On the whole Tanenhaus’s portrait of Buckley’s later views and activities is sketchy. Only a few dozen of the book’s more than eight hundred pages of body text are dedicated to the last twenty or so years of his life. But the story Tanenhaus most wants to tell—the rise and rise of Buckley and his movement—ends in the mid-1980s. He tells that story richly, giving life to a host of confidants and confederates just as fascinating, including conservative luminaries like Willmoore Kendall and Whittaker Chambers and less heralded figures like the mercurial, mudslinging ex-Communist Willi Schlamm, who helped shape National Review before falling out with Buckley, and Bozell, who left Buckley’s camp even more dramatically as he fell further into radical antiabortion activism and mental illness.
The conservative movement, Tanenhaus makes clear, was the product of many hands. The vision of Buckley as its leader that emerges from his narrative is one not of a commanding general but of a baton twirler at the head of a long procession. “Buckley’s true métier as writer and talker—eventually reaching levels approaching genius—was for intellectual comedy,” Tanenhaus argues, “an almost continual repartee.” This is one of his more charitable passes at making the point that Buckley wasn’t as smart as he labored to seem. “Buckley’s function,” he says elsewhere, “had never been to give theoretical substance to the movement. He was not its best or most serious thinker. He was its most articulate voice.” There are variations on this idea throughout the book, perhaps most pointedly in the account of The Revolt Against the Masses, Buckley’s lone, abortive attempt at an original work of conservative political philosophy. The draft he turned in to a publisher was a mess, and it would remain unfinished.
It is odd, though, given that assessment of Buckley’s talents, that Tanenhaus includes so little material from Firing Line, which will likely be his most enduring legacy. Thanks to YouTube, those who may never read Buckley’s columns or books can watch him make and fake his way through debates on gun control, inequality, abortion, campus politics, and other issues that sound remarkably and perhaps depressingly familiar to contemporary ears, though marked by a civility nostalgic conservatives and liberals alike pine for. Many who never bought Buckley’s conservatism were sold on the fantasy of public discourse he offered—the noise and tumult of politics reduced to the volume of parlor discussion. But for all the cordiality he and his guests displayed while chatting about the issues driving America apart, the country was, in fact, being driven apart. A larger, more impressive crop of public intellectuals and a more edifying political media were able to speak more ably to that moment’s discord than ours can now, but they could not tame it. As eloquent as Buckley and his peers were, their finely chosen words and manners did not prevent the seeds of our current political climate from taking root.
