Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America

Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America vividly captures its subject in all his facets and phases: founding editor of National Review, syndicated columnist, Emmy-winning TV debater, bestselling spy novelist, ally of Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater, game-changing candidate for mayor of New York, mentor to Ronald Reagan. 

Tanenhaus also has uncovered the darker trail of Bill Buckley’s many exploits – his secret partnerships with Southern segregationists, his campaign to free a self-confessed murderer from death row, CIA missions in Latin America, collusions with Watergate felon Howard Hunt — and Buckley’s struggle in his last years to hold together a movement coming apart over the AIDS epidemic, culture wars, and the invasion of Iraq, even as his own media empire was unraveling. 

Praise & Reviews

* “Sam Tanenhaus is one of the premier biographers and storytellers today   . . . a master craftsman of narrative and historical writing.”–Peter John Loewen, Dean of Arts and Sciences, Cornell University

“The principal achievement of Buckley is to have tightly wound together the life of the man and the life of the movement he coaxed into being. In Tanenhaus, both have found their Robert Caro.” –Mark Lilla, New York Review of Books

“Tanenhaus’s prose is clear-running, unassertive, and elegant, and his judgments are sound throughout. Buckley is a magnificent work of history as well as of biography, and is as relevant to these parlous times as it is revelatory of Buckley and his times.”–John Banville, The London Times

“Read this book—mainly because you’ll enjoy it, but also for the light it sheds on our current darkness.”– James Fallows, Book Post

“A magnificent achievement—a long, gripping, and enthralling account of the life of America’s premier conservative polemicist of the twentieth century.”—Max Boot, author of Reagan: His Life and Legend

“Not only a psychologically astute and subtle biography of a seminal figure, Buckley is now the definitive intellectual history of the conservative movement. William F. Buckley forever changed America, and Buckley will forever change how we understand America.” —John Ganz, author of When the Clock Broke

“A must-read for anyone who wants to understand what the conservative movement once was and what it has come to be. All that a biography could and should be.”—Beverly Gage, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of G-Man

“A superb biography. Writing a life is harder than it looks. Sam Tanenhaus’s contribution is up there with Robert Blake’s classic Disraeli.”
—Niall Ferguson, author of Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist and The House of Rothschild

“A rich, immersive biography. Exposes the roots of the modern conservative movement through the life of the firebrand writer and commentator who shaped it.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

“This elegant, capacious character study shows how Buckley’s spadework opened many of the fault lines that still fracture American politics.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Painstakingly researched and beautifully crafted, Buckley is a capacious and incisive history of the modern conservative movement’s formative years, seen through the eyes of its intellectual leader—a man who, in Tanenhaus’s hands, is enthralling and infuriating by turns, but never boring.”
—The Washington Post (front-cover review)

“Monumental, honest, fair-minded, and spectacularly enlightening.”
—Charles King, Foreign Affairs

“A biography not just of a prominent influencer but also of a potent movement . . . a milestone contribution to our understanding of the American Century.”—The Boston Globe

“Marvelous, decades-in-the-making. Offers a deeply affectionate portrait of Buckley’s personal life [and] also methodically surfaces the darker strains of the movement.”—The New Republic

“The detail is meticulous, the feel for context assured and the ear ever open to a good story . . . unlikely to be bettered anytime soon.”
—The Financial Times

“A grand biography . . . magnificent.”—The Washington Monthly

“Tanenhaus’s account of Buckley’s youthful adventures in the CIA stands comparison with the best John le Carré spy fiction . . . the definitive biography.”—The Spectator World

“Superb . . . Tanenhaus discovered some parts of the story that were largely unknown. Fair and balanced story of a life of purpose, one that was actively lived and whose echoes are still felt today.”—The Christian Science Monitor

“Runs to more than 1,000 pages—yet is not a word too long.”
—The Economist

“A remarkable accomplishment: exhaustive but not tiring, serious yet lively, both affectionate and suspicious . . . almost dizzyingly populated with recognizable characters.”—Defector