A middle child in a pack of ten, he had to become a performer from the start simply to be heard over his siblings. In such an articulate and rambunctious family, the young Buckley cultivated his innate talents for listening and then responding with witty repartee. From a father who was a wildcatter, as often on the cusp of bankruptcy as of great wealth, he inherited a risk-taking, almost swashbuckling, persona. Even his famous transatlantic accent was not a later life affectation but a holdover from his formative years at a British boarding school, one of the many stops in a meandering journey of early learning.
And most of all, he grew up a cradle conservative. While his family’s principal residence was in Connecticut, his parents were emphatically not Yankees. His father was the son of a Texas sheriff, and his mother the daughter of a Louisianian cotton broker. His father hated the New Deal, and the Buckley children competed to improve on their father’s denunciations. Thus, when Buckley arrived at Yale, he had the preparation and confidence to astonish his classmates by making powerful arguments against his liberal professors on politically and economically contentious topics. But despite his verbal facility, Buckley did not become a scholar. He absorbed ideas quickly in conversation but rarely pursued their depths through sustained study. What made him the biggest man on campus was the brio of his chairmanship of the Yale Daily News, not the originality of his academic contributions.
This background prepared him for what he became—the greatest controversialist in the nation and the broker of the most important political movement of his time, transforming conservatism from a moribund and reactionary philosophy to an effective ideology of governance. Tanenhaus is at his best in describing the sheer improbability of the achievement. Republicans had enjoyed substantial success in electing Eisenhower, a Republican, but not a man of the right, because he had made his peace with the New Deal. But Buckley recognized this kind of Republicanism would merely prove an interregnum between eras of increasing liberalism. The right needed to argue for a fundamentally distinct set of principles, not merely slow the implementation of the consensus liberalism of the time.
Just as his father had the confidence to drill where there was no assurance of striking oil, Buckley was willing to set up National Review as a conservative magazine of opinion where there was a likelihood of failure. He assembled a group of writers that encompassed the entire spectrum of conservative opinion from traditionalist Russell Kirk to fusionist Frank Meyer to the ex-Marxist, anticommunist dialectician James Burnham. These were a cacophony of voices, but Buckley here, too, was a good listener, allowing each to make his case in the magazine and making a politically astute synthesis of his own. Buckley’s empathetic nature enabled the kind of open tent that modern conservatism required if it was to corral different factions to create an effective movement.