Full Comment - The rich, populist Republican radical who paved the way for Trump

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00:01:01.940 Once upon a time, William F. Buckley was a household name. He ran a successful magazine. He

00:01:07.040 was on Firing Line, a popular PBS TV show. He was sought out for his views on anything and everything.

00:01:14.440 Today? Well, it's been quite a while since he passed on in 2008. His magazine National Review

00:01:19.900 isn't as influential as it once was, but Buckley is still a fascinating figure. Hello and welcome

00:01:26.320 to the Full Comment Podcast. My name is Brian Lilly, your host, and today I'll look at a

00:01:30.920 recently released biography of William F. Buckley. It's called Buckley, The Life and the Revolution

00:01:36.640 That Changed America, because at its heart, Buckley was a revolutionary and someone who started a

00:01:42.620 movement that continues to change politics in America and, by extension, Canada through to today.

00:01:48.980 I had a chance to sit down and speak with Sam Tannenhaus, former writer and book editor for

00:01:54.000 the New York Times. He's written extensively elsewhere and is the author of several books,

00:01:58.540 including a biography of Whitaker Chambers. Here's our conversation.

00:02:02.880 So, Sam, you've written a very big book. It's over 900 pages about William F. Buckley,

00:02:09.800 and while he is a very familiar name for me, someone whose writings I read vociferously as I was

00:02:20.180 altering my political mindset, a lot of people are just sitting there saying,

00:02:27.320 who is William F. Buckley today? He used to be very popular. He was one of the most popular guys

00:02:32.260 going at the center of the zeitgeist. Who's William F. Buckley in a nutshell, and why did you have to

00:02:39.340 write a biography of him? In a nutshell, Brian, he was the architect of the modern conservative

00:02:48.080 movement in the U.S. And that's not to say he wasn't a president like Reagan or even a nominee

00:02:55.600 like Barry Goldwater or Mitt Romney or name them. But he was a writer. He was a television

00:03:04.480 personality. He was the moderator of the first really great TV debate program in the U.S.

00:03:15.560 And I'll meet all sorts of, no offense to anybody, slightly older people who will remember that.

00:03:21.880 His show firing line extremely well. And I urge listeners, just go on YouTube and type in a name,

00:03:28.400 type in Muhammad Ali or Groucho Marx and William F. Buckley, and you'll see him. And he was born in

00:03:36.320 1925, died in 2008 at the age of 82, which means in November, his centennial will be celebrated. I think

00:03:46.920 that will bring some more attention to him, but you never know with, what do they call it now,

00:03:51.140 the attention economy, whether that's really going to happen. But he was an author. He was a debater.

00:03:57.300 He was a columnist, a television personality, and, Brian, an impresario, an organizer. He brought all

00:04:04.460 sorts of people together in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, right, those mid-century decades, to take a marginal

00:04:15.420 movement in the U.S. of conservatism, of ideological conservatism, take over the Republican Party and

00:04:23.120 then dominate our politics. With the result, some would say, we are seeing right now.

00:04:28.980 We'll get into how it relates to right now in a little bit, but people forget, or maybe not old

00:04:36.540 enough to have known this, but the Republican Party used to be rather middle-of-the-road,

00:04:43.700 some would say liberal, very much Northeastern establishment. And then Bill Buckley came along.

00:04:53.020 He was responsible in part for Barry Goldwater as the presidential nominee in 64, for Richard Nixon

00:04:59.420 in 68. I won't give him any credit for Ford unless you want to give it to him. But Ronald Reagan,

00:05:04.440 he had a big part in Ronald Reagan's ascendancy. You know, Reagan was, you know, big by 80 anyway,

00:05:11.760 but... Buckley was a mentor to Reagan in a way. He wasn't so much for Goldwater as one of the

00:05:19.220 discoveries I've made. But Buckley, through his magazine National Review, which was founded in 1955

00:05:26.040 when Buckley was 29, first a weekly and then in the elegant old phrase of fortnightly, maybe you still

00:05:33.480 say that in Canada. You all speak better than we do here in the U.S., which means it came out every

00:05:38.200 two weeks. That became the flagship publication for conservatism in the United States. You've made

00:05:43.840 a really important point, Brian, which is that we have to separate out, though it seems inconceivable

00:05:49.660 today, but going back in time, the conservative ideological movement from the Republican Party.

00:05:56.340 And the Republican Party is closer to what you've described. It was a kind of moderate, middle of the

00:06:03.400 road, the party of businessmen, because that's what they mainly were. And the Democrats were the party

00:06:09.280 of the New Deal, of social reform, social justice. And the Republicans were the rump party. They were just

00:06:15.480 out of power. From Buckley's childhood in 1928 until the election of Richard Nixon in 1968,

00:06:24.780 no true blue conservative was elected president of the United States. There were a couple of

00:06:31.080 moderate figures. Dwight Eisenhower, the great general of World War II, was a moderate Republican,

00:06:38.160 but not ideological conservatives. So what Buckley and Company did was to choose a couple of very big

00:06:43.860 issues and put them front and center. And the most important was militant anti-communism,

00:06:50.840 starting at the beginning of the Cold War and in the late 1940s.

00:06:57.140 What was it that drove his anti-communism? Because I know you talk about his relationship with

00:07:04.180 Joe McCarthy, McCarthyism. He wasn't really into McCarthyism, but he also didn't, you know,

00:07:11.140 throw McCarthy under the bus the way so many people did.

00:07:14.240 Yeah. A lot of it had to do with religion. Brian Buckley was a really devout Catholic.

00:07:19.500 So let me do a little bit on his background, because it's what sets him apart from so many

00:07:23.720 others. So I mentioned he was born in 1925. He was the sixth of 10 children in a quite wealthy family

00:07:30.880 that grew up on a big estate in Connecticut, near the border of Massachusetts, just to the north,

00:07:39.040 and Dutchess County, New York, to the west. I mentioned that because when Buckley's father,

00:07:44.700 who was a self-made oil millionaire, was launching his crusade against the Bolshevik,

00:07:52.340 Franklin D. Roosevelt, as he saw him, that was their neighbor. Roosevelt was living 30 miles away,

00:07:58.960 and they would see him at the horse show, you know. So it's very much a kind of inside the

00:08:03.960 establishment attack on the establishment. And that's what was new. That's what made it sound

00:08:08.640 different. You always had people out there in the heartlands who didn't like the political

00:08:12.880 establishment. But Buckley went to Yale University, was the star of his class, the editor of the

00:08:17.940 newspaper. His family had all this money that had been 47 acres. They had another mansion in South

00:08:23.120 Carolina with black help. I have a lot on that in the book, some of the discoveries I made.

00:08:28.040 So it made him a kind of insider declaring war on the elite. Not so different from what we're seeing

00:08:36.440 today in our politics. When I first remember seeing William F. Buckley, when I was first reading him,

00:08:43.380 you would think that this guy came from central casting for the Northeastern Anglican aristocracy,

00:08:52.400 that, you know, he'd been a blue blood for his whole time. And instead, his ancestors came from

00:08:59.600 Ireland. They went to Hamilton, Ontario, my hometown, then went to Texas and made a bucket load of money

00:09:07.740 that helped Buckley throughout his career. It was a very different background than you would expect

00:09:14.440 for someone like him. Yeah. What was interesting, I found, Brian, there's a funny theme that runs through

00:09:21.440 the discussion of politics in the 1960s with the rise of the very charismatic Jack Kennedy,

00:09:28.800 John F. Kennedy, who was elected in 1960, is people began to notice what seemed to be parallels

00:09:33.720 between the Kennedy family and the Buckley family. They're Irish. They're Catholic. They're really

00:09:38.860 rich. They're very good looking. All the boys go to the Ivy League, Harvard or Yale. And there are a lot

00:09:46.000 of daughters who have many children. And it feels like these two clans. But Buckley was always very

00:09:53.460 snobbish about the Kennedys. And he'd say, well, they're kind of, you know, lace curtain Irish. 0.97

00:09:58.380 We never paid any attention to Ireland, he told me. Everything for us was Mexico, where his father

00:10:04.080 had made his fortune from growing up in South Texas and then migrating there. And the South,

00:10:11.360 there were very much Southerners, the American South. Buckley's mother came from a German-Swiss

00:10:17.940 family in New Orleans. What that meant, this is really important, Brian, is that not only were both

00:10:24.760 his parents devout Catholics, they came from places where Catholicism dominated. So they did not have

00:10:32.600 the inferiority complex. A lot of, say, Irish immigrants did in the U.S., right? No Irish need 1.00

00:10:40.100 apply. That was not an issue, as I think it was for quite a while in Ontario and Toronto, particularly.

00:10:47.600 Hey, I've read my Morley Callahan, you know. And there was this, you know, there was a very,

00:10:51.940 there's a wasp, kind of very Protestant elite, and the Catholics are excluded from that. Well, 0.95

00:10:59.440 that was true in the U.S. too, except the Buckley's origins were in these really, really Catholic

00:11:04.720 places. We should mention, by the way, that Buckley's socialite wife, Pat, came from Vancouver.

00:11:10.700 Now, people should know that. She came from our super rich, far richer than the Buckley's, 0.99

00:11:15.260 family in Vancouver, the Taylors. And there are people in Canada who will remember the names,

00:11:21.280 A.C. Taylor. That was her father, and her brother was also called A.C. Taylor. Hugely

00:11:27.040 successful financiers in Canada. So there's a whole Canada, North America thing going through here,

00:11:33.740 too. Also, you know, as you're going through some of the names there, it's remarkable to me how many of

00:11:43.520 the people who were at the center of shaping conservatism in the United States over the last

00:11:49.720 bunch of decades have been Catholic, like Buckley or the people behind First Things and, you know,

00:11:55.740 all of that. It's been an incredible influence, but it's not seen as that way. Would Buckley,

00:12:01.980 you know, someone who used National Review, used his show firing line, to put forward conservative

00:12:08.780 ideas, to make them mainstream, to the point where Ronald Reagan is elected in a landslide,

00:12:15.380 would he recognize the conservative movement that he sees today? Or, you know, would you even say that

00:12:21.140 what is around Donald Trump and MAGA, which is something very different, would he recognize

00:12:26.560 any of that or see that as the antithesis of what he was building?

00:12:32.760 He would see some of it, I think. What the economic policies will set aside. Now, Buckley was

00:12:39.140 an old-style, laissez-faire, Reagan-type, what's now called neoliberal. Free trade, no barriers,

00:12:49.100 everybody gets as rich as we can. And here's where he'd agree with Trump, the lowest possible tax rate

00:12:55.320 on the wealthy, right? Which Reagan did. Reagan first reduced the taxes. Trump is doing it even more.

00:13:00.860 And there's another place where he'd agree with Trump, I believe. No one can say these things

00:13:06.600 with certainty, right? Matt Buckley died in 2008, and we can't possibly predict what he would say now.

00:13:13.060 But what he might recognize is the culture war aspect. Buckley's first book, which put him on the

00:13:21.300 map and made him quite famous at the tender age of 25, was an attack on his own, his alma mater,

00:13:29.260 Yale University, called God and Man at Yale. And I know just from some chatting you and I have done,

00:13:37.940 you're aware there's a lot that's been written about in my book as it's come out in the U.S.

00:13:42.800 And whenever the discussion turns to Buckley's 50 books, they talk about only one of them,

00:13:48.500 his very first one, God and Man at Yale, because it's an attack on the Ivy League 0.77

00:13:52.920 or the ivory tower from within. What did Buckley advocate? Fire left-wing professors and alumni and

00:14:00.720 donors should stop giving money to the university. Pretty much what's going on now. That's the

00:14:05.380 culture war. Yeah. With Columbia and other schools. Columbia, Harvard, and others. University of

00:14:12.040 Virginia just fired its president. And the idea there is that a small cadre, we use the old

00:14:19.740 communist term, it's not a Buckley's first mentors, we're ex-communists, right? You have a small group

00:14:25.540 of elites who have kind of hijacked these great institutions and are espousing ideologies that

00:14:33.100 then convert or seduce the sons in Buckley's day. Women were not admitted to these universities. That 1.00

00:14:41.760 didn't happen until 20 years later in the late 1960s. The sons of, as he says, Christian and God-fearing 0.98

00:14:49.820 businessmen are being turned into atheistic socialists. That's his argument. And the argument

00:14:57.260 is outlandish and extreme, although quite cleverly and brilliantly stated. But here's where he scored

00:15:04.180 his big points, Brian. And I think it's where it's happening again today. What he got was not so much

00:15:11.000 that there were terrible things going on. Most people would say, well, sure, you're going to have

00:15:16.700 economists who think the New Deal kind of worked in the 30s. Why should they not teach students that?

00:15:22.940 Or with the rise of the natural sciences, we don't accept the Bible as revealed truth. What's the surprise

00:15:30.760 there? Well, what Buckley knew was that what was going on in the classroom, the things I've just

00:15:36.960 described, was something the administrators of those universities were actually kind of shielding the donors

00:15:44.000 and alumni from. They still assumed Yale in 1950 was the university it had been in 1900, you know, in a kind

00:15:54.440 of a Victorian institution, which in itself had not changed all that much from its founding 200 years

00:16:04.340 earlier. So Buckley's saying we've entered modernity, modernity is dangerous, and worse, the people who run

00:16:12.120 the institutions won't own up to it. So now we flash forward to what's going on when people in

00:16:18.220 Congress, U.S. House of Representatives, attack the presidents of universities, put them in the

00:16:23.940 right, put them on, you know, they interrogate them, they put them on display, they ask them these

00:16:30.620 questions, well, what are you doing about anti-Semitism? Is it true faculty have signed these

00:16:35.000 petitions? Is it true that Jewish students feel intimidated and the university professors don't know

00:16:40.660 what to say because either they're not really paying attention or they're going to be taken someplace

00:16:45.940 they don't want to go to? So Buckley's phrase for that was unacknowledged orthodoxy. If you've got a

00:16:53.440 new philosophy that you're teaching the students, just come out and say it. But they weren't saying

00:17:00.200 it. And that's where the points got scored. So he would recognize the outrage over the anti-Semitism

00:17:06.420 on campus and the culture wars around that. I know that you write about the, you kind of wrote

00:17:13.760 the playbook, as you said, by telling the donors not to go on. Was he an establishment conservative

00:17:20.620 when he started out or was he a radical?

00:17:22.700 He started out as a radical. He called himself a radical conservative. And you know, it's a funny

00:17:28.400 phrase because people say, well, how can you be a conservative who wants to preserve things

00:17:33.600 and look at yourself a radical? And the answer to that, which took me a while to find, that's why

00:17:38.440 these books take a long time, is that if you think the enemy has taken over, well, the only way you're

00:17:45.540 going to get rid of them is through the root and branch pulling it up. So you become the champion of

00:17:51.380 conservative values in his estimation. I'm not saying, by the way, that I agree with any of it.

00:17:56.620 My job as the storyteller is just to guide you through it. So if you have that view, you're going

00:18:02.380 to say, well, they've really come after us. They have really attacked our ideals, our values. We have

00:18:10.220 to fight back. We have to be aggressive in turn. We can't meekly go along with it. And that's where the

00:18:17.620 more traditional Republican Party didn't seem to be meeting the challenge because they would say,

00:18:23.560 well, we're conservatives. And as long as there's not rioting in the streets, we're going to make the

00:18:29.740 adjustments we need to make and we'll be OK. Buckley says, no, you can't do that, that you're giving up

00:18:35.220 more than you realize and you've got to get it back or it's never going to come back. So he had this

00:18:41.260 kind of enthusiasm and this zeal, you know, for converting people and bringing them along to the

00:18:46.840 cause, finding all the different platforms, whether it's the debate stage, whether it's television,

00:18:51.700 whether it's books, whether it's columns, whether it's the magazine he publishes, all these things

00:18:55.700 he's doing at once to build this movement in opposition. And let me add one thing to that.

00:19:00.680 You mentioned McCarthyism before, Brian. Buckley's second book, also controversial,

00:19:08.540 was a defense of Joseph McCarthy called McCarthy and His Enemies. He wrote it with his

00:19:13.120 best friend at Yale who became his brother-in-law, Brent Bozell. Well, if you read that book,

00:19:19.180 which I've done very closely, there's not a whole lot about McCarthy in it, as you were kind of

00:19:23.400 suggesting, but there's a lot about his enemies. A lot of it's about the bad guys. And who are the

00:19:29.560 enemies? They're in media and they're in academia, just as we hear today.

00:19:37.720 I saw, I heard a clip where he was talking about, about that book and about McCarthy. And he said,

00:19:46.320 yeah, as bad as McCarthy was, his enemies were worse.

00:19:49.300 That's it. Yeah. That was always the line. Yeah.

00:19:52.780 To use a term that you used in both your essay and your book, the death of conservatism,

00:19:58.980 this from, what is it, 2009, 2010 era. Yeah.

00:20:03.000 You were writing about, you know, the death of the conservative movement after

00:20:06.360 George W. Bush was done, after John McCain had lost to Barack Obama. And you talked about

00:20:13.580 a divide within the movement. And you said that there were these revanchists who don't trust

00:20:22.180 government. Kind of sounds to me like Bill Buckley started as a revanchist. He didn't trust the

00:20:27.820 establishment and wanted to pull it out, you know, by the route.

00:20:32.100 Yeah, he did. He did. And here's the interesting thing is, and again, you know, draw the current

00:20:39.840 parallels. And thank you, by the way, for bringing up that book of mine, which had kind of been

00:20:45.520 forgotten and made fun of in part because of the title. Although now I see, particularly on the right,

00:20:52.460 I was surprised to see this, it's being discussed again because conservatives are trying to figure

00:20:59.420 out where Trump fits in. And in this very moment, right, we're talking at the midst of this crazy

00:21:05.200 Jeffrey Epstein crisis or controversy or scandal or hilarity, however you view it. Now you have the

00:21:13.480 paradox of the outsiders becoming the establishment. What do you do? What do you do when your guy who's

00:21:20.820 been railing against the Justice Department in the U.S. for concealing all this evidence now runs the

00:21:27.540 Justice Department and tells you they're not going to release the documents, right? Then you get to

00:21:32.080 this place Bill Buckley did where he's on the outside all these years. And then, OMG, his 2T,

00:21:39.100 Ronald Reagan, is one of the most popular presidents in U.S. history. Not only that, Reagan kind of starts

00:21:45.720 acting like more, you can't see air quotes, more normal kind of president. He wants to scale back

00:21:53.000 the Cold War. He actually reaches a kind of truce for the Soviet Union. They finish it off. He doesn't

00:21:59.100 really eliminate all the social programs, the big spending programs they say is going to eliminate.

00:22:03.860 None of that's really happening. And he doesn't really denounce his enemies that much. And you're

00:22:09.140 thinking, well, how did that happen? Well, it happened because he was a responsible leader once he came

00:22:14.080 into office. And now we're actually seeing some repudiation of that, maybe. This may be the first

00:22:22.080 time, although there will be different interpretations of this, where we may actually see an insurgent

00:22:30.380 in the White House. And that's why he's getting caught out, because he's supposed to, his followers,

00:22:36.960 some of them, expect him to follow through on this stuff that suddenly isn't getting followed through

00:22:41.060 on so much. Yeah. And they're quite loud. Just to, while you're mentioning or alluding to Donald

00:22:49.820 Trump, both men have a connection, Buckley and Trump, at least through one person, Roy Cohen,

00:22:59.760 who was Trump's mentor, was a great friend of William F. Buckley.

00:23:03.400 You know, you've picked up on that. There's one mention, as you said, it's a very long book.

00:23:11.240 Although I want listeners to understand, it's meant to be fun to read. And many who've read it have

00:23:18.300 said so. You know, it moves quickly, Buckley in a very busy, active life. He did all kinds of crazy

00:23:24.980 stuff. Frankly, incredible things, as one reviewer said. So Trump is mentioned in just one place.

00:23:32.560 And that is when he and Bill Buckley were character witnesses for Roy Cohn, when Cohn was threatened

00:23:42.800 with disbarment and was disbarred near the end of his life. So you say, well, why would Buckley have

00:23:49.520 such affection for Roy Cohn? Well, Cohn had been the chief assistant to Joe McCarthy. Buckley had known

00:23:59.000 him from that period in the 1950s. And Buckley was a really loyal guy. He was loyal to his CIA friend,

00:24:06.860 E. Howard Hunt, right through the Watergate crisis. Buckley's covering up for him and withholding

00:24:14.260 information that he knew about the Watergate break-in, which was a huge scandal. It makes

00:24:19.060 Jeffrey Epstein's scandal look pretty small. And Buckley was very loyal. So he was loyal to Roy Cohn.

00:24:25.080 What surprised me, Brian, is when Buckley testified before the judicial panel that was weighing

00:24:33.420 Cohn's many egregious, grievous acts as a lawyer, Buckley said, I can't imagine how Roy Cohn would

00:24:43.080 ever do anything untoward when Buckley knew that Cohn had done it to his own friends.

00:24:48.760 He promised them money that he didn't give them, or he'd write bad checks, this kind of thing. And

00:24:55.220 Buckley knew it. But he went before this panel and pretended he didn't know it.

00:25:00.360 But his friends were legion. And he was not someone who, you know, we've talked about him so far as this,

00:25:08.900 you know, father of the modern conservative movement in America. But politics, and he founded

00:25:15.020 National Review, which is still a great publication in my eyes. But he, he was about more than politics,

00:25:22.340 and his friendships transcended political lines.

00:25:26.320 That's one of the fun things about him is all who his friends were. Well, the publisher,

00:25:30.900 longtime publisher of Nash Revere, William Rusher, Bill Rusher said, Buckley was a good writer,

00:25:36.660 as you know, you've read a lot of his stuff. And he really admired good prose whenever he read it.

00:25:42.420 And he knew when people wrote better than he did. And then he really esteemed them. His favorite

00:25:46.340 writer was Norman Mailer, who was, you know, the novelist and journalist who was very much on the

00:25:50.740 left. And he and Buckley were great friends. Well, Bill Rusher said at one point, the publisher of

00:25:57.620 Nash Review, he said, it's a good thing the Communist Manifesto wasn't better written,

00:26:02.100 or we might have lost Buckley.

00:26:03.860 You know, he just liked good writing that much.

00:26:06.520 Yes. He liked good writing that much. And he liked the people who could do it. So he'd invite

00:26:11.160 them over to his house. He had these beautiful homes, one of them in Stamford, Connecticut,

00:26:17.340 right on the Long Island Sound. That was his weekend home. He had this beautiful, elegant apartment

00:26:22.220 in Manhattan that he and his wife, Pat. Pat was a great socialite and a great donor to AIDS research

00:26:33.260 and protection of gay men in the 1980s. In fact, she kind of overtook her husband as a moral force

00:26:40.960 in that period, very highly respected and esteemed philanthropist. But it was very philanthropic too,

00:26:47.880 by the way. But so they have these beautiful homes and their winter retreat in Gstaat, Switzerland,

00:26:55.060 where you would see Princess Grace Kelly and the film star David Niven. I mean, it's almost comical

00:27:01.480 what this life was like. And that really mattered more to Buckley in the end, I think, than the

00:27:07.720 politics did. He was really good at politics. He told me, but he hated talking about it. So when I

00:27:13.160 went to see him, I was working on this book, and I got to know him because he was a gatekeeper for a

00:27:17.960 previous biography I'd written of one of his heroes, the ex-communist witness, Whitaker Chambers.

00:27:24.000 And Buckley said, I only talk about politics when I'm paid to do it. And he was paid a lot to do it.

00:27:33.140 Otherwise, it was, oh, did you see what was in The New Yorker this past week? Did you see that story

00:27:37.440 by John Updike? Isn't he good? Isn't that great? Or what about this gossip about what's going on in

00:27:43.020 the boardroom at The New York Times? He was very much inside that media world. You know, the media

00:27:49.140 elite that's consistently denounced today, those were Buckley's friends. You know, he got together

00:27:55.180 with them all the time. And he took them on his boat. He was a big sailor. At one point, he owned

00:28:01.360 two big sailing boats at once, and he really couldn't afford either one. He was always in

00:28:06.540 the verge of bankruptcy. So I have a lot on that, too, because I found it all interesting how he led

00:28:12.320 this huge and busy, active life. He just never slowed down. One of the key items, documents I had,

00:28:22.240 which no one else had ever seen, is his personal diary from about 30 years, from 1968 to the year 2000.

00:28:30.800 And it's just a list of his appointments each week, what he's doing every single day,

00:28:38.580 kept by one of his two secretaries. And you just can't believe it. It's like a Monty Python routine.

00:28:44.960 How many people are coming in? Henry Kissinger over here and Joan Didion over there. And oh,

00:28:49.440 we have to meet with the president. And it's just the United States.

00:28:53.440 It would sound like a lot of name dropping.

00:28:56.260 Oh, so much name dropping. If you read his memoirs, I have a feeling you've read them.

00:29:00.500 Cruising Speed and Overdrive. The names just fall in these huge cascading bunches.

00:29:05.380 These were just his friends.

00:29:07.100 They're his friends. They're his friends. And we have to say, somebody who cultivated friendship.

00:29:14.460 I don't know how many of your listeners remember the name Alistair Cook, who's a great Manchester

00:29:22.200 Guardian journalist who came to the United States kind of before Christopher Hitchens. He was doing

00:29:28.660 the Christopher Hitchens thing. Came to the United States and wrote very brilliantly about what was

00:29:34.000 going on in American politics and culture for what was then called the Manchester Guardian. And now

00:29:39.840 we call it the Guardian. And he was also on public television. And he introduced every week something

00:29:47.300 that in the US we called Masterpiece Theater, which were BBC costume dramas. And he did this in the 1970s

00:29:53.860 and Buckley got to know him pretty well. And he said to me, he said, I have lunch with Alistair Cook

00:30:01.700 every three months. It's just put into his calendar. And you think you have lunch with somebody every

00:30:06.980 three months. Why would you do that? Well, I put to you, I wish I could do it. And I put it to your

00:30:12.520 listeners. Imagine if you saw someone for an hour and a half, once every three months, over the course

00:30:20.780 of, say, 10 years. You would think of that person as a true friend, as somebody really new, because

00:30:30.520 you're making a point of seeing them. When I was starting out at this department, I was nobody from

00:30:36.220 nowhere. Now I'm an older nobody from nowhere. But then I was a younger nobody from nowhere. And I was

00:30:41.760 working on this biography of Whitaker Chambers. And Buckley would call me out of the blue. How are

00:30:46.520 you doing? Can I help you with anything? He would initiate it. And at that point, now we're talking

00:30:52.460 about the early 1990s, when Buckley was still on television, and his protege Reagan had just been

00:30:58.760 elected president. And Buckley's good friend from Yale, George H.W. Bush, is the next president. That's

00:31:05.460 the world Buckley's living in. If you stood in Fry's to work at the New York Times, who was a writer

00:31:11.240 reporter and editor there, if you stood in front of the New York Times, you should tell

00:31:14.960 my colleagues, and a lot of famous people walked by, a lot of famous writers, I mentioned

00:31:21.000 Norman Mailer, if he walked by, how many people would recognize him on the street? I'm guessing

00:31:25.940 maybe two out of 10. Or if Joan Didion, the famous Joan Didion walked by, maybe three out 0.98

00:31:31.620 of 10. If Bill Buckley walked by, everybody would recognize him. That's how famous he was.

00:31:36.280 Because it was on television every week. It was on for 30 years.

00:31:39.940 And it was a good-sized audience watching Firing Line.

00:31:43.620 It was in many, it was PBS, public television. So the numbers were never huge, but it's in 100

00:31:50.680 markets, as we now say. And it's, you can't see the air quotes again, it's the right people watching

00:31:57.400 it. That is to say, it's the people who read, the people who really are engaged in politics.

00:32:03.160 We need to take a quick break to pay the bills, but more with Sam Tannenhaus and his book on

00:32:08.220 Buckley in a moment.

00:32:10.040 This is Tristan Hopper, the host of Canada Did What?, where we unpack the biggest, weirdest,

00:32:15.120 and wildest political moments in Canadian history you thought you knew, and tell you what really

00:32:19.940 happened. Stick around at the end of the episode to hear a sample of one of our favorite episodes.

00:32:25.540 If you don't want to stick around, make sure you subscribe to Canada Did What?, everywhere

00:32:30.300 you get podcasts. Let me ask you about his, the way he was able to change and adapt. You

00:32:37.460 mentioned earlier that his family came out of the South, that he would spend a good part

00:32:42.920 of the summers when he was growing up in South Carolina. That informed his views on race.

00:32:50.840 And at the beginning, he was in favor of segregation. He was not by the end. Talk to me a bit about that

00:33:01.280 and the famous Muhammad Ali interview on Firing Line.

00:33:07.120 Yeah. One of the great things about Buckley was his ability to adapt. And it's interesting because

00:33:13.560 it's not a matter of splitting the difference, right? Like, we talk a lot, we look back at that

00:33:21.280 era, 1950s and 60s in the U.S., and we say, well, that was the peak period of consensus politics,

00:33:28.120 right? That's when you have this great civil rights legislation that much of the country supports.

00:33:34.940 The anti-communism, for better and worse, the country supports. It gets us into Vietnam, 0.96

00:33:39.600 which kind of, you know, to somebody my age was a single great calamity in U.S. history. It tore

00:33:47.200 the country apart. Well, Buckley had very firm views, but he could also see when he was losing.

00:33:54.980 And if it wasn't going to win, he liked to win. You know, as a kid, he was very competitive. He runs

00:34:03.260 the newspaper at Yale because he out-competes everybody for it. When he was a young horseman,

00:34:08.920 you know, an equestrian, he competed at Madison Square Garden in the National Horse Show because

00:34:15.540 he won the local competition. He was a brilliant student when he was very young and then became

00:34:20.480 less interested in it, but he liked to win. And if his side wasn't going to win, then he was going to

00:34:26.220 find some other thing to do. And after a while, because also, this was so important and we've touched

00:34:33.440 on it, because his own range of experience kept getting bigger and bigger, he would meet people

00:34:39.960 who defied his presumptions about them. And that's a great thing when you can do that. So you mentioned

00:34:45.680 Muhammad Ali and race. Well, we start with Buckley, as you say, in the 1950s, one of the big finds I made

00:34:52.540 in the research, probably the most important discovery I made, was not something Bill Buckley gave me,

00:34:57.740 for something he actually hid from me, which is important when you're doing biography for all you

00:35:02.880 researchers out there. And it wasn't in his huge archive at Yale. It was in another little archive

00:35:08.540 in South Carolina where his family had a home. And I'd picked up one little reference in National Review

00:35:14.260 to the town where the Buckley family spent its winters in Camden, South Carolina. Something had

00:35:20.280 happened there. I think, well, what's that about? So my wife and I go down to Camden, South Carolina,

00:35:24.620 I'm going to go into the archive. And what did we find? That there was a pro-segregation newspaper

00:35:30.040 that Buckley family had sponsored. And I can tell you-

00:35:33.620 Was that him or was it his father or was it all of them?

00:35:37.520 His parents owned it. So they paid for the staff, they paid for the equipment. His older sister,

00:35:45.240 Priscilla Buckley, who was one of the best text line editors of her time, as we say, 0.56

00:35:52.460 this is somebody who edited copy by Joan Didion and Gary Wills and writers of that caliber,

00:35:59.540 was for a time the editor of that newspaper, edited it out of her office in New York.

00:36:05.020 And nobody knew about it. In the South, they did. You could see references to the Buckley family

00:36:11.300 newspaper, the Camden News in the Southern press. But this goes back long ago to mid-1950s,

00:36:18.240 where mass communications had not reached the saturation point it has today. So Buckley could

00:36:24.560 kind of keep that secret and did keep it secret for a really long time. He himself was not involved

00:36:29.940 in it. But there were causes that National Review, having to do with things like voting rights,

00:36:36.760 keeping Black Americans from voting, that were identical to the positions being advanced in the 0.77

00:36:42.940 Camden News. So Buckley is, and I was just amazed when I'm working on the book, and I typed the phrase

00:36:50.060 Northern segregationist, and I think, have I ever seen that phrase before? Because it just makes a

00:36:56.600 little sense. But here you have these very erudite, thoughtful conservatives in the North, where there

00:37:03.600 was not legalized segregation, actually siding with the South, as they called it, by which they meant

00:37:09.480 the power structure in the White South. Well, what happens? Buckley ran for mayor. There's one 0.68

00:37:16.240 campaign, a hilarious kind of wonderful campaign he waged in 1965 to become the mayor of New York City

00:37:24.320 to try to save the Republican Party after the calamitous defeat in the federal national election

00:37:30.360 of their candidate, the rights candidate, Barry Goldwater. And the movement looks finished.

00:37:35.600 There's been a huge landslide victory for the Democrats and Lyndon Johnson. And the party,

00:37:41.080 the Republican Party, taken over by the conservative movement, looks as if it's going to become a fringe

00:37:48.060 party, totally out of power. So Buckley runs for mayor of New York to try to revive it. It turns out to be

00:37:54.000 this very charming and beguiling and persuasive candidate, especially on television, where he's just

00:38:03.180 instantly the charisma on television just transforms him, his celebrity and the movement. Well, what

00:38:12.320 happens when he's running for office, he starts meeting more black people who aren't like the 0.99

00:38:17.040 ones who just work for his family in their two estates in Connecticut and South Carolina. They're

00:38:21.780 actually middle-class professionals. And suddenly he realizes they don't sound the way he expects them

00:38:27.780 to. Then he starts firing line and he thinks, OK, I've got to talk to these people. So it's kind of

00:38:32.900 interesting for Americans now or anybody now who wants to know about black militancy in the late

00:38:39.340 60s, which has become a big theme, the Black Panthers and such. I'm actually working on some of that

00:38:45.100 now myself. They were all on firing line. Buckley invites them in. Go ahead, Huey Newton, the minister of

00:38:51.760 defense for the Black Panther Party, who poses with a machine gun. Go ahead and tell me what you

00:38:56.960 believe. And he brings Muhammad Ali on. Why does he like Ali? Because Ali's got moral courage. He's

00:39:02.520 giving up his heavyweight crown because he doesn't want to fight in the Vietnam War. So Buckley invites

00:39:08.520 him on. And at this point, 1967, 1968, I know this. I was a kid then. And I would read the New York

00:39:15.880 Times. And its esteemed sports writer refused to call Ali Muhammad Ali. So, well, you know,

00:39:23.940 that's just some radical name. He's really Cassius Clay. And he insisted in the newspaper, that's what

00:39:29.480 he would call him. Buckley has him on his program. And the first thing he says is, well, we're going

00:39:34.860 to call you Muhammad Ali. And if you change your mind tomorrow and decide you're Cassius Clay, then

00:39:40.180 we'll call you Cassius Clay. In other words, you get to decide who you are, right? Well, we add another

00:39:47.100 piece to this, which was a fascinating and devastating debate. Buckley had had with James Baldwin, the great

00:39:54.080 writer in Cambridge. And Baldwin just dismantled Buckley. And explain who Baldwin was and why this

00:40:02.880 mattered to Buckley. Baldwin had become, in the mid-1960s, probably the most famous Black author

00:40:12.720 in the world, certainly in the United States, through his fiction, which was quite admirable,

00:40:19.500 but really through a little polemic called The Fire Next Time, which is a very small book. It's just

00:40:25.640 barely 100 pages. It's really two essays he wrote, one of them published in The New Yorker.

00:40:30.480 And Baldwin says, basically, Black people don't take it anymore. It's the beginning of what we 0.98

00:40:37.660 think of as the Black Power Movement. Buckley, the Southerner, is horrified by this. And he really

00:40:43.260 wants to take Baldwin on. And so Cambridge University invites them to debate. In England, Baldwin was doing

00:40:51.060 a promotional tour for his novel, a very good novel, called Another Country. He's touring Europe.

00:40:56.160 It's coming out there. Buckley's on a skiing vacation in Switzerland. They invite them for

00:41:03.560 a BBC televised debate. You can see it on YouTube, listeners. Go on, you'll see it. You'll see Buckley

00:41:09.300 and Baldwin. And Buckley comes across as this kind of snarling white supremacist, which he wasn't

00:41:18.140 really, but that's what it sounds like. And Baldwin stands up with all the skills of the former

00:41:25.280 boyhood preacher he had been in Pentecostal churches in Harlem and delivers this kind of

00:41:32.520 glorious, impassioned autobiography of Black people in America. And Buckley is fighting against it at the

00:41:43.240 very moment, February 1965, when Black citizens in the Deep South are being brutalized by the police

00:41:53.560 because they're trying to exercise their constitutional right to vote.

00:42:00.560 So in all your research, I mean, you said that Buckley hid the paper from you and you met with

00:42:09.740 Buckley many times about this book. After your Chambers book, you met with him many times to talk about

00:42:15.800 this book. But do you get the sense from all your research that he was a racist? Was it just the

00:42:27.760 way that he was brought up? And then, you know, whatever your answer is, tell me how he gets from

00:42:32.360 there to having Jesse Jackson on firing line and really helping that guy start his public figure

00:42:39.760 career. I'm glad you brought that up because he loved Jesse Jackson. He met him on a tour.

00:42:44.760 Buckley, and I'm so glad that you're a good interviewer because you know how to ask the

00:42:49.040 questions, is after he had had Muhammad Ali on his program. And by the way, when Ali is on firing

00:42:54.500 line, it's worth watching because he and Buckley then have a debate about Malcolm X and the Nation of

00:42:59.280 Islam. And it's fascinating. Buckley takes Malcolm X's side because Muhammad Ali was part of the group

00:43:05.160 that forced him out. It's fascinating. But at any rate, what happened is he met them. Buckley,

00:43:10.080 although he was an intellectual, was not a huge reader. He read very slowly. I sympathize with

00:43:16.960 that. I'm a slow reader. But he's a great listener. He was a pretty good musician. He really wanted to

00:43:23.080 be a concert pianist. He wasn't anywhere near good enough to do that. But he was a great music

00:43:28.460 appreciator. And there's a kind of musical quality to his speech and writing if you listen closely. He loved

00:43:33.640 music. So when he met a good talker, he was all ears. And he went on a tour. He was invited more

00:43:40.220 power to the National Urban League, points, props to them. They were a civil rights organization

00:43:46.860 that invited journalists in 1969, right after Richard Nixon had been elected, a period of great

00:43:54.640 civil unrest in the U.S., to tour what was then called the inner city ghetto in eight cities across

00:44:02.680 the country. And Buckley was invited and he went along. First thing, he went. He wanted to meet.

00:44:10.180 They said to him, you're not going to eat in fancy restaurants. You're going to stay in the homes

00:44:14.440 of ordinary citizens in the inner city and you're going to meet community leaders. And Buckley was

00:44:20.460 just astounded. Who are these people? They're so smart. They're so educated. They've taught themselves

00:44:26.840 all these things, right? And today, again, it can sound condescending. But I talked to a guy who was

00:44:33.620 on that tour with Buckley and he was impressed. He said, what's he doing there? He was there. He

00:44:39.100 wanted to hear what people had to say. And when they went to Chicago, he met the very young

00:44:44.440 and charismatic organizer, Jesse Jackson, who was then in his late 20s, mid to late 20s. Buckley's

00:44:52.160 knocked out by him. He says, oh, you've got to come to New York. You have to meet my colleagues

00:44:55.680 at National Review. Like his famous elder at the magazine, James Burnham, the political theorist,

00:45:02.460 who is far more of a racist, by the way, than Bill Buckley. And then Buckley puts him on firing

00:45:07.300 line and you can see it. You can see Jackson and his dashiki, you know, during this debate.

00:45:12.680 And then it's just because he was interested. He was curious. He would say to you, so who are you?

00:45:19.320 What do you believe? He didn't care what your background was, whether you were rich or poor.

00:45:23.300 He wanted to know what you thought, where you stood. And Jackson, he realizes, is saying something

00:45:28.120 he hasn't heard before. And the phrase used back then was black capitalism. Jackson is saying,

00:45:36.620 help us. Help us with, give us some money and we will put that money to use. Yeah, we can't generate

00:45:43.300 ourselves. We just don't have the wherewithal. But if you give us some money, we'll make something

00:45:50.280 happen with it. And Buckley thinks, you know what? That might work. He's for that. In fact,

00:45:55.840 Nixon was for that. So Buckley starts listening and then he thinks, oh man, that stuff I was saying

00:46:02.680 about how black people can't vote. He said, that's pretty bad. So he writes an article in Life magazine

00:46:09.000 and then he does an interview with Playboy magazine. It will surprise people. Playboy was a very

00:46:14.600 distinguished sort of magazine. Oh, you wanted to be the celebrity Playboy interview. Yeah,

00:46:19.540 he was the, more than once. And Bill Buckley in 1970 says, I'll tell you what we need. We need a

00:46:26.620 black president in this country in 1980. And he died six months, 2008, before Barack Obama got the

00:46:34.740 nomination. What would he have made of Barack Obama? To me, that's a very interesting question

00:46:39.860 because Barack Obama is a really good writer, really good talker, all the things Buckley liked.

00:46:45.200 He has that kind of poise and charisma that's very interesting to Buckley. And Buckley's only

00:46:51.540 biological child, his son, Christopher Buckley, very accomplished and well-known novelist and humor

00:46:58.740 writer in the US, voted for Barack Obama in 2008. Yeah, some controversy around that.

00:47:03.740 Some controversy got driven out of National Review because of that. So it's very, very interesting

00:47:09.340 when you do Buckley and race. So you look at it and you think, okay, this is how people change.

00:47:15.080 And if you are diehard ideologue, you say, oh, well, you just like Buckley because his views on race

00:47:23.060 became softer and more accommodating. And so I think, well, what's wrong with that exactly?

00:47:29.020 You know, he's taking the measure of the real world he's living in. You know, he came out of

00:47:35.560 a place, not just his childhood, Brian, but the intellectual world that created him, these very

00:47:41.800 impassioned ex-communists who in some ways remain Bolsheviks at heart, like Whitaker Chambers was

00:47:49.000 one of them. They still see the world in apocalyptic terms. Buckley's not really that apocalyptic.

00:47:53.980 He sees it more in strategic terms. And the strategy says, strategic thinking says,

00:48:01.140 well, maybe we can pull some of those people over to our side. Remember, Ronald Reagan was

00:48:04.860 very pro-immigration, right? He would say, well, they're Democrats now, but once they start making

00:48:09.480 money, they'll all turn into Republicans, which kind of turned out to be true. If you look at some

00:48:14.880 of, you know, Donald Trump's numbers.

00:48:16.840 I was in, I was in Arizona just before the election last year. Um, yeah, it's a, yeah.

00:48:24.420 I mean, who's with them? It's surprising who's with them on a lot of the, you know, the

00:48:28.320 Latino men voted for, for Donald Trump in big numbers, black men too, and much bigger numbers

00:48:33.580 than we've seen in a long time because they feel they're a part rightly or wrongly of whatever

00:48:39.400 world they think he's creating. You know, there's an aspirational, uh, aspect to all of this politics

00:48:45.660 that I think we sometimes forget. And, um, Buckley's got that. Buckley was much more better acquainted

00:48:53.680 with the middle class and the working class than people realized because, uh, because he'd grown up

00:49:02.020 in the Catholic church. And even though his own family had this almost kind of Spanish

00:49:07.860 counter-Reformation style, high church Catholicism, they still went to the local church. And I've seen

00:49:15.240 that church in the town of Sharon, Connecticut, where he was raised. The beautiful old churches are

00:49:20.940 the Episcopal and the Congregational Church, you know, um, and, uh, that, that's Connecticut. It's,

00:49:27.740 it's a Protestant state. But you have to go around the corner to kind of a side street to see the

00:49:33.880 very modest little brick church where the Catholics worship. And that's where the Buckley's went, 0.96

00:49:39.440 alongside whom? The groomsmen who were working in the stables, the mechanics who were fixing people's

00:49:45.840 cars, the gardeners and the lawn workers, people who used to work in the factories when they still had

00:49:52.280 them in Connecticut. That's who Buckley knows in some way are his actual constituency. That was not

00:50:00.000 easy for him to reconcile himself to, by the way. He didn't like the idea that, that his politics had

00:50:05.700 this populist aspect, but he was shrewd enough to understand that it did, um, that that's where the

00:50:13.000 votes were coming from. He kind of, he never really reconciled himself to it, but he was smart enough to

00:50:20.420 see that's how it worked. What was then called the backlash politics and in his era was really where

00:50:27.240 the Republican party was, was finding its support. Well, Sam, I could keep talking to you for hours,

00:50:33.240 I think. Um, but I do encourage people to read the book because you, um, you brought out all sides of

00:50:41.080 William Buckley and, you know, he, he seemed like a larger than life character and that's, uh, you know,

00:50:46.180 from my far off perch and that's what you've presented here. So thank you very much for the

00:50:51.200 book. I appreciate it. Oh, it was so much fun talking to you, Brian. Full comment is a post-media

00:50:55.660 podcast. My name's Brian Lilly, your host. This episode was produced by Andre Proulx, theme music

00:51:00.320 by Bryce Hall. Kevin Libin is the executive producer. Please remember to hit subscribe, whether

00:51:06.040 you're on Apple, Spotify, wherever you're listening, hit the subscribe button. Help us out by leaving a

00:51:11.560 review, telling your friends about us until next time. I'm Brian Lilly. Thanks for listening.

00:51:21.040 Here's that clip from Canada did what I promised you.

00:51:27.820 So, um, although, although abortion was sort of accessible, it really wasn't.

00:51:35.700 But then 1988 rolls around. And what's the law on abortion then? Suddenly, there wasn't one.

00:51:43.340 Literally no restrictions existed in 1988. Abortion went from heavily restricted to completely

00:51:49.700 unrestricted almost overnight. There was no referendum on this. There wasn't even an act of parliament.

00:51:56.740 This whole thing is due to a somewhat surprised decision out of the Supreme Court of Canada.

00:52:01.400 And it came about in large part because of one man, a Canadian doctor who had been relentless about

00:52:07.580 running illegal abortion clinics since the 1960s and was determined to overturn the laws prohibiting

00:52:13.140 the practice. Along the way, he endured multiple arrests, constant raids, a jail term, a firebombing

00:52:19.600 of his clinic, an attack by a fanatic wielding garden shears, the approbation of virtually his entire

00:52:24.940 profession. And frequent death threats. If you want to hear the rest of the story, make sure you

00:52:32.880 subscribe to Canada did what everywhere you get your podcasts.

Full Comment - September 01, 2025

The rich, populist Republican radical who paved the way for Trump

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