A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley

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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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.