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 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.
A long (a thousand pages, though it reads shorter), well-written, and intelligent take, both critical and admiring, on a complicated man. The book is a history of postwar American political life in the form of a biography of one of its actors. One relives a lot, and one learns a lot.
Colorful, comprehensive ... The narrative flows briskly: Tanenhaus streamlines decades of research and interviews ... Tanenhaus is fair to this complicated pundit — more than fair — and the payoff is worth it. Buckley is a milestone contribution to our understanding of the American Century.
Tanenhaus’s biography of Buckley has arrived at last, and it is more or less the book conservatives feared it would be. The author is a gifted writer and a diligent scholar; his account is ably paced. But the Bill Buckley of this book is little more than a wasted talent: a man who put his stupendous gifts in the service of a perverse cause and, though he got one or two big things right, propounded a muddled ideology and probably compounded the nation’s problems ... A book so long in the making was bound to sprawl, and this one does ... Buckley’s devotees will find it frequently irritating and occasionally enraging ... The size of this biography would seem to suggest an act of homage, but its effect is to reduce Buckley to smallness ... Tanenhaus’s decisions about what to include and exclude in this 1,000-page account frequently mystify.
