A Man and His Presidents, deeply researched and smoothly written, is a superb political biography ... The most entertaining chapter of A Man and His Presidents is 'Demand a Recount,' the story of Buckley’s quixotic campaign for mayor of New York ... In his 82 years, concludes Mr. Felzenberg in this fresh account of a much-chronicled figure, Buckley achieved a great deal of what he set out to do, leaving behind a movement that continues to make a profound difference in our politics.

...a gracefully written and richly informative book, but it’s not a narrowly focused study of the relationships between one of the 20th century’s leading political commentators and a series of American presidents, which were not very significant ... Reading the book in light of events since Buckley’s death — including the Sarah Palin sensation of 2008, the Anybody but Romney procession during the Republican primaries of 2012, but most of all Donald Trump’s shockingly successful populist insurrection in 2016 — one realizes the passages that provide the most illumination are those in which Felzenberg highlights what Buckley himself described as his greatest achievement: purging the conservative movement of 'extremists, bigots, kooks, anti-Semites and racists' ... Felzenberg has produced an accomplished and admiring biography that paints a portrait of a man toiling joyfully to define and elevate a political movement. But the book also, perhaps unintentionally, vindicates a cluster of enduring truths taught by the wisest conservatives down through the ages — that elevated things are fragile, and that nothing lasts forever, or even as long as we may wish.

Felzenberg consistently describes Buckley’s various crusades with skill and detail. As a result, A Man and His Presidents thoroughly captures Buckley’s life and decades-long career, a comprehensive portrait of one of the towering figures of 20th-century conservatism. But the character Felzenberg depicts is also largely from a distance. When it comes to the lived experience of Buckley’s career choices or much of Buckley’s private life, A Man and His Presidents falls short ... Ultimately, what emerges from A Man and His Presidents is less the biography of one political commentator, and more the rise and fall of a movement bookended by the New Deal on the one hand and the 'compassionate conservatism' of George W. Bush on the other.

A Man and His Presidents is a rather poor biography of Buckley, consistently preoccupied with the trivial at the expense of the significant. Yet the book offers some important and perhaps unintended insights into the unraveling of the conservative movement. The principal weakness of Felzenberg’s biography is that it contains little in the way of serious intellectual history. A reader otherwise unacquainted with Buckley’s work would come away with the impression that he never wrote anything beyond acerbic one-liners and forgettable novels ... Without any coherent treatment of the deeper intellectual currents shaping Buckley’s positions, there is nothing to hold the narrative together. The book is less a biography than a breezy history of the major political events that occurred during Buckley’s lifetime. And since Buckley’s career spanned a period from before World War II to the Iraq War, no single episode can be examined in any depth ... Nevertheless, A Man and His Presidents offers some insight into the collapse of Buckley’s conservative movement precisely because its weaknesses as a biography coincide with the weaknesses of movement conservatism.

The book is at its best when Felzenberg describes Buckley as an enfant terrible, shaking up the Establishment (and his alma mater) at age 29 with the publication of God and Man at Yale and then founding the National Review. This Buckley defended Sen. Joseph McCarthy, flirted with the John Birch Society, and condoned the violence of Southern segregationists … Arguing that it is one of the least explored aspects of his career, Felzenberg devotes two-thirds of his book to Buckley's advice to and assessments of the presidents of the United States from Eisenhower to George W. Bush … Alas, although Felzenberg demonstrates that Republican presidents sometimes solicited and almost always listened respectfully to Buckley's advice, it is not at all clear how much influence he exerted.

Arguing that Buckley was hugely influential, the author more convincingly portrays him as an audacious gadfly and provocateur ... The author does not consider Buckley as a brother, father, and husband (his wife, 'his best friend' and supporter, is hardly mentioned), focusing instead on his relationships with politicians. A well-delineated portrait of an impassioned conservative.