Cullen Murphy: William F. Buckley Jr. died in 2008. Two generations of Americans have no real firsthand memories of him, and probably an even larger number don’t fully appreciate the role he played in American political and intellectual life for almost half a century. Can you give us a quick overview of Buckley’s significance and how it endures?
Sam Tanenhaus: WFB—or Bill Buckley, as all who knew him learned to say, at his insistence—was too many different people to summarize easily. He is best-known for being the architect of the modern conservative movement that remade the party of Eisenhower in the 1950s into the party of Reagan in the 1980s. That was one Buckley. He was also the author of some 50 books. His very first, God and Man at Yale, a scathing and witty critique of his alma mater published in 1951, when he was 25, laid out the lines of attack being repeated today by the Trump administration and its allies, who like Buckley say that Ivy League institutions enforce anti-American orthodoxies and through them corrupt the broader culture. Buckley was also a pioneer in the uses of media. At his peak, he was a thrice-weekly columnist syndicated in more than 360 newspapers—this at a time when most people got their information from newspapers. His TV debate-and-discussion program, Firing Line, which began in 1966 and lasted until 1999, invented the talking-head cable-news programs of our own time. Bill Buckley the literary man and editor was also a discoverer and nurturer of talented young writers whose work he published in National Review, the magazine he founded in 1955. Some of the best American writers and critics in the second half of the 20th century—Joan Didion, Garry Wills, George F. Will, Arlene Croce, John Leonard, and more—got their start writing for National Review. And this doesn’t touch on Bill Buckley the sailor, skier, best-selling spy novelist. Or Bill Buckley the devout Catholic—“our pope,” as one admirer told me.
Murphy: What’s astonishing to think about is how quickly he arrived on the scene with God and Man at Yale. He goes from being utterly unknown to nationally known with a snap of the fingers. Why did the book make such a splash?
Tanenhaus: Novelty and timing had much to do with it. He excelled at choosing moments, and seeing where the argument was and also where it wasn’t. In 1951, McCarthyism was a potent force, and Ivy League campuses were under assault—rather as they are today. The difference was that God and Man at Yale, or GAMAY in the shorthand acronym that Buckley and his publisher used, was the first assault to come from high up inside the ivory tower. Buckley wasn’t a populist scourge or congressional Torquemada. He was Mr. “White Shoe” Yale—editor of the campus newspaper, the “last man tapped” for Skull and Bones, which meant the No. 1 big man on campus. He was chosen to give the Class Day oration—that speech, delivered before 10,000 people at commencement, presaged the book. Also, he wrote with wit and style. Even as he attacked left-leaning “atheistic” professors, he learned from them. He wanted to write a book they would respect for its arguments and prose.