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Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America Hardcover – June 3, 2025

by Sam Tanenhaus (Author)

103 ratings

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“A magnificent achievement—a long, gripping, and enthralling account of the life of America’s premier conservative polemicist of the twentieth century.”—Max Boot, author of Reagan: His Life and Legend

“A rich, immersive biography exposes the roots of the modern conservative movement through the life of the firebrand writer and commentator who shaped it.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR (SO FAR)

In 1951, with the publication of God and Man at Yale, a scathing attack on his alma mater, twenty-five-year-old William F. Buckley, Jr., seized the public stage—and commanded it for the next half century as he led a new generation of conservative activists and ideologues to the peak of political power and cultural influence.

Ten years before his death in 2008, Buckley chose prize-winning biographer Sam Tanenhaus to tell the full, uncensored story of his life and times, granting him extensive interviews and exclusive access to his most private papers. Thus began a deep investigation into the vast and often hidden universe of Bill Buckley and the modern conservative revolution.

Buckley vividly captures its subject in all his facets and phases: founding editor of National Review, the twentieth century’s most influential political journal; syndicated columnist, Emmy-winning TV debater, and bestselling spy novelist; ally of Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater; mentor to Ronald Reagan; game-changing candidate for mayor of New York.

Tanenhaus also has uncovered the darker trail of Bill Buckley’s secret exploits, including CIA missions in Latin America, dark collusions with Watergate felon Howard Hunt, and Buckley’s struggle in his last years to hold together a movement coming apart over the AIDS epidemic, culture wars, and the invasion of Iraq—even as his own media empire was unraveling.

At a crucial moment in American history, Buckley offers a gripping and powerfully relevant story about the birth of modern politics and those who shaped it.

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Buckley is a magnificent work of history as well as of biography, and is as relevant to these parlous times as it is revelatory of Buckley and his times. Beautifully written.”—John Banville, The London Times

“A smart, stylish, and clear-eyed portrait of a complicated man—and of the rise of American conservatism, with Buckley in a starring role.”—The New Yorker

“Painstakingly researched and beautifully crafted, Buckley is a capacious and incisive history of the modern conservative movement’s formative years, seen through the eyes of its intellectual leader—a man who, in Tanenhaus’s hands, is enthralling and infuriating by turns, but never boring.”—The Washington Post

“A biography not just of a prominent influencer but also of a potent movement . . . a milestone contribution to our understanding of the American Century.”—The Boston Globe

“The principal achievement of Buckley is to have tightly wound together the life of the man and the life of the movement he coaxed into being almost single-handedly . . . In Tanenhaus, both have found their Robert Caro.”—Mark Lilla, The New York Review of Books

“Massive and absorbing . . . a welcome debunking of the myth of Buckley as a mainstream conservative when in fact he was a key catalyst of the radical right. . . . finely detailed and clear-sighted.”—Jeet Heer, The Nation

“Marvelous, decades-in-the-making . . . offers a deeply affectionate portrait of Buckley’s personal life . . . [and] also methodically surfaces the darker strains of the movement.”—The New Republic

“A magnificent, absorbing work about a man known as the father of postwar American conservatism.”—Chronicles Magazine

“Shows a rare familiarity with its subject and his times. . . . Tanenhaus is to be congratulated for his achievement.”—The Spectator World

“A lively, balanced and deeply researched book . . . engrossing.”—The Guardian

“A chronicle of the life of a man but also a history of the era he helped to shape . . . worth the wait.”—The Washington Free Beacon

“A grand biography . . . magnificent.”—The Washington Monthly

“Meticulous . . . unlikely to be bettered anytime soon.”—The Financial Times

“Superb . . . Tanenhaus discovered some parts of the story that were largely unknown . . . fair and balanced story of a life of purpose, one that was actively lived and whose echoes are still felt today.”—The Christian Science Monitor

“Runs to more than 1,000 pages—yet is not a word too long.”—The Economist

“Monumental, honest, fair-minded, and spectacularly enlightening.”—Foreign Affairs

“[A] stunning new biography . . . Tanenhaus chronicles Buckley’s . . . sprawling career as a right-wing revolutionary.”—Nicole Hemmer, Democracy Journal

“Unfurls a remarkable canvas . . . a vivid portrait of a singular man.”—Law and Liberty

“William F. Buckley forever changed America, and Tanenhaus’s Buckley will forever change how we understand America.”—John Ganz, author of When the Clock Broke

“A superb biography. Writing a life is harder than it looks. Sam Tanenhaus’ contribution is up there with Robert Blake’s classic Disraeli.”—Niall Ferguson, author of Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist and The House of Rothschild

“Sam Tanenhaus . . . has illuminated the often ugly ideological origins of our present predicament.”—Jonathan Alter, author of His Very Best

“A stone-cold masterpiece . . . Buckley is a brilliant portrait of man, movement, and age.”—Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of Rule and Ruin

“Buckley is all that a biography could and should be: penetrating, deeply researched, respectful but critical.”—Beverly Gage, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of G-Man

“Writing with superb insight into celebrity culture, Tanenhaus nails Buckley for many lapses of judgment, while also revealing his countless acts of unpublicized generosity.”—Richard Wightman Fox, author of Lincoln’s Body

“Tanenhaus is clear-eyed about Buckley’s many failures but also does justice to his eccentric charisma, humanity, and wit.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

About the Author

Sam Tanenhaus, the former editor of The New York Times Book Review, is the author of the national bestsellers Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize) and The Death of Conservatism. His feature articles and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and many other publications in the United States and abroad.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Connecticut Yanquis

William F. Buckley, Jr., the intellectual leader of the modern conservative movement, rightly saw himself less as founder than heir. Everything he learned, and all he became, began at home.

It started with his father, William F. Buckley, Sr., a lawyer, real estate investor, and oil speculator who grew up in the brush country, the scrubland frontier, of Duval County in South Texas. He was thirty-five and had made his first fortune when, on a visit to New Orleans, he met twenty-two-year-old Aloise Steiner, the eldest of three sisters of Swiss and German background—“the very essence of old New Orleans charm,” said one of the many men smitten by her. She had a year or two of college, played Mozart on the piano, and told captivating if not always quite credible stories—for instance, of the fourteen marriage proposals she claimed to have turned down before W. F. Buckley began courting her in the spring of 1917.

The physical attraction was immediate, almost electric. Many years later the couple’s children remembered the “frisson” that connected their parents. The couple also shared a deep and abiding Catholic faith. After the wedding ceremony at the Steiner family’s parish church, Mater Dolorosa on South Carrollton Avenue, on December 29, 1917, the Buckleys began their married life in Mexico. W. F. Buckley had been living there since 1908. He had apartments and law offices in Mexico City as well as in Tampico—the oil boomtown on the Gulf where, after building a prosperous law practice writing oil leases, he had gone into real estate and then into oil, borrowing substantial sums to sink five wells on the banks of the Panuco River.

Oil speculation was always a high-risk venture, but especially in Mexico. It was in the throes of the twentieth century’s first great revolution, its ten-year-long “bloody fiesta,” which ended in 1920 with the rout of the right-wing faction Buckley had supported and the election of a new president he despised. It was a stinging defeat, and he would never get over it. Yet he also could say, and often did—to his children most emphatically—that although he had lost, he had done so on his terms, without giving an inch to the opposition. Other oilmen, including some far wealthier and more powerful than he, had submitted to the new order and made lucrative deals with each fresh regime. W. F. Buckley refused to do it. He left Mexico—in fact was expelled by order of its government—with debts totaling one million dollars. In later years he showed his children a treasured souvenir from those times, an architect’s sketch of the grand palacio, with private chapel, which W. F. Buckley had planned to build on substantial property he had purchased in Coyoacan.

Bankrupt at age forty, Buckley would have to start all over. He had a family to support, his wife and three small children, now living with his mother and two sisters in Austin, Texas. But there was a new opportunity. In fact, having to put Mexico behind him might be for the best. The oil fields in its Golden Lane were nearly tapped out. The great new oil patch was in Venezuela. Once again there were large profits to be made but also many hazards—in this case “hostile Indian tribes,” as well as malaria and fatal “liver and intestinal disorders.” Visitors were advised to stay no longer than a few weeks.

For W. F. Buckley admonitions were a goad. He went to Venezuela, stayed a full six months, and came back in 1924 with leasing rights to three million acres surrounding Lake Maracaibo, spreading east and west, a complexly organized checker-board whose squares “in practically every instance adjoin properties that are being actively developed by major American oil companies,” it was reported at the time. The concession was “rated among the most valuable in Venezuela.”

Buckley, now based in New York, formed a new company, Pantepec (named for a river in Mexico), and with the sponsorship of the Wall Street broker Edward A. Pierce floated stock shares and secured investments from two California majors: Union Oil and California Petroleum. Matching wits against some of the finest legal minds in the United States, W. F. Buckley worked out the terms for an innovative “farm-out.” In return for gaining temporary control of a third of the holdings, the two behemoths would cover the costs of exploration and drilling and reap most of the profits once oil was struck. W. F. Buckley would be allotted a tiny fraction of those profits, and he now had funds to send teams of engineers and geologists to explore the remaining two million acres.

Remade as a Wall Street speculator, W. F. Buckley bought a suite of offices on lower Park Avenue and furnished them sumptuously, the better to impress investors. He also bought an apartment building nearby where he stayed alone during the week. Jazz Age Manhattan, with its speakeasies and fleshpots and lurking criminal element, was no place for his wife and growing family. They lived on his third shrewd purchase, a large estate in the rural northwest corner of Connecticut.

On Fridays, the work week finished, W. F. Buckley walked a few blocks uptown from his office to Grand Central and rode the train home to his family, three full hours through exurban New York—Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess counties—all the way to Amenia, where a Buick sat idling with the Black “houseboy,” James Cole of New Orleans, behind the wheel in a chauffeur’s cap. Together they drove three miles along a country road and, if daylight remained, enjoyed the vista—the wooded Litchfield Hills and the dipping valley, the bright quilt of dairy farms—and then crossed the Connecticut state line at Sharon, a picturesque village of fifteen hundred, incorporated in 1739 and named for the fertile Biblical plain. A favorite weekend and summer getaway for wealthy New Yorkers, Sharon was famous for its narrow elongated green, originally grazing land, which gracefully stretched for more than a mile from its north end—with storefronts and wooden walkways where in summer elms arched overhead, the branches on either side touching to form a canopy—to South Main Street. There, near the town hall and the Hotchkiss Library, stood what is still today Sharon’s chief landmark: a granite-and-brownstone clock tower, forty feet high with a pyramid roof, built in the 1880s by the same firm that designed Theodore Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill estate on Oyster Bay, Long Island.

On either side of South Main, set back from the street, were large and imposing manor houses. The Buckleys lived in one of them, Number 32, called the Ansel Sterling House after its first owner, a lawyer and judge twice elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1820s. Sterling had purchased the property in 1808 and then torn down the original brick, replacing it with a Georgian frame structure. Over time the tenacre property had tripled to thirty acres, beautiful and lush, with thick stands of oaks and sugar maples, outbuildings including barn, stables, and icehouse, and horse trails that wound through the rolling pastures and up into the gentle hills beyond. Today Ansel Sterling’s house still stands, though much enlarged by W. F. Buckley. Its handsome entrance with pediment and pillars stares across Main Street at Sharon’s two historic churches: little Christ Church Episcopal, with its witch-hat spire, and the Congregational church, the town’s oldest.

In 1923, when W. F. Buckley first toured the property and rented it for the summer, its most striking feature was the elm that towered up from its front lawn. It had been planted in colonial times by Sharon’s most illustrious forefather, the Congregational minister Reverend Cotton Mather Smith, a descendant of Cotton Mather. It was now the largest elm in the entire state, its immense trunk measuring eighteen feet around. In 1924, the same year Main Street was paved for motor traffic, Buckley bought the estate outright and renamed it Great Elm.

This was the new life Buckley had conjured in a few short years, seemingly pulled out of thinnest air, for his wife and growing family. So promising did the future look that when a sixth child was born on November 24, 1925, husband and wife agreed that this son, their third, should be his father’s namesake: William F. Buckley, Jr.

It was always an event when “Father” came home. The children who were not away at school or upstairs in the nursery crowded in front of the house to greet him. “We’d wait there for his car to come,” one of his six daughters remembered, “and make bets on which car would be Father’s.” He was delighted to see them, but even happier to see his wife. “He’d kiss us all and he’d say, ‘Where’s your mother?’ Mother would come and say, ‘Darling,’ and the two of them would walk out together.”

No one felt these currents more keenly than Billy Buckley, who had the middle child’s fear of being overlooked, lost in the crowd. And the Buckley siblings really were a crowd: ten in all, many of them very close in age, five born ahead of Billy and four after. With servants added, as well as tutors, workmen, groomsmen for the horses, and later a riding instructor and his family, the household numbered more than twenty and was alive with pranks, schemes, hilarity, and strife.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 3, 2025
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 1040 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375502343
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375502347
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.15 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.55 x 1.95 x 9.57 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #4,612 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #9 in Political Leader Biographies
- #10 in United States Biographies
- #13 in Political Conservatism & Liberalism
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Customers find the book to be an outstanding and interesting read, with one customer noting the whole Buckley family was fascinating.

"...The whole Buckley family was fascinating, including Will Buckley, Aloise Steiner Buckley, Trish Bozell, Pat, Priscilla, Jim, Christopher, et al...." Read more

"This is a serious read - very detailed. But it is well told and thoughtful" Read more

"Compulsively readable (I read all 860 pages in five days, couldn't put it down). Vividly written, with flashes of pathos and humor...." Read more

"I found this a very interesting book to read, especially since I lived through much of this period...." Read more

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Customers praise the writing quality of the book, describing it as a well-written compendium.

"...Among these, Buckley was outstanding as a wordsmith...." Read more

"This is a serious read - very detailed. But it is well told and thoughtful" Read more

"...Vividly written, with flashes of pathos and humor...." Read more

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"Long and meticulous account of Buckley’s most important years(less so regarding his post-Reagan years)...." Read more

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Pseudo D
Where Have You Gone, Bill Buckley?
Reviewed in the United States on June 30, 2025
Format: KindleVerified Purchase

I was so excited about the new WFB biography that I had to wait a couple of weeks before reading it. I haven't read Sam Tanenhaus' other books, but I was impressed with his article "When Pat Buchanan Tried to Make America Great Again", from around January 2017. It turns out that his interviews with PJB were probably in preparation for this long-awaited book. Tanenhaus has had fine conversations this month with Elisabeth Bumiller at a book signing, Charlie Rose, Oren Cass of American Compass, and Jacob Heilbrunn. Another Trump/PJB article in Politico was "The Ideas Made It, But I Didn't", by Tim Alberta, later the author of American Carnage.

As a movement conservative, I have to take seriously the criticisms of Rich Lowry, another longtime editor of National
Review. These included the fact that the book was cut short around the 1980s, while WFB was 1925-2008. Lowry also found insufficient emphasis on WFB's profound Catholic faith, and a lack of appreciation for his true intellectual depth.
First, the question of faith, which is my own area of knowledge. It was often found odd, for instance by Christopher Hitchens in Blood, Class and Nostalgia (a book I haven't read!), that Bill was viewed as the quintessential WASP while in fact Irish and Catholic in provenance. The brilliant William F. Buckley, Sr., was an oilman, and the family spent time in Mexico as well as Camden, South Carolina. In Spanish culture, the establishment was Catholic. As a result, young Bill approached Yale as both an insider and an outsider, confidently secure and yet itching to provoke. He didn't expect Yale to teach the doctrine of transsubstantiation, but the problem was that the great university wasn't Protestant either, but often atheistic and socialist. On the question of faith, Buckley's most important books were God and Man at Yale (1951), In Search of Anti-Semitism (1991-1993), and Nearer My God (1997). At certain points, Tanenhaus does emphasize the profundity of WFB's faith, as when during Watergate, he couldn't reveal his knowledge explicitly because of his friend Howard Hunt (from the CIA), but let it out covertly as if confessing before his omniscient God. The Spanish background is also important for understanding Bill's affinity for polysyllabic vocabulary. Besides his preppy education in classical antiquity, his first language was Spanish, so he gravitated toward Latinate constructions. The whole Buckley family was fascinating, including Will Buckley, Aloise Steiner Buckley, Trish Bozell, Pat, Priscilla, Jim, Christopher, et al.

Regarding Buckley's intellectual importance, I have to disagree with Lowry's assessment of the book. WFB is the most consequential public intellectual since WWII (along with, perhaps, Kissinger and Moynihan). But his importance was in being an intellectual who could communicate with the public, not in systematic treatises but in quick exchanges of wits. In the 60s and 70s, these debates engaged such as Arthur Schlessinger Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, James Baldwin, and Gore Vidal, perhaps the only opponent who actually disliked Bill. Apparently, Buckley didn't complete his project of "Revolt Against the Masses", an homage to Jose Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses. But the theoretical work had already been done by Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind), James Burnham (The Machiavellians), and others. The founding generation included Willi Schlamm, Willmoore Kendall, Whittaker Chambers, Frank Meyer, and many others. Among these, Buckley was outstanding as a wordsmith. Frank Meyer perhaps came up with the concept of fusionism, the linking of anti-Communism, free markets, and social conservatism, but it was Bill who gave us the word for it. He wrote many books and columns but was even better as an editor and a debater. It was taking the ideas into the arena of public life that changed America. Tanenhaus emphasizes the mentoring of writers such as Garry Wills,
who eventually moved to the left, and Joan Didion, who also left the conservative movement, as well as George Will. While Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan clearly were WFB's political allies, the relationships were more complex than one might imagine.

The book was apparently cut short (at 860 pages!) because more detail was necessary for all the years up to the election of Reagan and the mainstreaming of ideas that had long been marginalized in elite society and politics. The
WFB of the 80s, 90s and 2000s is available from many sources. In 1998, my freshman year of college, my "higher education" truly began with recreational reading in the library of "Happy Days Were Here Again", "Overdrive", "Up From Liberalism", and "McCarthy and His Enemies". In the late 80s and 90s, great episodes of Firing Line included those with Christopher Hitchens, John O'Sullivan, Joe Sobran, Alan Keyes and Ron Paul. In 2000, WFB was a guest on Hardball, where Chris Matthews asked him about George W. Bush. I was relaxing after college dinner when WFB replied "he is conservative, but he is not a conservative. Ronald Reagan is a conservative. Jack Kemp is a conservative". Matthews went on to ask if an adjectival relationship to the movement was sufficient. Most movingly, Chris Matthews concluded "William F. Buckley, the patron saint of American conservatism, I've said it before and I'll say it again, you make life on this planet all the greater".

Although WFB eventually expressed opposition to the 2003 Iraq war, by then National Review was aligned more
with the neocon side of the debate, with writers such as David Frum. Buchanan's American Conservative (2002)
and Chronicles (with paleoconservatives such as Thomas Fleming, Paul Gottfried and Sam Francis) were distinct
from the neocon Weekly Standard of Bill Kristol and others. The thrust of Tanenhaus' book is that Buckley's
career as a whole is more "paleocon" than it appeared from the vantage point of the 2000s. He began with an
apologia for Charles Lindbergh and the America First movement, and took a traditional southern and libertarian
(Goldwaterite) view on states' rights.

In the American Compass interview with Oren Cass, Tanenhaus made an interesting connection with J.D. Vance.
In 2017, the Politico article made the connection between MAGA and the Buchanan Brigades. The latter, however,
from the early 90s were "paleos" marginalized from movement conservatism itself. As a side note, it has always
fascinated me how PJB was for Nixon in 1968, not the populist George Wallace or the movement conservative
Ronald Reagan. When four delegates from Michigan pledged for Nixon, Pat publicly exclaimed "We got the
Birchers"! (The Greatest Comeback, 2014).

Did movement conservatism end in 2008 with the election of Obama and the financial crisis? Everybody
remembers the 2016 GOP primaries, where Trump defeated Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and many
others. The 2012 primaries were also interesting, where Romney and Jon Huntsman were challenged by
the wild crew of Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Ron Paul, and Rick Perry (who later on seemed mild!)
Vance is perhaps the one who will make the "fusion" of MAGA with the longer history of postwar conservatism.
He began with Hillbilly Elegy, a bestseller that captured Trump Country, but not in an explicit endorsement
of MAGA. This conversion came later, along with an interesting conversion to Catholicism and some aspects
of integralism and postliberalism. This may also be able to incorporate the "paleo" efforts of Chronicles
magazine and the American Conservative. If Trump is the one with populist appeal, like Joe McCarthy,
Vance may give the more theoretical foundations. There's a parallel between anti-anti-McCarthy and
anti-anti-Trump. Vance was good on Ross Douthat's Interesting Times.

P.S. Nearer, My God shows the literary theological influence on WFB of Arnold Lunn and Frs. Ronald Knox, Richard John Neuhaus and George Rutler. Also Clare Boothe Luce.

Final note: Vance appears to replace Paul Ryan as intellectual leader. Because the movement changed so much after 2010,
Ryan was unable to do what Newt Gingrich did in the late 80s and 90s.

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ProfAHK
A very interesting read
Reviewed in the United States on August 8, 2025
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
This is a serious read - very detailed. But it is well told and thoughtful

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Dag W.
Well written compendium
Reviewed in the United States on August 24, 2025
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Long and meticulous account of Buckley’s most important years(less so regarding his post-Reagan years). If you loved the career and story as I do you will love this book

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J. Holt
Reads like a great novel
Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2025
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Compulsively readable (I read all 860 pages in five days, couldn't put it down). Vividly written, with flashes of pathos and humor. It brings Buckley alive in all of his splendor, contradictions, and flaws, along with the era he did so much to define, through the Reagan revolution and beyond. The amazing cast of characters includes eccentric/passionate ideologues like James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers, glamorous celebrities like Paul Newman and David Niven, feline adversaries like James Baldwin and Gore Vidal, CIA spooks like Howard Hunt, nutcases like James Welch, and polecats like Roy Cohn. The saga of the Buckley family, with its fluctuating wealth, quasi-aristocratic privilege, and unyieldingly militant Catholic faith, rivals that of the Kennedys for drama and tragedy. And the portrait of Buckley's wife, the New York society doyenne Pat Buckley, is indelible. (And the sailing/skiing bits are fun!) The book carries an emotional punch. It heightened my admiration for some aspects of William Buckley's character but left me appalled at his misjudgments and ambivalent about his impact on American politics and culture.

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William Blackburn
Say it ain't so Bill
Reviewed in the United States on June 10, 2025
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
An intellect like the Platte River. . . a mile wide and inches deep, is the impression one gets from this well written biography. As a much younger man I was fascinated by Buckley's wit, vocabulary and obvious love of debate.
Now one realizes how deeply influenced and imperfectly molded was Buckley, Jr. by the ultra right wing Buckley, Sr. One also reads that Bill was not a reader and had little interest in deeply researching issues but was more prone to picking up on controversial topics rather like a magpie picking up shiny objects. A one dimensional demagogue wrapped in sophisticated rhetoric, interested in the effect rather the the truth of his hyperbolic assertions. It is difficult to believe the extent to which he supported such questionable figures as Senator Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn and, later in his life, Rush Limbaugh. All of which transgressions are greatly ameliorated by the recognition of Buckley's gift of friendship and his countless acts of generosity.

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Marcus
William F Buckley Jr
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 17, 2025
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Absolutely brilliant book recounting the life of William. F. Buckley Jr
From his childhood living with his siblings in there massive house and being home schooled by a brilliant teacher.
Being an outstanding rider from an early age and learning Spanish as a first language when his family lived in Mexico , from there back to the US and then off to London and boarding school and then the return back to the US .
His time in the army and from there back to collage to get his first class degree and from there his deep lifelong interest in politics and history.
His run for the mayor of New York in 1965 and the beginning of his tv programme
“ The Firing Line “ which started in 1966 and ran till 1998 .
His fall out with Gore Vidal and his Conservative movement.
Helping Ronald Reagan win the general election in 1981 .
A full and definitive life

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Cliente Amazon
Excellent read!
Reviewed in Spain on July 25, 2025
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Great book!

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Christine Willis
Significant insight into history of USA
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 25, 2025
Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase
Extremely well written

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5.0 out of 5 stars Where Have You Gone, Bill Buckley?

5.0 out of 5 stars A very interesting read

5.0 out of 5 stars Well written compendium

5.0 out of 5 stars Reads like a great novel

3.0 out of 5 stars Say it ain't so Bill

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5.0 out of 5 stars William F Buckley Jr

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent read!

5.0 out of 5 stars Significant insight into history of USA

Where Have You Gone, Bill Buckley?

A very interesting read

Well written compendium

Reads like a great novel

Say it ain't so Bill

William F Buckley Jr

Excellent read!

Significant insight into history of USA