Review: James Fallows on William F. Buckley, Jr.
A life of urbanity and charm, that paved the way for much that is dark and destructive in our time
Reading Sam Tanenhaus’s enlightening and entertaining new biography of William F. Buckley, I was reminded how during the dire first months of the Covid pandemic most TV interviews switched to remote Zoom sessions, and many writers, historians, and journalists appeared to us before a “book wall” featuring works they wanted literally to be seen as having read. A book that haunted the background of political commentary, distinctive for the bold red title on a broad white spine, was The Power Broker, by Robert Caro, which won the Pulitzer Prize for biography fifty years ago and which was, at over 1,200 pages, Caro’s first “big book” in all senses of the term. How might a new account of a writer, broadcaster, and socialite, someone we might now call an “influencer,” who shaped modern politics by archly riffing off it recall that of a landscape-altering civic administrator noted for his monumental construction projects? Both books were many years in the making and are very long. But they are so full of surprise and narrative detail that they “read” as much shorter, and can be picked up and put down in enjoyable increments. Both books are “about” a person but really are sweeping presentations of the broader policies, personalities, and uses of power that shaped an era. And, albeit in different ways, to me each book amounts to an overwhelming case that its subject left a negative mark on the world.
For Robert Moses, Caro’s judgment was up-front and explicit, because of the damage Moses’s block-clearing, highway-centric “building for the future” had done to neighborhoods in New York. Tanenhaus’s portrayal of Buckley is far more nuanced, admiring and sympathetic in many ways. But in the end it delivers mounting evidence that, for all his urbanity and charm, Buckley helped pave the way for much that is dark, destructive, and resentment-driven in the politics of our day.
Like Caro’s narrative, Buckley is thick with details that are sharply presented and startling. Some seem too good to be true, but for the rigor and ballast of Tanenhaus’s sourcing. One example: As a Yale undergraduate, Buckley chipped in with others to buy a small propeller airplane. After he had taken two flying lessons, but never soloed, he impulsively decided to fly the plane—by himself, as night fell, in bad weather—back from Boston to New Haven, as a favor to a friend. He landed there, under a low ceiling, and went to a bar. If true, this was one of the luckiest outcomes in the history of aviation. From Tanenhaus:
It was, as Buckley later said, a case of “egregious stupidity.” But it was typical, too—of his impulsiveness, his generosity, his appreciation for the large gesture, above all his eerie self-confidence.
