William F. Buckley Jr.’s Friends and Enemies

In 1924, after spending 16 years in Latin America flirting with reactionary politics, Buckley Sr. returned to the United States to join his young family. They resided on two large family estates, one in Connecticut and the other in Camden, South Carolina. The Camden estate had been built by James Chesnut, who owned the nearby slave plantation and was an aide to Confederate President Jefferson Davis. By the time the Buckleys took over the estate in 1938, the slave system was gone but the racial hierarchy remained. One of the major revelations of Tanenhaus’s book is how deeply enmeshed the Buckleys were in maintaining Jim Crow in South Carolina. Buckley Sr. supported Latin American and European dictators, but so, too, did his family covertly finance a pro–Jim Crow newspaper allied with the White Citizens’ Councils that organized resistance to desegregation.

These elitist and racist views were leavened with a personal commitment to Christian charity. Tanenhaus records, with a diligence that is perhaps itself an act of charity, many acts of private benevolence that Buckley Sr. bestowed on his employees, including Black domestic workers. But Tanenhaus ultimately concludes that such “private good works…did not so much mitigate the family’s ideological commitments as throw a bright glare on them.”

Not all the Buckley children were overawed by their reactionary patriarch or embraced his worldview. One sister, Allie Heath, remembered her father as a “sadist” and rebelled even to the point of supporting the New Deal. But William Jr. was another matter: Born in 1925 as the sixth of 11 children, he was never one to challenge his father’s dictates or political views. He had, Tanenhaus notes, “the middle child’s fear of being overlooked” and yearned for the approval of parents who were loving but inevitably distant, his father busy with a hectic career and his mother busy supervising two estates that included many servants and kids.

Eager for parental approval, Buckley aped the master of the house. By his own admission, as a young man he was not just loyal to “Father’s opinions” but an “echo chamber” for them. Buckley was so devoted to his parents’ religion that he contemplated becoming a priest. Like his father, Buckley was an America First nationalist who admired Charles Lindbergh’s call for neutrality in World War II. When Buckley Sr. insisted that “Bolshevik Russia was an infinitely greater threat than Nazi Germany,” Buckley Jr. did not disagree. Writing in early June of 1941, as the United Kingdom remained a lonely holdout against a Hitler-­dominated Europe, Buckley Jr. added that in his view, “England has been to date this country’s worst enemy.”

Buckley had few close friends at prep school, aside from the future historian Alistair Horne, ironically a refugee from the hated England and—even worse—a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt’s foreign policy. But as a young man, Buckley hadn’t yet developed his talent for friendship. He still had too much of the hauteur of a privileged child used to getting his way among all the people who raised him: a French governess, Mexican maids, a Black chauffeur. His oldest sister, Allie, nicknamed him “the Young Mahster.” A stint in the Army during the war, which he served Stateside, expanded the range of his social contacts, sanding off the hard edges of his personality, though it did not exactly turn him into much of a democrat or man of the people.

After he arrived at Yale, in 1946, Buckley did try to turn his inner direction outward. Embracing a more receptive and genial personality, he aspired to become the biggest of the big men on campus—which is what he ended up doing. A champion debater (often in partnership with his future brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell Jr.), he became a dominant voice in the Yale Daily News and was soon an inductee into Skull and Bones. He was eventually selected by the class council to deliver the Class Day oration in 1950. Along the way, he gained many lifelong friends.

It’s common enough to build up a social network in the Ivy League, but the ambitious Buckley used his time at Yale to make something of himself. In his first book, God and Man at Yale, published not long after he graduated, Buckley presented himself as a brave young conservative rebelling against a stultifying liberal institution that sought to indoctrinate students into leftist orthodoxy. “Conservatives, as the minority, are the new radicals,” he wrote in the book. One might have assumed this meant he had few friends and supporters at Yale, but the swiftness of Buckley’s success—publishing a book only a year out of college—gives the lie to his claim of rebelliousness. In reality, Buckley flourished as a pet of the Yale establishment. Far from a rebel, he was telling a lot of people what they wanted to hear; even many liberals were turning on those within their own ranks. Under the imperatives of a Cold War promoted by a liberal Democratic president, Harry Truman, the old New Deal popular front that united liberalism with the left had given way to a new centrist consensus uniting liberals and conservatives against radicals. When Buckley wrote his book, he was not so much rebelling against the establishment as helping amplify its rightward turn.

Buckley’s brand of reactionary conservatism flourished in the context of this new centrist anti-radicalism: With the intellectuals of the left now personae non gratae, Buckley and his ilk were becoming increasingly popular among the growing ranks of liberal anti-­communists. Lindbergh supporters like Buckley and his father may have been fringe figures before the war, but now, in the increasingly tru­culent postwar era, they were welcomed by the powers that be, including many liberals. This was certainly true at Yale, where, as Tanenhaus notes, “the same professors Buckley tangled with often became his friends.”

Buckley also did not stop at public denunciations of radicals and liberals. At Yale, he was already working with the FBI as an informant to discredit critics of the new Red Scare, including dishonestly maligning the excellent reporting of Harvard student journalists documenting the suppression of free speech. Meanwhile, Yale president Charles Seymour asked Buckley to send him his editorial clippings, especially the more “freakishly conservative” ones, so he could prove to alumni that “the place wasn’t swarming with New Dealers.” In fact, far from being New Dealers, most of Buckley’s fellow students also leaned to the right. In 1948, a poll of Yale students showed that 63 percent voted for Thomas Dewey, the Republican candidate for president, against just 21 percent for Truman. Half of the students agreed with the idea that the Communist Party was trying to overthrow the US government.

Buckley knew this. When he wrote God and Man at Yale, it was not to denounce Yale but rather to mobilize its conservative alumni to use their economic power to purge the university of subversive professors (by which he meant not communists, who were already unwelcome at Yale, but atheists and Keynesians).

One might have viewed this attack on the rights of free speech and freedom of association as just a way for Buckley to get his foot in the door of the emerging Cold War establishment, but he would go even farther in his 1954 book McCarthy and His Enemies, cowritten with Brent Bozell, which defended Senator Joseph McCarthy and his reckless and shoddy smearing of political foes. Buckley charmed the liberals in his life: He courted them and invited them for dinner or drinks, but he was also more than happy to see them called to testify in front of Congress or lose their jobs for any fellow-traveling in their past. As Tanenhaus writes, “Those who got to know Buckley noticed the disjunction between Buckley the ideologue and Buckley the friend.” Buckley was a public extremist and a private charmer. For many liberals who were part of his circle, the charm was an excuse to ignore the extremism.

Buckley’s foursquare support of McCar­thyism was rewarded: By aligning himself with the incendiary demagoguery of an already increasingly conservative and even reactionary political culture, he found his profile also rising on the right. Militant anticommunism, extending to a war against alleged liberals, was the glue that held the warring factions of the right together. With his genial good manners and adept way of winning over contending friends, Buckley discovered that numerous doors stood open to him: Along with a group of right-wing pundits and political activists who were disgusted with the centrist drift of the Republican Party under Dwight Eisenhower, Buckley established National Review in 1955 and in 1960 helped form the influential student group Young Americans for Freedom, which was founded on the Buckley family’s Connecticut estate.

At its founding, National Review was a mess of contending conservative factions—anti-communism, libertarianism, militarism, and reactionary religious politics—that were often at odds with each other, although editor Frank Meyer tried to bring them together in an unconvincing concoction he called “fusionism.” These political factions never truly fused, but they did sit next to one another peacefully, if only because they all tended to serve the interests of an overlapping group of elites. There were inherent contradictions in pushing both militarism and a minimal state and in expecting that capitalism’s dynamism was compatible with Christian traditionalism—contradictions that Buckley himself acknowledged, noting that to fight communism, Americans “have got to accept Big Government for the duration—for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.” But if National Review’s fusion was intellectually incoherent, it was politically sturdy. It united warring reactionary tendencies that shared a desire to roll back liberalism to at least the period before the New Deal, if not earlier. The National Review factions had little in common except for a shared hatred of egalitarian politics. But a common foe is a powerful glue in politics, more than enough to build a movement on.

As an intellectual, Buckley was at best middling, a popularizer and synthesizer of ideas originated by far superior thinkers. But he attracted a set of intellectual heavyweights into his orbit, including James Burnham, Hugh Kenner, and John Dos Passos. Although hardly a first-rate mind, Buckley had a superb eye for talent, as did Meyer, the magazine’s literary editor. In addition to Burnham, Kenner, and Dos Passos, the early National Review abounded with younger literary talent as well: Joan Didion, Garry Wills, Guy Davenport, Arlene Croce, and John Leonard. In the turmoil of the 1960s, many of these writers moved left, which at one point had Buckley worried that he was running a “finishing school for apostates.”

Yet if he wasn’t an intellectual, Buckley was in many ways what we would now call a lifestyle influencer. In this, he had much in common with another unlikely friend, Hugh Hefner, who in 1967 lent him a chauffeured car when Buckley had to rush to the airport after learning that his sister Allie Heath was dying. In 1970, Buckley wrote to Hefner, “I am happy to be your friend, if you desire me to be.” Hefner was born a year after Buckley, and Playboy was started two years before National Review. The magazines were not as different as one might assume: Playboy offered not just nude pinups but an entire philosophy of sexual libertarianism combined with consumer consumption (high-end stereos, cocktail recipes, interviews with top writers), while National Review sold not just political opinions but an entire conservative philosophy of economic libertarianism combined with leisure pursuits (yachting, ski vacations, listening to Bach). You read Playboy so you could fantasize about being Hefner in his decadent Playboy mansions in Chicago and Los Angeles. You read National Review so you could fantasize about being Buckley in his decadent Sharon estate. Perhaps this was the reason Buckley wrote so many autobiographical books: More than his conservative politics, he was selling the fantasy of being William F. Buckley Jr.

Buckley once told the story about an editor of Paris-Match showing French guests a TV interview between Buckley and Hefner, which was soundless and caused confusion because “they had all tacitly come to the conclusion that I was Hefner, and Hefner was I; he being, in their reading of our faces, clearly the conservative ascetic, I the free liver….” It was an easy mistake to make: As different as they were, they were brothers under the skin, two merchants 
of dreams.

With good reason, Tanenhaus is troubled by Buckley’s friendship with and repeated defenses of Joseph McCarthy. The biographer classifies it under the heading of the “low company” Buckley had an unfortunate tendency to keep. Another example was the attorney Roy Cohn. Buckley knew full well Cohn’s habitual criminality and dishonesty: Cohn had, in fact, tried to rip off Buckley and one of his friends—not once but twice. Yet Buckley still remained loyal to Cohn, writing a column defending him after he was charged with fraud in 1968. In 1986, when Cohn faced disbarment, Buckley once again defended him, testifying on his behalf: “He is absolutely impeccable. Not only would I have to forage within my own memory for any example of a lack of integrity, I would find it a priori inconceivable.”

This testimony was a flat-out lie done as a favor to a man who was little better than a mobster and arguably far worse. But one suspects that Buckley felt an affinity for Cohn, in part because despite his supposed conservatism, he was more than willing to ignore the law too when it benefited him. In 1979, the Securities and Exchange Commission rendered a judgment finding Buckley guilty of fraud for improperly using the assets of one of his companies (Starr) on behalf of another (SITCO).

Among the numerous ways that Buckley had followed in his father’s footsteps was in running over-­leveraged businesses that skirted the edge of the law. There are many accounts of Buckley doing so in Tanenhaus’s biography, but of the many incidents, one in particular stands out. Part of Buckley’s plan, when it came to Starr and SITCO, was to replace the board at Starr with allies who would agree to the underhanded move of using the profitable company to bail out the floundering SITCO. To do so, Tanenhaus reports, Buckley turned to “two members [who] were fellow Bonesmen” and “a third” whom Buckley had deemed “pliable because he could assert the ‘leverage’ of long friendship.”

In other words, Buckley was tapping his friendship network in order to shore up his business interests, to the detriment of the shareholders and existing executives of the company. Being friendly with everyone could have its benefits, after all—though not if you were one of those shareholders or executives. As Michael F. Starr, one of the business partners Buckley mistreated, titled his memoir: What a “Friend” We Had in Bill: William F. Buckley, Jr. and the Rise, Betrayal, and Fall of Starr Broadcasting.

But Buckley’s tendency to align himself with low company—and to sometimes end up being that low company himself—wasn’t just a quirk of personality but a key to his political project: Buckley wanted to be embraced by the centrist elite, but he also wanted to build a base for his reactionary ideas among the discontented and marginalized voters of America. That meant pursuing and cultivating as much low company as his liberal friends would tolerate.

In journalistic accounts, Buckley is often seen as the figure who excommunicated the kookier and more bigoted parts of the conservative coalition that he had tried to build in the 1950s and ’60s, groups like the John Birch Society. But as the historian Matthew Dallek has noted in Politico, “There’s a popular idea that Buckley cordoned off the Birchers and expelled them through editorials in his magazine.” Building on his own research into the Birchers and echoing the work of many other recent scholars, Dallek notes that whenever Buckley distanced himself from such extremists, it tended to be a belated and ineffectual effort often undertaken in response to mainstream pressure. The lines between the extremist and the mainstream right were always blurry, but Buckley liked to blur them even further—at least until he risked getting called out for it. From 1945 to 1965, for example, Buckley was more than happy to make alliances with a number of known racists, antisemites, fascists, and conspiracists. The Birch Society was only one of several: There was also the White Citizens’ Council as well as figures like the antisemitic and fascist Merwin Hart and Revilo Oliver (the latter a frequent early National Review contributor whom Buckley described as “without exception the single most erudite man I have ever known”). Buckley and Oliver would later sever ties, and Oliver would go on to become a major figure in the white nationalist movement. But Buckley’s relationship with the radical right followed a pattern: He would use extremist figures for as long as they could help him build up a mass movement on the right and then break with them when it was politically expedient.

One way to look at this pattern is that Buckley’s politics of friendship were almost always two-faced. In terms of movement-building, he had to cultivate ties with the extreme right. But when it came to courting the world of respectable liberals, he had to disavow these same extremists in order to maintain his mainstream credibility. In this way, National Review and the John Birch Society were in the same movement but with different functions. As Tanenhaus writes, while Buckley and National Review “were trying to win over liberal journalists and intellectuals—and meeting them publicly in debate”—John Birch Society founder Robert Welch (an “amazing man,” as Buckley described him in 1958) “was shepherding the movement’s infantry.” More extravagantly, in 1955 Buckley praised Welch’s conspiracy-­riddled tracts May God Forgive Us and The Life of John Birch as “two of the finest pamphlets this country has read in a decade.”

Buckley also had a nose for cash, and he repeatedly took money from Welch, who along with other Birch Society leaders was a strong early supporter of National Review. Over time, however, Welch’s extremely unhinged views proved to be a liability, and so Buckley carefully disassociated National Review from him, even while not fully breaking with the Birch Society. At that point, the conservative movement still needed the Birchers as foot soldiers to take over the GOP. Only in 1965, a year after Barry Goldwater won the Republican presidential nomination, did Buckley publicly denounce the Birch Society as a whole—in other words, after the popular front was no longer needed. His own break from them didn’t matter anyway: As historians like Dallek and Edward Miller have noted, the Birchers didn’t disappear after Buckley’s excommunication; they became an active agitational faction in the GOP coalition.

Like all myths, the story of Buckley excommunicating the Birchers serves a social function as well as a political one. Liberals needed to believe that their good old friend William Buckley was a respectable voice of conservatism. They also needed an example or two they could point to.

If Buckley often masked the reactionary elements of his political project, it was because he was well trained in deception from his brief time at the CIA. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, just after Buckley graduated from college, he wanted to find a way to join the cause. Of course, as Tanenhaus dryly notes, even if he “was all for a war against Communism,” he “had no desire to put on a uniform,” and so instead he signed up with the CIA.

Buckley’s roots at Yale probably didn’t hurt either. One of his mentors there was the unorthodox and populist-inflected reactionary Willmoore Kendall, who was an intelligence agent of long standing and was just about to start a four-year stint as chairman of Project POWOW (Military Psychological Warfare) at Johns Hopkins University, where he developed propaganda methods used in Korea. Psywar and disinformation, Kendall knew, could be used at home as well, and he encouraged Buckley to put his own skills in these fields to use on the home front.

Buckley’s formal time at the CIA was short—about one year, which included nine months in Mexico, under the direction of E. Howard Hunt. But Buckley remained close to Hunt, a notorious figure who was deeply implicated in some of the greatest scandals of the Cold War, including the 1954 destruction of democracy in Guatemala by a CIA-­sponsored military coup, the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, and the Watergate break-in in 1972. National Review had many other ties to intelligence agencies as well. Like so many intellectual magazines of the era, the early National Review was thick with former OSS and CIA agents. This included Buckley’s sister Priscilla, Ken­dall, who became a frequent contributor to the magazine, and the Trotskyist turned right-wing political philosopher James Burnham, who had links to both the OSS and the CIA. Before National Review was launched, its finances were set up by Bill Casey, a former OSS agent and future director of the CIA 
under Ronald Reagan, and many of Buckley’s friends were also in the CIA or accused of being agents, such as William Sloane Coffin and Allard Lowenstein.

According to Garry Wills, Frank Meyer, the book review editor of National Review from 1957 until his death in 1972, suspected that Buckley and Burnham were “running NR as a CIA operation.” To be sure, Meyer, like many of his National Review colleagues, had a strong streak of paranoia, though the CIA did covertly fund many political and literary magazines, including Encounter and The Paris Review. But even if Meyer’s suspicion wasn’t strictly true, it can still be argued, as Tanenhaus insists, that Buckley was “functionally” doing the work of the CIA. This is true even if he wasn’t on its payroll or taking instructions from the agency.

Buckley, after all, often wrote or published articles that amounted to disinformation and propaganda that served the CIA’s interests. In one instance, Tanenhaus reports, Buckley went to Chile in 1971, meeting with a CIA deputy station chief along the way: “Buckley’s purpose…was to help build up support back home for a coup,” which he did by relentlessly propagandizing against the Allende government and, after the coup of 1973, on behalf of Pinochet. But even when the direct links were far more tenuous, Tanenhaus’s point stands: Buckley was a full-throttle ideological cold warrior. Even without the CIA’s involvement, he would have advocated for many of the programs and ideas that the CIA promoted, and he also tended to live his life like a spy even if he wasn’t one. “Buckley was remarkably good at keeping secrets,” Tanenhaus writes. “It was one reason powerful people trusted him. He remained till the end of his life a clubman, devoted to the rituals of secrecy.” As Garry Wills described him, Buckley was “the secretest kind of spook.”

Buckley also remained loyal to many of his CIA friends, including Hunt, even after the latter was arrested for organizing the Watergate break-in. Buckley raised money for Hunt’s legal expenses and covered some of the lawyers’ bills himself while also trying to shield the Hunt family from investigation by Rolling Stone. Hunt told Buckley about the many sordid acts he was guilty of, including the proposed assassination of newspaper columnist Jack Anderson, and yet Buckley kept Hunt’s confidence until Nixon’s resignation and dissembled about the Watergate scandal whenever he did write about it.

According to Tanenhaus, Buckley received “kind treatment” during this period of his life. His “liberal ‘brothers’ let Watergate pass” because he was “a member in good standing of the innermost clubs.” If Buckley’s CIA friends often looked to him to help launder their reputations, it turns out that Buckley looked to his liberal friends to do the same for his. While Buckley’s friendships were undoubtedly rooted in his genuine affability and great capacity for personal kindness, the liberal company he kept also helped keep him in good graces with the public. This company included many in high places: Buckley gathered some of his media buddies together in a group called “the Boys Club” that he cofounded with Time magazine’s chief of correspondents Richard Clurman, which had monthly lunches that included high-powered figures such as Theodore H. White (the influential political historian), New York Times executives Abe Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb, Newsweek editor Osborn Elliott, and neocon maven Irving Kristol.

Buckley’s celebrity continued to grow in the 1960s and ’70s, in part thanks to his place within the conservative movement and his perch at the PBS show Firing Line, but also because elite liberals welcomed him as an ally in the face of the increasing militancy of the radical movements of the New Left. To his credit, Buckley—much more so than many others—was often willing to debate these more militant radicals, bringing onto his show Paul Goodman, Germaine Greer, Michael Harrington, Roy Innis, Eldridge Clea­ver, and Noam Chomsky, and in those debates he again demonstrated the flimsiness, at least in intellectual terms, of the arguments the right made.

Buckley’s skills as a debater always hinged on his “genius at friendship” as much as any coherent arguments, and when he was on a public stage, his debate skills tended to run into a brick wall. In a 1965 debate at Cambridge University, James Baldwin laid waste to Buckley’s racism. In a 1968 televised debate with Gore Vidal, Vidal’s expert needling provoked Buckley to sputter, “Now, listen, you queer, stop calling me a ‘crypto-­Nazi’ or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face, and you’ll stay plastered.” After the debate, Vidal chortled in a column, “The little door in William F. Buckley Jr.’s forehead suddenly opened and out sprang that wild cuckoo.”

Firing Line and other televised debates made Buckley a well-known figure not only among the right and elite liberals but also more generally with the public. He even sneaked into popular culture, such as when Robin Williams memorably mimicked his transatlantic drawl and sesquipedalian diction in Aladdin (1992). But his post-1965 celebrity also marked Buckley’s decisive transformation from insurgent rightist to conservative member of the establishment. National Review followed suit: Whereas the early National Review had lambasted Eisenhower, the magazine now offered apologia for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and the two Bushes. This was also a sign of his success: Buckley’s right-wing views were now part of the establishment.

Buckley’s coziness with the powers that be sometimes angered younger right-­wingers still filled with anti-­establishment passions. In 1976, Kevin Phillips, a political strategist who at that time was a prophetic advocate of right-wing populism, mocked Buckley and National Review as “Squire Willy and his Companions of the Oxford Unabridged Dictionary.” From Phillips’s point of view, Buckley was an obstacle to bringing into the GOP working-class voters angered by liberalism’s elitism. As Phillips argued, we can’t “expect Alabama truck drivers or Ohio steelworkers to sign on with a politics captivated by Ivy League five-syllable word polishers.”

While Buckley dismissed Phillips in turn as an anti-intellectual vulgarian, he took to heart the lesson that the rage of the populist right required an outlet, and Buckley would occasionally stake out incendiary positions to regain his stature, notably in 1986 when he advocated that people with AIDS should be tattooed. He also welcomed a new generation of right-wing flame-throwers into the ranks of National Review, most notably the racist, gay-bashing writers at The Dartmouth Review, the student publication that launched the careers of Dinesh D’Souza and Laura Ingraham. He also, Tanenhaus reports, gave his “blessing” to Rush Limbaugh. A man who loved “low company,” Buckley was always on the hunt for 
fresh recruits.

Tanenhaus spends less time on the last 34 years of Buckley’s life: They are covered in a brisk 100 pages that read like an addendum to the 750 pages that take Buckley to age 49. While it’s true that Buckley’s major political achievements took place before he was 50, the biography regrettably speeds up the story just as we begin to see Buckley’s balancing act of right-wing and liberal alliances coming undone—and just as the Cold War is ending.

By the early 1990s, a bitter factional battle had erupted between the neocons and the so-called paleocons who sometimes identified themselves with Buckley. Buckley tried to split the difference in bizarre ways. In 1991, he distanced himself from Pat Buchanan in a notably convoluted manner, writing: “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-­Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it: most probably, an iconoclastic temperament.” Two months after publishing that knotty sentence, National Review urged its readers to tactically vote for Buchanan in the Republican primaries in order to push George H.W. Bush to the right.

It’s also possible that the book is abridged toward the end because these were the years when Tanenhaus got to know Buckley, so they touch too closely on that personal connection. In his acknowledgments, Tanenhaus notes that he met Buckley in 1990 while working on a biography of Whittaker Chambers. “Like so many others, I discovered the great breadth of Buckley’s generosity and the almost limitless reach of his friendships and connections,” Tanenhaus recalls. “Within months of our first conversation he had opened doors, uncovered grant money, made phone calls, and performed innumerable other kindnesses, large and small.”

That Tanenhaus, given his own proximity to Buckley in his later years, was able to write such a finely detailed and clear-­sighted study of the man is a mark of his skill as a biographer. Paradoxically, although he stints on depicting their personal relationship, Tanenhaus couldn’t have written this book as it exists without his friendship with Buckley. All good books are built on the contradictions and tensions and internal arguments that an author wrestles with during their creation—and in this one, so many of them derive from Tanenhaus’s own struggle to reconcile the Buckley he knew with the appalling politics and sometimes crooked behavior of the Buckley he didn’t. How could the man who was so charming, so appealing to the liberal as well as the conservative intellectual, also have ties to groups like the John 
Birch Society?

This is a question that Tanenhaus, rightly, doesn’t present in personal terms but allows to permeate the book from beginning to end. What was it about Buckley that made him so attractive to liberals—and what was it about liberals that caused them to be attracted to Buckley in the first place? The liberal impulse to befriend Buckley was a product of the larger elite consensus politics of the Cold War era. The supposed threats of communism and left-wing radicalism created an incentive for elites to huddle together. But it was more than that: Buckley represented the unleashed id, and perhaps the private thoughts and views, of his some of his liberal contemporaries—people who, like Buckley, were untroubled by America’s class system, by its violence and exploitation, because they benefited from it as well. Amid the Black Power uprising of the 1960s, erstwhile liberals like Teddy White discovered that they weren’t that far removed from National Review after all. For them, like Buckley, the New Deal was a set of shackles on the ankles of modern liberalism—something that was preventing it from winning back those suburbanites who now tended to vote Republican and thus needed to be removed. And yet all along, as liberals embraced Buckley’s clubbable conservatism, he was helping to promote many of the right-wing militants who paved the way for the rise of Trump.

Alas, liberals still haven’t learned the lessons that Buckley’s life offers. Joe Biden fetishized bipartisanship while touting his relationship with Strom Thurmond. ­Kamala Harris embraced the support of Dick and Liz Cheney. There can be no real defeat of the far right until liberals learn what the right already understands all too well: Politics is telling the difference between a friend and a foe.