The Man Behind the Modern Conservative Movement, with Sam Tanenhaus – Niskanen Center

William F. Buckley was a public intellectual, commentator, and founder of National Review, the magazine that arguably launched the modern conservative movement as we know it today. Would there even be a conservative movement without Buckleys leadership?

And if so, is he responsible for the Trumpist turn Republican Party has taken? Does Buckley bear some blame for the direction in which conservatism has developed?

Journalist and historian Sam Tanenhaus has spent years studying the life and legacy of William F. Buckley. He joins Vital Center host Geoffrey Kabaservice for a deep dive into how Buckley became the force that shaped American politics as we know it today.

Sam Tanenhaus: Willmoore Kendall said Bill Buckley was the greatest conversationalist alive. What he meant was he was the greatest listener alive. Willmoore Kendall did all the talking but Bill was a great listener and Wills says this, too, in his memoirs. He would listen to everything that you said.

Geoff Kabaservice: Im Geoff Kabaservice from the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the mighty muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events.

And Im especially delighted to be talking with Sam Tanenhaus today. Sam is a well-known journalist, historian, and author of several books, including his 1997 biography of Whitaker Chambers, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and 2009sThe Death of Conservatism.

Hes also been an editor at theNew York TimesandVanity Fair, and was editor of theNew York Times Book Review. He is working on an authorized biography of conservative leader William F. Buckley, Jr. And Sam hired me as an assistant on that project, doing research way back in the 1990s when I was a grad student at Yale. And now here we are in a pandemic, talking through some kind of computer app. So welcome, Sam!

Sam Tanenhaus: Great to be with you, Geoff. All my research assistants have far surpassed me. Youre only the first of them. Ive seen all your bylines in the newspaper all the time, beginning with yours.

Geoff Kabaservice: Im proud to be your first, Sam. So youve been a politically engaged commentator as well as a historian and biographer. And one benefit of the biographers work of extended reflection on figures like Buckley you notice how artfully I dont mention how long youve been working on this is that you have a kind of perspective that other people lack.

And the questions that we ask about Buckley now, given our knowledge of what has happened since he died nearly a dozen years ago in 2008, those are different questions from what they would have been years ago. So I think part of what we would like to know now is: How did he manage to keep together the often conflicting strains of traditionalist and libertarian style conservatism? And whether a conservative movement would have happened without Buckleys leadership, whether conservatism would have succeeded in taking over the Republican Party?

But I think wed also like to know now what is Buckleys responsibility for the conservative movement leading to Donald Trumps presidency? And given that Buckleys grand-nephew L. Brent Bozell IV was one of those arrested in the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, were the darker traits of conservatism encoded in it from the beginning and destined to be dominant someday?

Was conservatism wrong from the beginning? Does Buckley bear some blame for the direction in which conservatism has developed? And given that the Q Anon movement bears some real similarities to bygone extremist movements on the right such as the John Birch Society, are there lessons to be drawn from Buckleys attempt to marginalize the Birchers and to excommunicate them from the conservative movement?

So thats a bunch of big questions that I hope well get to in the course of this conversation. But I guess right now, for those readers who are not familiar with William F. Buckley Jr., what kind of overview of him would you give? And what was his significance, not just for conservatism, but really for American politics and history?

Sam Tanenhaus: Well, those are the questions. Those are questions Im wrestling with in the book. And as I mentioned to you, two-thirds of the manuscript are now in with a publisher. Ill get the next third in, which is all revision because Im now in a draft where Im turning an inchoate mass of material into what I hope is choate, but its still a mass of material.

And what I found, Geoff, is there were several Buckleys, as there often are with complex figures who are larger than life, and who are brilliant the way he was. So let me touch on a few points. And I hope your audience doesnt object if I call him Bill, for two reasons. One, I knew him quite well. My wife and I became quite close to him. He was instrumental in the writing of the first biography I did of Whittaker Chambers all those years ago.

And second, because people who were close to him And Ill give you two examples to show how wide his range was, because thats what we get to, how big the orbit of Buckley was. Two exceptionally brilliant figures who are very much with us still: the political thinker and analyst Michael Lind, and in many ways, an adversary of his the giant of thought, and criticism, and history, and religion, and many other things, Garry Wills, who was really the most important defector fromNational Reviewand from the Buckley world. [They] always call him Bill. Its always Bill.

And I think one reason they do that is they dont like the WFB, which is what is out there so often. When Im in touch with Christopher Buckley my subjects son, the very prominent writer, the brilliant humorist its always WFB, thats what we call him. He even calls him that.

But Bill is what people who were close to him called him. So thats what Im going to call him now and again. Because there are a lot of Buckleys out there now, and its hard to keep them all straight. So there are just a few things to think about that have been on my mind a lot the past, lets say, year or so, or in the Trump years even.

One is the book changed a little bit, and it became, as you kind of suggested I think pretty directly, it became a How we got here book. And if its a how we got here book, then the question is: Are we here because of Bill Buckley, in spite of Bill Buckley, or are we here partly because of and partly in spite of Bill Buckley?

And those are some of the complications, because he was really a protean figure. So you can look at different aspects of the conservative movement, of American political life, of American cultural life and see Bill Buckleys imprint. Without Bill Buckley theres no Rush Limbaugh. And you think, well, how can that be? Well, Bill invented, really, the modern media presence for a major conservative figure, in the most literal sense, through his program Firing Line. But he was also a mentor and sponsor of Rush Limbaugh, which is really surprising to many people.

So for instance, I was going back and forth with Garry Wills, who knows everything about the early Buckley because he was the first genius they discovered in the 1950s when he was very young and he really was a genius. Willmoore Kendall, one of Buckleys mentors, said This is a genius when he saw some of the early work.

And so Garrys a little surprised about the Bill Buckley and Rush Limbaugh connection. And he said, Limbaugh thats just the kind of vulgarian Bill hated.

And I reminded him, Well, Joe McCarthy was just the kind of vulgarian Bill hated until he took him up. And Bill became Joe McCarthys most articulate defender, in collaboration with Bills brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell. So theres that aspect of Buckley.

There is also the Buckley who was the peerless discoverer of talent. Garry Wills is one. George Will is another. My predecessor at theNew York Times Book Review, John Leonard, was a third who was a superb literary journalist and really the best editor by far in the history of theNew York Times Book Review. And I feel Im qualified to say that because I had the same job. But a brilliant writer and critic. And when Bill hired him, he was 19 years old. He was a Harvard dropout.

Bill was a mentor to Joan Didion who never talks about it any longer, whom many think just kind of wrote occasionally forNational Review. No, she didnt. Go on Unz.com underNational Reviewand youll see the 20 essays she wrote on J.D. Salinger, on Norman Mailer No, she learned a lot atNational Review.

So you have this range of figures as intellectuals whom Bill discovered, nurtured, and groomed. And they come up to the present, Geoff, as you know David Brooks and Rick Brookhiser, theyre somewhat older now, but we remember when they were young, they were all discoveries of Bill Buckley.

But you also had Bill Buckley who was the early champion of Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats inNational Reviewgo back and look at it. This is the subject thats come up the most, I would say, in the past year or two, is Bill Buckley andNational Reviews relationship to race and civil rights.

What many dont realize is the unsigned weekly editorials inNational Reviewcan be identified. Theres a master list at the magazine, which Ive seen, but there are other ways of identifying them as well. Bill wrote most of them.

So when people wonder, Well, did Buckley write that editorial defending the South, when it said black people shouldnt vote? Yeah, the answer is yes. Not only that, and heres an interesting thing Probably the most controversial thing Bill Buckley ever wrote was an editorial inNational Reviewat the time the first modern Civil Rights Act was passed, the 1957 act, which as you know all about, the one that the watered-down bill that made possible the great bill that came in the 1960s. And Bill wrote the notorious editorial that said, the headline is: Why the South Must Prevail.

And so today we look at that and we think, How could he possibly have written such a thing? Well, you probably know he reiterated it word for word two years later in his bookUp from Liberalism. So why would Bill Buckley do that? Because in those days it was not so unusual a thing for a sympathizer with the white segregationist South to say.

Today were appalled and aghast by it. We are right to be appalled and aghast by this. But in those years, thats what people were saying. So then you can ask a question: Should Bill Buckley have known better? Should Bill Buckley have been more generous? Should he have been more available and more open to civil rights arguments?

And we would say, Yeah, he should have been. And then we leaf throughNational Review, and we can hardly find anybody else, any of his colleagues, who was more generous. Wills became so a few years later, and Wills really opened up civil rights and youth politics as a new dimension ofNational Review.

So heres another way of putting it. The simplest way of looking at Bill Buckley is to say he was the most articulate and protean and connected media promoter of whatever the most conservative line in the Republican Party was in his time. And he was not a philosopher. Theres this idea kicking around including at Yale now, which has a program at Yale which you know so well, the William F. Buckley Jr. Program that pretends, or they have deluded themselves, that he was some kind of political philosopher. He would be the first one to tell you he was not. He couldnt be bothered reading most of the books the philosophers wrote, much less to write one himself.

No, he was a journalist. He was an activist. He was a great connector of people. And you knew him He was absolutely enchanting as a person. You never met a person you liked more. Among famous people, of the famous people Ive met I havent met all that many, but of the great people Ive met, he was by far the kindest, the most generous, the best listener, the one who was interested in you rather than himself. He had those extraordinary qualities.

So, for instance, one of his very best friends, the writer he most admired among journalists, was the columnist Murray Kempton, who was very far on the left compared to Bill. Kempton wrote a book defending the Black Panthers and all that. Bill paid for Kemptons columns to be collected and published, because the publisher was not going to take the financial hit.

Bill paid for an editor at theNew York Review of Booksto publish them. And he said, Murray, theres so many great columns here. If you cant decide how many, lets do two volumes instead of one. Because you are the greatest craftsman among journalists of this time and your work should be preserved.

So when you see that book, its called, I thinkPerversitiesand something else theres another P in there, you probably know what it is youll see the dedication, and it says, To Bill Buckley, whose genius for friendship surpasses understanding. So thats the Bill Buckley we look at and we think, Why couldnt there have been more of those around now?

Why couldnt we have someone who would invite an adversary onto his great program,Firing Line? which people now watch just for kicks. They go on YouTube to watch these interviews of Norman Mailer and others. And you think, Well, why cant somebody else just be like him? And the answer is there was never anyone like him before, and theres unlikely to be anyone similar afterward.

You can find people who were smart, who were smarter than he was, who wrote better books than he did, who thought better. Some of his mentors were far better thinkers than he was. Willmoore Kendall, and James Burnham in particular, were far better theorists and spellers-out of principles and arguments than Bill was. But they didnt have Bills genius for living.

Its like the Yeats line: genius goes into the life or the work. Well, for Bill, the life and the work intersected; they were one. He exuded a kind of generosity of spirit, no matter where he happened to come down on some political issue. And thats the thing we miss. Thats what elevated the conversation.

So when Bill publicly is writing about someone like Mailer Norman Mailer, the great writer he calls him every name you can imagine. And then he has him onFiring Line, and it almost looks as if hes trying to seduce him, because he admires his talent, his gift, so much. And thats Bill. So there was a largeness, a capaciousness to him that we dont see elsewhere. Those are personal traits, theyre not political or ideological traits. They dont get passed through a movement the same way.

Geoff Kabaservice: You get lost in reminisces about the personal qualities of Bill Buckley. But I think maybe the political point to put on that is first, yes, Buckley did admire quality from whatever quarter it emerged. But I think he also believed that high culture, for example, was the common property of conservatives as well as people on the left. That was why he hired John Leonard to maintain a culture section, which was actually a pretty good culture section of a magazine. Even though Leonard, when he quit, said thatNational Reviews readers were the stupidest people hed ever encountered in his entire life.

And it was why Buckley criticized theNew York Times, as every conservative has, but he really thought the solution to the problem of theNew York Times dominance was not its demolition but creating a conservativeNew York Timeswhich was just as good. And so in many ways, Buckley is that kind of path just not followed by the conservative movement.

And on some level he could never decide whether he was a conservative in the sense of being a traditionalist or libertarian. He did call one of his volumes of memoirReflections of a Libertarian Journalist. But I think he attached to the Russell Kirk idea that the correct meter is not left versus right, but civilization versus barbarism. And he wanted to be on the side of civilization.

So these are all things that make him an interesting figure. But youre almost talking about him as sort of anomalous. And I think that in many ways he, as the creator of the conservative movement, bred a lot of his DNA into that movement as well.

Sam Tanenhaus: Yes he did. And its interesting too, because if you look at his own history in particular, his fathers ambitions His father was from South Texas. Many people think Buckley descended from New England gentry. He did not. He was the son of two Southerners, one from Duval County, Texas (South Texas) that was his father. His mother was from New Orleans.

Geoff Kabaservice: I was always taken by the fact that one of Buckleys ancestors on his fathers side died in a bar brawl in Texas.

Sam Tanenhaus: Well, yeah, there are questions about that. There were a lot of tall tales told about the Buckleys. The most interesting aspect this gets into material thats far afield But his grandfather was a remarkable figure. What I found was that he wanted to set the family on a course they didnt follow politically. He was going to be a kind of Grover Cleveland, Mugwump reformer as a sheriff in Duval County, Texas. And he was actually indicted by the U.S. government for being involved in a revolution led by a Mexican Tejano. Its a very interesting story

But all that aside, there was something about Buckley that was set apart from the normal run of the Republican Party in the United States. Now, his father And his father was enormously influential, a commanding presence and figure in his life and in some ways the real progenitor, not just of a brilliant son, but of the movement. His father was involved in counter-revolutionary politics.

As Bill later did, his father was secretly working for a Senate investigative committee, in this case looking at the Mexican Revolution in the Woodrow Wilson years. The Buckleys crossed a lot of lines. The Buckleys broke a lot of rules, broke a lot of laws.

Sam Tanenhaus: Bill Buckley was almost indicted for his pursuit of Adam Clayton Powell in the late 1950s. He came very close to getting indicted for jury tampering, and in fact was guilty of it; the judge let him off.

So theres an interesting thing one of Buckleys prep school tutors wrote about him I saw the file. Its not in the Yale archive, the massive Yale archive, its in the Millbrook Prep School archive, which I saw a number of years ago. Its a line that I have in the book and really stayed with me. So hes writing about the 15- or 16-year-old Bill Buckley, and he says, He has to be made to understand that the rules dont exist just to be invoked in his favor.

And if you keep that in mind, you see a lot of how the conservative movement works today. When black people in the South were asking as American citizens for the right to vote, he and others atNational Reviewdismissed that as democratism. When the white backlash came, Bill Buckley wrote a column and he said, Well, the majority has its rights too. They shouldnt be pushed around by these minorities, meaning blacks. And the majority in that case was the white South. And you will see this time and time again.

Bill Buckley was a libertarian, absolutely. One of the original founding principles ofNational Reviewwas opposition to the imperial presidency what one of Bills mentors, James Burnham, called the Caesarist presidency. Bizarrely enough, they thought that Caesar was Dwight Eisenhower. But that was their view.

AndNational Reviewwas founded as a vehicle in support of Joe McCarthy. And Ill get back to that point in a moment. And it was understood to be that; it was not a secret, it was not hidden from anyone. It was McCarthyite intellectuals who foundedNational Review. Thats how they were perceived in the broader culture of that time, the journalistic culture.

And so one founding principle its in their original prospectus for the magazine was opposition to the strong presidency. When Richard Nixon was elected and got in trouble for Watergate, Bill Buckley wrote a column saying, Well, American presidents are essentially monarchs. Why are we telling this guy what to do, what laws he cant break?

Right? We see this time and time again. So as far as the philosophical consistency goes, it doesnt exist; it simply doesnt exist. There are different strands. And then Bill the musician he was a pretty good pianist hits the chord he needs at that time. If its somebody he doesnt like, if its an Adam Clayton Powell, then hes shocked that the system of jurisprudence is not working so Powell will be indicted and sent to jail for tax evasion.

If its black people and civil rights activists who say, Well, maybe the problem in the South is all-white juries which keep turning down every black person who puts in a complaint about not being allowed to vote, then Buckley says, Well, what do we need these jury systems for? There are higher values than jurisprudence when it comes to protecting the superior civilization. It happens over and over and over again.

So you think, Well, how then does this influence what we have now? And the answer is: its everywhere. Thats essentially what our conservative movement is. Its a war against liberalism.

So we have not mentioned the first great mentor, the most underrated figure on the right, because he has been kind of ridiculed in recent years and he was a kind of a ridiculous figure. But he also saw everything. And that was Bills first mentor, Albert Jay Nock, the writer, whos often called a libertarian. Hes called In his book, the comprehensive history of the intellectual movement, George Nash says that had he lived longer he died in 1945 Albert Nock would have been the godfather, the great old man of libertarianism.

But thats not really what he was. He was a social Darwinist. His famous book,Our Enemy the State, is a rewriting of Herbert Spencers book on the predatory state. And if you read enough of Nock, youll see hes a social Darwinist. What I would propose to you is that we come back to ideology forget libertarians, forget traditionalists. Russell Kirk has 15 pages [inThe Conservative Mind] on John Calhoun, who was the philosophical hero for many atNational Review. And Harry Jaffa wrote about this very directly and talked to me about it before he died in 2010.

Russell Kirk has 15 pages defending the great John C. Calhoun. He says hes one of the two outstanding, two preeminent conservatives in American history, conservative thinkers. John Adams was the first. And of course John Adams was the only one of the early presidents who didnt own slaves. And the second was John Calhoun.

And what he said was, Calhoun was the great defender of American minorities. And the only minority that does not get mentioned in those 15 pages is African Americans, whom he wanted to enslave. And this is the contradiction. This is the problem we have with that conservatism. Heres something for the real geeks out there I recommend you read an exchange inNational Reviewfrom the summer of 1965. The first is by Frank S. Meyer another one of the ideologues and mentors atNational Review, very much involved in the Goldwater movement called Lincoln without Rhetoric.

And it essentially makes the argument you hear from the ultra-libertarians today that the great villain in American history is Abraham Lincoln because he brought in the centralized state. He couldnt just make a nice bargain with the Southern states; instead he had to defeat them. And he goes on to say, Frank Meyer does, that this brought on the evils of the New Deal and the evils of his own moment which happened to be the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Then youll see a reply that came a month later. Franks piece ran, I believe, August 24th, 1965. And youll see Harry Jaffas reply from September 21st, 1965. And Jaffa says, this is Im paraphrasing, but its pretty close to accurate Harry leads the piece: Frank Meyer has succeeded in doing something I have never in all my years Jaffa, who some years before had completed one of the masterworks on Lincoln,Crisis of the House Divided, on the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Harry Jaffa says, Frank Meyer has succeeded in doing something I dont think Ive ever seen before. He has written an extended essay on Abraham Lincoln and his legacy and the Civil War, and has not once mentioned or even alluded to slavery. I dont think Ive seen that before.

Geoff Kabaservice: Is there a racial or at least ethnic component to Nocks idea of the Remnant?

Sam Tanenhaus: Yes. I dont think there was initially, but I think there later was, after he began to be nervous at all the Turks and Jews he saw rubbing shoulders in the reading rooms of the New York Public Library. Yes, I think so.

Geoff Kabaservice: Something interesting about Buckley, though, and the conservative movement, is that Buckley first comes to public prominence with the publication in 1951 ofGod and Man at Yale. Its this kind of slashing attack on his alma mater for insufficiently defending capitalism and Christianity which is ironic given how conservative Yale really was at that point.

Sam Tanenhaus: And he knew that too, by the way.

Geoff Kabaservice: And he knew that. But Buckley then makes various thwarted attempts to get a conservative magazine going before he startsNational Reviewas the flagship of this new intellectual conservatism in 1955. And he is well aware that the conservative movement is a difficult proposition because of the bad image that most Americans have of the right, which comes from having fought Nazi-ism in World War II and being well aware that theres still a considerable amount of antisemitism on the right. And Buckley takes pains to oppose antisemitism. He hires many Jewish (or at least formerly Jewish) people onto his staff and claims at least to have no truck with antisemitism. And he certainly breaks with people who he had worked for and with, for that reason. And yet this logic does not carry over to black people or other groups who are minorities in this country.

Sam Tanenhaus: Youve touched on a really interesting point there, because heres something If there are any masters students, MA students or Ph.D. students out there who might listen to us, looking for a topic, one I would suggest is the anti-black feeling racially fairly intense biological racism of the Jews in theNational Reviewcircle and in libertarian circles.

Murray Rothbard was one. Frank Chodorov. Frank Meyer. Ayn Rand was a defender of segregation; she opposed the Civil Rights Act. The interesting thing is, all of those libertarians were Jews right after Nazi-ism. Im allowed to say this because Im a Jew. Here you have a group of Jewish intellectuals who think the problem is the state trying to intervene to protect a minority. It really boggles the mind. But youll remember it gave us, at the end, Murray Rothbard siding with the police who beat up Rodney King in Los Angeles. There was an odd thing that happened there.

So, Im going to do a little sideline again, because here were talking about this One of the most famous early pieces as you know very well, and some of our listeners will know too published inNational Reviewwas Whitaker Chambers very strong critique ofAtlas Shrugged, Ayn Rands novel. This was in the winter of 1957. And theres a whole joke that works through it which most people will miss, and that is that Atlas seemed a very maladroit title because Atlas was the name of one of the American missile systems that kept fizzling on the launch pad.

So this idea of Atlas shrugging, it looks like the pictures of the missiles that would fall. And Chambers had some fun with that. He talks about these materialist systems that come crashing down to earth when they go up in the sky, and all the rest. Chambers was, by the way, the only person atNational Reviewwho thought Sputnik was a great breakthrough. The others either thought it was a hoax or pretended that it didnt make any difference.

So in his attack onAtlas Shrugged, Chambers has a very famous line He said, Her message seems to be, Go to the gas chamber.' And that was really upsetting to Rand and her circle because almost every single one of them was Jewish. And they thought, Who is Chambers the Christian communist, they called him to be telling Jews that they seem to promote gas chambers? And of course the famous letter was published inNational Reviewby the very young Alan Greenspan, who was a Randian at the time.

But I realized now, all these years later, coming back to Chambers and Buckley and all the rest, Chambers saw something. He saw there was a paradox here. Remember, Chambers was married to a Jewish woman and many of his closest friends when he was coming up through the intellectual world in New York were Jews at Columbia. So its not a question of the country club guy who says, Well, I wont let them into my club, but some of my best friends are Jews.

No, Chambers grew up among Jewish intellectuals. That was his world. And he saw something. He saw there was something profoundly disturbing in this, in somebody Because remember, Rand, she was an immigrant from St. Petersburg whod come over earlier than the others. She came over in the 1920s and had gone out to Hollywood; she had a different career from the other immigrants. But he saw something there that I think is really important. And its surprising, Geoff, if you go throughNational Reviewall the way through the 1970s, in their book pages edited by Frank Meyer, they are publishing surprisingly indulgent analyses of tracts on biological racism by writers like Nathaniel Weyl and Ernest van den Haag.

Theres an interesting moment in 64, I think it is Bill Buckley was very impressed by an essay that van den Haag (who taught at Columbia) had written defending bigotry, racial prejudice, and segregation. And so Bill sent it to two (at that time) liberal journalists he really admired, Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell. And they both told him, This stuff was discredited decades ago. This guy is doing the old racial arguments nobody believes anymore.

And Bill didnt believe them. You can see it in the correspondence. Youll remember he told the real racists, There arent biological differences. There may be mild cultural differences. But Bill himself thought Jews were smarter than Gentiles. So he was willing to accept that maybe pure intellect is not that important. But he was surprisingly indulgent And as you yourself have noted I dont know whether youve done it in print, certainly you and I have discussed this as weve teamed up on the research weve done Bill kept up pretty friendly relations with some quite notable antisemites for a really long time.

Geoff Kabaservice: Gerald L. K. Smith, for example.

Sam Tanenhaus: Gerald L. K. Smith. Merwin K. Hart was a really important figure someones writing a book on Hart. Let me throw something else in here too, Geoff, and I know were going far afield, but here we are Bills first political movement, remember, that he was involved in and all his siblings were was the America First Movement.

I have a lot of pages in my book on America First. Bills first idol was Lindbergh also Gore Vidals idol, which is kind of fun. If you look at Bills first novel, his first Blackford Oakes novel, youll see he calls him the great advocate for peace. Hell never changed his mind about Lindbergh.

And theres a biography of Bill that came out a few years ago that mistakes which of the Lindbergh rallies Bill Buckley attended. There were two in New York. One was in May of 41 and one was the very last rally before Pearl Harbor. That was the one Bill Buckley was at, which is notorious today for the Bellamy salutes that youve seen in photographs. Now, Bill Buckley did not do that. He was a Lindbergh idolater. But from internal evidence, documentary evidence, its very clear thats the rally he attended.

And Lindbergh, as we know I recommend Sarah Churchwells book to people who are interested in the whole idea of America First and also the American dream; she very cleverly shows how theyre complementary ideas. Lindbergh was very much a race theorist, a subscriber to racial theories. Absolutely no doubt about it. The first magazine Bill read closely was one that was essentially banned by the government for being pro-Nazi. It was calledScribners Commentatorand was published for just a few years, from 39 to 41 or 42. That was the first magazine Bill Buckley ever subscribed to. And Albert Jay Nock wrote for it after he was banned from other publications.

So theres a very strong America First component in that ideology. And we tend to think it went away because the anticommunists were internationalists. But theres a key word, theres a key linking word, that Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Rovere thought they were coining. The word actually was already in the vocabulary, and they kind of knew it but they didnt bother tracing the genealogy. But they reintroduced it as a joke, as a satirical term, which they called unilateralist. Because if you think about it, the word unilateralist is almost a contradiction in terms. But thats what connects That concept is what connects America First to the extreme anti-communism of the 50s, because theyre both about America going it alone. So youll see a lot of praise inNational Reviewfor people like Curtis LeMay and theWings For Peacepeople, the ones who thought that if you strapped enough megatonnage onto B-52 bombers they could circle the globe the Doctor Strangelove thesis.National Reviewwas very much behind that. So thats the America First carryover. Its the Fortress America argument.

Geoff Kabaservice: And of course Buckley and his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell co-authored a book calledMcCarthy and His Enemies, which was really a defense of McCarthy or at least McCarthyism.

Sam Tanenhaus: Yes. And its interesting you say that, because what they tried to do was to set McCarthy himself aside, even though Bill really liked McCarthy. Bill had this personal loyalty; its one of the things I like about him. If you were his friend, you were going to stay his friend. And McCarthy was quite a genial person for those who got to know him, if you drank with him or you went to the racetrack with him. Joe McCarthy would call Bill at home and trade stock market tips with Pat Buckley, Bills wife, that sort of thing. McCarthy as we know dated some of the Kennedy sisters and all these other things.

In that book, what people noticed at the time reviewers like Richard Rovere, the great journalist of theNew Yorker is theres not a word in that very long book about McCarthys own biography. They say nothing about him, because they werent interested in him. They wanted to create around him an honorable McCarthyism. And thats another one of their really notorious statements, right? McCarthyism is a movement that men of stern moral discipline can gather behind.

See, now were getting close to Trump and Trumpism. So you have defenders, champions of Trump on the American Greatness blog, and theyre intellectuals, theyre very smart. Theyre good writers and theyre well-read and they know languages, just the way theNational Reviewcrowd did multilingual, remarkable figures. When John Leonard, the young John Leonard, first met them Ive seen his letters, theyre in an archive at Columbia University, he wrote letters home he describes his first meeting with Bill Buckley. And he said, You have no idea what these people are like. Theyre called every name in the book, but you cant believe how brilliant they are. They quote reams of poetry. Theyre incredibly sophisticated.

William Rusher, Bill Rusher, with his wine collection and his eidetic memory for verse, he could do hundreds of lines of poetry he could recite. And Burnham and Kendall and Meyer and Whitaker Chambers some of them spoke three and four languages. Chambers was going to translate Proust at one point when he was young, even while he was a communist. So they have all these qualities about them. And Bill, tooEnglish, you know, was his third language.

So the idea, by the way, that he wrote a letter to the King of England about the war debt when he was six if he did it, he wrote it in Spanish. And he couldnt write Spanish because he learned Spanish from his nursemaids, and they were not writers. Thats one of these myths that surrounds Buckley. Its kind of fun to poke little holes in those. You just think it through logically: of course he didnt write a letter to the King of Spain when he was six. You have seen the letters he wrote when he was seven and eight years old.

At any rate, what they wanted to do was to create an idea of McCarthyism that had nothing to do with Joe himself. And this is part of the problem. Garry Wills was telling me the other day He remembered a conversation he had with Frank Meyer, who had been his mentor after they discovered him at this incredibly young age he was 23 when they discovered him, had just left the Jesuit seminary. And Meyer asked him a question about Aristotle, and he said, Now, is this argument in Aristotle? And Garry Wills said, No, its not. And in his note, Gary actually gives me the Greek terms. And Meyer says, Well, it ought to be. It should be in Aristotle. And Garry said, Thats it. Yeah, thats it: if its not in Aristotle, it should be in Aristotle. If Joe McCarthy isnt a great guy, well, he ought to be a great guy because we agree with him. Hes going off to fight liberals.

Geoff Kabaservice: Buckley and Bozell had studied at the feet of Willmoore Kendall at Yale. And Kendall opposed the Bill of Rights; he didnt think the founders actually intended to pass the Bill of Rights. But he wanted society to be ruled by an extremely coercive mentality and morality and standards. And in that sense theres kind of an anti-democratic element encoded in conservatism from the beginning as well.

Sam Tanenhaus: At the same time, Kendall called himself a majority-rule Democrat. He had the famous formulation: 50% of the population plus one equals a majority. And its funny, Geoff, because he made that argument about McCarthy. McCarthy never really got to that 50%. Maybe for about Its the argument you hear about Trump now: Everybody loves Trump. Well, they dont. 74 million people is still 7 million less than voted for the other guy. It is interesting.

Well, you may remember theres a paper Bill wrote when he took the seminar with Kendall, and at the bottom Willmoore wrote: I think the First Amendment is going to have to go. Remember he says that? And its about McCarthyism. Its defending McCarthy. I have a lot on that.

The text people should read to really understand Kendall, who was an extraordinary figure he was hugely influential on Garry Wills too. The text they should read is Saul Bellows short story, Mosbys Memoirs. Wills was the first one to point out in his book,Confessions of a Conservative, that its clearly a portrait of Kendall. And he said to me, I think Frank Meyer told me that. Because Meyer knew all the literary gossip.

Then you know theres a scholar, a young scholar at North Carolina named Joshua Tait, who went through the Kendall papers (which are not cataloged) and found the letter Saul Bellow wrote to Kendalls widow explaining exactly when and how hed known Willmoore Kendall. Hed known him in Minneapolis when they were part of the Hubert Humphrey circle. Hed known him again in Paris, hed known him in Chicago, and he wrote one of his most famous short stories about him. Mosbys Memoirs is the title of the first collection of short stories that Bellow published. It was published in theNew Yorkernot long after Kendall died. And if you were part of the very small circle, you knew that. You can read James Atlas very good biography of Saul Bellow, which discusses that short story, and not see Kendalls name mentioned. There was a kind of inner circle that this group inhabited. Let me say

Now Im going to get to one of Bills great sides, because weve talked about some of the questionable things with his politics. He made people feel that they belonged to an exclusive club when they came toNational Review. You know this, you are the expert on this in these United States, about how the elite operated at Yale. And part of Bills genius was He was welcomed into the club. He was the last man tapped for Bones. And heres the thing to think about If the great [African-American] football player, Levi Jackson, had not turned Bones down, we mightve gotten a different picture of race from Bill Buckley. Youve probably thought about that, right?

Geoff Kabaservice: Sure.

Sam Tanenhaus: Because Bill was all about personal relationships. I can see Bill saying, How can I oppose the Civil Rights Act and look at Levi across the table when we have dinner next? Thats what he would have done. Thats the best to Bill Buckley. Thats what he would have done at any rate, thats what Id like to think.

See the rest here:

The Man Behind the Modern Conservative Movement, with Sam Tanenhaus - Niskanen Center