The Conservative Intellectual Who Laid the Groundwork for Trump

Tanenhaus’s biography complicates this narrative. It offers a deeply affectionate portrait of Buckley’s personal life: of his munificence, his sense of humor, his extraordinary loyalty and capacity for friendship—what the ex-Communist intellectual (and early National Review staffer) Whittaker Chambers, the subject of Tanenhaus’s first biography, called Buckley’s “special grace.” Yet Tanenhaus also methodically surfaces the darker strains of the movement that flourished even, and sometimes especially, in its most rarefied precincts. The political vision that Buckley helped forge was, as it is now, concerned not primarily with advancing a particular set of principles but with defining and rooting out perceived enemies. When Donald Trump rails against the “Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, Fascists, Marxists, Democrats, & RINOS” who comprise the “enemy within,” he inherits Buckley’s legacy far more than he blasphemes it.

For a man who lived an infamously peripatetic life—winters skiing the slopes of Gstaad, summers sailing up and down the Atlantic Coast, decades criss-crossing America on a speaking tour so unremitting that it’s a miracle he lived into his eighties—Buckley’s politics never strayed far from his childhood hearth and home. “Everything he learned, and all he became,” Tanenhaus writes, began in the hothouse environment delicately constructed by his father. A Texas-born lawyer turned oil wildcatter who made a fortune in Mexico, Will Buckley was later expelled from the country for “secretly disbursing large sums of cash to insurgent caudillos and paying for truckloads of Winchester rifles to be smuggled into Baja California” on behalf of right-wing insurgents. Briefly bankrupt, Buckley struck black gold again in Venezuela, returned stateside, and, in 1924, purchased a many-acred property in Sharon, Connecticut, an idyll he christened Great Elm.

The Buckley paterfamilias—“Father,” to his growing brood—intensely supervised the cultivation of his children, populating Great Elm with tutors, workmen, groomsmen for the horses, a French mademoiselle, and Mexican nanas. The children were schooled in a curriculum of his own creation, emphasizing history, literature, and music. Tanenhaus writes beautifully of the extended household, which “numbered more than twenty,” and was “alive with pranks, schemes, hilarity, and strife.” (The pranks weren’t always so innocent: In 1937, the elder Buckley siblings—young Bill was left out, much to his regret—burned a cross on the lawn of a Jewish resort. Years later, his sisters defaced a nearby Episcopal church.)