As a teenager in the 1930s, Buckley had been an admirer of the isolationist and race theorist Charles Lindbergh and his America First movement. It had long been Buckley’s ambition to lead an insurgency that would roll back, rather than compromise with, the dramatic expansion of the federal government under President Franklin Roosevelt. Here, the anti–New Deal and often antisemitic and racist attitudes of Buckley’s father and his associates were formative. When Bill was young, the libertarian Social Darwinist Albert Jay Nock, author of Our Enemy, the State, was a frequent guest at Great Elm, the grand Buckley estate in Sharon, Connecticut. Bill, who adored his father and prized his every word, considered himself the heir, and his father the actual founder, of the radical conservatism that National Review would make respectable. In 1921, Will Buckley had been expelled from Mexico by a newly elected pro-democracy government that confiscated his oil holdings. Will had helped fund an unsuccessful counterrevolutionary movement there. The friendly attitude of the Woodrow Wilson administration—and especially its assistant secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt—toward Mexico’s democratizing forces further embittered Buckley Sr. toward the Democratic Party. He passed those grievances on to his son.
Bill Buckley cited Nock’s book in the first article he wrote for Commonweal, where he expressed his hopes for the 1952 Republican presidential candidate. The twenty-seven-year-old argued that “ideally, the Republican Platform should acknowledge a domestic enemy, the State.” He complained about collectivism, taxes, and the “horrors of welfarism” imposed by the New Deal, insisting on the “irreconcilability between individual freedom and State-sponsored security.” Yet he conceded that the existential threat posed by the Soviet Union required “Big Government for the duration.” That obvious contradiction in his thinking—like the tension between his libertarianism and cultural conservatism or his uncompromising individualism and the communitarian dimension of Catholicism—was never fully resolved.
Tanenhaus writes sympathetically but critically about the more controversial episodes in Buckley’s long career, which included his unrepentant defense of Sen. Joe McCarthy’s red-baiting and conspiracy-mongering. With Bozell, he co-authored McCarthy and His Enemies, which defended McCarthyism while remaining largely silent about the man himself. Buckley’s anti-communism was militant and unwavering. He argued that a hundred million deaths would be an acceptable toll to defeat the Soviet Union in a nuclear war. In National Review, he explained “Why the South Must Prevail” in opposing civil-rights laws and desegregation efforts. The young Buckley evidently agreed with Barry Goldwater’s assertion that “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” In that spirit, he railed against those protesting the Vietnam War and advocated for further military escalation.