Buckley; or, The Revolution Betrayed?

P. J. Collins

Sam Tanenhaus
Buckley: the Life and the Revolution
that Changed America
New York: Random House. 2025

This month the Postal Service issues a new “Forever” stamp honoring William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008). Its portrait is distinguished by a) being black-and-white, like a photograph, and b) not looking an awful lot like the gentleman in question.

One wonders why the art director bothered with engaging a professional illustrator to reimagine Mr. Buckley, a figure with whom they are evidently unfamiliar. Why not simply take a familiar photograph (perhaps from a book cover of collected essays, e.g., The Jeweler’s Eye or The Governor Listeth) and just punch it up a little in Photoshop?

I find something of the opposite problem in Sam Tanenhaus’s recent biography, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution, etc. We get an abundance of actual images and vignettes, in photos and prose, each recognizable; yet a clear portrait of the man fails to resolve itself in the biography as a whole. Daunted by the sheer mass of the book (1040 pages) I went straight to the index, early on, checking to see which names got a lot of ink, and which ones got passed over. The results didn’t clarify the picture entirely, but they helped show me where the story was spotty and incomplete. I’ll talk about some of those holes farther down.

The book is sprawling and episodic. An easy read, for the most part, but lacking the soaring and tense plot arc we got in Tanenhaus’s biography of Whittaker Chambers.[1] That was the book Christopher Buckley was thinking of when, after his father’s funeral, he asked Tanenhaus to consider taking on an authoritative life story of William F. Buckley, Jr. That seemed a good choice: the Chambers book is a superb narrative, stuffed full of Sturm und Drang, with lots of personal agony and slow, grueling vindication. A heroic romance along the lines of The Count of Monte Cristo, only with real-life historical gravitas as well. When Tanenhaus was writing the Chambers book in the early 1990s, Alger Hiss was still very much alive, and to some extent so was the Hiss-Chambers case. It wasn’t hard to find people who had devoted years to proving Alger’s innocence. I knew people like this. They told me they still talked to Alger. Even in 1990 they would grab you like the Ancient Mariner and tell you insistently, with bulging eyes, how they had collected acres of evidence back in the 1950s, and it was now proven, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the FBI could and did construct a fake typewriter!

Alas, Tanenhaus could not frame the Buckley story with a similarly compelling plot and moral, let alone with frothing crazies full of inchoate rage a half-century on. This hero isn’t thrown into a dank prison for fourteen years, or threatened with extinction during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s.The closest Bill Buckley ever came to being an outcast was when he was barred from giving an Alumni Day speech at Yale because it was too critical of faculty and administration. Explaining who he is or what he and his National Review stood for (once upon a time) is no easy task when the historical context or the 1950s and 60s has long vanished. You’d have to scratch hard through old bound volumes and collected essays to find anything both interesting and conceivably controversial.[2]

But Tanenhaus does his best, making it the story of Buckley’s thirty-year struggle against liberal and complacent politicians and opinion-makers, ending with the triumphant election of Ronald W. Reagan as President in 1980. Here is young William F. Buckley, Jr., resolutely fighting his uphill battle to make “conservatism” acceptable and even fashionable. There he goes, politely shunning the cranks of the “fever-swamp right”. He tactfully praises members of the John Birch Society while calling its founder (who contributed $2000 startup money to National Review) a loon. We see Bill Buckley supporting segregation when that seems a winning cause in the mid-50s, then quietly stepping away, leaving James Jackson Kilpatrick of Richmond as the last syndicated columnist to man that crumbling fort. Buckley cheerfully rides through the Goldwater loss in 1964, and then makes his own amusing run for New York mayor the following year. Two years later he’s a known television personality and makes the cover of Time, in a spindly David Levine caricature (“Conservatism Can Be Fun”). Through it all, he manfully puts up with those Republican Party opportunists who gave us the insipid Eisenhower and deceitful Nixon, and even attempted vainly to push William Scranton and Nelson Rockefeller. And in the end, unbowed and barely battered, Buckley and his little magazine succeed in achieving the near-impossible: Ronald Reagan is elected President in 1980. It’s a victory Reagan generously if glibly credits to his favorite reading material, Bill Buckley’s National Review.

And so at last, parade’s end. The climax of the story. If the triumph seems limp and unremarkable today, just put it down to foggy hindsight, and maybe politics-fatigue. Anyway, it was such an innocent time back then, was it not? We were so easily impressed. And, truly, Reagan didn’t really accomplish much, did he? A wasted presidency, some say today. “A historic failure of nerve,” carp the critics. “To True Believers, Reagan’s presidency was like an eight-year Inaugural Ball.”[3]

Surely that presidency was instrumental in bringing the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. But that’s a hard story to get across today. Just saying it, you feel like George W. Bush hanging his “Mission Accomplished” banner, thirty days into his endless Iraq fiasco. Memories fade. Who now recalls Yuri Andropov, the career KGB hood who sent Soviet tanks into Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968, and in 1983 was insisting to the world that Reagan, the trigger-happy cowboy, was bringing us to the brink of nuclear war by putting Pershing II missiles in West Germany? Or that nuclear-disarmament propaganda we were continually force-fed, with horrifying scenarios laid out in tedious New Yorker essays, comic books and pop songs about “Nuclear Winter” and “How the World Ends”? And who could possibly give a damn that one of the Reagan Administration’s first priorities was rebuilding the morale and effectiveness of the CIA, after the despoilation of the Carter years?

Weirdly enough, this Collapse of Communism occurs offstage even in Tanenhaus’s Buckley, with scarcely a footnote. (Mikhail Gorbachev barely makes it into the book’s index; Boris Yeltsin not at all.) Thus the peak of Buckley’s career, and National Review‘s, comes as a sad-trombone anticlimax. Maybe the chopping block is to blame: I imagine pages of toothy geopolitical analysis about the 1980s-90s winding up on the writing-room floor, as the author cuts his unwieldy typescript down to publishable size.

But probably not. The geopolitics aren’t there because Sam Tanenhaus just isn’t a geopolitical kind of guy. His métier is writing about individuals and personal crises. One reason his Whittaker Chambers works better than Chambers’s own memoir, Witness, is that it leaves out all the Chambers-ian brooding and thumbsucking, about Historical Necessity and the Crisis of the Middle Class. The kind of thing that makes my eyes glaze over, as Bill Safire used to say. And for most readers it’s not nearly as interesting and down-to-earth as stuff like Bill Buckley’s slide into near-bankruptcy in the 1970s. That was the result of overleveraged and unprofitable side businesses (Starr Broadcasting Group radio stations) as well as heavy personal debt—largely from the purchase and upkeep of yachts—which Bill would take on compulsively. And I must say, Tanenhaus really does indulge his Schadenfreude over financial setbacks of Buckley and kin. He loves giving us the bad news, at ungainly length and in considerable detail. We get continuing updates on the downturn of the family’s oil business and the eventual sell-off of their gigantic estates in South Carolina and Connecticut. And all the lowdown about the alcoholism and various mental illnesses and physical disabilities that eventually befall many Buckleys and in-laws.

Anyway, once we get Reagan safely in the White House, Sam Tanenhaus seems to be in a hurry to wrap things up. Perhaps he’s been on the job for 14 or 15 years, and Random House now wants him to get them a semi-final typescript so they can have the book out for Buckley’s centenary in 2025. And so Sam skates through Bill Buckley’s last couple of decades…in about 20 pages. Not much to say here, besides valedictions and physical decline. There’s the death of wife Pat, his lookalike partner and alter ego, in 2007. Then Bill’s prescription-drug gulping, suicidal thoughts, and his quick and merciful death the following year, in his garage office. Finally, a memorial mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, with some words from Henry Kissinger (a longtime chum) and a supercilious eulogy delivered by his apostate son, Christopher. That’s all, folks!

 *   *   *

And so now we move on to the index, that dark, revelatory underbelly where we find who’s been put in and who’s been left out of the story Tanenhaus and company want to tell us. After 15 years of research, writing, interviewing, and re-fact-checking, the book must have first emerged as a draft twice the size of the present doorstop. Great hunks of material had to be excised. Maybe they concerned minor figures who only briefly intersected with the Bill Buckley career trajectory. Or they were personalities in some of the painfully protracted lawsuits that Bill dragged on for years in the 1970s and 80s. Or they were colorful anecdotes that were thought a bit too unsavory, in the opinion of Tanenhaus or another party (most probably Chris Buckley, his quasi-patron).

As an example of the last I think in particular of an event that appeared in John P. Judis’s 1988 biography of Buckley[4], on which Tanenhaus often leans. It is 1975, and Bill and son Chris and other crew members of Bill’s yacht Cyrano have docked in the Bahamas, preparatory to sailing across the Atlantic to Marbella. (This is the voyage Bill wrote about in the memoir Airborne.) Surprising them on the dock is none other than Bill’s old friend Roy Cohn, wearing a bikini bottom and a t-shirt that says SUPER JEW. Roy has a muscled young man with him, whom Chris guesses to be a rough-trade pickup. The Buckleys and crew huddle and deliberate at length: “How can we avoid having dinner with those two?”

That story does not appear in the Tanenhaus bio, though there is plenty of Roy Cohn elsewhere in the book, particularly back during the McCarthy era. With Tanenhaus, the mid-1970s pass in a storm of financial woes followed by a blessed, steady windfall from bestselling novels. Bill begins to write his Blackford Oakes spy-thriller series (Saving the Queen, Stained Glass) and all is thereafter smooth sailing. There is no room here to discuss the 1975 voyage of the Cyrano, or Roy Cohn’s colorful lifestyle. But Tanenhaus usually finds plenty of time and space to talk about men who may or may not be light in the loafers. Apropos of nothing, he suddenly informs us that National Review publisher Bill Rusher was gay (a longstanding rumor, true or not); and tells us how NR editor Marvin Liebman, never firmly closeted anyway, publicly outed himself toward the end, after Bill proposed that HIV+ gay men get themselves tattooed prominently with that useful disclosure.[5] And of course he tells us about the number of gay men in the Buckley’s social circle (not to be unexpected, given that Pat Buckley was society’s top A-lister); and reminds us of how Gore Vidal would continually insinuate that Bill was a closet queer. Finally he asks Bill’s old school friend from the Millbrook Academy, Alistair Horne, if Bill had ever showed any predilections that way. (No, not at all; repelled by the idea.) I’m surprised nosy-parker Tanenhaus didn’t cast any aspersions on son Chris—though of course if he did, they surely wouldn’t show up in the published edition.

With all this fluttering around, an anecdote about Roy Cohn at dockside with his bikini trunks and rent boy might have seemed a bit excessive. Or it could be Tanenhaus just didn’t like Cohn’s t-shirt.

But as to the index; I was going to talk about the index, wasn’t I? My first port-of-call in the index was Professor Revilo P. Oliver (or RPO, as we say). I’d known for years, via connections of the first degree, that RPO was a treasured old family friend, one whose cordial allegiance survived his departure, early 1960s, from the masthead of the National Review magazine.[6]

But I had a specific question about RPO that is trivial and playful: was he or was he not Best Man at Bill Buckley’s wedding? Ancient history here: it’s July 6, 1950, and Bill weds the wealthy, regal, immensely tall Patricia Aylden Austin Taylor in Vancouver BC, in what is said to be the largest (outdoor) wedding ever staged in that part of the world. Now, I’d heard and read this “best man” factoid a few times. It’s been attributed to, or blamed on, Paul Gottfried, but no one’s ever nailed it down. The story seems plausible enough on its face. Long before National Review was launched, with Prof. Oliver as one of its “conservative” leading lights, he had been a close friend of Buckley’s Yale mentor and friend, Prof. Willmoore Kendall. The two profs been grad students in the early 1930s at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. So Prof. Kendall would almost certainly be at the wedding. And RPO too? Well, I can’t find it documented in writing. But tantalizingly, in a home movie of the event, one can spot a large gentleman with slicked-back black hair and mustache—the only visible mustache in this 1950 crowd.[7]

Prof. Oliver here, if indeed it is he, would be just turning 42, and looks rather like a taller, younger, jollier version of Louis Calhern, the movie actor. (Whom you undoubtedly remember from one of that year’s finest motion pictures, The Asphalt Jungle.)

However I can now confirm, with a modicum of confidence, that RPO was not Bill Buckley’s best man. At least not according to the marriage notices prominently placed in the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times the following day, July 7, 1950.  Under the slugline “Special to the New York Times” (newspaperese for “an outsider wrote this one”), we read that Buckley’s best man was in fact elder brother James L. Buckley, who later was U.S. Senator from New York, 1971-1977. The many ushers include Bill’s two other brothers and some brothers-in-law, including college chum and sometime writing colleague (McCarthy and His Enemies) L. Brent Bozell. There’s also that prep-school roommate and future bestselling author Alistair (aka “Allan”) Horne. Then we have all the bride’s sisters, friends, in-laws counted among Pat’s attendants. Just listing these names in the wedding party takes up over three inches of column space. But nowhere do we see the names of Professors Revilo P. Oliver or Willmoore Kendall. No matter; as a rule, only family and members of the official wedding party, get listed in these newspaper notices.

In the end we have several possibilities: a) RPO wasn’t there at all, therefore he’s not Mustache Man or Best Man. b) But perhaps he was at the wedding, and stood in for Jim Buckley because of some last-minute problem. Perhaps Jim was ill, or missed his flight; and so, come wedding morn, hopeful eyes turned to Prof. Kendall as a backup, but Kendall too was nowhere in sight. And so, RPO gladly stood in, and the “Best Man” story got carried forth via oral tradition (never mind what the wedding notice said). Unfortunately all the principals are now dead and I cannot ring one of them up and ask. So finally, we are left with my own safe guess: c) Mustache Man is indeed RPO, but he wasn’t best man; that’s just some old rumor that’s been kicking around.

As it happens, there is no discussion of this “Best Man” question in the Tanenhaus book. In fact there is almost no mention of RPO at all. In passing he’s called an “NR contributor…friend of Willmoore Kendall, and a fanatical racist and anti-Semite” (p. 363, Kindle edition). That’s ungenerous, and smacks of incuriosity. John P. Judis had a lot more to say about RPO in his 1988 Buckley biography. But RPO was still alive then, and harder to ignore or lose down the memory hole. So, snip-snip, sayonara, RPO!

Considering other notorious scamps from the early NR days who might have been blue-penciled to near-nothingness, I lighted upon George Lincoln Rockwell. And wouldn’t you know it, he’s gone missing entirely. His name appears once, as a slur, when Edward Bennett Williams[8] gives a college speech and calls Buckley “the Ivy League George Lincoln Rockwell.” Buckley threatened to sue Williams over that. It was a dumb thing to say, not only because cheap and nasty, but because the real Ivy League George Lincoln Rockwell was none other than that selfsame Brown University alumnus, George Lincoln Rockwell. (Edward Bennett Williams, it must be said, went to Holy Cross.)

Rockwell, a sometime ad man and magazine publisher, was briefly hired by Buckley in NR‘s early days to develop a subscription-marketing campaign aimed at college and university students. Afterwards the two men corresponded occasionally, with snipes and insults. Buckley dismissed Rockwell’s new American Nazi Party kick as mental derangement. Finally, rather unctuously, he sent over a priest-psychologist to talk to Commander Rockwell and see if Rockwell could be talked down from his “mania.” Answer: no.[9]

This missing Rockwell in the index leads us, free-associatively, to another omission that must be deliberate: Willis A. Carto. In the early days of Carto’s Liberty Lobby (late 1950s), he and Buckley maintained cordial, if distant, relations; much as Buckley remained friendly with members of the John Birch Society (for which Carto himself worked for about a year). But they inevitably became enemies, occupying as they did two polarities of the Right-wing universe: Buckley the prudent sailor, tacking close to the winds of bien-pensant opinion, vs. Carto the publisher-explorer of farther shores, contemptuous of “respectable” opinion and prospecting for paydirt among the “kooks.” As though to spite Buckley, in the 1960s Carto acquired the American Mercury, the occasionally racialist and Jew-critical magazine that Buckley ordered NR writers to keep away from in the 1950s.

Buckley himself almost never mentioned Carto in print. But in September 1971, NR published a takedown of him and his various publishing and lobbying operations.[10] Following that, Buckley and Carto spitballed at each other for many years in petty, pointless libel suits, usually leading to nominal damage awards. In the most prolonged of these, a 14-year action decided in 1985, Buckley sued Liberty Lobby for claiming (in The Spotlight newspaper) that Rockwell and Buckley had had a “close working relationship” in the early days of Buckley’s magazine. The court eventually found for Buckley (the “working relationship” wasn’t that close), awarding token damages. Another suit against Carto appeared to be a proxy action spurred by Buckley. An ex-spook who worked for Carto claimed in The Spotlight that Buckley’s old CIA friend E. Howard Hunt, the “Watergate Burglar,” was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. The Spotlight even ran the famous photo of Hunt (or his lookalike), dressed as a tramp in Dallas on assassination day. Hunt is unlikely to have seen this article on his own, so presumably Buckley encouraged him to file suit. Which Hunt did, but without success.

*   *   *

From the early 1960s onward Buckley was easily goaded to sue, generally on account of casual insults, libels and calumnies that would be tossed off in print or on television, and just as easily forgotten in a week if he didn’t draw attention to them. As a public figure who courted controversy, he should have gained a thicker skin as time went on. Instead the opposite happened. Initially his anger and litigiousness were mostly piqued by attacks upon his family, uttered on TV chat shows. From the very beginning, Gore Vidal was the main provocateur, but Buckley was persuaded to keep his powder dry—no defamation suits today, please. They sparred via Jack Paar, David Susskind, the 1964 Convention coverage. Things finally came to a head in their fourth or fifth set of encounters, in 1968, during the Democrat Convention in Chicago. They had been engaged to give commentary, and maybe debate a little, for ABC News, with Howard K. Smith as moderator. Toward the end of the run, Vidal called Buckley a crypto-Nazi, and Buckley called Vidal a queer. It should have stopped there, but they followed up the following year in the pages of Esquire. At extraordinary length, maybe 9500 words, Buckley excoriated Vidal for his continuing and gratuitous attacks on the Buckley family, and slammed him for his apparent delight in perversity and pornographic writing, ending his essay with a perfunctory apology to Vidal for calling him a queer on live television.

In response, Vidal carted out some heavy, if dubious, ammunition. Among the acquaintances who’d told him tales of the Buckley family were the two daughters of the Episcopal minister in Sharon, Connecticut, the Rev. Francis Cotter. These two Cotter daughters both became actresses and television personalities, under the names Audrey and Jayne Meadows. Jayne Meadows married perennial TV host, comic and songwriter Steve Allen. They had a wide circle of friends in the 1950s and 60s, including young Gore Vidal, then living nearby in the Hudson Valley; and the Buckleys as well. This social circle is the real background to the Vidal-Buckley feud. Vidal was a kind of interloper, repeating hearsay: a gossip-queen. The Cotter girls, though, had skin in the game. They’d known the Buckleys since forever, and when they talked about them they saw it as just neighborly teasing. Jayne in particular liked to tell and retell a colorful tale from 1944. One Saturday night in May, it seems, three of the Buckley girls and two of their friends committed a few minor vandalisms at their father’s Christ Episcopal Church (honey and oatmeal in the pews, Varga Girl pinups and salacious Peter Arno cartoons from The New Yorker in the hymnals and prayer books). Bill wasn’t there, he was in South Carolina. He learned about the mischief when he came back to Sharon and learned his sisters had been charged with vandalism and now were awaiting their trial date. The Buckley girls’ motivation was unclear; they had no real motivation; it was a prank. But Vidal, in his Esquire piece, implied that Bill was a party to the shenanigans, and painted the vandalism as dark retaliation against Mrs. Cotter,  a real estate agent who’d recently sold a house to a Jewish couple. (That bit may or may not be true, and anyway did not figure in the court case, which ended with a fine. But the story spread far and wide, and mutated wildly over the years. I remember a Jewish acquaintance in college in the 1970s, informing me that the Buckley family had once vandalized a synagogue.)

This speculative anecdote was the only one Vidal related in his article. (His investigative research consisted of the initial news report in the weekly Lakeville Journal, talking about church vandalism.) But there was another old Buckley tale he did not repeat, perhaps because it didn’t manage to find its way into the newspapers or courtroom. That was when, in the summer of 1937, the first two Buckley boys, along with the first two Buckley sisters and local friends, built a wooden cross and lit it on a hillside in front of a resort hotel frequented by Jews. Bill was not present at that event, either, being only 11, and too young to participate in such hijinks. (“I wept tears of frustration,” he wrote in 1992, over missing out on this “great lark.”)[11]

In publishing the Vidal riposte, Esquire broke an agreement it had made with both Vidal and Buckley: that each would be able to read and blue-pencil the other’s essay. Esquire failed to send a copy of Vidal’s draft to Buckley, thereby leaving the innuendoes about the Buckley family unchallenged and actionable.

Predictably, Esquire eventually settled with Buckley, paying at least his legal costs, while Vidal dropped his suit. Tanenhaus does not give the details, but I seem to recall that Esquire made additional payments in kind, by buying years of display ads in National Review, and simultaneously running subscription ads for NR in Esquire. There were also some big Esquire subscription ad buys around this time (1974) in the Yale Daily News Magazine, of which Christopher Buckley was an editor. (A monthly periodical, not a weekend supplement, as Tanenhaus seems to think.)

As a rule, Tanenhaus does not give us details about personality conflicts and lawsuits, and this is bound to result in a lot of headscratching. I was not an NR reader in the 1980s and 90s, so heard about the simmering Joe Sobran problem long after the fact. From what I can learn from Tanenhaus and elsewhere, Sobran was a columnist and then senior editor on the magazine, regarded there as a disorganized, passionate, but often brilliant essayist. In 1993 he was summarily fired from NR after making some remarks critical of Israel and/or Jews in another periodical.

I still don’t really know what the fuss was about, but I’m pleased to say that Tanenhaus succinctly tells us why Sobran was fired. Buckley did it, he said, to make Norman Podhoretz happy.

Buckley claimed to be personally fond of Joe Sobran. And while you wouldn’t guess this from its title, his In Search of Anti-Semitism (1992), seems to have been intended as both defense and constructive critique of Sobran (as well as Pat Buchanan and other, lesser targets). It’s a kind of open letter addressed to NR readers but also The New Republic‘s Marty Peretz, and Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz and Norman’s wife Midge Decter. Midge in particular had complained to Buckley about Sobran incessantly. But of course, there are some subjects you cannot write about, however honestly or obsequiously, without making some parties unhappy. And certain types of folks you can’t ever please anyway. In this case, everyone was unhappy, and Buckley’s book (which began as a long cover essay in NR) looked, and still looks (to me) like a desperate, preposterous venture.

There is an obsessiveness and repetitiveness in the Anti-Semitism book that characterizes much of Buckley’s later non-fiction writing. You see it in the pendulous, overwritten 1969 “On Experiencing Gore Vidal” in Esquire. And it’s noticeable in the drop-off in quality in “On The Right,” Buckley’s thrice-weekly syndicated column, a decline that seems to have commenced around the same time.

Once upon a time, perhaps because I’d idly mentioned that I’d found his father’s recent columns difficult to get through, Chris said to me, “Do you find that he’s become very parliamentarian?” I had no idea what he meant by that. Many years later I suspect that what Chris was really trying to say was something like orotund, talking (writing) like a bloviating orator. Around this time I had a theory about it all: the problem was that Bill was now regularly dosing himself with Ritalin, which he told Chris was prescribed for him “for low blood pressure.” Now, Ritalin has an effect similar to amphetamines. It may give you a boost to write passionately and creatively if you’re doing something like fiction, but in my experience it gives me a passionate need to rewrite every sentence about ten times (if it’s supposed to be polished, expository writing).

Tanenhaus informs us that Bill actually began taking Ritalin in 1958. This I find hard to believe, since not only does that make him a very early adopter (it only went on the market in 1957), but it destroys my whole theory about the decline in quality of his essays just before he became a manic writer of memoirs and those page-turner spy novels: thrillers he supposedly cranked out in three or four weeks while on vacation in Gstaad.

But perhaps I’m not far wrong, and the truth is simply that Bill took a lot more Ritalin as the years passed. Christopher wrote of his father’s last days, when half-empty blister packs littered the night table, and it appeared that Bill was gobbling sleeping pills and “Rits” together when he went to bed. In his final months Bill did not seem to “get it” that Ritalin was a stimulant. I have yet to read a single Buckley thriller, but if ever I open one and it’s phamaceutically enhanced, I think I’ll spot the Ritalin right away.

 

Notes

[1] Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers. 1996.

[2] There is a “Yale Alumni” Facebook group, evidently populated mostly by recent grad students. Recently, after the postage stamps were announced, a number of them were denouncing Buckley in chorus, because they had learned that back in 1957 he wrote an essay, “Why the South Must Prevail,” which argued that negroes, for the most part, were not yet advanced enough to be awarded the voting franchise by fiat. Of course none of these could remember the era or could even fathom that this opinion was fairly mainstream, let alone quite reasonable.

[3] F. Roger Devlin said this once, in 2016, supposedly quoting Joe Sobran; but I have never located the original.

[4] John P. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr., Patron Saint of the Conservatives. 1988.

[5] This passage about the management of Young Americans for Freedom is particularly choice: “[Bill] entrusted YAF management to Marvin Liebman and Bill Rusher. Both were delighted to be in charge—not least because both were gay and never happier than when in the presence of young men.” Like most of the principals in this tale, Liebman and Rusher were safely dead long before this book made it to galleys.

[6] Prof. Oliver was a founding member, spokesman and writer for the John Birch Society, 1958-1966, a period when editor William F. Buckley, Jr. politely eased his way from what he considered Right-wing and libertarian “crank” groups, including among others the JBS, Liberty Lobby, Ayn Rand’s Objectivists, and Russell Maguire’s American Mercury magazine.

[7] A clip appeared most recently in the 2024 PBS documentary, The Incomparable Mr. Buckley.

[8] Williams was a celebrity lawyer whose clients included mob bosses and flamboyant Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell. For a year or so in the late 1950s, Buckley and NR were obsessed with Powell.

[9] Buckley disclosed this long acquaintance after Rockwell’s 1967 assassination, in a column collected in The Jeweler’s Eye (1969).

[10] Bylined C. A. Simonds (Chris Simonds, a rock-music writer whom Buckley had brought over to his magazine to celebrate and comment upon youth culture), the article covered far more detail than even an intrepid young investigative reporter could dig up on his own. It was clearly assembled from dirt files that some helpful outside agencies had available.

[11] Buckley wrote this near the beginning of In Search of Anti-Semitism (1992) a collection of essay-memoirs about how he juggled relations with such annoying people as neocon Jews Norman Podhoretz and Marty Peretz on the one hand, and prickly National Review staffer Joe Sobran on the other. The story about cross-burning had been published at least once before, in John B. Judis’s William F. Buckley, Jr., Patron Saint of the Conservatives (1988). I first heard the cross-burning story myself about 50 years ago, from one of the participants, a friend and neighbor of the Buckleys, and father of some friends of mine. He described vividly that foggy night 40 years before, the wet grass and slippery hillside near the hotel, along with his own weepy regret that he’d come along on this crazy trip. “Oh no, Johnny and Jimmy, don’t do this, let’s go back,” he cried. Or at least he claimed to have cried, recounting it for me long afterward. I gathered this adventure took place in the Berkshires, perhaps over the Massachusetts line. In his 1988 book, John Judis said it happened in Salisbury, in northwest Connecticut. Tanenhaus says it happened in Amenia, New York, two-and-a-half miles west of Sharon, practically in the Buckleys’ backyard. Of course it might have happened in both places, and maybe others. Or it might just be one tall tale that they’d been a-tellin’ since ’bout 1937. Regardless, young Billy said he was sad to have missed it.