December 5, 2025 • 26 mins
One hundred years after William F. Buckley Jr.’s birth, Margaret Hoover sits down with biographer Sam Tanenhaus to reflect on the original “Firing Line” host’s life and legacy. In his long-awaited book, “Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America,” Tanenhaus details Buckley’s childhood, his leadership of the American conservative movement, and his later years.
This is an abridged version of a conversation with Tanenhaus that lasted nearly 90 minutes. In it, Tanenhaus defends his handling of Buckley’s Catholicism and his views on racial issues, as well as his contention that Buckley was an arguer, not a thinker. He also comments on Buckley’s lasting impact on journalism and politics, including the extent to which he might have laid the groundwork for President Trump’s MAGA movement.
Support for Firing Line with Margaret Hoover is provided by Robert Granieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, Peter and Mary Kalikow, Pritzker Military Foundation, Cliff and Laurel Asness, Katharine J. Rayner, Lindsay and George Billingsley, and Jared Stone.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
When the Berlin Wall finally fell and communism was defeated,
Buckley said, Oh, that's nice. But Bill, don't you realize how
much you had to do with it? No.
Why was I important? He was hugely important in it.
He kept that argument alive, buthe never overrated his
significance in that way. That's biographer Sam Tanenhaus
(00:24):
assessing William F Buckley Junior's place in history.
I'm Margaret Hoover. This is The Firing Line podcast.
Sam Tannenhaus spent nearly 3 decades working on his biography
of William F Buckley Junior. His book, Buckley, The Life and
the Revolution That Changed America, arrived 100 years after
(00:48):
Buckley's birth. There was nobody like him
before. There hasn't been anyone since.
He was a ubiquitous presence forabout 50 years in American life.
It follows Buckley and the modern American conservative
movement he led, exploring his influences and his legacy.
He thought if you could turn everything into a debate in an
(01:08):
argument, the better side, his side would win.
Often his side did not. But the argument always got
better when Bill Buckley was involved in it.
Along the way, Tannenhaus uncovered new details about
Buckley's family. The Buckley family had actually
supported and funded one of the segregationist newspapers in the
town, something that was heretofore unknown by
(01:30):
conservatives or by history it. Was a secret they guarded for
many years. And chronicled his evolution on
issues like race. He changed the way most of us do
because he met people, looked him in the eye, talked to them,
listened to them, and realized they might be different from
what he thought originally aboutthem.
(01:50):
So how does? Tannenhouse respond to
conservative critics who say he was the wrong person to tell
Buckley's story it. Hurts a little bit when some
say, well, you seem to be undermining or attacking Bill
Buckley. No, I'm not.
I'm showing you how big he was. Sam Tannenhouse, welcome back to
(02:12):
FIRING LINE. It's been a long time, Margaret,
but I'm glad to be here. William F Buckley Junior asked
you to write his biography. It spans more than 80 years of
Buckley's life and is more than 1000 pages, including footnotes.
For the uninitiated, what is thesignificance of the life of
(02:35):
William F Buckley Junior? Well, he is the architect of the
modern conservative movement. There was nobody like him
before. There hasn't been anyone since.
He was a showman. He was a brilliant writer.
He was a great debater. He was a socialite.
He was a sailor and skier, kind of a Renaissance man.
(02:55):
He spoke languages. He wrote novels.
He wrote best selling spy novels.
He was a ubiquitous presence forabout 50 years in American life.
There was no more famous intellectual left or right.
Set the politics aside just as apublic figure, Bill Buckley was
probably the most famous intellectual in America for that
(03:16):
entire span. With respect to Buckley's
Revolution, how did Buckley's revolution change America?
Well, what it did was to shift the power center from the East
Coast, the old Line establishment, which Buckley
seemed to come from but actuallydidn't.
That was a mistake people make with Buckley.
(03:38):
They think he was a patrician. He was not.
He looked like one, it sounded. Like, his father was from Texas,
his mother from New Orleans, NewOrleans.
They raised him in Connecticut, but they also raised him in
South Carolina. The money was new, they were
Catholics and a time when Protestantism dominated the
culture. But also the establishment
politics of the time really cameout of the media in New York
(04:00):
City and a couple of places, Time Ink, Time magazine, the
Herald Tribune, which no longer exists anymore.
Those are the publications that anointed the leaders of the
Republican Party. And Buckley was part of the
group that led the revolt against that and shifted the
power centers to what one of hisdisciples, Kevin Phillips, was
(04:22):
to call the Sunbelt. That's the politics of Barry
Goldwater, Ronald Reagan of the Bushes, coming from that part of
the country, shifting the argument, the debate and the
geography, actually changing themap of American politics.
You appeared on the original Firing Line in 1997 to discuss
your biography of a former Soviet spy, Whitaker Chambers.
(04:44):
Who became the great anti communist witness during the
early Cold War and an early heroto William F Buckley Junior.
Chambers was so admired in his radical.
Phase by the other. Radical intellectuals of the day
because they knew he was taking risks they never would.
They would never actually do anything that might jeopardize
an ICE teaching position at Columbia University.
(05:06):
Chambers, on the other hand, turned his back on a very
promising literary career to become a spy, and this placed
him in a different realm of experience.
Your biography on Whitaker Chambers Buckley described as an
epical event and he referred to you as a major talent.
So how did that book lead to this book?
(05:28):
Well, he liked it, as you've said, and it was really in the
course of writing that book thatI realized Bill Buckley would be
my next subject if he agreed to do it.
He was the first really famous person I met who treated me as
an equal. And I thought already there's
something different about him. There's something interesting
(05:51):
about him that attracts me to him, and that maybe will help me
unlock some of the secret of themovement he'd LED.
Which which was then at its peak.
This was 1990. Buckley was a devout Catholic.
You write about it in his book. You don't seem to take on how
his political views were influenced by his Catholicism.
You don't address abortion, gay rights, prayer in schools, the
(06:14):
AIDS epidemic in the context of his Catholicism.
Why not? Well, because in the sense you
may be thinking of, they affect them no differently than they
would from any other Catholic, any other conservative Catholic.
He was a, he was a conservative Catholic.
He was not a theological Catholic.
(06:35):
He knew very little about Catholic teaching and theology.
He depended on others for that. How much did Buckley's faith
influence his trajectory on race?
Which Which you know, his trajectory did change.
Buckley, although he was not a learned Catholic, was a devout
Catholic and very much a believer in the liturgy and the
(06:59):
the three pillars of faith, hopeand charity, with emphasis on
the last so charity. So when Buckley, in unsigned
editorials, criticized Northern liberals for being too hard on
white Southerners, he said they were being uncharitable toward
(07:23):
the white S because he believed,on the basis of his own family's
relationship with the black people who worked for them, that
there were the essence of charitable dealings with the the
disadvantage, as they used to say.
And there you get a sense of Buckley feeling of personal
(07:43):
obligation and responsibility. The philanthropic side of
Buckley I found in the archive checks Bill Buckley wrote all
his life to historically black colleges and universities.
He wasn't a supporter of integration in those early
years, but he he and his family helped the black people around
them. And I interviewed someone who'd
(08:05):
worked for the family in the South who said the Buckleys were
the finest white family in the town of Camden, SC.
So is the emphasis on on charitycame directly from their their
Catholicism? Yes, and charity does mean, you
know, to love, to love thy neighbor and, and, and sometimes
your enemy and to treat people with a, a kind of kindness and
(08:26):
equality. The Buckley's and the household
staff both when he was growing up and then when he himself was
a, a kind of Peter Familias in his own home with Hispanic
workers. They all went to church
together. They climbed into the car and
went to church together. That's the older style of, of
Catholicism. And and it sounds very
paternalistic, and it was, and it sounds archaic, and it was,
(08:50):
but that doesn't mean the feeling wasn't real.
They went to church together. And yet, one of the pieces of
reporting you uncovered in the archives in Camden, SC was that
the Buckley family had actually supported and funded one of the
segregationist newspapers in thetown, something that was
heretofore unknown by by conservatives or or by history.
(09:12):
Buckley never mentioned it. No one in his family ever
mentioned it. His elder sister Priscilla, who
is one of the great text editorsof her time, worked at National
Review for many years. Do you think they did that?
Newspaper did. She was the editor of it.
She never mentioned it. They knew.
Of course they knew, and it was just a secret they guarded for
many years. You write that the pages that
(09:35):
mean the most to you were the chapters that you wrote about
the Buckleys in the South and this complicated set of racial
relationships. Why?
Well, as a storyteller, they were the most challenging and to
me they felt the richest becauseof the complexity of of the
situation. So to me, it was satisfying as a
(09:57):
storyteller to be able or at least try to make a reader see
and feel what it was like to be there in that time and
experience the things the Buckley's did and the Black
people who worked in their household did.
So as a writer, that's a wonderful challenge.
So this is also important context for how Buckley comes to
(10:21):
take the position of penning theeditorial for the National
Review, The South Must Prevail in 1957, and then sort of more
of the background with which he came to the debate with James
Baldwin in the Cambridge Union in 1965 and.
I built the railroads under someone else's whip for nothing.
(10:47):
In response to Baldwin's case about the American Dream having
been achieved at the expense of black Americans, luckily
responds this way. Of us.
Mr. Baldwin can write his book The Fire Next Time, in which he
threatens America. He didn't, in writing that book,
speak with the British accents that he used exclusively
(11:10):
tonight, in which he threatened America with a necessity for us
to jettison, for us to jettison our entire civilization.
I noticed in your book you also wrote that, Buckley said about
the debate that night. That quote tonight is the lost
(11:31):
cause because he did resoundingly lose that debate.
Buckley misread the room and thescene.
This debate was happening at thevery moment of the March on
Selma in Alabama, where white sheriff's and police officers
were brutalizing black Americanswho are only expressing their
(11:52):
right to cast a ballot to vote. And Buckley sounded as if he had
no sympathy for. Them you write about how the
years following the debate with Baldwin Buckley views changed on
race. He went on a tour of inner
cities and he brought prominent black civil rights leaders on
firing line. Many of them.
I mean he had great respect for Jesse Jackson.
(12:14):
He argued with Muhammad Ali about Malcolm X as you as you
point out in in Defense of Malcolm X position.
Less I less I get the details wrong.
So how does he then evolve from declaring the South must prevail
to ultimately acknowledging thatthe Civil Rights Act was
necessary? The great thing about Bill
Buckley was that he changed the way most of us do, not because
(12:37):
he read a brilliantly nuanced argument on a point he disagreed
with that turned his mind to degrees.
It's because he met people, looked him in the eye, talked to
them, listened to them, and realized they might be different
from what he thought originally about them.
(12:58):
And so his world got bigger and bigger.
And so people know who's who. Study this period.
If you want to know what the Black Panther sounded like in
debate, want to know what Huey Newton sounded like and Eldridge
Cleaver, you have to watch Firing Line.
Because Bill Buckley had him on his program when almost nobody
(13:19):
else would do. He thought people should hear
them. It didn't mean he agreed with
them. In fact, he thought that they
would lose support if people heard them.
But you should hear what they had to say and not just see
newsreel footage of them being scary.
That was one of the great thingsabout Buckley.
He thought if you could turn everything into a debate and an
(13:42):
argument, the better side, his side would win.
Often his side did not. But the argument always got
better when Bill Buckley was involved in it.
The engaging ideas Seriously A contact A rigorous contest of
ideas. Yes, really, the foundation of
it is the way Buckley lived his life.
That's why his best books are these wonderful memoirs he wrote
(14:04):
where he just takes you inside his life.
His book Cruising Speed, I recommend anyone read, and
partly because that book was published in 1971 at a terrible
moment in American history. And Bill Buckley wrote a book
that says life can be rich. You can be friends with almost
(14:24):
anybody. You can make fun of yourself.
You can, you can try to have themost civil kind of of discussion
with people who stand on the opposite side.
You can lighten the tone a little bit.
It's what we could use more of today, I think.
You describe Buckley as a performing ideologue, and you
(14:45):
write about his inability to articulate a grand, unifying
conservative philosophy. You once said, quote, the single
greatest disappointment in Bill Buckley's intellectual life,
letting down himself, friends and admirers, and I increasingly
feel the country at large, was his failure to articulate a
serious, coherent conservative philosophy.
(15:06):
Unpack what you mean when you also say that he was an arguer,
not a thinker. Bill Buckley lived and thought
in the moment, so if a debate came up, he would almost always
have a striking, original or at least sesquipedalian answer for
(15:27):
you that would catch you off guard.
But if you ask him to step back from that and put all the
arguments together, then he really struggled.
It wasn't something he was temperamentally suited for.
And I think you can be a conservative person without
having a a a complicated or sophisticated system of ideas.
(15:49):
I don't think Bill Buckley needed that.
Buckley is often celebrated for driving the more extreme voices
out of the conservative movementlike the anti Semites, the
Birchers, John Birch Society. In another book about Buckley
that El Felzenberg wrote a man in his Presidents, he said quote
he stood guard over the movementhe founded and in what he called
(16:10):
his greatest achievement, kept it free where he could from the
extremist bigots, kooks, anti semites and racists.
You present Buckley's relationship with Welsh and the
Birchers as as primarily standing up to the Birchers as
an act of self preservation. Robert Welsh, of course.
(16:31):
Right, the founder of the John Birch Society in 1959 and leader
of the most extreme fringe of the conservative movement.
Where did? Buckley draw the line with the
extremists he would stand up against and the extremists that
he wrapped his arms around like Joe McCarthy.
Yeah, it's a very interesting question.
(16:53):
I think as the movement gained in respectability, that
respectability was really important to Bill Buckley.
He did not want liberals to ridicule him and his movement.
He was very sensitive about that, and some of Buckley's
closest colleagues thought it was a mistake to read Welch out
of the movement. As I said back then, and
(17:15):
Buckley's response then I think is very important, he said.
If people think the kooks are leading the movement, we're in
trouble. If they're, if they are the the
ground forces, the foot soldiers, that's OK.
Every movement has kooks. But if they really think the
(17:38):
guys at the top sound like that,then we're going to get
ridiculed in the publications, Buckley read First and foremost,
which were The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine.
You know, as far as I don't know, the only person pro crypto
Nazi I can think of is yourself.Failing that that I would only
say that we can't have. Now listen, you stop pulling me
(18:00):
a crypto net, let's stop callingyou in your God damn face.
Let's stay plastered, gentlemen.Let's.
In recounting Buckley's famous feud with the writer Gold Vidal,
there is some time you spend on examining the suspicion that
Buckley was himself gay. Ultimately, you put this to
rest. I did.
(18:21):
I thought it. That's what I thought part of my
contribution was. But I guess some people are
offended that I even discussed it.
But here's another thing, Margaret too, that's that's
interesting, a friend of both men told me.
Someone I know quite well, said Gore thought Bill was getting
(18:42):
away with something. And what he meant by that was
you could place Buckley in the line of fanatical or extreme
anti communists who are accusingother people of being
subversives in order to conceal their own sexual deviancy in
(19:04):
their language. That's my guy Whitaker Chambers
was accused of. And this is a very common thing.
And so. And if you add Bill Rusher, the
publisher of National Review, who was closeted but known by
everyone in that universe to be gay, and Marvin Liebman, another
figure there. Marvin Liebman was was openly
(19:24):
gay and and wrote a famous book about coming out gay, coming out
conservative, but being a gay conservative in the context of
National Review. But is that detail about their
orientation important to Buckley's biography?
It's important in a movement that whose main figure suggested
(19:45):
gay men have their buttocks tattooed during the AIDS crisis,
when some of his closest friendsare gay and were shocked that he
said it. Yeah, I said.
It's important. And when his wife, Pat Buckley,
was one of the chief fundraisersfor AIDS Research.
That's right. So the question of homosexuality
(20:06):
and and gay relations and then also AIDS is hugely important in
the history of the modern right.If we look at Marvin Liebman's
famous letter to Bill Buckley, which was written to him
privately but meant to be published, and it was published
in National. Review, which is the, which is
the editorial where he comes outand that's right.
(20:27):
It's a long letter Marvin Liebman wrote to Bill Buckley,
his friend of 30 at that .35 years or so.
And he says, what has happened to our movement where we are
raising money on the corpses of of gay men, We're demonizing
them to raise money in our campaigns.
(20:48):
Why are we doing this? It wasn't about who's gay and
who's not. Or are we spilling secrets?
No, it was exploiting it as an issue to attack weak people in
the society and build a movementagainst it.
And if Bill Buckley at the center and apex of that movement
(21:09):
is protecting the identities of gay men around him, yet also
countenancing attacks on other gay men because their politics
are different. Yeah, we're talking about
something that's essential to the modern conservative
movement. You argue in a recent column
that the through line from the architect of the modern American
(21:31):
conservative movement to a populace like President Trump is
not immediately obvious. But upon closer inspection, Mr.
Trump is heir to Mr. Buckley. To what extent did Buckley pave
the way for MAGA? That's the imponderable.
(21:51):
He certainly cleared the space for the attack on elites, on the
cultural elite particularly, particularly through his first
book, God Man at Yale, which remains the most influential
thing Buckley wrote. He's 25.
And if it's published, it's the most important book to come out
of the right in our time, I believe, because it shifted the
(22:15):
debate to a cultural 1. He he made it about professors
and students and ideologies and,and arguments.
So Buckley opened up that place for saying the problem with
America is that the wrong peopleare in charge.
Not so much or necessarily that they have ideas that won't work,
(22:37):
but they're ideas we don't like and we can sharply criticize
them even if we may not have ideas of our own ready yet to
replace them with. That's what we're seeing now.
It's really a politics of, of, of opposition and enmity.
And Bill Buckley was pretty candid about that.
That's why he couldn't write thebig book.
(22:58):
He was very good at saying what he was against, but not so good
at saying what he could envisionas being a a better world.
Does Buckley have responsibility?
I mean, some have claimed that there is an even more direct
through line between Buckley andTrump.
Do you see that? I don't think we needed Bill
(23:20):
Buckley to give us Donald Trump.Donald Trump comes out of
different forces. I believe in that.
That has to do with the complexities of a American
democracy. And, and not to sound pompous,
self aggrandizing, but I think there's a lot about democracy we
still don't understand. And one thing we don't
understand is how democracy itself might well give us a
(23:42):
Donald Trump that doesn't require Bill Buckley to to give
us that. Can you see connections?
Yes, absolutely you can. But that doesn't mean Bill
Buckley is responsible for Donald Trump.
And I think that's what some people seem to be saying.
And, and, and I think that's unfair.
(24:03):
Final question, you spent 27 years with Bill Buckley.
Did you enjoy your time with him?
It was more than that, and I'll speak for two of us, my wife as
well. We loved him.
He was a wonderful person. I interviewed spouses of a
(24:28):
National Review man. It was mainly men who worked
there, and they said to me Buckley treated them with more
respect than their Radcliffe professors ever did.
To me, the most moving part of the very long story I tell is
something I haven't seen a single of the what, three dozen
(24:51):
reviewers mention that when the Berlin Wall finally fell and
communism was defeated, Buckley said.
Oh, that's nice. But Bill, don't you realize how
much you had to do with it? No.
Why was I important? He was hugely important in it.
He kept that argument alive, buthe never overrated his
(25:14):
significance in that way. He had a very human
understanding from stuff. That's what my wife Kathy says
about Bill Buckley. He said he was so human.
He was a human being. You felt it from kind of
vulnerability, the quick quickness to laugh, the way Pat
would endlessly ridicule him, make fun of him, and he took it.
(25:37):
He didn't object. There was a warmth and
generosity about him. I've just never seen it in
somebody that large, and I don'texpect to encounter it again.
And it was a lesson if I ever became famous like that, I would
want to treat people that way. My own father died young.
(25:58):
He died in 1980 at the age of 56.
And when Bill Buckley died, I felt the way I did when I lost
my father, that a really great presence had been taken from my
life. That's why it hurts a little bit
when some say, well, you seem tobe undermining or attacking Bill
Buckley. No, I'm not.
I'm. I'm showing you how big he was,
(26:21):
you know, And that's how he feltto me.
And that's why that when I try to convey to the best of high,
admittedly limited capacities ina very long book that was
written with a lot of dedicationand care.
Sam Tannenhouse, thank you for returning to firing mine.
What a pleasure, Margaret.
When the Berlin Wall finally fell and communism was defeated,
Buckley said, Oh, that's nice. But Bill, don't you realize how
much you had to do with it? No.
Why was I important? He was hugely important in it.
He kept that argument alive, buthe never overrated his
significance in that way. That's biographer Sam Tanenhaus
(00:24):
assessing William F Buckley Junior's place in history.
I'm Margaret Hoover. This is The Firing Line podcast.
Sam Tannenhaus spent nearly 3 decades working on his biography
of William F Buckley Junior. His book, Buckley, The Life and
the Revolution That Changed America, arrived 100 years after
(00:48):
Buckley's birth. There was nobody like him
before. There hasn't been anyone since.
He was a ubiquitous presence forabout 50 years in American life.
It follows Buckley and the modern American conservative
movement he led, exploring his influences and his legacy.
He thought if you could turn everything into a debate in an
(01:08):
argument, the better side, his side would win.
Often his side did not. But the argument always got
better when Bill Buckley was involved in it.
Along the way, Tannenhaus uncovered new details about
Buckley's family. The Buckley family had actually
supported and funded one of the segregationist newspapers in the
town, something that was heretofore unknown by
(01:30):
conservatives or by history it. Was a secret they guarded for
many years. And chronicled his evolution on
issues like race. He changed the way most of us do
because he met people, looked him in the eye, talked to them,
listened to them, and realized they might be different from
what he thought originally aboutthem.
(01:50):
So how does? Tannenhouse respond to
conservative critics who say he was the wrong person to tell
Buckley's story it. Hurts a little bit when some
say, well, you seem to be undermining or attacking Bill
Buckley. No, I'm not.
I'm showing you how big he was. Sam Tannenhouse, welcome back to
(02:12):
FIRING LINE. It's been a long time, Margaret,
but I'm glad to be here. William F Buckley Junior asked
you to write his biography. It spans more than 80 years of
Buckley's life and is more than 1000 pages, including footnotes.
For the uninitiated, what is thesignificance of the life of
(02:35):
William F Buckley Junior? Well, he is the architect of the
modern conservative movement. There was nobody like him
before. There hasn't been anyone since.
He was a showman. He was a brilliant writer.
He was a great debater. He was a socialite.
He was a sailor and skier, kind of a Renaissance man.
(02:55):
He spoke languages. He wrote novels.
He wrote best selling spy novels.
He was a ubiquitous presence forabout 50 years in American life.
There was no more famous intellectual left or right.
Set the politics aside just as apublic figure, Bill Buckley was
probably the most famous intellectual in America for that
(03:16):
entire span. With respect to Buckley's
Revolution, how did Buckley's revolution change America?
Well, what it did was to shift the power center from the East
Coast, the old Line establishment, which Buckley
seemed to come from but actuallydidn't.
That was a mistake people make with Buckley.
(03:38):
They think he was a patrician. He was not.
He looked like one, it sounded. Like, his father was from Texas,
his mother from New Orleans, NewOrleans.
They raised him in Connecticut, but they also raised him in
South Carolina. The money was new, they were
Catholics and a time when Protestantism dominated the
culture. But also the establishment
politics of the time really cameout of the media in New York
(04:00):
City and a couple of places, Time Ink, Time magazine, the
Herald Tribune, which no longer exists anymore.
Those are the publications that anointed the leaders of the
Republican Party. And Buckley was part of the
group that led the revolt against that and shifted the
power centers to what one of hisdisciples, Kevin Phillips, was
(04:22):
to call the Sunbelt. That's the politics of Barry
Goldwater, Ronald Reagan of the Bushes, coming from that part of
the country, shifting the argument, the debate and the
geography, actually changing themap of American politics.
You appeared on the original Firing Line in 1997 to discuss
your biography of a former Soviet spy, Whitaker Chambers.
(04:44):
Who became the great anti communist witness during the
early Cold War and an early heroto William F Buckley Junior.
Chambers was so admired in his radical.
Phase by the other. Radical intellectuals of the day
because they knew he was taking risks they never would.
They would never actually do anything that might jeopardize
an ICE teaching position at Columbia University.
(05:06):
Chambers, on the other hand, turned his back on a very
promising literary career to become a spy, and this placed
him in a different realm of experience.
Your biography on Whitaker Chambers Buckley described as an
epical event and he referred to you as a major talent.
So how did that book lead to this book?
(05:28):
Well, he liked it, as you've said, and it was really in the
course of writing that book thatI realized Bill Buckley would be
my next subject if he agreed to do it.
He was the first really famous person I met who treated me as
an equal. And I thought already there's
something different about him. There's something interesting
(05:51):
about him that attracts me to him, and that maybe will help me
unlock some of the secret of themovement he'd LED.
Which which was then at its peak.
This was 1990. Buckley was a devout Catholic.
You write about it in his book. You don't seem to take on how
his political views were influenced by his Catholicism.
You don't address abortion, gay rights, prayer in schools, the
(06:14):
AIDS epidemic in the context of his Catholicism.
Why not? Well, because in the sense you
may be thinking of, they affect them no differently than they
would from any other Catholic, any other conservative Catholic.
He was a, he was a conservative Catholic.
He was not a theological Catholic.
(06:35):
He knew very little about Catholic teaching and theology.
He depended on others for that. How much did Buckley's faith
influence his trajectory on race?
Which Which you know, his trajectory did change.
Buckley, although he was not a learned Catholic, was a devout
Catholic and very much a believer in the liturgy and the
(06:59):
the three pillars of faith, hopeand charity, with emphasis on
the last so charity. So when Buckley, in unsigned
editorials, criticized Northern liberals for being too hard on
white Southerners, he said they were being uncharitable toward
(07:23):
the white S because he believed,on the basis of his own family's
relationship with the black people who worked for them, that
there were the essence of charitable dealings with the the
disadvantage, as they used to say.
And there you get a sense of Buckley feeling of personal
(07:43):
obligation and responsibility. The philanthropic side of
Buckley I found in the archive checks Bill Buckley wrote all
his life to historically black colleges and universities.
He wasn't a supporter of integration in those early
years, but he he and his family helped the black people around
them. And I interviewed someone who'd
(08:05):
worked for the family in the South who said the Buckleys were
the finest white family in the town of Camden, SC.
So is the emphasis on on charitycame directly from their their
Catholicism? Yes, and charity does mean, you
know, to love, to love thy neighbor and, and, and sometimes
your enemy and to treat people with a, a kind of kindness and
(08:26):
equality. The Buckley's and the household
staff both when he was growing up and then when he himself was
a, a kind of Peter Familias in his own home with Hispanic
workers. They all went to church
together. They climbed into the car and
went to church together. That's the older style of, of
Catholicism. And and it sounds very
paternalistic, and it was, and it sounds archaic, and it was,
(08:50):
but that doesn't mean the feeling wasn't real.
They went to church together. And yet, one of the pieces of
reporting you uncovered in the archives in Camden, SC was that
the Buckley family had actually supported and funded one of the
segregationist newspapers in thetown, something that was
heretofore unknown by by conservatives or or by history.
(09:12):
Buckley never mentioned it. No one in his family ever
mentioned it. His elder sister Priscilla, who
is one of the great text editorsof her time, worked at National
Review for many years. Do you think they did that?
Newspaper did. She was the editor of it.
She never mentioned it. They knew.
Of course they knew, and it was just a secret they guarded for
many years. You write that the pages that
(09:35):
mean the most to you were the chapters that you wrote about
the Buckleys in the South and this complicated set of racial
relationships. Why?
Well, as a storyteller, they were the most challenging and to
me they felt the richest becauseof the complexity of of the
situation. So to me, it was satisfying as a
(09:57):
storyteller to be able or at least try to make a reader see
and feel what it was like to be there in that time and
experience the things the Buckley's did and the Black
people who worked in their household did.
So as a writer, that's a wonderful challenge.
So this is also important context for how Buckley comes to
(10:21):
take the position of penning theeditorial for the National
Review, The South Must Prevail in 1957, and then sort of more
of the background with which he came to the debate with James
Baldwin in the Cambridge Union in 1965 and.
I built the railroads under someone else's whip for nothing.
(10:47):
In response to Baldwin's case about the American Dream having
been achieved at the expense of black Americans, luckily
responds this way. Of us.
Mr. Baldwin can write his book The Fire Next Time, in which he
threatens America. He didn't, in writing that book,
speak with the British accents that he used exclusively
(11:10):
tonight, in which he threatened America with a necessity for us
to jettison, for us to jettison our entire civilization.
I noticed in your book you also wrote that, Buckley said about
the debate that night. That quote tonight is the lost
(11:31):
cause because he did resoundingly lose that debate.
Buckley misread the room and thescene.
This debate was happening at thevery moment of the March on
Selma in Alabama, where white sheriff's and police officers
were brutalizing black Americanswho are only expressing their
(11:52):
right to cast a ballot to vote. And Buckley sounded as if he had
no sympathy for. Them you write about how the
years following the debate with Baldwin Buckley views changed on
race. He went on a tour of inner
cities and he brought prominent black civil rights leaders on
firing line. Many of them.
I mean he had great respect for Jesse Jackson.
(12:14):
He argued with Muhammad Ali about Malcolm X as you as you
point out in in Defense of Malcolm X position.
Less I less I get the details wrong.
So how does he then evolve from declaring the South must prevail
to ultimately acknowledging thatthe Civil Rights Act was
necessary? The great thing about Bill
Buckley was that he changed the way most of us do, not because
(12:37):
he read a brilliantly nuanced argument on a point he disagreed
with that turned his mind to degrees.
It's because he met people, looked him in the eye, talked to
them, listened to them, and realized they might be different
from what he thought originally about them.
(12:58):
And so his world got bigger and bigger.
And so people know who's who. Study this period.
If you want to know what the Black Panther sounded like in
debate, want to know what Huey Newton sounded like and Eldridge
Cleaver, you have to watch Firing Line.
Because Bill Buckley had him on his program when almost nobody
(13:19):
else would do. He thought people should hear
them. It didn't mean he agreed with
them. In fact, he thought that they
would lose support if people heard them.
But you should hear what they had to say and not just see
newsreel footage of them being scary.
That was one of the great thingsabout Buckley.
He thought if you could turn everything into a debate and an
(13:42):
argument, the better side, his side would win.
Often his side did not. But the argument always got
better when Bill Buckley was involved in it.
The engaging ideas Seriously A contact A rigorous contest of
ideas. Yes, really, the foundation of
it is the way Buckley lived his life.
That's why his best books are these wonderful memoirs he wrote
(14:04):
where he just takes you inside his life.
His book Cruising Speed, I recommend anyone read, and
partly because that book was published in 1971 at a terrible
moment in American history. And Bill Buckley wrote a book
that says life can be rich. You can be friends with almost
(14:24):
anybody. You can make fun of yourself.
You can, you can try to have themost civil kind of of discussion
with people who stand on the opposite side.
You can lighten the tone a little bit.
It's what we could use more of today, I think.
You describe Buckley as a performing ideologue, and you
(14:45):
write about his inability to articulate a grand, unifying
conservative philosophy. You once said, quote, the single
greatest disappointment in Bill Buckley's intellectual life,
letting down himself, friends and admirers, and I increasingly
feel the country at large, was his failure to articulate a
serious, coherent conservative philosophy.
(15:06):
Unpack what you mean when you also say that he was an arguer,
not a thinker. Bill Buckley lived and thought
in the moment, so if a debate came up, he would almost always
have a striking, original or at least sesquipedalian answer for
(15:27):
you that would catch you off guard.
But if you ask him to step back from that and put all the
arguments together, then he really struggled.
It wasn't something he was temperamentally suited for.
And I think you can be a conservative person without
having a a a complicated or sophisticated system of ideas.
(15:49):
I don't think Bill Buckley needed that.
Buckley is often celebrated for driving the more extreme voices
out of the conservative movementlike the anti Semites, the
Birchers, John Birch Society. In another book about Buckley
that El Felzenberg wrote a man in his Presidents, he said quote
he stood guard over the movementhe founded and in what he called
(16:10):
his greatest achievement, kept it free where he could from the
extremist bigots, kooks, anti semites and racists.
You present Buckley's relationship with Welsh and the
Birchers as as primarily standing up to the Birchers as
an act of self preservation. Robert Welsh, of course.
(16:31):
Right, the founder of the John Birch Society in 1959 and leader
of the most extreme fringe of the conservative movement.
Where did? Buckley draw the line with the
extremists he would stand up against and the extremists that
he wrapped his arms around like Joe McCarthy.
Yeah, it's a very interesting question.
(16:53):
I think as the movement gained in respectability, that
respectability was really important to Bill Buckley.
He did not want liberals to ridicule him and his movement.
He was very sensitive about that, and some of Buckley's
closest colleagues thought it was a mistake to read Welch out
of the movement. As I said back then, and
(17:15):
Buckley's response then I think is very important, he said.
If people think the kooks are leading the movement, we're in
trouble. If they're, if they are the the
ground forces, the foot soldiers, that's OK.
Every movement has kooks. But if they really think the
(17:38):
guys at the top sound like that,then we're going to get
ridiculed in the publications, Buckley read First and foremost,
which were The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine.
You know, as far as I don't know, the only person pro crypto
Nazi I can think of is yourself.Failing that that I would only
say that we can't have. Now listen, you stop pulling me
(18:00):
a crypto net, let's stop callingyou in your God damn face.
Let's stay plastered, gentlemen.Let's.
In recounting Buckley's famous feud with the writer Gold Vidal,
there is some time you spend on examining the suspicion that
Buckley was himself gay. Ultimately, you put this to
rest. I did.
(18:21):
I thought it. That's what I thought part of my
contribution was. But I guess some people are
offended that I even discussed it.
But here's another thing, Margaret too, that's that's
interesting, a friend of both men told me.
Someone I know quite well, said Gore thought Bill was getting
(18:42):
away with something. And what he meant by that was
you could place Buckley in the line of fanatical or extreme
anti communists who are accusingother people of being
subversives in order to conceal their own sexual deviancy in
(19:04):
their language. That's my guy Whitaker Chambers
was accused of. And this is a very common thing.
And so. And if you add Bill Rusher, the
publisher of National Review, who was closeted but known by
everyone in that universe to be gay, and Marvin Liebman, another
figure there. Marvin Liebman was was openly
(19:24):
gay and and wrote a famous book about coming out gay, coming out
conservative, but being a gay conservative in the context of
National Review. But is that detail about their
orientation important to Buckley's biography?
It's important in a movement that whose main figure suggested
(19:45):
gay men have their buttocks tattooed during the AIDS crisis,
when some of his closest friendsare gay and were shocked that he
said it. Yeah, I said.
It's important. And when his wife, Pat Buckley,
was one of the chief fundraisersfor AIDS Research.
That's right. So the question of homosexuality
(20:06):
and and gay relations and then also AIDS is hugely important in
the history of the modern right.If we look at Marvin Liebman's
famous letter to Bill Buckley, which was written to him
privately but meant to be published, and it was published
in National. Review, which is the, which is
the editorial where he comes outand that's right.
(20:27):
It's a long letter Marvin Liebman wrote to Bill Buckley,
his friend of 30 at that .35 years or so.
And he says, what has happened to our movement where we are
raising money on the corpses of of gay men, We're demonizing
them to raise money in our campaigns.
(20:48):
Why are we doing this? It wasn't about who's gay and
who's not. Or are we spilling secrets?
No, it was exploiting it as an issue to attack weak people in
the society and build a movementagainst it.
And if Bill Buckley at the center and apex of that movement
(21:09):
is protecting the identities of gay men around him, yet also
countenancing attacks on other gay men because their politics
are different. Yeah, we're talking about
something that's essential to the modern conservative
movement. You argue in a recent column
that the through line from the architect of the modern American
(21:31):
conservative movement to a populace like President Trump is
not immediately obvious. But upon closer inspection, Mr.
Trump is heir to Mr. Buckley. To what extent did Buckley pave
the way for MAGA? That's the imponderable.
(21:51):
He certainly cleared the space for the attack on elites, on the
cultural elite particularly, particularly through his first
book, God Man at Yale, which remains the most influential
thing Buckley wrote. He's 25.
And if it's published, it's the most important book to come out
of the right in our time, I believe, because it shifted the
(22:15):
debate to a cultural 1. He he made it about professors
and students and ideologies and,and arguments.
So Buckley opened up that place for saying the problem with
America is that the wrong peopleare in charge.
Not so much or necessarily that they have ideas that won't work,
(22:37):
but they're ideas we don't like and we can sharply criticize
them even if we may not have ideas of our own ready yet to
replace them with. That's what we're seeing now.
It's really a politics of, of, of opposition and enmity.
And Bill Buckley was pretty candid about that.
That's why he couldn't write thebig book.
(22:58):
He was very good at saying what he was against, but not so good
at saying what he could envisionas being a a better world.
Does Buckley have responsibility?
I mean, some have claimed that there is an even more direct
through line between Buckley andTrump.
Do you see that? I don't think we needed Bill
(23:20):
Buckley to give us Donald Trump.Donald Trump comes out of
different forces. I believe in that.
That has to do with the complexities of a American
democracy. And, and not to sound pompous,
self aggrandizing, but I think there's a lot about democracy we
still don't understand. And one thing we don't
understand is how democracy itself might well give us a
(23:42):
Donald Trump that doesn't require Bill Buckley to to give
us that. Can you see connections?
Yes, absolutely you can. But that doesn't mean Bill
Buckley is responsible for Donald Trump.
And I think that's what some people seem to be saying.
And, and, and I think that's unfair.
(24:03):
Final question, you spent 27 years with Bill Buckley.
Did you enjoy your time with him?
It was more than that, and I'll speak for two of us, my wife as
well. We loved him.
He was a wonderful person. I interviewed spouses of a
(24:28):
National Review man. It was mainly men who worked
there, and they said to me Buckley treated them with more
respect than their Radcliffe professors ever did.
To me, the most moving part of the very long story I tell is
something I haven't seen a single of the what, three dozen
(24:51):
reviewers mention that when the Berlin Wall finally fell and
communism was defeated, Buckley said.
Oh, that's nice. But Bill, don't you realize how
much you had to do with it? No.
Why was I important? He was hugely important in it.
He kept that argument alive, buthe never overrated his
(25:14):
significance in that way. He had a very human
understanding from stuff. That's what my wife Kathy says
about Bill Buckley. He said he was so human.
He was a human being. You felt it from kind of
vulnerability, the quick quickness to laugh, the way Pat
would endlessly ridicule him, make fun of him, and he took it.
(25:37):
He didn't object. There was a warmth and
generosity about him. I've just never seen it in
somebody that large, and I don'texpect to encounter it again.
And it was a lesson if I ever became famous like that, I would
want to treat people that way. My own father died young.
(25:58):
He died in 1980 at the age of 56.
And when Bill Buckley died, I felt the way I did when I lost
my father, that a really great presence had been taken from my
life. That's why it hurts a little bit
when some say, well, you seem tobe undermining or attacking Bill
Buckley. No, I'm not.
I'm. I'm showing you how big he was,
(26:21):
you know, And that's how he feltto me.
And that's why that when I try to convey to the best of high,
admittedly limited capacities ina very long book that was
written with a lot of dedicationand care.
Sam Tannenhouse, thank you for returning to firing mine.
What a pleasure, Margaret.
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