Buckley:
The Life and the Revolution that Changed America
By Sam Tanenhaus
Random House, 1040 pages, $40
Nearly every major figure in the conservative movement has a biography. There are biographies of Russell Kirk, Phyllis Schlafly, James Burnham, Frank Meyer (with a second forthcoming this year), Whittaker Chambers, Robert Welch, John T. Flynn, Max Eastman, Murray Rothbard, Fred Schwarz, M. Stanton Evans, and down the list. Several editors of National Review have written memoirs about their years at the magazine, including Richard Brookhiser, Jeffrey Hart, and Priscilla Buckley.
The only thing missing from the groaning bookshelf of Right-Wing Studies is a definitive biography of William F. Buckley Jr. In 1988, progressive journalist (and Compact contributor) John Judis wrote William F. Buckley Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives, but doing the job right was always going to require a more sympathetic author. The story also needed to be brought up to date. Buckley died in 2008 and was active up to the very end.
Sam Tanenhaus was chosen for this task by Buckley himself, partly on the basis of his fine Whittaker Chambers biography published in 1997, which showed him to be a liberal who could treat a conservative subject fairly. Buckley’s son Christopher also vouched for him. Buckley gave Tanenhaus access to all of his files and instructed his associates to do the same.
And then, nothing. The book was commissioned in 1998. As the decade mark loomed, people started to wonder when it would appear. Buckley’s friend Neal Freeman joked to Buckley that his biographer had “committed the perfect literary crime.” Tanenhaus was editor of the New York Times Book Review from 2004 to 2013 and thus one of the most influential men in publishing, with the power to make or break new releases. There was no chance that Random House was going to antagonize him by demanding their advance back. Alas, Freeman wrote in National Review, the joke “had not been well received. WFB was inconsolable.”
“Perhaps Tanenhaus is embarrassed that it took him 27 years to complete it.”
Finally we have the book, all 1,040 pages of it, published to coincide with the centenary of Buckley’s birth. Perhaps Tanenhaus is embarrassed that it took him 27 years to complete it. If so, his embarrassment must be compounded by the weakness of the final product. He has not even managed to produce a better book than Judis. That was his one job, and he flubbed it.