The magazine’s case against desegregation was more constitutional than tribal. This has always been true of most opposition to civil rights. Tanenhaus, with a baby boomer’s tendency to use the American race problem as an all-purpose moral heuristic, calls Buckley’s editorial “Why the South Must Prevail” a statement that “haunts his legacy and the conservative movement he led.”
This was a more convincing view in 1998 than it is today. To be sure, Buckley’s own argument against civil rights was preposterously weak. For him, as long as there was the risk of one black vote tipping an election against “the claims of civilization,” blacks on the whole must be denied the franchise, because any vote could be that vote. That’s absurd: You could say the same about whites or, indeed, anyone. But stronger arguments were beginning to emerge, and in the early 1960s Barry Goldwater announced that he opposed civil rights because it would bring into being “a federal police force of mammoth proportions . . . neighbors spying on neighbors, workers spying on workers, businessmen spying on businessmen.” The woke era has vindicated Goldwater’s view…
Buckley couldn’t attack the Birchers wholesale. Republicans depended on their votes. He singled out and personally denounced Welch for sins that were, in the final analysis, neither intellectual nor moral but social. “Our movement has got to grow,” Buckley explained to a friend. “It has got to expand by bringing into our ranks the moderate, wishy-washy conservatives: the Nixonites.” And to these swing voters, Welch would make the party look like what Buckley called “Crackpot Alley.” Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator just emerging into national politics, gratefully took Buckley’s side. Buckley had assumed his own role as the movement’s Great Excommunicator.
In trying to describe what irked Buckley about Ike, Tanenhaus captures a paradox of conservative thought in a progressive world: “The New Deal had been kept intact,” he writes, “. . . through the stealth rhetoric of conservatism.” Governing ideologies are dialectical. The more progressive and planned a society becomes, the more need it has to win over public opinion, which is generally not progressive at all. So rhetorical conservatism bubbles up even in progressive eras, perhaps especially then, because progressives require something to pit against actual conservatism. This creates considerable dissension among conservatives, not to mention a lot of bad intellectual incentives…
Buckley, though a generous boss, could abuse his privileges—even claiming a sort of editorial droit du seigneur by cribbing from his writers’ work before it appeared. He infuriated Wills by declaiming, unattributed, whole passages of Wills’s unpublished essay on James Baldwin during a debate with Baldwin himself at the Cambridge Union in 1965…
He never managed to write the book he intended to be his magnum opus—a conservative summum that he planned to call The Revolt Against the Masses. To look at the Ortega y Gasset–derived title is to see why. Even at Yale, Buckley, when he was not speaking, writing, or otherwise performing, had a tendency to get bored with politics. He had been lukewarm about all the Republican presidential candidates in his lifetime: Eisenhower, Nixon, Goldwater, Nixon again. Buckley’s youthful conservatism—which really had been a conservatism—was coming out of synch with the emerging populist movement that had borrowed the name. Conservatism as Buckley understood it was a preference for the noble against the crude, a defense of the “best that has been thought and said,” an elitist movement. He is alleged to have quipped in 1963 that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty, but that was a bon mot, not a credo. He never believed any such thing. In the twenty-first century it would become a kind of conservative parlor game to ask which postwar thinkers would have backed Donald Trump’s reshaping of the Republican Party and which would have opposed it. The question can be answered for Buckley more easily than for any other: He would have been a resolute opponent. And sometime after the start of the Nixon administration he snapped awake to discover, perhaps to his private horror, that he had been having a social hallucination, and that the crowd who had been rallying behind his banner for decades, whom he had taken for Optimates, were in fact Populares.
That changed everything. How could you lead the masses in a Revolt Against the Masses? The Republican Party was now pursuing a “Southern Strategy” that focused on suburban transients and poor whites in the sticks. Those were not Buckley’s people. “Even now, the only newspaper Bill read or took seriously was the Times,” Tanenhaus tells us. Buckley was beginning to backpedal from his slashing assertions about civil rights. “I was wrong,” he eventually said of his opposition to racial integration. “Federal intervention was necessary.” Why break one’s mind over the race problem? In the European ski resorts and yacht clubs where he spent so much of the year, it didn’t really come up. Buckley was writing yachting memoirs and spy novels. He was learning to paint with David Niven, Princess Grace, Teddy Kennedy, and John Kenneth Galbraith. He came to feel a “sneaking affection” even for his old liberal-Republican nemesis, Nelson Rockefeller. Forced to choose perfection of the life or of the work, Buckley settled on the former.
In this new biography, Buckley is consistently portrayed as the most shallow thinker in his own circle. I wonder if that gnawed at him?
ChatGPT says:
Tanenhaus presents Buckley as profoundly self-assured, charismatic, and sharply driven—less introspective about his inner depth than confident in his rhetorical and strategic gifts. That confidence, in fact, seems to shield him from the kind of self‑doubt your question implies.
The book portrays him as a stylist and media impresario: “more strategic than dogmatic,” holding conservative factions together with charm and rhetorical flair rather than philosophical rigor.
One anecdote underscores his unflappable nature: when a priest suggested everyone has doubts, Buckley reportedly replied, “I never did.” The biography leaves the impression that he really meant that.
Overall, reviewers describe the biography as a “sweeping, meticulously researched account” that captures both Buckley’s brilliance and contradictions—but doesn’t show signs that he was troubled by being seen as superficial.
So, no hint he was gnawed by being deemed shallow. Almost the opposite—he leaned into his persona, seemed to enjoy his role as a gladiatorial thinker, and never let doubts distract him.