Book review: ‘Buckley,’ a biography by Carl T. Bogus

Half a century ago, when he was only 35 — already one of the country’s foremost debaters and brimming with elan, but long before he started his syndicated column, mounted his (presciently virtual) campaign for mayor of New York City, began hosting “Firing Line,” threatened to sock Gore Vidal in the face, sailed across the Atlantic or published a dozen spy thrillers — William F. Buckley Jr. could not have imagined that he, or his ideas, would actually prevail.

So deeply ingrained in the America of his formative years was the philosophy of liberalism that Buckley, as a conservative, was resigned to an eternity of frustration in the minority. Of this despair he made no secret. On the fifth anniversary of his upstart right-wing journal, National Review, Buckley congratulated the ballroom audience in New York’s Plaza Hotel, in November 1960, for not succumbing to the era’s “modish” intellectual fashions. Most notable among them, in Buckley’s eyes, was “the notion that all points of view are equally valid, except perhaps that point of view which says they are not.”

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(Bloomsbury Press/Bloomsbury Press) - ’Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism’ by Barl T. Bogus

“It is precisely the deepest roots of our civilization that are out of fashion,” Buckley lamented. “The sponsors of this dinner — and I speak here now not only of those whose names adorn this program, but of every one of you — know that we are destined to live out our lives in something less than a totally harmonious relationship with our times.”

How the next decade, with its wars, assassinations, riots and excesses, would prove him wrong! The American lurch rightward — unthinkable in 1964 but unmistakable after the Nixon landslide of 1972, and reaffirmed by the Reagan rout of 1980 — represented a counterrevolution against the upheavals of the 1960s.

And as many noted even before his death, in February 2008, Buckley planted the seeds of that counterrevolution: Using his family fortune, his disheveled good looks, his theatrical flair and his organizational and rhetorical genius, he single-handedly made conservatism palatable in the electronic age. Ronald Reagan, a former Democrat converted by National Review, regarded Buckley as “the most influential journalist and intellectual in our era.”

And yet, even as the counterrevolution was in full swing and nearing its ultimate triumph, Buckley himself, working tirelessly to advance it, remained resigned about its prospects. “Is there going to be a continued leftward movement over the next thirty years?” Martin L. Gross asked him in the spring of 1975. “It appears that way,” Buckley answered tersely.

There is, then, some irony in the growing number of books chronicling Buckley’s role in this counterrevolution he simultaneously midwifed and missed. And there is irony, too, in the growing number of liberals writing them. Many still regard John B. Judis’s “William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives” (1988), the first full-scale biography of Buckley, as the best, and it looms large in the footnotes of this latest liberal entry, Carl T. Bogus’s “Buckley.”