A Life of Service

In November, we will definitively rank our two presidential candidates, but whoever wins the election will eventually be subject to yet another ranking effort -- that of historians who, every decade or so, compare all the U.S. presidents from the Founding to the current day. Inevitably, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington end up at the top of such lists, and Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan -- both notoriously ineffectual, among other things -- at the bottom. But the judgments of historians can often seem arbitrary or recondite, not to mention politically weighted, making the whole effort seem like a mysterious parlor game.

Alvin Felzenberg is not an academic historian, although he holds a doctorate in politics from Princeton. He has also held senior staff positions in Congress and most recently served as the spokesman for the 9/11 Commission. He thinks presidential ratings should be demystified and opened up to laymen with an interest in American history. He wants to restart the conversation about what we want in a leader. It is a good time to ponder such things.

In "The Leaders We Deserved (And a Few We Didn't)," Mr. Felzenberg draws up a report card for each U.S. chief executive, assigning numerical scores to six categories. Three have to do with what a president brings to the office: character, vision and competence. Three try to capture what he actually does while there -- his policies in foreign affairs and economics and his efforts to preserve liberty, especially at home. Mr. Felzenberg adds up his category-numbers and arrives at an individual score (30 is the highest possible number), allowing for an easy comparison of presidents across the years. He doesn't grade W.H. Harrison and James Garfield, because they served less than a year, or George W. Bush, because he is still in office.

And, yes, Lincoln tops the book's list with a perfect 30, based in part on his integrity and his great role in ending slavery -- a victory for liberty that more than offsets, in Mr. Felzenberg's view, his wartime emergency measures. Lincoln also, Mr. Felzenberg notes, set in motion the Homestead Act, which opened up the West to settlers and gave them a property right. George Washington follows with a rating of 28, earned in part because he created the citizen presidency and in part because, by mixing the advice of rival advisers -- Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson -- he set the U.S. economy on a course toward prosperity without radically lurching toward either a centralized or a libertarian extreme.

After such chestnut judgments, Mr. Felzenberg begins to diverge from the academic consensus. Franklin Roosevelt, who usually follows Lincoln and Washington, slips to sixth place, marked down for arrogance (Mr. Felzenberg says that he often "forged ahead with ill-considered policies") and for his spotty record on human rights. FDR, as Mr. Felzenberg reminds us, did little to help Jewish refugees and egregiously violated the rights of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Mr. Felzenberg thinks that, except in the cases of Lincoln, LBJ and Nixon, historians pay scant attention to civil rights and liberties when they judge a president's record. His emphasis on them leads him to surprising conclusions. Woodrow Wilson, a hero to all sorts of historians, slips in his estimation because Wilson resegregated parts of the federal government, locked up citizens for opposing American involvement in World War I, and arrested and deported thousands of people (often on hearsay evidence) as part of a postwar "Red Scare." By contrast, Ulysses S. Grant rises in Mr. Felzenberg's esteem because he reversed the racist policies of Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor, and was the last president until Eisenhower to dispatch federal troops to the South to enforce the rights of black citizens.

A key lesson of the book is that historians tend to give high marks to an "activist" presidency without judging whether the activism had good or ill effects. Take Andrew Jackson, a dynamic leader who almost always figures in the historical Top Ten. But in Jackson's own Farewell Address, in 1837, he cites as his three main accomplishments: destroying the Bank of the United States, forcibly evicting Indian tribes from the lands granted them by treaty and preventing South Carolina from nullifying federal law. "Two out of three were clearly mistakes, and shouldn't gain much credit," Mr. Felzenberg drily says, granting the rightness of only the antinullification policy.

Some presidents routinely receive too little credit for the best parts of their record. When it came to economics, John F. Kennedy followed the advice of Walter Heller, and not that of John Kenneth Galbraith, by dramatically reducing marginal tax rates. "Kennedy demonstrated a decisiveness that FDR (and other presidents) often lacked on the economy," Mr. Felzenberg observes. He praises Calvin Coolidge for similar fortitude, not merely for his tax-cutting record but for being something of a reformer. Coolidge called for federal antilynching laws and a greater federal role in furthering black education.

Written in a breezy style, "The Leaders We Deserved" is clearly intended for anyone who wants to learn something about U.S. history while observing presidents compete with one another for top rankings. It is useful to be reminded, for instance, that the now obscure Millard Fillmore rigorously enforced the loathsome fugitive slave law and that he thought the Compromise of 1850 would be the "final settlement" of the conflicts roiling America. This, Mr. Felzenberg notes, "proved to be one of the shortest-lived presidential predictions in history."

Mr. Felzenberg is the first to admit that he doesn't have the final word on which leaders were brave or callow or independent-minded or overly beholden to special interests. But his book is certain to inform this year's debate over "the leader we deserve."

Mr. Fund is a columnist for WSJ.com.

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At the dinner marking National Review’s 30th anniversary, President Ronald Reagan summed up the debt that he and the nation owed the magazine: “You didn’t just part the Red Sea—you rolled it back, dried it up, and left exposed, for all the world to see, the naked desert that is statism.” He went on to call the magazine’s founder “perhaps the most influential journalist and intellectual in our era.” Rarely has a sitting president been so lavish in his public praise—at least of someone outside his own administration. In fact, William F. Buckley had been Reagan’s intellectual mentor, political counselor and friend for nearly a quarter-century.

Most of us are familiar with Buckley’s multiple lives—novelist, TV host, columnist, Bach lover, enfant terrible turned éminence grise. But not until Alvin Felzenberg plumbed the Buckley Papers at Yale, as well as other sources, was another Buckley revealed: a political strategist determined to change the political direction of America.

Writing to prospective investors for National Review in 1955, Buckley explained that conservatives needed a journal that would supply its readers with “live ammunition for every round of the battle.” Over time, he predicted, an alternative network of commentators, academicians and journalists would emerge. All would take their inspiration from National Review, which would function as the “keeper of the tablets” for an emerging movement. One of the journal’s first subscribers was Ronald Reagan.

“A Man and His Presidents,” deeply researched and smoothly written, is a superb political biography. At its core is the friendship between Buckley and Reagan, who corresponded and telephoned constantly about matters of state and sometimes their children’s future. The two did disagree—as on the Panama Canal treaties (which Reagan opposed) and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force Treaty (which Buckley opposed)—but never allowed their policy differences to weaken their ties.

Of all the presidents during his lifetime, Mr. Felzenberg writes, Buckley was “most strident” in his criticism of Dwight Eisenhower, considering him the “principal obstacle to the conservative cause.” At home, Buckley believed, Ike was too willing to continue New Deal and Fair Deal programs; abroad, he too often played a weak hand. The feeble U.S. response to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 produced National Review’s “most bitter condemnation” of the administration.

John F. Kennedy was treated differently. Sometimes Buckley agreed with him, as with Kennedy’s call for across-the-board tax cuts; and sometimes he did not, dissenting from the widespread praise of Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which included a U.S. pledge never to invade Cuba. What Khrushchev cared about most, Buckley argued, was the survival of the Castro regime, “not the lousy missiles.” As for Lyndon Johnson, Buckley demanded that if he was not prepared to win the Vietnam War, he should withdraw U.S. forces “and quickly.” He noted that, in spite of the vaunted aspirations of the Great Society, LBJ left office “lonely, unloved, and discredited.”

The most entertaining chapter of “A Man and His Presidents” is “Demand a Recount,” the story of Buckley’s quixotic campaign for mayor of New York. The campaign invigorated conservatives, still devastated by Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat months earlier, and led to the birth of “Firing Line,” Buckley’s long-lived TV show. Buckley received an impressive 13.4% of the vote by appealing primarily to white working-class Democrats in the outer boroughs, the same constituency that re-emerged in later years as Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” and “Reagan Democrats.”

Buckley supported Nixon in 1968 as “the most right, viable candidate who could win.” He spent the next five years skewering him for appeasing the Soviets and Chinese Communists and embracing Keynesian economics. Buckley’s final verdict on Nixon: He was both the “weakest of men and the strongest, a master of self-abuse and of self-recovery.”

The presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush was a disappointment to Buckley, who called him a “reluctant statist.” Buckley had fewer dealings with George W. Bush and his administration than any Republican president since Nixon. The lack of engagement was partly intentional—by 2001, Buckley was winding down his affairs. But he applauded Mr. Bush’s action against Saddam Hussein because of the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and then reversed himself when no WMDs were found. He roundly criticized Mr. Bush for his utopian policy of “nation-building.”

Over the years, writes Mr. Felzenberg, Buckley and the conservative movement changed. In the 1950s, Buckley and his nascent movement sought to reverse the New Deal, “roll back” Soviet expansion and even wage preventive war on the U.S.S.R., all at the same time. But gradually, influenced by realists like Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, Buckley learned to prioritize and trim his sails here and there. He thus managed to bring conservatism into the mainstream and, Mr. Felzenberg says, “helped change the world.”

To what end? Much like the historian Russell Kirk, Buckley saw his role not as a discoverer of new truths but as a retriever of ancient ones. He believed those truths to be the best means to “preserve human freedom, enhance civilization, create wealth, enable people to attain their full capabilities, and glorify God, in whose image humankind was created.” In his 82 years, concludes Mr. Felzenberg in this fresh account of a much-chronicled figure, Buckley achieved a great deal of what he set out to do, leaving behind a movement that continues to make a profound difference in our politics.

Mr. Edwards, a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation, is the author of a biography of William F. Buckley. His memoir, “Just Right,” will appear in the fall.

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Should Andrew Jackson, founding icon of the Democratic party, be ranked 27th out of 39 rated presidents–below both the discredited philanderer Warren G. Harding and forgotten spoilsman Chester Arthur?

Should the widely memorialized Thomas Jefferson (one of four presidents carved out of Mount Rushmore) be in 14th place–tied with his unpopular old rival John Adams and the even less popular son, John Quincy Adams, and actually below much abused-conservative Republicans William McKinley and Calvin Coolidge?

Should two military heroes typically downgraded in presidential ratings–Zachary Taylor and Ulysses S. Grant–be tied for seventh with the much-praised Harry Truman and fondly remembered John F. Kennedy, one notch below universally celebrated Franklin D. Roosevelt? Nearly all Americans who claim even a passing interest in their nation’s history would answer with a resounding denial. Yet these are carefully reached conclusions, defended in detail by this book, and derived from Al Felzenberg’s new rating system that is intended to replace unsubstantiated declarations from the halls of ivy.

Alvin S. Felzenberg is not just some guy seated at the end of the bar, mouthing off about what he thinks he has learned from the History Channel and C-SPAN3. He has been a state and federal government official (most recently spokesman for the 9/11 Commission), congressional staffer, Republican political activist, biographer, essayist, and commentator, with a doctorate in politics from Princeton. But he is not a historian, and The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn’t) is, in essence, a rebuttal to academic historians who, until now, have dominated the ratings racket, under the direction of the Arthur M. Schlesingers, père and fils.

What Felzenberg calls “the presidential ratings game” was started in 1948 by Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., professor of history at Harvard for 30 years. He asked 55 colleagues to evaluate and rank presidents, and published the results in Life magazine. That triggered more than a dozen similar surveys, including another by Schlesinger (“Our Presidents: A Rating by 75 Historians”) in the New York Times Magazine of July 29, 1962. His more famous son, fellow historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., followed on December 15, 1996, in the Times Magazine with his own survey of 32 historians. The Schlesinger surveys ranked presidents in numerical order (omitting, as does Felzenberg, William Henry Harrison and James Garfield, who each served less than a year) and slipped them into categories of “Great,” “Near Great,” “High Average,” “Below Average,” and “Failure.”

From the start, conservatives complained that the Schlesingers were dealing from a stacked deck of liberal historians recruited as presidential judges. The panel selected by Schlesinger Jr., himself a JFK White House aide, included just one conservative (Forrest McDonald of the University of Alabama), numerous former aides to Democratic officeholders, and two Democratic politicians who were historians only because they wrote about history (Mario Cuomo of New York and Paul Simon of Illinois).

Not surprisingly, the Schlesinger polls downgrade Republicans, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Grant is a “Failure” and Coolidge “Below Average.” The 1962 survey has Dwight D. Eisenhower ranked 22nd or “Average,” defined by Schlesinger Sr. as “mediocre.” The subsequent 34 years, when his presidential papers were opened, were good for Ike on the left, because he climbed to ninth place in 1996. That made him “Above Average,” alongside the flawed presidencies of Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. But Ronald Reagan took Eisenhower’s place in the lower reaches with a No. 24 ranking, making him “Average,” along with George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. The historians forgave the failings of Democratic household gods Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, and Harry Truman to rank each in the top 10 as “Near Great” presidents.

No objective standard can be divined in the historians’ rankings except, perhaps, which past president would be booed and which one would be cheered at a Jefferson-Jackson dinner of the Democratic party. It is as if arguments about the all-time ranking of baseball players were not guided by statistics (batting average, number of homers and runs batted in, slugging percentage, etc.).

Felzenberg attempts to remedy this by inventing a numerical rating system, one through five, in each of six categories: “character,” “vision,” “competence,” “economic policy,” “preserving and extending liberty,” and “defense, national security, and foreign policy.” He gives each president from one to five points in each category.

Only Lincoln is six-for-six with a perfect five for 30 points. Felzenberg drops George Washington one point each for “vision” and “economic policy,” giving him 28 points for second place. Thus, his point system, with a one-two finish for Abe and George, duplicates the historians’ judgment. They also largely agree about who should rank lowest: Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Herbert Hoover, and Richard Nixon.

But their agreement does not extend much farther. Republican Felzenberg tried to rate the presidents objectively, which is more than can be said of the Democratic historians, whom he accuses of “bias.” He gives Theodore Roosevelt and Reagan 25 points each, to tie them for third place. The historians did rank TR as “Near Great,” but Felzenberg lifted Reagan from mediocre status in the last Schlesinger poll.

The historians rated Franklin Roosevelt as “Great,” along with Lincoln and Washington, third in 1962 and tied with Washington for second in 1996. Felzenberg drops FDR to sixth place, contending he “fares less well when his character, experimentation, and human rights practices are considered.” Roosevelt’s fall, however, is modest compared with what Felzenberg does to other Democratic icons. Jackson and Wilson, top-ten “Near Great” presidents in the historians’ view, are rated 27th and 14th respectively, illustrating that this five-point rating system is really just as subjective as the Schlesinger method and cannot be a political version of RBIs or batting averages. It all depends on what the rater thinks is important.

Paradoxically, conservative Republican Felzenberg evaluates through the lens of race as a defining issue for the country, but one the liberal academic historians ignore. Wilson, at heart, was a southern segregationist who fought black rights advocates and sowed the seeds of World War II when he “used his influence at the Paris Peace Conference to block a Japanese-initiated amendment on racial equality.” Jackson was a racist, an unapologetic champion of slavery and brutal persecutor of Indians who always expressed pride in his forced relocation of Native Americans beyond the Mississippi River. That included the infamous Trail of Tears, where “about a quarter of the Cherokee nation perished enroute”–ignored by Schlesinger Jr. in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Jackson.

Race is the overriding reason James K. Polk, Jackson’s protégé who was rated eighth and “Near Great” in the Schlesinger surveys, is 20th on Felzenberg’s list. While he is given a five out of five in “competence,” he gets only a one in “character” and a two in “preserving and extending liberty” because of his massive expansion of American territory through the Mexican War. Felzenberg sees Polk’s policies as crafted to benefit slaveholders: “Polk’s vision for his country proved harmful over time, igniting the fuse that would set off the Civil War.”

Felzenberg’s racial focus also explains his unexpectedly high ratings–especially 23 points for Zachary Taylor, considered mediocre by the historians, to tie him for seventh place. If he had not died in his second year as president, Felzenberg writes, “Taylor might have been able to draw upon his personal standing to bring to the fore sufficient numbers of Southern moderates to hold the ‘fire-eaters’ at bay.” He contends that Taylor “might well have killed secessionist agitation in the cradle.”

The Felzenberg rating system also gives 23 points to the maligned Grant, contending that he was trashed by reformers who neglect to praise his reversal of Andrew Johnson’s racist policies. Grant was the last president to send federal troops south to enforce the law for African Americans until Eisenhower did so in 1957.

“So let the game begin,” Felzenberg tells readers as he begins rating presidents, indicating he does not take his new rating as seriously as academic historians regard their Olympian pronouncements. He implies nobody needs a Ph.D. in history (or in politics) to play this game, and I–with just a bachelor’s degree in English–will give it a try.

I would reverse the rating system’s evaluation of Jefferson (tied for 14th) and Theodore Roosevelt (tied for third with Reagan), opposites who are forever joined on Mount Rushmore. (TR considered Jefferson one of the worst presidents, and the insult surely would have been returned by Jefferson if he had known TR.) Felzenberg undervalues Jefferson’s bold purchase of the Louisiana Territory, his opposition to the noxious Alien and Sedition Acts (approved and enforced by John Adams), and his suspicion of an overreaching federal government. Roosevelt’s legacy includes gunboat diplomacy, the first federal police force, interference with markets, and advocacy of big government.

I disagree with Felzenberg keeping both Franklin Roosevelt and Truman in the historians’ top-ten stratosphere. I would drop each into the middle range of presidents at best. FDR’s performance on human rights for American blacks, Japanese Americans, and Hitler’s Jewish refugees was abysmal, his high-tax economic policy unnecessarily extended the Great Depression, his handling of intelligence about Japan led to the Pearl Harbor disaster, he betrayed Poland at Yalta, and this book deplores “the inattention and lack of concern Roosevelt paid to warnings that Stalin ordered agents to infiltrate the highest reaches of the American government.”

Similarly, Truman sloughed off communications intelligence about Soviet espionage. Felzenberg does not mention that, or Truman’s deplorable performance as commander in chief during the last two years of the Korean War. Felzenberg lifts Coolidge to 12th from 29th in the historians, but I would make him a top ten president by raising the very low marks in “defense, national security and foreign policy.”

On his way to the ratings, Felzenberg delivers a rollicking 377-page survey of American history, replete with surprises. Unfortunately, he defers a verdict on the unfinished tenure of George W. Bush. But I will, using the rating system of The Leaders We Deserved: Three for “character,” two for “vision,” one for “competence,” four for “economic policy,” one for “preserving and extending liberty,” and two for “defense, national security and foreign policy.” That’s 15 points, which would tie him for 22nd place with William Howard Taft and Clinton in this book’s tally–not very good, but predictably better than Schlesinger’s historians would give him.

We’ll have to wait for the paperback edition to see what Al Felzenberg thinks.

Robert D. Novak is a syndicated columnist in Washington and the author, most recently, of The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington.

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Full Review. This is where the review body would appear

Alvin Felzenberg puts Lincoln and several other presidents in the full context of their times and ours, shedding much new light on those we thought we knew well, and taking a fresh look at some we need to know better. The sections on Abraham Lincoln, the most elusive of all presidents, adds much to the field of Lincoln studies and should not be missed.

See that twenty dollar bill in your wallet? If Al Felzenberg has  his way, Andrew Jackson will no longer be decorating it. His book looks at every president from George Washington to ‘W’, and reshuffles their reputations in surprising ways.

You know what they say: Never judge a book by its title.

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Alvin S. Felzenberg’s “A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr.” is a gracefully written and richly informative book, but it’s not a narrowly focused study of the relationships between one of the 20th century’s leading political commentators and a series of American presidents, which were not very significant. (The exception was Buckley’s singularly important friendship with Ronald Reagan, which Felzenberg explores in a pair of illuminating chapters.)

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Neither does the book tell the story of its subject’s “political odyssey.” Rather than taking the form of a journey from one place to another, or a voyage of discovery that ends where it began, Buckley’s life is noteworthy for its constancy. He was born (in 1925) into a conservative Catholic family, he devoted his life to forging and popularizing the ideology that galvanized the conservative movement, and he died (in 2008) a conservative and a Catholic.

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Yes, there were important incremental adjustments along the way, as, like any thoughtful person, Buckley learned from intelligent interlocutors and responded to changes in the world around him. But his core political convictions remained remarkably consistent: opposition (in the name of individualism and free enterprise) to the size and growth of the federal government; insistence on defending traditional Judeo-Christian morality against all forms of “moral equivalency”; and a belief that American foreign policy should be oriented toward the defense of freedom against the threat of totalitarianism, especially Soviet Communism. (Buckley joined the America First Committee as an adolescent, but he permanently abandoned his youthful isolationism as soon as the United States entered World War II.)

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If there’s an odyssey recounted in the book, it’s that of conservatism itself — the ideology and electoral coalition that started to coalesce with Barry Goldwater’s insurgent presidential campaign in 1964, took control of the Republican Party when Reagan won the White House in 1980, and held the G.O.P. firmly in its grip through the presidency of George W. Bush. That’s where Felzenberg’s story ends, but it’s where conservatism’s travails begin — or rather, it’s where they resurface.

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Reading the book in light of events since Buckley’s death — including the Sarah Palin sensation of 2008, the Anybody but Romney procession during the Republican primaries of 2012, but most of all Donald Trump’s shockingly successful populist insurrection in 2016 — one realizes the passages that provide the most illumination are those in which Felzenberg highlights what Buckley himself described as his greatest achievement: purging the conservative movement of “extremists, bigots, kooks, anti-Semites and racists.”

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The first such act of ideological excommunication came in the pages of National Review in 1957, two years after Buckley founded the magazine. (National Review would always play a crucial role in Buckley’s efforts at boundary definition and policing, but so would his syndicated column and erudite public affairs program, “Firing Line,” which premiered in 1966 and stayed on the air for an astonishing 33 years.)

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When Buckley assigned a review of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” to Whittaker Chambers, a Communist turned fervent anti-Communist and devout Christian, he must have known the sparks would fly. To call the review an evisceration is to understate its severity. For Chambers, Rand’s novel was morally obscene, a shrill and dogmatic exercise in political propaganda that promoted a form of inverted Marxism in which a coterie of capitalist supermen do battle with and justly triumph over throngs of resentful, parasitic “looters.” Buckley himself would criticize Rand in similar terms on many occasions over the years, including in a decidedly mixed appreciation written on the occasion of her death in 1982.

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Four years after Chambers’s review, Buckley took aim at the John Birch Society and its founder, Robert Welch. The two men met in 1952 and at first saw themselves as allies and ideological compatriots. These were years when Buckley and National Review were flamboyantly right-wing — denouncing President Eisenhower for an absence of ideological fortitude, treating Senator Joseph McCarthy as an American hero, defending Southern segregation and opposing the early civil rights movement in blatantly racist terms, and advocating the military “rollback” of the Soviet Union from Central and Eastern Europe. On all these matters, Buckley and Welch found common cause.

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But by the early 1960s, Buckley’s most intellectually formidable colleagues (Chambers and the political theorist James Burnham) had prevailed on him to make the magazine more politically responsible. At the same time, Welch was moving in the opposite direction, founding the John Birch Society in 1958 to promote the view that Soviet spies had penetrated the highest levels of the United States government. Over the coming years, Welch and his organization would accuse a long list of public figures of acting as Communist agents, including Eisenhower himself, Eisenhower’s secretary of state John Foster Dulles, and the young Henry Kissinger. The Birch Society also launched a campaign to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren for using the Supreme Court to prepare the way for a Communist takeover of the country.

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In April 1961, Buckley wrote the first of several editorials blasting Welch for spreading conspiracy theories that were both implausible on their face and likely to do considerable political harm to the conservative cause they both professed to believe in. Hundreds of angry letters streamed into the offices of the magazine, subscriptions were canceled, prominent donors withdrew their support, and the magazine’s staff split into polarized factions. To his considerable credit, Buckley kept up the assault on Welch and the Birchers, ultimately establishing that the conservative movement would not tolerate conspiratorial forms of argument.

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Buckley responded similarly to George Wallace during his third-party presidential run in 1968. Making a play for many of the voters who had cast ballots for Goldwater four years earlier, Wallace portrayed himself as more conservative than the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon. Buckley disagreed, calling Wallace a “dangerous man” and a “welfare populist” who stoked anger and resentment among blue-collar voters and favored increased federal spending, provided it went only to whites and did nothing to further civil rights for African-Americans.

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In his final act of excommunication, Buckley took a stand against the paleoconservative Pat Buchanan in 1991 for expressing opposition to the Persian Gulf war in terms that were both incendiary and undeniably anti-Semitic. (Buchanan had claimed that the only two groups clamoring for war were “the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States” and described Congress as “Israeli-occupied territory.”) Later that year, Buckley sought to expose and root out remaining vestiges of anti-Semitism on the right in a lengthy essay that filled an entire issue of National Review.

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Those were the factions of the right that Buckley aimed to exclude from the conservative movement: proudly plutocratic libertarians; conspiracy theorists; angry, race-baiting populists; and paleocons dabbling in ethnic demonization.

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Sound familiar?

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If it was once possible for members of the conservative movement to tell themselves that these factions had been driven into the political wilderness for good, recent events tell a more disconcerting story. Even when one side of a political argument appears to prevail decisively, it rarely succeeds in vanquishing the losers, who often live on to fight another day, sometimes years or decades later, more powerful and politically formidable than ever before.

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Felzenberg, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, has produced an accomplished and admiring biography that paints a portrait of a man toiling joyfully to define and elevate a political movement. But the book also, perhaps unintentionally, vindicates a cluster of enduring truths taught by the wisest conservatives down through the ages — that elevated things are fragile, and that nothing lasts forever, or even as long as we may wish.

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The rise of Donald Trump and overturning of so much that Buckley stood for doesn’t quite cast a shadow of tragedy over his life’s work. But it does evoke a mood that can only be described as wistful.

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In high school, I searched drugstores for each new issue of National Review. It was that important. For me, William F. Buckley, Jr. was the door-opener to intellectual politics. He made ideas as important as the rivaling personalities, even the parties themselves. I’ll always be grateful for the wildly adventurous thinker who welcomed me into serious political debate. I thank Alvin Felzenberg and A Man and His Presidents for bringing it all back.