The erstwhile symbol of “respectable conservatism” showed how Republican elites would capitulate to Trump

I own but haven’t yet started Sam Tanehaus’s generally well-regarded long-gestating biography of William F. Buckley. In the meantime, I can say that Brandy Jensen’s review is an excellent and important piece of writing in its own right:

Again and again, while reading Buckley, one is struck by this sense of queasy recognition. After leveraging his elite credentials to launch an attack on the Ivy League, Buckley proceeds (along with Bozell) to craft a forceful defense of a brutish, slovenly, vengeful Republican leader on the grounds that, whatever his sins, his attackers are worse. That’s Joseph McCarthy in this case, but this Buckley-penned tune would inspire many, many cover versions. Buckley spends much of his public life riding into battle on behalf of a League of Extraordinary Assholes: Roy Cohn, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Strom Thurmond, Howard Hunt, and, in a frankly bizarre turn, Edgar Smith, the convicted murderer of a teenage girl with whom Buckley has become pen pals and for whom he launches a media crusade. Buckley’s loyalty was ferocious, and while Tanenhaus highlights its tender aspects when given to the lonely and abandoned (like Chambers), it is just as often a destructive force that relies on astonishing dishonesty. 

Let me step in here and strongly recommend Scoundrel, Sarah Weinman’s story of the Edgar Smith case. The TL;DR is that Buckley made it a personal crusade to free someone who senselessly bashed a random 15-year-old girl’s head in with heavy rocks, although he received a fair trial and there was no real doubt about his guilt. Buckley essentially invented a miscarriage of justice because Smith subscribed to the National Review and was the kind of roguish working-class guy with some modest prose ability Buckley wanted to be able to impress. (Smith would ultimately make a deal for his release and after appearing on Firing Line would attempt to murder another woman for her paycheck and spend the rest of his life in prison.) I don’t think it’s too much a stretch to find a thread between this and Trump’s routine pardons of rogue cops, war criminals, and ultimately actual insurrectionists — another example of Republican commitments to “law and order” really being about Wilhoit’s Law.

The larger point here is that McCarthy and His Enemies, while not Buckley’s best-known or best-selling book, is the work that is most important in prefiguring how quickly Republican elites would become part of Trump’s personality cult. “Whatever his sins, his attackers or worse” is a durable formula.

Returning to our story:

This is among the great revelations of Buckley: its subject’s endless willingness to lie. Over and over we watch Buckley slander, deceive, withhold information, and defend the falsity of others. He lies with glee and without compunction; he lies willfully and by omission. He stands athwart history, yelling the wildest possible bullshit. 

Another of the book’s revelations has to do with dishonesty as well, namely the extent to which the Buckley family was engaged in the segregationist cause. While regarded as a scion of the Northeast, Bill spent much of his time in the family’s second home in Camden, S.C., at a restored plantation manor called “Kamschatka.” While the Buckleys were segregationists of the genteel variety—Tanenhaus notes how well the family’s black servants were treated—the book reveals that Buckley money funded a paper, The Camden News, which espoused the views of the local White Citizen’s Council. National Review’s editorial from 1957, written by Buckley and titled “Why the South Must Prevail,” is notorious and well-known. In it, Buckley wrote that the question:

is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.

This family connection sheds new light on the depths of Buckley’s commitment, and further explains why he would dismiss the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution as “inorganic accretions to the original document,” or compare the federalized National Guardsmen deployed to desegregate Little Rock’s schools to the Soviet tank commanders in Hungary and Poland. Tanenhaus reports that William Buckley Sr. assured his friend Strom Thurmond that Bill “is for segregation and backs it in every issue.” 

“Inorganic accretions to the original document” would be an excellent summary of John Roberts’s approach to the Reconstruction Amendments. The Party of Lincoln folded no later than 1891 and never returned to any kind of commitment to equal citizenship.

According to all accounts, another theme of the book is that the shallowness at the core Buckley’s voluminous contributions to public discourse — “less an intellectual than a convener” as Jennifer Burns puts it in her review. The fundamentally nihilistic format of the debating club was his ideal form. Less erudite heirs to his glib dishonesty like JD Vance and Brett Kavanaugh permeate the Republican elite, and it’s no coincidence that they’ve become critical Trump henchmen. For all the longing for a different era of conservatism, Buckley would have slide easily into MAGA himself.