In the world according to Buckley, Gatsby would marry Daisy, Tom Buchanan would find eternal happiness with Jordan Baker, Myrtle Wilson would open a chic and successful boutique, and Nick Carraway would become the Republican-Conservative governor of New York, with William F. Buckley, Jr., as his mentor/adviser/éminence blanche.

—October 13, 1983

William F. Buckley, John Gregory Dunne
‘Overdrive’: An Exchange

My principal point here is that where I attempted to be revealing in my book, Mr. Dunne simply rewrote me into a drab…genteel…humdrum…conventionalism for which he then proceeded to take me to task.

—November 10, 1983

Peter Singer
Looking Backward

“This tension between ideological opposition to state action and concern for those who will suffer without it runs through Buckley’s reforms; and the most serious objection to them is that, when the going gets tough, Buckley falls back on his principles and haughtily ignores the consequences.”

—July 18, 1974

Margot Hentoff
Unbuckled

“What happened to Mr. Buckley, along with the rest of us, was the breaking down of traditional ideological compartments, the blurring of traditional alliances and enmities. Not only did the old New Deal and New Frontier politics lose credence with the left, but the left then walked off with the conservative banners of nonintervention, freedom from governmental coercion, rugged individualism, decentralization, and, in some cases, racial separatism.”

—December 3, 1970

I. F. Stone
The Collected Works of Barry Goldwater

[L. Brent] Bozell, [as] the right wing of Buckley’s right-wing weekly, National Review…has moved down in recent years from an editor to a contributor. His enthusiasm for Franco Spain and his predilection for holy war and statism may have proved a little gamey even for the tastes of Buckley’s “conservatism.”

—August 20, 1964

William F. Buckley
Stone on LBJ

We do not, at National Review, change the pecking order every week depending on our writers’ ideological temperatures. It is probably Mr. Stone’s experience with the Left, unhappy one would hope, that makes him suppose that life among conservatives is equally sordid.

—September 24, 1964

Save $168 on an inspired pairing!
Get both The New York Review and The Paris Review at one low price.

Get the deal

Politics   Literature   Arts   Ideas

You are receiving this message because you signed up
for e-mail newsletters from The New York Review.

Update your address or preferences

View this newsletter online

The New York Review of Books
207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016-6305