“William F. Buckley, Jr., the intellectual leader of the modern conservative movement, rightly saw himself less as founder than heir,” Tanenhaus writes in the opening pages of Buckley. “Everything he learned, and all he became, began at home.” That home, crammed with ten children, was led by his father W. F. Buckley, whose appetite for risky investment led the family through a series of boom-and-bust cycles that always ended in a scheme or bailout that kept the Buckleys wealthy (though never as wealthy as outsiders thought).
The senior Buckley modeled far-right politics for his children. He was an ardent antisemite and segregationist, a supporter of Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz, and an America First nationalist. The children joined him in these causes, the older ones burning a cross in a neighbor’s yard and vandalizing another neighbor’s church. (Buckley, who regretted being too young to join in the cross-burning, later shrugged it off as “the kind of thing we didn’t distinguish from a Halloween prank.”) Buckley showed his filial loyalty by becoming, as he described it, his father’s “echo chamber,” absorbing his worldview and parroting it back during dinnertime discussions and school debates.
What Buckley most inherited from his father, however, was a tangled sense of entitlement and exclusion, a belief that he deserved to rule but was denied his birthright, either because of his Catholicism or his conservatism. And Buckley did buck the consensus of his day, first around the New Deal, then U.S. entry into World War II, then the liberal postwar order. Among the elites in Connecticut, at boarding school, and then at Yale University, Buckley stood out as a right-wing iconoclast. No wonder he developed an attraction to his favorite philosopher Albert Jay Nock—a regular dinner guest at the Buckley home—and to Nock’s idea of the Remnant, a tiny minority standing against the tide of modern liberalism.
But as it turned out, no door was actually closed to Buckley. At Yale, where he was unknowingly part of a quota on Catholic and Jewish students meant to limit their numbers on campus, he quickly became the elite of the elite, elected as chairman of the Yale Daily News, inducted into the secret society Skull and Bones, and chosen for the prestigious Class Day speech. He turned that speech into a bestselling book, subsidized by his father, while doing a stint with the CIA. Mountains of speaking invitations followed, establishing Buckley’s national fame, which he used to assemble a group of donors and launch National Review in 1955.