Journalist Sam Tanenhaus discusses his authorized biography of conservative intellectual William F. Buckley Jr., exploring how Buckley transformed American conservatism from 1950-1980 and examining his legacy's relevance to today.
Watch the video recording of this Keynote here on YouTube.
In the space of a single generation (1950 to 1980), the journalist and author William F. Buckley led a small band of little-known conservatives to the peaks of political power and cultural influence.
Ten years before his death, Buckley chose journalist and historian Sam Tanenhaus to tell the full story of his life, granting him extensive uncensored interviews and exclusive access to his most private papers. The result, “Buckley: The Life and the Revolution,” published in June 2025, has received a great deal of attention and prompted wide and intense debate.
In a live on-stage conversation at Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences, Peter Loewen, the Harold Tanner Dean of Arts and Sciences, and Tanenhaus discuss Buckley and the true meaning of his life and legacy in the Age of Donald Trump.
Chris Wofford: [00:00:00] On today's special episode of Cornell Keynotes. Which is brought to you by the College of Arts and Sciences. We learn about the life and legacy of one of America's most influential conservative voices, William F. Buckley, Jr. And we are shown how his intellectual revolution continues to shape our political landscape even today. In the span of just 30 years, from 1950 to 1980, Buckley transformed a small band of little known conservatives into a movement that would reach the heights of political power and cultural influence in America. Sam Tanenhaus, the acclaimed journalist and historian who spent over a decade crafting the definitive biography of this towering figure is interviewed here by Peter Lowen, who is the Harold Tanner Dean at the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell.
Sam Tanenhaus was personally chosen by Buckley himself to tell his complete story, receiving access to extensive uncensored interviews and Buckley's most [00:01:00] private papers. The result is Buckley, the Life and the Revolution, which published in June of 2025, which already has sparked wide and intense debate about conservative thought and its evolution.
So now let's join Sam Tanenhaus and Dean Peter Lowen on stage at the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell.
Peter Loewen: Thanks. I'll just say two things about Sam Tanenhaus before I, I ask him some questions. The first is that he's been meeting with all sorts of people all over campus, and I just wanted to give my appreciation to Sam right off the hop as a person who has come here for the week and gave a masterclass yesterday on writing, on narrative writing, and has been meeting with faculty and students all over campus.
It's been, he's been very generous with his time. I suspected Sam would be this way because I, I know him from a past life. When we were both at the University of Toronto. It's where I met Sam, where he came up as a, uh, visiting journalist many times. I think the first time I met you was in 2018. And that was about a week before you were about to finish [00:02:00] Buckley.
That was seven years ago. He got hung up on the title, I think, and settled on Buckley. But otherwise it's been a long awaited book that many people have known Sam is writing and have been waiting for all this time, and by my lights, it's, well, uh, it's well worth the wait. So I wanna talk to you about the book and talk a little bit about journalism as well, um, because, uh, you're here as a, as a writer and as, and as a biographer.
So I think it just for me, I'd love to hear the story as much detail as you're willing to give us, of how it is you met William F. Buckley, how he chose you to be his biographer and how you think about writing a biography of probably one of the most important conservatives of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century as a person who's not actually people might think a conservative.
Sam Tanenhaus: Well, it's it's actually a pretty simple story. In 1990 when I was much younger and even less well known and, uh, than I am today, I was started work on a biography of [00:03:00] another great conservative, mid-century conservative. Whitaker Chambers who had been the witness in the famous or notorious Alger Hiss perjury trial was a big Cold War McCarthy era spy trial that a lot of people thought really began the Cold War. And chambers was born in 1901 and died in 1961. And I was starting this book really 30 years later. And at the end of his life, his last few years, I just knew this from the preliminary research I'd done, his great patron champion and defender because Chambers was despised by much of the country.
They thought he lied in his testimony in the first, the HUAC hearings, House UnAmerican Activity Committee hearings, and then in a court case, uh, two court cases. And, but others really believed in him. And Buckley was one. And for that [00:04:00] generation of conservatives, chambers was a giant. He was one of the first voices of a kind of Christian, um, humanist anti-communism. This is right in the middle of the Cold War, but Chambers was living in exile. Bill, the very young Bill Buckley had kind of welcomed him back into society, wanted him to contribute to Buckley's own magazine National Review, which many in the audience will know, which Bill Buckley founded at the age of 29 in 1955.
So there was an odd relationship. Chambers was the elder figure, but the young Buckley was in some ways his patron and sponsor. And I knew in order to write this book, this biography of Chambers, I was a newcomer to the world of conservative ideology and conservative personalities. I really didn't know much about them, but I just thought this would be an interesting story to tell.
So I wrote to Buckley and I [00:05:00] said, is there any way, Mr. Buckley, you could help me with this? In 1990 when I wrote to Buckley, some in the audience, or will be old enough to know this, he was about as famous a public figure as you could be in America. He was on television every week. He edited this famous magazine.
He was a bestselling novelist. And memoirs, his books would jockey for space in the bestseller list. He was a huge celebrity. I was nobody from nowhere. And yet when I approached him with this idea, he invited my wife, Kathy who's here, and me out to his home to meet him and his famous socialite wife. We didn't even know what clothing to wear when you were, you know, young people starting out.
And there were these famous people, you know, waited on by servants to whom they spoke Spanish Cuban refugees. English was Bill Buckley's third language, which is one reason so many people had trouble [00:06:00] understanding him when he spoke in Rome. But he greeted us as if we were interesting people. He was the first really famous person I met who took an interest in me.
So I thought, well, this is an unusual kind of guy. And then as the years went on, as I worked more and more in the project. It was Buckley who would phone me. How's it do, how's the book coming along? How are you doing with it? Why don't you come out for dinner? Why don't you come to the house and hear a concert?
So we drive out to a concert and there's 60 people collected on the lawn. And the harpsichord being played is, is a famous instrument and a a professional recording would come out of the salon person who was performing there. This is entirely different life, but he was also very, very serious in his devotion to chambers.
This figure he thought was a great man. But of all the people I met in this era, so I'm back 35 years near the end of the Cold War, there were lots [00:07:00] of people, especially conservatives, who had a stake in Whitaker Chambers. Bill Buckley was first of all, the only person I met who had actually known Chambers, and at the same time, the only one who said This book is actually not an ideological mission.
It's actually about you as a writer trying to write a good biography and for a young person starting out, all the students, I'm amazed to see so many here. First of all, I've met about half of you by now, but some of the others I know you've got prelims. You've got midterm exams. And for some people who are here anyway, thanks for coming.
But you know, from the conversations we've had when an older person who's done some things in the world shows some interest in you, it really means a lot. And that's what Buckley did. So I thought if I write another one of these books about a conservative, he's the guy I want to do. [00:08:00] And so after the Chamber's book was published in 1997 and it was,
you know, it was a, in its own, on its own terms, a success was well received. It, um, I cringe when I hear the prizes. It didn't win. None that are always announced, but, um, but it did well, and, and
Peter Loewen: I've also not won a Pulitzer, but I was, I wasn't a finalist, but go on. Yeah.
Sam Tanenhaus: But, you know, established me a little bit. His son Christopher Buckley, and some of you may know him, he's a really great fiction writer and essayist, and he liked the book and he said, why don't you do pup?
That's what he called his father pup. I said, well, I've, I've had that thought. So then we went to Buckley, bill Buckley, everybody called him Bill. I tell people this, I'm not taking liberties when I say that. The people who worked in the mail room at National Review called him Bill. He had ideas and attitudes that we might wonder about, but if he met you face to face, it was always an equal plane.
As my wife and I discovered when we first got to know him, and Buckley [00:09:00] said, well, there are other people who wanna write this book, but I think you'll tell the big story. Uh, that he wanted that other, in other words, not an ideological history, not a work of discipleship, not a hagiography, the life of a saint, but a big American story about a big American life.
And I thought, this is what I'm gonna try to do. And lo these many years later, this is what we've got.
Peter Loewen: I wanna talk about the, the revolution that Buckley sits at the center of which is about what half of the book is about, but the other half is actually about him at a personal level and about who he was.
He is a very, for those, I mean, I think everyone here sense of who Bill Buckley was, but a, but a person not only of consequence, but of very varied interests, very refined taste to get a very privileged upbringing, but also a person who worked extremely hard, et cetera, et cetera, squeezed every minute out of life.
How much did he let you in to that, to that life? And how important did he think it was that you saw it, and [00:10:00] how much of it was genuine. And how much of it was this person that he portrayed
Sam Tanenhaus: that was a difficult thing, uh, with Bill Buckley? He was, I think it's possible to say he was not the best writer of his time. Though, he was a very good writer. He was a good debater. Maybe one of the best debaters. He was a good columnist. He was a good speaker. Overall, in the round, he was about the most articulate person you'd ever meet. He was a terrible guy to interview. Not because he withheld secrets, but because he'd been interviewed so many times.
It's like when a presidential candidate is interviewed, they've heard all the questions and they press the button and the automatic response comes out. So I was talking to students today in the, um, the narrative class and said, well, one thing you want to do, 'cause some of them are journalists, is you want to ask a really simple question of someone because then they will fill in, right, the silence. Everybody gets [00:11:00] awkward and they'll answer their question, not Bill Buckley. He was so practiced just stare at you. So I realized. This is not someone who's going to divulge much of his secret life. I'm gonna have to find that out myself. And because he gave me full unrestricted access to his papers, told everybody he knew that I was the guy and they should talk to me.
And better yet, because he was so busy, as you said, doing so many things, he couldn't remember much of what had happened. That opened the way for me to find out a lot. And you know, he died in 2008. And his last words to me were, and they were not happy words. They were, I know, I won't see my biography. He didn't understand why he couldn't write it in six weeks 'cause that's how long he spent on his books.
And except, and, and, and he would always correct [00:12:00] interviewers and say, that's not true. He said, I also spend a full 10 days revising them. And then in the book I say, he didn't mention that he is revising them on his yacht in Bermuda, right. With friends all around him. Made him very fun to write about, but hard to get to know.
So the big surprise people ask , what's the most surprising thing about Bill Buckley? For those of you who remember seeing him in firing line, all the wit and the style and the, and the raised eyebrows and all the rest. Was how complicated he was. It was a lot more complicated than I realized, and that had to do with secrets in his family, secrets in his own life.
And part of my job was to decide which secrets were worth writing about, which ones to pursue. And a lot of that happened, uh, Peter after Buckley died because he was right, I couldn't write the book while he was still alive.
Peter Loewen: did you feel a sort of feeling of obligation to him that you couldn't [00:13:00] reveal the stuff?
What, what, what was keeping you from
Sam Tanenhaus: Yeah, well, that's some of it. Um, my father died in 1980, was about the same age as Bill Buckley died in 1980, at the age of 56. And listen, a lot of young guys look for father figures. I mean, that's not an unusual thing. And so I kind of felt that with Buckley and that was inhibiting.
I, I will admit that. And that's why it was hard for me to really get at the story in that period. You know, talking about this with, with some people here, 'cause there are a lot of writers and scholars around here. We've had fantastic conversations. I'm always running over the time limit, so whichever professor's office I'm in will take me to the next one.
Right. While poor students are waiting for their meetings, sitting outside the office. 'cause we get into this stuff. If you really look at the time in the book actually got written, which was when I left the New York Times in the end of 1914 and Kathy and I left New York and moved to Connecticut 2014.
Peter Loewen: [00:14:00] 2014. You haven't working on it that long.
Sam Tanenhaus: What did I say ?
Peter Loewen: 1914.
Sam Tanenhaus: Oh man. You mean we're not talking about World War I, uh, so in 2014 I was long enough it, it really got written in about eight to 10 years. 'cause it takes more than a year, once a book is done for it to come out. But came out 2024 was really mostly finished by 2022, so eight to 10 years is not an uncommon length of time to spend on this book.
The difference was Buckley's archive at Yale because the life was as busy as you said. This is a guy who like anointed presidents, who in 1968 said to Ronald Reagan, no, it's not your turn yet. We're going with Nixon, which he regretted till the end of his life. And then in 1980 said, okay, it's your turn now, Ronald Reagan, only to have Reagan turn around and, and kind of diss him.
Right? Well, somebody who lives on that scale, I'll give you an idea of what it was like back in [00:15:00] the days before email, and he was very big on technology. He loved email. But back in the days when letters had to be typed, bill Buckley received 600 a week and answered every single one. So that's the material you're going through.
And the more letters you get, as a researcher, the more you have to go through, the less valuable each one becomes. And so a lot of time is spent just sifting through all that stuff, and that, that took time. You have to navigate your way through it. You're searching for a story, which may seem odd.
Somebody's life. One thing happens after next, where's the story? Well, if you just recite the facts of somebody's life, it doesn't make for much of a narrative. So I defined where I thought the threads of the story were and try to tug on them and take the reader along with me.
Peter Loewen: Was he, was he fundamentally contradictory?
Or could you find [00:16:00] the reconciliation of his life, the more you got into it? I mean, did he become more complicated or less the more you, you dug into his life?
Sam Tanenhaus: More complicated. And no, you cannot reconcile the different sides of him. And people who've read the book will come to me and say, well, Buckley seemed like such a great guy, like such a warm friend.
what's he doing? Running around with Roy Cone, Joe McCarthy, Howard Hunt, the guy who led the Watergate uh, break in. Why is he covering up for these people? Why, uh uh, let alone the death row inmate that everybody thought was guilty, been convicted of first degree murder. And one person on the planet thought he was innocent.
Bill Buckley got him sprung from prison, and he stabbed some, uh, somebody else and came with an inch of killing them. Right? So how do you reconcile that Buckley, who was this charming man, you mentioned this debonair, sophisticated kind of aristocrat with this guy who kind of had, what [00:17:00] one of his observers calls it a uh, a taste for low company.
And the answer is, I don't think you can reconcile it . We all have different sides. There's dark and light to us. We're driven by different motives. That's why as a biographer and I, I've talked about this with writers here, both young and, and you know, established writers on campus. You can't answer all the questions.
And the best you can do is try to give the most accurate account of what somebody did and maybe what they said they were thinking, but not what the secret motives were. You let a reader try to figure out who the person is. My inspiration, a lot of people in this room now know, 'cause I've talked to them, are novelists, the great novelists, the great 19th century novelists, the Tolstoy's and writers like that who bring people to life by showing their complexity.
Peter Loewen: So let's talk about the, the revolution that is captured in the subtitle of the [00:18:00] book. What in your view, is the essence of the revolution that Buckley led? And what parts of it did he believe in? Was he truly passionate about, or what parts were, were byproducts of what happened?
Tell us about how you, how you see the conservatism that he championed changing and then what parts of that that did he like, did he not like?
Sam Tanenhaus: Well, bill Buckley was raised the six of 10 children in extremely conservative, wealthy Catholic, Irish Catholic family. But the roots were in the south.
This is the big important discovery I made. His father was from the deep southern Texas. His mother was from New Orleans, and they reinvented themselves as Yankee aristocrats. But the ideology they had was very much we think of as the Gilded Age ideology of the wealthy. Let rich people like Andrew Carnegie and John d Rockefeller run the world.
They'll make the money, they'll create the jobs, and they will philanthropically help everybody else along. And that's what Buckley's [00:19:00] father believed. It's what Buckley's siblings believed, and it's what Bill Buckley himself believed. What that meant was that the great enemies, and that was the word that was used a lot just as we hear it today, were the creators of what was then called, some still call it the welfare state, the paternalistic welfare state, leave people to their own devices and don't have the government intrude and tell them how to live their lives and also create dependency among all these people.
So Buckley's ideological mission was to overturn the new deal. I was just talking about that today with the great scholar here, Larry Glickman, who's looking at some of the same things I am. And Buckley was asked in 1958 when he was 33 years old and already famous, how do you define yourself? How do you describe yourself?
Famous interviewer, Mike Wallace, asked him this. Some of you remember Mike Wallace and Buckley said, well, I'm a counter [00:20:00] revolutionary and what does it mean then to lead a counter revolution? And he said to overturn the idea of society created in the Roosevelt years, and the word that I'd ask everyone to think about is society.
He didn't say government. He meant a whole way of life. Yeah. That he identified with liberalism, and that's what he was trying to overturn.
Peter Loewen: I learned an immense amount, an immense amount from the book. Among, I was just telling Richard Benzel, among the things that I learned was that I didn't appreciate how much to and fro in negotiation and conflict there was between the Birchers and, and the Goldwater people, um, in the early, in the early sixties.
And there were compromises in there around things like social security and, and how they were gonna think about appealing to their voter base. And there was also a lot in there about race and about how Buckley was thinking about racial [00:21:00] questions in the United States. The book has some discoveries in it about, about Buckley's early attitudes about race and his, his engagement with it.
Tell us about those, and then tell us about how they changed your view of Buckley if they did.
Sam Tanenhaus: Well, as I mentioned his family, his parents are from the South, and, bill Buckley's older brother, your two older brothers, one of them, James Buckley, who became a senator from the State of New York, first, uh, candidate to run on the conservative party ticket and Buck Bill Buckley created the Conservative party in New York.
It was one of the many things he did. Uh, he'd make a phone call, let's get a conservative party going, and then right then there, there it is. And his brother Jim, who's actually a much better politician than Bill, had much more of the common touch, was elected to the Senate. And it was Jim Buckley who died recently at the age of 101, I think, who told me we were culturally southern.
So they lived in this 47 acre estate in the northwest corner of Connecticut. [00:22:00] Right across Duchess County. I tell people all the time when Buckley, the Buckley's were waging war on Franklin Roosevelt, he was the guy who lived 30 miles west, whom they saw at the Rhinebeck horse show every summer. So this is very much a battle being fought within a class.
But the Buckley's had this southern side and his mother, Eloise Steiner, who, uh, German Swiss from New Orleans, really pined for the south. Not least because all the Protestant matrons in Litchfield County, Connecticut snubbed her. I mean, these were the days when you actually get a calling card with the corner turned down, which meant don't bother knocking on my door because of Buckley's worshiped at the wrong church, the Catholic church.
So they wanted, she Eloise, Mimi, they called her, wanted to a second home in the South. So the father found [00:23:00] a place for her in South Carolina, a beautiful antebellum mansion, which, uh, Kathy and I visited and did spend time there going through archives and interviewing people. And what we discovered was that in the archive of Camden, South Carolina, which is a very small city, kind of mid-state, Carolina, near Columbia, South Carolina, was that the Buckley's during the peak period of massive resistance to the brown versus school board decision, had financed a segregationist paper.
A segregationist newspaper in 1956, when they did it, meant headlines like communist supporting race mixing to dilute the right, dilute the ethnic purity of Americans. That's the kind of stuff that was being published, and nobody [00:24:00] knew the Buckley family was doing this, except in the South. So if you read the Charleston Courier News, they would praise the Buckleys for supporting this newspaper.
Shows you how far our media and culture have come that New York, nobody knew about it. And the Buckley's never talked about it. So there's a question where if I had asked Bill Buckley when he was alive, what about that segregationist newspaper? He might well have said, thank you very much, and now we're gonna find another biographer.
Or he might have said, I don't remember it. You tell me about it. I don't have an answer to that, which he would've said. So that meant that those racial attitudes, bill Buckley, was the first to see could be imported into the conservative movement. And combined with a Republican party opposition to centralized government. States' rights could be, [00:25:00] they could become the basis of a new counter-revolutionary politics.
And that emerged in the 1950s and Buckley himself became the leader of that
Peter Loewen: 10 or 15 years before Nixon's so-called Southern strategy,
Sam Tanenhaus: well before the Southern strategy. In fact, it was Buckley's father who was a really brilliant and kind of monstrous figure who was the first to see as early as 1948 when some people in this room like Professor Benzel will know very well, a Southerner ran on an independent ticket, there were four candidates for president. And Bill Buckley was worried about the communist. His father was saying the segregationist might have the answer to where the new politics was. And then the son caught up with him. And that, yes, that became the new politics, much of which happened in South Carolina.
So Buckley knew all the figures who were dominating that politics. And when the breakthrough [00:26:00] came really began in nine, as early as 1960, it was in South Carolina and Buckley was help making it happen.
Peter Loewen: Uh, a lot of the book is about Buckley's Catholicism, which is genuine. Talk about that for many, many will know a lot about it, but talk about his Catholicism, if you don't mind, and, and, how it helped you understand him.
And then if you don't mind thinking about how, how it weaves in to the changing conservative revolution in the United States. And it, it's still, it's remarkable to me today how much Catholicism and Catholic thought is in discourse with modern conservatism in the United States. So can you just tell us about, uh, how, how that, from his birth, all the way through to the end mattered for his life and for the revolution?
Sam Tanenhaus: The Buckleys were all of them absolutely devout Catholics. That's how they were raised. His mother was a daily communicant. And for those of you who don't know what it means, it means someone who goes to mass every day of the [00:27:00] week. his father was absolutely a devout Catholic. In fact, one reason the family saw themselves as aristocrats was that their idea of Catholicism was formed when the father who had grown up poor in a small town in southern Texas, made his first fortune in Mexico, spoke perfectly fluent Spanish as the father.
'cause the area he came from, Duval County, was, was 80% to 90% Tejano, as we now say. So if you were a Catholic white guy growing up there and
you're going to church, that's who surrounds you. So the Buckley family in Connecticut, when they went to mass on Sunday, all the household servants, including Latino servants and black servants, if they were Catholic, they all piled into the cars and went off to church together.
Yeah, that's the Catholic view of equality, right? There may be some social differences here. You have to sit over there and you have to [00:28:00] sit over there and we've got a not very good school to send your kid to, but in the eyes of God, we're all the same. So we will worship together. And what that did though, it's very easy to mock it, but what it did also was to create a sense of personal charity and obligation.
So the other side I found to the Buckley's in South Carolina was we were able to find one person to interview, a man then 80, now 90, who with his 10 siblings and their father, black, a black family in segregated South Carolina, worked for the Buckleys and absolutely worshiped them because compared to all the other white people in the south, the Buckleys paid better wages when the winter season ended, that he would, uh, the father would find other work for the family if no work was to be found.
He [00:29:00] paid them out of his own savings or brought them up to Connecticut. Um, so somebody I interviewed, a friend of Buckley's, told me describing what the Buckley colony in Sharon Connecticut, Northwest Connecticut was like. You have to keep in mind, you have a family of 10 children, two parents, and about two dozen household servants or people working, working the lawns, like 47 acres.
They, he said it would take Tom Wolf to describe that scene. White jacketed butlers. It was almost something that was unreal. And we saw a little bit of it just when we went to see him in, in his much more modest home in Stanford, Connecticut, where you heard Spanish being spoken in, um, to the servants and such.
Well, that sense of charity and obligation was when the Buckley's really took seriously. So they might support segregated schools, but the father would pay for the siblings of the man [00:30:00] we interviewed to go to historically black colleges and universities. He'd pay out of his own pocket, and that was the idea then, and of the progressive white Southerner.
So Buckley saw his attitudes as being very humane and in many ways they were. So that's the complication for a writer. Uh, anybody who likes telling stories. There is no better material than this to work with. It is like the material Tony Morrison would work with, right? Or Faulkner, um, is all this mix of like racial differences and people who can talk to each other, but across these barriers of social and, and, um, ideological difference.
So it made, it, uh, made him all the more interesting to me. And so people will tell me, how could you keep writing about Buckley when he was doing and believing all these terrible things? And I would just tell them you know, this is the, I guess the ruthlessness of the writer. I just think it makes a better [00:31:00] story.
It also tells you more what life was like back then, and we understand how far we need to go today. We understand it better when we realized the place we started from, you know?
Peter Loewen: If Buckley had been nothing else, he would go down in the book as a wonderful media entrepreneur who started his own magazine and had his, I mean, he did remarkable job of making completely inaccessible conversations on PBS, uh, or N-P-P-B-S accessible and, and interesting.
He was really remarkable in that sense. But National Review is his legacy. And tell me what you learned about National Review that he didn't know before and how should we understand it? As the vehicle through which he, not only kind of prosecuted his arguments, but brought up whole generations of people in the conservative movement.
Sam Tanenhaus: I had not realized.
Um, anybody who does this kind of work, which is bi biography or history knows you start with a timeline. [00:32:00] Right. Um, so you have to know in what sequence things happen. That's why when I talk about people, I always give their year of birth and year of death. The National Review was born in the fall of 1955, but it was first formulated Buckley and his, a few elder colleagues.
Buckley was the young star, the only charismatic, young conservative in America. In those days, the words his friend Whitaker Chamber said to me, the words Young Republican sound like an oxymoron. How could there be such a thing? Well, now we know a lot more about that 'cause we're, we see many of them. Well, it was formed really after the demise of one of, or the destruction, we'll say, of one of Buckley's first political idols.
Joseph McCarthy. His very first was Charles Lindbergh, the leader of the America First Committee. Those of you who are hearing America first. now in my book, you'll see [00:33:00] what it all came out of. Buckley was a teenage member of the America First Committee, which opposed intervention in World War ii.
McCarthy was his next political hero. And that was in the 1950s. And most people are generally familiar with the Joseph McCarthy story. Buckley was his most articulate champion and defender. He and his brother-in-law, Brent Bozel, wrote a book defending McCarthy. After McCarthy imploded on national television in a time when there were only three major networks.
Most American citizens people did not own a television set, but 20 million people saw McCarthy collapse on television. So Buckley's conclusion from that was, it was a failure of media that the media directed the story and the conservatives, they, they stated the terms of debate. And they carried the debate on, and conservatives were powerless against it.[00:34:00]
That's why the conservative media we have today, Fox News from, from Fox News all the way through social media, or our new ideological entrepreneur, who in many ways is a kind of heir to Buckley, Barry Weiss, who's kind of taking over American media, that Buckley was the first one to see That was the way to go, that political debates are really cultural debates. Remember I mentioned Roosevelt's society, right? Not government. Once you're talking about society, you're really talking about people interacting in their regular lives. That's why Buckley's first book was an attack on Yale, his alma mater. Of course, we can't imagine a graduate of a university, especially a wealthy one attacking an Ivy League University today.
I mean, these things would never happen. Or how about accusing, uh, professors of being disloyal? I mean, no such thing would ever happen in our lifetime. But Bill Buckley did it at the age of 25, and he realized in order to carry his [00:35:00] mission forward, conservatives needed their own beachhead. They're media beachhead.
You start the magazine, you write the newspaper column, you go on television. Buckley debated here often at Cornell, and one of his favorite debate partners is a really famous name here, Clinton Rossiter. And I talked to the Clinton Rossiter professor here and uh, pointed out to him something people don't know.
I didn't get a chance to put it in the book that when National Review, Buckley's Magazine, was not even being stocked on library shelves, though some of its contributors were brilliant writers and thinkers who are read and studied today, Buckley wrote to Clinton Rossiter and said will you please provide a testament I can show the libraries in America that my publication is actually reputable. And one reason people thought it wasn't, was it because it came out of the McCarthy movement. So the other [00:36:00] thing that relates to that, that I had not realized about National Review is that it was constantly on the brink of insolvency.
You cannot start a small magazine and expect to make money, particularly not in those years. So Buckley was continually scrambling and you think, well, what about his rich father? Why couldn't he keep it going? Well, because the father was not as rich as he pretended, and everybody else thought. A lot of it was kind of acting the part of a much wealthier person than he was.
So Buckley had to look for other ways to support his magazine. And at one point, uh, right after the great moment came for them, when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, Buckley did a public event. Um, they were every five years had a big banquet and Buckley at the Plaza Hotel in New York and it's a famous hotel, hundreds and hundreds of people there, and Buckley looked out over the audience and he said, anybody [00:37:00] who thinks I'm not dedicated to this magazine, I've spent $6 million.
And in those days, that was a lot of money. You could multiply that by 10 or more today, of my own money to keep this magazine from going outta business. And that money was made by the books he, he wrote, the articles, the columns. He actually, his active philanthropy was keeping his own magazine afloat.
That was one of many acts. So he was kind of a one man show in that way. There was not the infrastructure, but he helped create it. And I think that's actually his biggest legacy.
Peter Loewen: Yeah. I mean, my sense is when, when you look through the roster of conservative writers and then a much actually larger set of respected writers in America today and from one generation before, the number that went through the National Review is outsized.
So clearly something happens there when you, when you went into it. I wanna ask you one more question, then I want to hear questions from the audience, especially from our, from our students. But, um. tell you how to say this. So the [00:38:00] the book spends an outsized amount of time at the beginning of his life.
Maybe not outsized, but the focus on the book is the beginning of his life and then the period all the way up through to Reagan's election really. And the last part of it in some sense, you speed through. And when I read it, it was interesting to me, but it also seemed to me that it was appropriate to the degree that the conservative movement looked less and less like Buckley's movements movement as it went along.
And he sort of slowly, which remarkable for him, kind of just faded into the, into the background. You were as likely to see him on Charlie Rose as you were on Fox News. Right. What's your sense if, if, if you could have one more interview with Buckley and you could ask him about what he thinks of conservatism today, what would he, what would he say about it?
Sam Tanenhaus: Yeah, it's the great unanswerable question and we talked about it in his
Peter Loewen: but yeah. Partly because he is dead.
Sam Tanenhaus: But, but in his last years, he was quite alienated from a lot of the movement. Something that has thrown, uh, some interviewers off, uh, not Peter, but some television interviewers when I tell them that Buckley [00:39:00] saw the movement as one that could be a kind of cult, uh, waged in terms of culture, they think, I mean, he was a culture warrior, but he wasn't so much. His idea really was ideological. You know, professor Silak here knows that Buckley went through many phases, some of them involving libertarianism. He wasn't hard, a kind of libertarianism. Once a Cold War ended, he became a libertarian again.
Well, a lot of people on the right were doing the culture wars. And Buckley didn't really understand that. His idea of a culture war was, well, I'm gonna write a better editorial in national review than the other side is gonna write in the Nation magazine. That's his idea of a culture war. It's not going after people 'cause of their private lives and all the rest.
So that didn't make sense to him. Also, the great cause in his life had been defeating [00:40:00] global communism, and there were probably two great figures alive who thought that could happen. One was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the other was Buckley. Buckley really thought it would happen. He was an optimist and it did happen.
So I remember talking to him about this near the end of his life and I said, uh, well Bill, how does it feel? Your side won the, the Cold War is over. You did it. And he said. Oh, that wasn't me. You know, that just happened. It's other people never had an outside sense of his own importance. One way I describe the trajectory in the book, which is a lot about his youth and formative years, and less about the end is you write Peter.
He did begin to withdraw. But it's also because I don't write or don't think of what I do as being a conventional, a cradle to grave biography. I think of it more as a kind of moral drama. So again, more like a [00:41:00] novel when Buckley's really engaged in the world, then he's at his largest and when he moves on or the world moves on.
And one of the just big finds I made, it was a little shocking to me, was how his protege, Ronald Reagan, very coldly, kind of sent Buckley packing, which it might surprise those of us who remember Reagan first because he was so genial and you don't think of him as being kind of uh, egotistical in that way.
But he was, he and Buckley were rivals as much as they were friends. They were competing for that market. And Reagan was President. Buckley gotten him elected. He didn't need Buckley anymore, and he wanted him to move beyond him. That was very hurtful to Buckley, but he always kept it to himself. If you were raised the way he was you didn't complain about those things.
You kept them to yourself and you were a team player. And the last thing I'll say about that is anybody here interested, like in the story [00:42:00] of the Beatles, does anybody like to read about them and, and their life? I do. And what I want to know about is what John Lennon and Paul McCartney were like when they were 14 years old, when they were nobody, and they're creating the music.
Once they become multi zillionaires and they're celebrities. They're not that interesting to me anymore. There are a lot of rich, famous people out in the world, and as a writer that doesn't engage my interest. But the young Buckley who took Yale by storm, who when he's 25, is changing the political debate.
He's involved with all these nefarious characters. As a writer, I'm more interested in that. And that's one reason the book took the shape it did.
Peter Loewen: Who's got questions for Sam?
Sam Tanenhaus: Wow. I board them into total silence. Here we go.
Peter Loewen: The floodgates will open.
Audience Q1: I was just curious if, uh, you could speak on Buckley's relationship to E Howard Hunt and, um, his response to the Watergate scandal.
Sam Tanenhaus: [00:43:00] Yeah, that's one of my favorite parts of the story. After Buckley graduated from Yale, he joined the CIA, um, from Yale University.
I interviewed one of his classmates and he said, we found out on graduation day that about half the class had been recruited for the CIA. That's how it worked better. Anyone who's seen the film, I think it's called the Good Shepherd, the De Niro film. That's really what Yale was like back then. There's all these club men.
They're all men. Right. Yale did not become co-ed until 1969. Unlike Cornell. My wife's grandmother went to Cornell and my mother went to Cornell, and it was a, a long time before 1969. Yale was all guys, all white guys. They go into the CIA and Buckley was sent to Mexico City because he spoke fantastic Spanish.
All the Buckley's learned it from their nursemaids. And his boss was E Howard [00:44:00] Hunt. And Hunt was a kind of flamboyant, slightly disreputable character, exactly what Buckley liked in his friendships. And, um, so they worked very closely together for a short period in Mexico City. Mexico City had the biggest CIA station in the hemisphere.
Because they're the country closest to us. Remember, this is when everybody's terrified of communists. This is 1950. Well, then Buckley left, came back home, his book had been published. He wants to be a famous author instead. And Hunt is doing all this other stuff like overthrowing the government in Guatemala or not overthrow the gov.
Fidel Castro's government in Cuba, and all the while trying to, but failing Buckley's in touch with him all through all this time. And when Hunt needs money, Buckley gives him money. Then Watergate happens. 1972, the Watergate break-in Buckley's now in his mid forties and he and [00:45:00] Howard's Hunt's name surfaces as the one of the two chief burglars who broke into the Watergate Hotel.
And Buckley notices his friend Howard Hunt has gotten really silent about this. And Buckley's unhappy about it 'cause he knows Hunt has broken the law. What he wants hunt to do is explain to the world how he did it in the name of patriotism and anti-communism and then maybe they can all feel better about that.
And nothing happens until December of 1972 when there's a plane crash outside Chicago and Hunt's wife, now widow is killed and she's ferrying Watergate cash to the burglars. Hunt then tracks down Bill Buckley. And makes a full confession. He tells him everything. So for those of you who are familiar with the Watergate story, that [00:46:00] means in the end of 1972, bill Buckley knew more about Watergate than Woodward and Bernstein and didn't say a word to anybody because he didn't want his friend Howard Hunt to get in trouble.
And that's where you get that weird thing with the friendship and loyalty. Um, doesn't he owe it to the country to tell them what he knows? This is pretty close to a coup, Watergate. Buckley's not saying anything. He was really twisted up and tormented about it. So what I discovered, no one else had ever seen this before.
'cause you have to read through Bill Buckley's many writings to pick it up. He would drop these little hints now and again. One of the things Hunt told him, for instance, was that a really famous syndicated columnist at the time, Jack Anderson, had actually been targeted for assassination. And Buckley knew this and he knew Jack Anderson and didn't tell him this.
That they actually were [00:47:00] thinking of killing you. And he knows all this stuff. He doesn't know what to do about it. And in my interpretation of Buckley, the moral drama, that's when he started going down a, a darker path because at that point, his loyalty to his friend, to their Republican president, Nixon, to the movement that put him in office, Nixon was the first true card carrying Republican elected president since Herbert Hoover in 1928, Dwight Eisenhower was kind of an ideological cipher.
He's the, the candidate you choose because he is electable. We know how that usually turns out. But in Eisenhower's case, won. So Buckley out of those loyalties actually kind of disserved the country, I think as a journalist. But was more interesting to me than that and with this is that all later when all this emerged, [00:48:00] these really famous journalists like Woodward and Bernstein never held Buckley accountable for. Some people in this room will guess why? Because they're all part of the same club in the end. Oh, bill, we kind of missed it at the Yale club the other day. Or how's the, how's the yacht race coming along? And that's when Bill Buckley became a different guy. Suddenly he's defending liberals and all his writing, he's hanging out with liberals.
He always had liberal friends. And one thing I want to add to this, before we get to the next question, Peter. Peter, kind of Tantalizingly mentioned all the talented people who worked at National Review. Anybody know who, who he's talking about? People like the writer, Joan Gideon started at National Review, like some of the biggest names in American Letters, Buckley, discover.
You know, a piece came over the transom once and he said, well, this is good. Let's publish it. He calls the author up and it's the great historian, Gary Wills, who is then 23 years [00:49:00] old and about to leave the seminary. And Buckley with his ear and his eye, he sees the talent, he brings them in and they become his acolytes.
And later apostates, as he called them, had a great phrase, wonderful phrase, he said, national Review became a finishing school for apostates. All these really talented writers who would go there and then move on. And I ended up thinking a lot of the story was about them that had he been able to keep the apostates there, we might've had a different conservative movement.
Peter Loewen: How did you, uh, we'll go in a second, but I just wanna follow up. How did you broach his behavior, his choices over Watergate with him?
Sam Tanenhaus: I didn't. I didn't, and I really regret it. Because, because of this strange sequence where I did so much of the work after he died, I didn't ask him about it. But somebody else did.
His son Christopher, [00:50:00] wrote a fantastic memoir, which I recommend called Losing Mom and Pop, and he describes the torment his father went through. What I had was the documentation; the checks that were being written to defend hunt, the organization set up to raise the money, the sequence of columns Buckley was writing. But I never was able to look him in the eye and say, how could you do this, bill? You know that what we would now say is our democratic institutions are being challenged, they're under threat. Didn't you feel an obligation to preserve them if he were alive today, that, that's one of the questions I would ask him.
Peter Loewen: Next question.
Audience Q2: Would you talk a little bit about his run for mayor of New York City? Why did he do it and did he think he accomplished anything?
Sam Tanenhaus: [00:51:00] That's one of the great things Buckley did, and so I have to tell this, many people know the famous Exchange, but I have to say it anyway. So Buckley decided to run for mayor in 1965 because Barry Goldwater, whom he had been instrumental in getting the nomination in 1964 was absolutely devastated in a landslide defeat to Lyndon Johnson. And the conservative movement looked finished and people who were watching the movement thought the only guy left. Who could really keep it going was Buckley himself and somebody I interviewed, Pat Buchanan, remember him? He told me Bill Buckley was all we had back then. Nobody else was taken seriously. There was a guy in California, Buckley had his eye on who was gonna run for governor soon. Ronald Reagan, who looked pretty good, but he hadn't gotten there yet. So Buckley decided since he had this, created this conservative party, he would run for mayor and not expect to win.
Now, Buckley was kind of a [00:52:00] man about town in Manhattan and a lot of his friends with these very successful liberal writers, people like Joan Didion or his good friend Norman Mailer. And he didn't want them to think he was deluded enough to think he could actually win this thing. So he treated it almost as a kind of joke or entertainment.
So the famous exchange came at his second press conference when a reporter sat, and he's very entertaining in his press conferences. You know, Donald Trump can be in one way. Buckley was in another way. It was like, it was like listening to Noel Coward, a great wit. So somebody said to him, Mr. Buckley, what are you going to do if you win?
And Buckley said. Demand a recount. And what I found out about the very witty line of his was that he'd scripted it in advance, and because he thought it was hilarious, he could never pass up a good joke. And the people around him pleaded with [00:53:00] him not to say it because it would turn the campaign into a kind of joke.
The genius Buckley had was he realized in this terrible time of dispute over the Vietnam War. The country's divided. There's a lot of racial polarization. The civil rights movement, which is beginning to come around on a little bit, is now moving up to the north where it takes on a different kind of aspect of disputes over housing and, and schools and all these other things.
And it's a very fraught, dangerous time. People are nervous. And Buckley thinks it's not the worst moment, just to lighten up a little bit and treat it all as something that's maybe not so serious. You know, who's a little bit like him as a can candidate for Mayor of New York. Right now, some people could guess who it it is.
It's Mamdani. You do these [00:54:00] funny videos and people are amused by them and say, do you really think you're gonna do these crazy things? And he says, I don't know. Let's try them anyway. What we've done before hasn't worked yet. Right. Let's do it. Buckley was a pioneer of that, of, uh, the campaign is a kind of spectacle and you bring people in.
Right. So they would put 'em in these television debates because there was a newspaper strike, and Buckley just blew the opposition out of the water because he was so funny. The guy he was running against was very handsome, liberal Republican, John Lindsay, who was taken very seriously by the Republican establishment, even as a potential presidential candidate.
Well, of course he was a guy Buckley had known at Yale. That's the world we're living in. And Buckley figures, he can puncture him and take him down, and that's what he thought he was gonna do, but he didn't. Lindsay squeaked [00:55:00] through because the Democratic party machine candidate lost all, i'm just gonna use the terms of the day.
Okay. So I don't. Want people you know, to be taken aback by them. The white ethnic vote, the blue collar white ethnic vote in the outer boroughs started going to Buckley, and then they realized. That's where the strength in the conservative movement was that Buckley might be, you know, whining and dining with his friends, Norman Mailer and Tom Wolf and Murray Kempton.
But the votes are actually coming from people out there whose attitudes are more like Buckley's, only Buckley's able to state them in this very kind of mellifluous, humorous, civilized way. And in that campaign that he actually did rescue the conservative movement. So observers, these famous journalist like Walter Lipman and Evans and [00:56:00] Novak, they said Buckley is now leading a movement and if there's ever a candidate who is anything like his political skills, his witness charm, and who actually takes it seriously, they could take over the Republican party.
So Buckley gets on a plane, flies out to California, tells his disciple Ronald Reagan now might be a good time to run for governor of California. So that's really what came out of it. His defeat was a victory. And that's something a, a lot of people involved in politics should think about. It's hard to take that longer view. But if you don't see every moment as being urgent and you keep your eye kind of, you're looking at the goalpost 80 yards away. Gradually you can get there and that was part of the Patience Buckley had.
Audience Q2: Hi. You spoke [00:57:00] a little bit earlier about, um, the effect Buckley's Catholic Faith had on him. I was wondering if you could speak to his relationship and thoughts on the moral majority and the amassing power of the Christian Right. Especially leading up and through Reagan's election.
Sam Tanenhaus: Yeah, yeah. Really important point.
Yeah, it's a, it's a great question because Buckley was a high church Catholic. Buckley was a Vatican one. Everybody know what that, I mean, pre Vatican two Catholic, he went to the Latin mass and that is a little different from what we think of, right. That's why you're asking this question.
Somebody, uh, uh, who talked about Buckley early on, who knew him in the 1950s, said, bill Buckley's not a conservative, he's a Spanish aristocrat. And it's the Spanish Catholic church that he would, that he, the counter reformation, very liturgical, very much about the ideology of the church. Then you [00:58:00] have these upstarts come along.
They're evangelicals. It's a mass movement with the moral majority coming out of places like Virginia and also the South. And Reagan made it, made a great appeal to them, and Buckley was always. I'm glad you asked that because it gave me an opportunity, uh, to say something I left out before. Buckley was really pragmatic and practical.
One of the first people who wrote a profile of him in some ways the best profile ever was a great journalist, Dwight McDonald, profiled Buckley when he was about 26 years old and already a phenom. And he said, Buckley is a fanatic and a practical man at the same time. And we're now seeing in our politics how that can work.
How you can have an extreme ideology, but also make the calculations to win. So Buckley could look at some of these leaders of the moral majority and [00:59:00] say, what do we all have in common? What do they have in common? Well, if you are a really conservative Catholic, you have very clear ideas about issues like abortion, about the family, and about the importance of the church. And there he could look at the moral majority and say, they're not the same as I am, but we can be allies. So he built alliances with them when he was never really personally comfortable with them. And that's one reason Buckley became a different kind of figure.
He was almost, uh, mocked by some people on the right. Um, they said, well, Mr. Buckley was a great man on his day, but he's a blue blood and we're blue collar conservative and we're don't have a connection with him. And part of Buckley's temperamental genius was that he would say, okay, if you don't want me around, I won't be around, but I'll still support what you do.
So he was surprisingly comfortable with that. But this [01:00:00] leads us to another thing that we have to talk about. And it's another big part. Well, I won't say a big part, but it's an important part of the story. And that is Buckley's complex relationship, uh, or ideas about sexuality and gender. Buckley was in, you know, the terms of his own era was kind of homophobic.
And, um, he made some quite notorious comments about that. One of the most famous things he said, besides this remark about running for mayor, uh, demanding a recount was that at the height of the, the peak of the AIDS crisis, he suggested in the New York Times where I later worked, that all addicts and all gay men should be tattooed.
Just to warn others [01:01:00] against them. And he had a lot of gay friends and I interviewed some of 'em, and they were just shocked that he would do that. I'll be very specific, and again, I don't want to trigger anybody here, but what he said was, addicts should be tattooed on their arms, and gay men should be tattooed on their rear ends.
And what I found was that that had actually been discussed. Tattooing was kind of out there as a possible solution to the AIDS crisis. And so when Buckley did it, he wasn't pulling it out of thin air. As it happened, even in that quite homophobic era, the Los Angeles Times did a poll. One out of seven people thought that was a good idea to even in a homophobic time.
And Buckley stated it, he was convinced to the end of his life, he was doing it only to save [01:02:00] lives. That was his explanation for it. But, that put him in company with the evangelicals in that era. And not every single one obviously. But uh, with the campaigns that led to a break with one of his closest friends who was a closeted gay man who came out, who had been an organizer of the movement and, uh, wrote to Buckley and wrote kind of a public letter and said, how are we, the libertarian movement we created, what are we doing supporting people who would treat,
it is aids, right, treat dying men in this way. And, Buckley just kind of shrugged it off. That's what he would do at moments like that. He didn't like conflict of that kind. He didn't like hurting people's feelings. So he would retreat and kind of withdraw into [01:03:00] himself. And that's what happened then. But I think that was an important, uh, moment too for him.
Peter Loewen: It's a strange cruelty.
Sam Tanenhaus: Yeah. Yeah. There's a, there's a coldness, a callousness to it. Absolutely. Oh, we got more questions here. Let's go for it.
Audience Q3: So you, uh, you mentioned Buchanan, briefly earlier. Can you talk about, um, Buchanan obviously had a very different version, vision of the right.
And he started to take a lot of the energy of the movement in the nineties. Can you talk about what Buckley thought of that and what his attitude towards that was?
Sam Tanenhaus: Yeah. Buckley had a very complicated relationship with Buchanan. Buchanan, as I mentioned before, had been a real admirer of Buckley when he was young.
And in 1992 when Pat Buchanan first challenged Bill Buckley's Yale friend and fellow member of Skull and Bones, and the Bohemian Grove, George HW Bush, who was the incumbent president, Buckley actually supported Buchanan in that [01:04:00] challenge to him. At the same time, one of the last important things Buckley did, he was always doing some house cleaning or rather, Peter mentioned earlier the John Burt Society and they were kind of ma like maga before there was Maga. And Buckley had a complicated relationship with them. And first he was for them and then he was against them. Same thing happened with Pat Buchanan. Buckley saw again the energy Buchanan was bringing to the movement.
One of the finds in the book, uh, discoveries in the archive was a letter, an exchange of letters Buckley had in that period, 1992. As it happened, my wife and I were visiting the Buckleys at their house during the Notorious Convention in 1992, where Buchanan made the speech saying There's a religious and culture war in America.
And I said, bill, well what do you think of that? And at this time point, I'm writing about the present moment, so [01:05:00] you can see in the notes. I'm interviewing him in person and he said, I like it. And why do you like it? He goes after the other side also, he said, I agree with a lot of what Buchanan says. I wouldn't say it the same way, you know, I'd use 11 syllable words, uh, instead of one syllable words, but I'm on his side.
I agree with him, and we need to keep those people in. So in a lot of ways, he actually liked Buchanan. Even I mentioned the house cleaning he did. That was the antisemitism had resurfaced. And one of the themes that winds through the book. Is the complex relationship with Jews. Buckley had really, really complicated, including with me, his biographer.
not that we had a difficult time, but the fact that he chose me to be his biographer shows how, you know I'm Jewish, how it, it's hard to pin him down on that. But he liked Buchanan's energy and his humor. He found him very amusing. And sometimes Buchanan could be, we [01:06:00] got to, my wife and I got to know Buchanan.
Absolutely great company, and I tell people this and they're shocked by it, but it's really true. A lot of people who disagree with him, Gary Wills is another, he said he's the most likable fanatic in America. You, you just can't help enjoying his company. And now in retrospect, I think we could actually use a little more of that, of people we would never think to agree with on anything, but we would could actually enjoy their company a bit.
I think Ezra Klein, by the way, was trying to say that about Charlie Kirk. I'm not sure it was a big success, but I think that's what he was trying to say. That this is somebody you could actually have a conversation with. He might say terrible things about you and make really outrageous claims, but you didn't feel the threat of menace from him.
And that's what also happened with Buchanan once you got to know [01:07:00] him. So that's what, so Buckley's relationship with him was very interesting one,
Peter Loewen: it's also just a, was a feature of Buckley, right. The, the whole show. The whole premise of the show was extended conversations with people with whom you disagreed.
Sam Tanenhaus: Yeah. Yeah.
And in that way elevate the conversation. There are a lot of liberals who learned how to debate by watching Buckley do it.
Peter Loewen: Yeah. Let's go right here.
Audience Q4: Um, good segue. I was hoping you could talk about how Buckley saw his political opponents as people and what actually what comes to mind is actually on ABC news in 1968 with his famous interviews with Gore Vidal and what you make of that.
Sam Tanenhaus: Yeah. That was probably Buckley's lowest moments. One of the interesting things about Buckley is the general consensus, I think you'd say, was that Bill Buckley was probably the most accomplished debater of his time. And the two most famous debates he had, he lost. The first was to James Baldwin in Cambridge University.
You can see that on YouTube. Buckley had no idea what hit him. [01:08:00] It was, it was a, a brilliant James Baldwin. He knew Baldwin was a great writer. By the way. That's that egalitarian thing with Buckley. He would never have said, James Baldwin is not a great American writer. It's the kinda thing you would never hear now.
Gore Vidal. He also respected. And so that was ABC news, just as you say. In the 1968 political conventions and, um, turn your mind back if you know this history at all. 1968 was the most violent year in American politics since the Civil War. There were two assassinations of American heroes. Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated within six weeks of each other in the peak of a political campaign and before then ABC News, which was, um. As my friend Frank Rich says, you know, the budget rental of the three networks, there were only three uh, networks back then, three major networks.
So if [01:09:00] CBS was Hertz and NBC was Avis, then ABC was budget rental. They had no money. And they had an idea that rather than new gavel to gavel coverage of the conventions, first the Republicans in Miami and then the, uh, the Democrats in Chicago, they would do just a 90 minute recap at the end of the day of what had gone on in the convention.
And part of that recap would include a 15 minute conversation between Bill Buckley and a liberal of his choice. So Buckley was invited into ABC News. He's already famous, now. He's his television program Firing Line, which Peter's been talking about. Many people here in the audience are familiar with.
And they said, well, Mr. Buckley, uh, we're thinking of having a conservative and a liberal debate each other. Who do you think might make a good debate partner or opponent ? Buckley said, well, there's my friend Norman Mailer. There's my friend Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The great historian. There's my friend John Kenneth [01:10:00] Galbraith, the great economist.
There's the great liberal politician, Allard Lowenstein. And they're starting to hear something here. They say, well, Mr. Buckley, is there anybody you don't want to debate? And he said, well, I really have a problem with Gore Vidal. They say, that's the guy. So they listened to the tapes. They watched the tapes because he said, I've debated him in the past and I've not enjoyed the outcome or the situation.
And what happens is if you watch them and there's a film, right, called best of Enemies, and you see these guys go at each other, they're weirdly similar. They have these, these elegant like Patrician profiles. They're both aristocrat. Uh, aristocratic seeming. In fact, some of Vidal's family came from Oklahoma and Buckley from Texas.
The kind of pretending to be the aristocrats. They aren't really. They're incredibly well-spoken and quick-witted. Anybody, by the way, who watch it. I used to do [01:11:00] cable TV when I was at the times, and when you're on with these people, you're watching these people who sound like blowhards, which they are when you're in a studio with them, that's not what you're aware of. What you're aware of is how incredibly quick their minds are. They're coming at you constantly with all this stuff, and Vidal and Buckley were probably the fastest. They were probably the quickest wits in America at that time. And they were both really experienced on television.
And you know, Vidal had that famous comment. He said, you should, there are two things you should never turn down in life. One is sex and two is going on television. So he was ready to go. And Buckley underestimated Vidal just as he did james Baldwin. Buckley thought, this is not a serious person. This is not John Kenneth Galbraith.
This is not Arthur Schlesinger. So I don't have to prepare too much for Gore Vidal. And it was one of the biggest mistakes in his life. 'cause Vidal was ready to come after [01:12:00] him. And he did. He did it by pressing buttons all the time. Now I'm gonna get into a complicated thing here, and I don't want us to get too lost.
Vidal, probably most people here know was gay. He was not however openly gay. That's a misnomer that's kicking around in the culture now because we're looking at the past through our eyes. In those years. If you said somebody, I'm gonna use the, the language that was presented to them. If you accused somebody of being gay, that was like accusing someone of being a communist.
And if you didn't have the evidence, you've committed libel or slander. And Vidal was convinced, Vidal was gay, but did not, was not open about it. He was convinced that Buckley two was secretly gay and a lot of people were in America. That's what I found in the research, why I write these books. And [01:13:00] Vidal started pushing Buckley's buttons.
The guy interviewed who knew them, both said Gore thought Bill was getting away with something. That he was able to conceal his actual sexual proclivities because he was a conservative and can denounce other people for their sins. And Vidal says, I'm just gonna get this guy. So he's pushing his buttons.
12 debates they have. six in Miami when the Republicans are debating. Six in Chicago. So they finally get to the end. I know there's some students here who are really good at history, and you know what happened in the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. There was like a riot in the streets, and Buckley and Vidal are brought in on television to talk about it.
And the moderator, uh, Howard k Smith, who by the way, had moderated [01:14:00] the Nixon Kennedy debate in 1960 says, uh, Mr. Vidal don't you think it's a problem that anti-war protestors in America, in Chicago are raising the flag of the North Vietnamese. Doesn't that strike you as kind of a fascist or Nazi sort of thing to do?
Isn't that similar? Wouldn't that be similar to people being pro-Nazi during World War ii? And Buckley chimed in and he said, yes, that's exact, I think so too. And Vidal looked at him and he said, the only proto Nazi in this room, bill, is you. And it set Buckley off. And he leans toward Vidal. It's really famous, you can see it.
And he says, stop calling, again I just want everybody to be prepared for this. Okay. Stop calling me a Nazi, you queer. [01:15:00] Or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered. You've gotta imagine the guy at that the Ivy League club, speaking that way, the way the words come out. I wish I could do voices.
I can't. but I remember the words. Well at that point. It's like total silence. It's really hard. I know for us to imagine a time when public figures would use bad language publicly. So you have to take yourself back to an age. Nobody had ever said anything like this on tv. Vidal was not someone who said, here I am and I am gay.
Buckley is again accusing him of something. A lot of people suspect he's coming very close to a kind of defamation on television. So he, he was actually canceled and bleeped in television stations across the line. You don't [01:16:00] want your children hearing that. Right?
Well, here's Buckley, this very elegant writer and talker. This enormous vocabulary. He had all 22 volumes of the Oxford English dictionary and once when he wasn't around in his office, I flipped through it and he seemed to have been through every volume. And if you read Buckley, you saw, you just couldn't believe the words he knew and used. And the ones he's gonna be famous for is calling some guy queer.
And it was devastating to Buckley. But if you watch the tape closely, you'll see a little smile on Go Vidal's face. He's surprisingly undisturbed by that because he was pushing Buckley's buttons the whole time and he got the response he wanted. And that's another one of those public events that really wounded Buckley and we've been talking about his Catholicism.
One of his good friends, a great Catholic writer, some of you may know Wilfred Sheed, do you remember that name? He was a really good essayist and [01:17:00] writer and novelist was and liked Buckley. And he said after that moment he said, I think all this stopped being fun for Buckley. If you're in the play, you are a a Catholic, you have just done a very uncharitable Catholic thing, which is to call somebody a name like that.
You say, well what about the fact that he was calling him a Nazi? And in retrospect, we say yeah, he shouldn't be calling him that. But somehow the personal thing about the identity felt the secret. Maybe it felt a little different. And so for the readers of this book where you see what comes next, a story that's planted much earlier about, um, and some, I don't know if anybody's here from the class I taught today, but they'd read some of the early chapters of the book where there are episodes like this that are building up to what came later.
And so when it [01:18:00] happened, it was a really explosive thing. And to this day, it's what some people know most about Buckley and Vidal. Add one thing to that. Which is Buckley was embarrassed by it, and I never heard him in many conversations with him in which Vidal's name came up, say a single disparaging thing about Gore Vidal.
And another friend of mine, who was a protege Buckley, said Buckley would tell him, Gore Vidal's, a brilliant writer. Then I had a conversation once with Gore Vidal's biographer, and he said vidal never mentioned Buckley without disparaging him. And if you see the documentary Best of Enemies, there was a, a great moment near the end where Vidal is doing a, a call in radio show and a guy calls in and says, Mr. Vidal, you know, you won that debate and you made Buckley look pretty bad. He said, but I think I like Buckley better than you. Because Buckley was speaking out of his emotions and he lost his cool and he lost his [01:19:00] temper. But you are different. You are kind of maneuvering and manipulating people to get them to say the things you want.
Where you could say Bill Buckley did that many times in his life too. But this was actually one moment where it was Buckley's emotion that surfaced. So it's a, it's a fascinating and important episode in media, in politics, and also in the change both made toward becoming much more aggressive with the sort of, I know we can't imagine name calling, so you just have to put yourself in perspective.
It just became so common thereafter and it just gets worse and worse. And, and Buckley in some way, bears responsibility for that.
Peter Loewen: I'll tell you something and then we'll say thank you to Sam. And that's that when I invited Sam to come, uh, and join us at Cornell, he told me something, which I didn't know at the time, which is that, uh, both of his parents went to Cornell.
Sam didn't. Uh, but no, it's perfect. But, I think that you are, uh, [01:20:00] you're a cornellian in spirit. And you've really placed yourself right in this campus in, in just the best way, giving so much of your time to students and this last 90 minutes to us. So it takes a long time to get to Ithaca, but it's always the place to end up.
We're so glad you've been here. Join me in thanking Sam Tanenhaus, please.
Sam Tanenhaus: Uh, thank you so much, Peter. A number of people have asked me if your parents went to Cornell, why didn't you? And it's a really simple answer. I couldn't get in.
Peter Loewen: Thank you very much.
Sam Tanenhaus: Yeah.
Chris Wofford: Thank you for listening to Cornell Keynotes. If you wanna watch the video recording on YouTube of this event, just be sure to check the episode notes for the link. I want to thank you for listening, and as always, please subscribe to stay connected with Cornell Keynotes.