Two of the most important figures in 20th century American conservatism were William F. Buckley, Jr., and Ronald Reagan. Two important new works looking closely at these two remarkable figures – champions of freedom and conservative values – have recently appeared. Both books are thorough, detailed and critical biographies.
It is certainly the case that both books are the newest and most comprehensive volumes to appear so far, which is saying something, given how much has already been written about these two men. The books are:
Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus (Random House, 2025)
Reagan: His Life and Legend by Max Boot (Liveright, 2024)
The volumes do not make for a quick read: the former is 1000 pages in length while the latter is 800 pages. Each one includes 100 pages of notes. Being critical assessments of their subjects, the good points of each man are discussed, but so too are various faults and weaknesses. Thus the bios are neither hatchet jobs nor hagiographies, although Boot is much more negative of the two authors, not just of his subject, but of conservatism in general.
Indeed, the number of times pejorative adjectives are thrown around about the man and the movement (‘conspiratorial,’ ‘moralistic,’ ‘paranoid,’ ‘noxious,’ ‘alarmist,’ ‘prejudiced,’ and so on) really becomes rather irritating after a while.
In his Introduction he says he was once a Republican but no longer is. He says he is not a Democrat either, but an independent. But his volume is just too much a tome of the left. Tanenhaus, who also did not turn his subject into a saint, came off as much less biased, and his book was a joy to read – I did not want it to end.
The two subjects share many similarities, while there are some obvious differences. Buckley grew up in a wealthy family, while Reagan started life with a quite poor upbringing. Buckley was Catholic while Reagan eventually found his spiritual home in a Presbyterian church. Reagan spent much of his later life in political office, but Buckley’s only direct time with politics involved a run for mayor of New York City in 1965 (which he lost).
Unlike Buckley, Reagan was not an intellectual, although he was a voracious reader. He had an excellent memory, which helped him not just with movie scripts, but in political speeches and debates. Buckley penned some 50 books (I have quite a few of them). A number of them are collections of his columns, memoirs, books about his passion for sailing, as well as some spy novels. Reagan wrote just one: Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation (1984). Various collections of his speeches, letters and writings however are found in a number of volumes.
While Buckley was born into wealth, Reagan only later in life became well off. But both were gracious with their wealth, and both would often send personal cheques and the like to those who were struggling in various ways. Even strangers sending them letters, discussing their situations, would find a kind gift sent to them.
Both men were anti-communists and advocates of limited government. Both men lived roughly at the same time, and both had a big impact on each other. So let me comment on each book mainly in terms of what these two great figures thought and said about the other.
Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed Americaby Tanenhaus, Sam (Author)
Tanenhaus
William F. Buckley (1925-2008) was of course the founder and editor of National Review magazine, the host of the long-running Firing Line television program (aired on PBS from 1966 to 1999), and one of the leading conservative intellectuals of last century.
As I was reading through his volume, I thought he was not getting very far, since halfway through, he still had decades of his life to cover. But that fit in with his purpose: to show how Buckley really was the founder of a powerful conservative movement, with aims of making an intellectually respectable conservativism, and – to use today’s parlance – rid the Republican party of the RINOS and drain the swamp.
Thus the real direction of the book is to show how the elections of Reagan in 1980 and 1984 were the real culmination of his work and writing. A few short concluding chapters follow on from the chapters on Reagan’s wins. Yes, there had been hope in Goldwater (who never did make it to the White House), and Nixon did get in, but he disappointed conservatives along the way, and was forced to resign over Watergate.
So the landslide elections of Reagan were in effect a very real result of Buckley’s decades of writing, debating, networking and speech-making. While he would not claim any special credit for these wins, there is no question, as Tanenhaus documents, that Buckley was instrumental in bringing conservatism back into the mainstream – and into the Oval Office.
Tanenhaus notes how the first Reagan election win was in so many ways the end game for Buckley and National Review:
For the first time since Grover Cleveland lost in 1888, an incumbent Democratic president had been defeated. And this was a landslide, the most decisive reversal of party control since Eisenhower’s victory in 1952. And it went beyond the presidency; Reagan’s coattails were the widest in modern memory. The Senate results were astonishing. The Republicans picked up a dozen seats—nine of them from Democratic incumbents…
The Buckleys returned to New York on Thursday, November 20. Going into the National Review offices the next day, Bill found the staff – now numbering thirty-nine – elated, jubilant, almost dizzy with excitement. “It was like getting the keys to the kingdom,” the young editor, Rick Brookhiser recalled, “as thrilling as it was unbelievable.” All shared in the feeling that “we had built the movement that made Reagan its champion.”
The size of the victory was only now becoming clear. It looked as revolutionary as Roosevelt’s win in 1932, in fact was an almost mirror-image reversal of it, led by an ideological convert who had himself supported Roosevelt for president in all four of his elections. Buckley’s ambition had been to persuade liberals, and Reagan’s election represented the consummation of that effort. He had been a union man – president of the Screen Actors Guild – and had nominally remained a Democrat until he changed his party registration in 1962, when he was fifty-one.
In the pages of NR, there was no holding back. “With the election of Ronald Reagan,” the editors had written in the first flush of Reagan’s victory, “National Review assumes a new importance in American life. This is therefore the last issue in which we shall indulge in levity. Connoisseurs of humour will have to get their yuks elsewhere. We have a nation to run.” (pp. 818-820)
He closes his book this way:
In his time, as in our own, no one really could say what American conservatism was or ought to be. Buckley himself repeatedly tried to and at last gave up. But for almost half a century, millions of Americans could confidently say who had been the country’s greatest conservative: William F. Buckley, Jr.
In clearing so large a place for himself, he left a vacuum no one since has been able to fill. This is the absence so many feel today—adversaries and apostates as well as advocates and admirers. A founder of our world, he speaks to us from a different one, beyond our reach but hovering near, if only we can discover in ourselves the imagination and generosity, the kindness and warmth, that Bill Buckley demonstrated time and again in his long and singular life. (p. 860)
Boot
Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) was a Hollywood film star, a two-term California Governor, and a two-term President of the United States. He may be best known for how he helped to bring the Cold War to a close and helped to dismantle the Communist Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Early on Reagan had developed his passions for freedom and anti-communism, and a distaste of Big Government. Sure, as Boot makes clear, he was a pragmatist and was willing to compromise, so conservatives were not always pleased with what he did while in the White House.
Boot refers to Buckley and his influence on Reagan at various times. Reagan was reading
such influential conservative texts as Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) and Whittaker Chamber’s Witness (1952)—on his long, cross-country train rides. He also became a charter subscriber to National Review when it was launched in 1955. Reagan met the magazine’s urbane, wealthy, Yale-educated editor, William F. Buckley jr., when asked to introduce him in 1961 before he delivered a speech in Los Angeles. Ron and Nancy Reagan would become close to Bill Buckley and his socialite wife, Patricia, even asking Buckley to counsel their wayward children. (pp. 226-227)
Indeed, National Review “quickly became Reagan’s favorite magazine”. (p. 227). The conservative columnists he most liked to read were Buckley, George Will and James J. Kilpatrick. (p. 439)
As to Reagan’s role in bringing down the Berlin Wall and bringing the Cold War to a close, Boot repeatedly plays it down. He instead gives most of the credit for this to Gorbachev. But we get snippets of Reagan’s long-standing desire to bring this about. For example, when he saw the wall for the first time in November 1978, he said to Richard Allen, “Dick, we’ve got to find a way to knock this thing down”. (p. 379)
As might be clear by now, if you are lacking in money, reading time and bookshelf space, and only can get one of these large tomes, I would recommend Tanenhaus. Both authors have come out with detailed, well-researched and well-written biographies, but Boot just gets too annoying with his constant digs at conservatism and Reagan.
Boot of course has to admit (as did almost everyone who met or knew Reagan) what a nice guy he was. He was humorous and friendly, and was without guile or pretence. He always remembered his humble upbringing, and never looked down on people, and almost never spoke ill of others. He was gracious and charming to the end. As Boot said at the end of his biography:
Reagan’s ascent was an outcome that no one in Dixon, Davenport, or Des Moines could have predicted, and yet he made it look effortless. Perhaps his greatest achievement of all was that, no matter how far or how fast he climbed, he never lost his trademark dignity, modesty, and grace or forgot the “Midwestern ethic” that he had learned growing up. He was, and always remained, a quintessential product of early twentieth-century, small-town America, with all the strengths and blind spots inherent to that time and place….
Reagan was far from ordinary, but he had an innate understanding of ordinary Americans, at least ordinary white Americans, that carried him a long way in his storybook life. . . . Whether he changed the world for better or worse—or, more likely, some of both—he undoubtedly left his “strong footprints in the sands of time,” as Jane Wyman told Nancy Reagan shortly after his death. (p. 731)
In sum, if you are a lefty or a connoisseur of the New York Times version of events, you will like Boot’s book. But if not, and if you are already more or less familiar with Reagan, this book is really an optional extra. I am glad I have it, but it needs to be balanced by other books about Reagan, including some of the volumes by Paul Kengor and Peggy Noonan. And evangelicals will enjoy the book by Christian writer Peggy Grande, The President Will See You Now (Hachette Books, 2017).
Given the importance of these two new biographies, more articles on each should be appearing in the days ahead.
