What Makes Buckley Tick?

A new biography captures the personality better than the political philosophy.

In April 1945 a young soldier named William F. Buckley, Jr., stationed at Fort Benning, served in the honor guard that escorted the body of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the train station at Warm Springs, Georgia, to be sent back to Washington. And so the father of the modern American welfare state was seen off on his last trip to the nation’s capital by a man who would spend his life waging intellectual war against liberalism.

William F. Buckley, with his imaginative flair, his prodigious output of books and articles, his wit and charm, and his importance as a leading light of modern American conservatism, deserves a first-rate biography. Unfortunately, Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement (Wiley, 358 pages, $27.95), is not that book. Its authors, Linda Bridges and John R. Coyne, Jr., are both former editors at Buckley’s magazine, National Review, and though they write with aplomb and tell an engaging story, their book is too much an appreciation, rather than a truly critical study of a man whose influence on American political thought has run both wide and deep.

To be sure, there is much to recommend in the volume for fans of Buckley. The authors know their subject well and enjoyed extensive access to his family and friends, which paid off handsomely in chapters that deal with his personal development. We learn that the Buckley family made its money in Mexican and Venezuelan oil, and that by the time Bill was born, his father was already comfortably rich. We also learn that his first language was Spanish, courtesy of his Mexican nurses, and that he spent the first several years of his life in Paris and England. His seemingly affected accent is not so affected after all.

Coyne and Bridges share many entertaining anecdotes as they weave their narrative, and present a clear picture of Buckley as a charming and witty dinner host and a generous and open-minded soul. We learn, for instance, that after Ronald Reagan half-jokingly offered him the ambassadorship to Afghanistan, Buckley kept mentioning in his correspondence with the President that he was already working in Kabul time. Buckley also emerges as an avid sportsman, deft on the ski slopes and fearless on a sailboat. Younger staff members at his magazine said they always had a hard time keeping up with their boss.

Where the book falls short is in its surface-level treatment of his political development and the concurrent transformation of American conservatism. Amazingly, the authors devote only a couple of paragraphs to examining Buckley’s important first book, God and Man at Yale, which became an early bible for the postwar right. Though they spend three pages outlining the competing factions of American conservatism as it existed in 1950—identifying libertarianism, traditionalism and anti-Communism as the key pillars on which the House of Reagan would later be built—they reduce the argument of God and Man to “recognizing that Yale had been founded to produce patriotic, Christian leaders of America, an end that was being subverted by an extreme understanding of ‘academic freedom,’ and . . . fostering a return to that original purpose by giving alumni a say in running the institution that had formed them and that they so generously supported.”

This analysis is disappointingly incomplete. Over the past 20 years, popular and academic writers have produced an impressive body of work on the origins of modern American conservatism and on early conservative theorists like Ayn Rand, Isabel Paterson, and Rose Wilder Lane. While Buckley surely wore many hats—television host, lecture-circuit figure, magazine editor—he is best known for helping to repair obvious ruptures in the movement, for instance between traditionalists, who prize an ordered, Christian world in which values develop organically and change occurs over centuries rather than in spurts of radical reform, and doctrinaire libertarians, who view government in all its forms, particularly taxation, as imposing a form of serfdom. Buckley’s wit and intelligence come through in this biography better than do his ideas.

Bridges and Coyne are also too close to their subject and too uncritical of modern conservatism to provide necessary balance. In their chapter on Buckley’s quixotic 1965 campaign for mayor of New York, they seem stuck in time, intent on proving that he was not a racist, as his detractors then often charged. This is almost certainly true. One of his most important contributions to American conservatism was his clear and unequivocal demand that the movement banish anti-Semites and racists from its ranks. Still, his behavior wasn’t always entirely admirable.

Appearing before 5,600 members of the New York City’s Police Department’s Holy Name Society in April 1965, he decried the media’s coverage of the events on “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama. “The television cameras showed police nightsticks descending upon the bodies of demonstrators,” he claimed, “but they did not show the defiance of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the demonstrators.” He said that although the Selma police had behaved “excessively, yes,” they had done so only after the black civil rights demonstrators had “marched in defiance of a lawful order. . . . Something is happening to the world when there is a general atmosphere of hostility to the police.”

Aside from the historical inaccuracy of Buckley’s comments on that occasion—King had not participated in the first attempted march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the police had gone viciously on the attack after the demonstrators had turned back toward their churches—the speech was an incendiary defense of police brutality in a city that had its own serious race problems. To this moral and political lapse in Buckley’s career, his biographers offer only the assurance that he was not a racist, and then they criticize one of his political opponents, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who they claim “urged his fellow Northern blacks to take to the streets in violent protest of conditions in the South.” Powell was certainly no saint. He was a terrifically corrupt member of Congress and as cynical a politician as they come. But he was also a serious civil rights advocate with deep roots in the city’s longstanding coalition of labor and civil liberties groups. He was by no means a proponent of armed struggle.

In whitewashing Buckley and writing off Powell as almost a Black Panther, Bridges and Coyne approach the distortions of Buckley’s own 1965 remarks. And they go over the line on page 17 of the book, when they write about a rival Buckley biographer, a longtime senior editor at The New Republic: “Buckley’s first biographer, John Judis, who is Jewish, describes Will Buckley [Buckley’s father] as a ‘virulent’ anti-Semite—although he absolves Bill of any such charge.” Do we really need to know that John Judis is Jewish? Is it that Judis’s religious background disqualifies him from assessing the anti-Semitism of Buckley’s father, or that it ratifies his exoneration of the son?

It’s hard to write a good biography of someone who is still alive, and William F. Buckley, though getting on, is very much with us. It will probably be left to a generation of writers born too late to know first-hand his lanky frame, Old World drawl, and acerbic yet persuasive wit, to write his life as it should be written.

—Joshua Zeitz is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine and the author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern (Crown).