Buckley’s Blind Spots
9th July 2025
Sam Tanenhaus, author of the acclaimed 1997 biography of Whittaker Chambers and editor of the New York Times Book Review from 2004 to 2013, has finally completed his long-awaited biography of William F. Buckley, Jr.—the contract for which he signed more than 25 years ago! Whittaker Chambers had been a great friend of Buckley’s and a major influence on his political thought, so when the Tanenhaus biography of Chambers came out, the publisher asked Buckley to chair an event in the ballroom of a New York City hotel to promote it. As I recall, Buckley began the evening by telling the audience, “After I opened the manuscript and read it, I knew that I had just completed a masterpiece.”
So, it was not a surprise that Buckley agreed to let Tanenhaus write his authorised biography. Although Tanenhaus is not a conservative of any kind, the Chambers volume indicated that its author would strive to produce a fair and accurate, although not uncritical, portrait, and that he would not use the project as an excuse to score points against his political opponents. Buckley duly instructed his friends and family, associates, schoolmates, and political brethren to cooperate fully when Tanenhaus approached them for interviews and pertinent files they may have held.
What would Buckley have made of the upshot, were he alive to see it? On one hand, it is a magisterial work so compelling and fascinating that I wished I could read it in a single sitting (an impossible task given the book’s length). It will surely win the Pulitzer for biography in 2025 when the prizes are announced next year. Tanenhaus need not fear being relegated to the runner-up category, as his Chambers book was. Although blurbs are not a reliable guide to the quality of a newly published work, on this occasion, the lavish praise adorning the book jacket from authors like Beverly Gage, Max Boot, and Jonathan Alter is well deserved.
On the other hand, the portrait of Buckley that emerges is, in many ways, so unflattering that it has enraged a number of critics on the contemporary Right.
Buckley’s problem was that he was a native of the same East Coast Establishment that he so often criticized. He could never break himself of the top-down elitist we’ll-decide-for-you-what-you-ought-to-think attitude that has characterized the New York/Boston/Philadelphia/D.C. corridor since forever. The true heir of Buckley is not Donald Trump but David French.
Let it not be forgotten that former associates of his magazine National Review included not only people who went on to become pillars of ‘conservative’ thought (however defined) but also notorious turncoats like Gary Wills, David Frum, Conor Friediersdorf–and Ron Radosh.