Sam Tanenhaus is best known as the incisive interpreter of William F. Buckley Jr., the most influential conservative intellectual of the twentieth century.
Widely considered the father of modern American conservatism, Buckley remade the Republican Party from the moderate politics of Eisenhower into the avowedly radical right-wing movement of Reagan. By constructing a right-wing media infrastructure, Buckley packaged and promoted conservative ideas to a mass audience, guiding the movement from political obscurity to national ascendancy. A colossal biography of Buckley has recently been written by Sam Tanenhaus, who agreed to speak with me.
Sam Tanenhaus is exceedingly warm and genial from the very start of our conversation. When he speaks, he seems to be swept up in his words. He does not merely answer my questions; he pushes the conversation forward with his insights, expressing himself with the same eloquence displayed in his writing. Tanenhaus has an undeniable intellectual thirst, a curiosity more akin to that of a youthful idealist than to a seasoned writer. Above all, Tanenhaus is desperate for readers to truly understand Buckley, rather than rigidly characterise him or dismiss him for his missteps.
Tanenhaus was born in 1955 to parents who were “aspirational, assimilated American Jews” and second-generation immigrants. “I was raised in an academic literary household”, he tells me. He initially thought he would follow the scholarly path, but while studying English Literature at Yale, he realised that he wanted to be a writer.
It was while researching his first book in the 1990s that Tanenhaus first met the man who would change the course of his life: William F. Buckley Jr. The biography Tanenhaus was writing was of Communist agent turned defector Whittaker Chambers, a man whom Buckley knew well, so Tanenhaus reached out to him. “I was just starting out. I was in my early 30s. I’d written, published very little. And yet, Buckley took this very kindly interest in me”, Tanenhaus recalls. “He invited my wife and me to his house for dinner, which terrified us. Buckley was really famous then.” Tanenhaus’ genuine affection for Buckley – a man who helped him invaluably – is unmistakable in the smile that crosses his face. “It was really as if we were doing him a favour by visiting him, which is hard to imagine, because this is someone who was on television every week.”
Whittaker Chambers: A Biography came out in 1998 and was highly acclaimed – especially by Buckley. Its success prompted Buckley to anoint Tanenhaus as his biographer, granting him remarkable access to his archives. Almost three decades later, Tanenhaus’ long-awaited biography was published and became one of the most-reviewed non-fiction books of 2025. “When people ask me, well, why’d it take so long to write the book?” Tanenhaus says, pre-empting my next question, “I tell them I’m actually not that slow a writer, but I’m a really slow thinker”.
Despite writing two heavyweight biographies, Tanenhaus does not see himself as a biographer. Perhaps this is because his biographies are more than simply narratives of a life; Tanenhaus describes them as “moral dramas”. He explains that writers are often drawn to people who are bolder in the lives they lead. “I like the idea of the intellectual who somehow participates in history, because that’s the fantasy we all have”, Tanenhaus notes. Writing is his way of living out his fantasies.
Crucial to being a writer, according to Tanenhaus, is being able to “immerse yourself in the world that surrounds your figure”. He adds: “If you can’t understand how the world looks to them, then you’re never going to see who they really were.” Tanenhaus is compelled to write about his subjects by an inescapable desire to understand them in all their complexity. As he sits down at his desk to write, his mind is no longer in his study in America – it is wherever he wishes. “Your mind goes out into the world”, Tanenhaus says of the process of writing. “You can just become anybody and anything, and that’s liberating.”
“I wish there was more of that in our political conversation”, Tanenhaus remarks, a flicker of dejection crossing his face. “We pay a lot of lip service to listening to one another and setting aside partisanship, but I think it’s even more than that. It’s almost trying to put yourself really inside someone else’s character and mind.” Doing this, Tanenhaus argues, reveals the limitations in one’s own thinking. Tanenhaus exemplifies his own principles. A man with liberal, centre-left political leanings, he dedicated decades of his life to exploring Buckley, a towering figure on the right who exhibited views which today are considered racist and antisemitic. “You can’t judge by the standards of this moment”, Tanenhaus emphasises when I bring this up. “No one will ever pass that test.” Tanenhaus adds that he’s often mistaken for a conservative because of his endeavour to understand conservatives. “People are shocked when I tell them I voted for Jesse Jackson in Democratic primaries”, he exclaims, eyes widened in amusement. “They can’t believe it!”.
Understanding – and truly capturing – William F. Buckley Jr was far more challenging than Tanenhaus had expected when he started writing the book. Political figures are often categorised, presented in such a way as to fit an ideological straitjacket. Yet nobody is as simple as the one-line summaries of their careers suggest. People are more complex than the simplistic binaries that the conservative-liberal paradigm allow for. We are shaped not solely by a single ideological worldview, but by a constellation of influences – attitudes, people, events – which intertwine to form a distinctive perspective. In Buckley’s case, those influences included thinkers such as the anti-democratic libertarian Albert Jay Nock and the former Marxist philosopher James Burnham; formative events like the Second World War, the postwar Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe and the cultural revolution of the 1960s; and the traditionally Southern attitudes of his parents.
“There are so many different Buckleys, and sometimes people will say, well, how do you reconcile them?” Tanenhaus observes. “And I say, you can’t.” That acceptance – even embrace – of contradiction is evident in the biography. Buckley can simultaneously be described as a globalist, due to his vehement support of the Vietnam War, and an isolationist, because of his opposition to US involvement in WWII. He was unyieldingly confrontational in debates and scrupulously polite in private conversation. He was racist in his early years, supporting segregation in the South, but by 1970 spoke of the need for a black President. The inconsistencies are endless. What was consistent throughout his life was his Catholic faith and his allegiance to the Republican Party; those loyalties never wavered.
Tanenhaus and I then turn to discuss Buckley’s role in the rise of American conservatism. Of Buckley, Tanenhaus writes: “His weapons were not his ideas, which could be heard elsewhere, but his words, which sparkled with freshness.” Tanenhaus sees Buckley not as a theorist or a purveyor of original ideas but as an entertainer, a political performer. Tanenhaus expands on this vision in our conversation. “What Buckley saw was that the conservative arguments are never going to change all that much. The point of conservatism is to preserve and hold on to things”, he explains. Conservatism thus defines itself against innovation: it is a creed of continuity rather than rupture, stability instead of radical change. “So you have to make your arguments sound fresh. They have to have the kind of rhetorical excitements that liberalism does.” That Buckley did. As America entered the age of mass media, the entertainment aspect of politics became increasingly important. Buckley was one of the first to embrace this, unlike many of his political contemporaries, who felt threatened by it. Buckley recognised that intellectual ideas could not simply be incubated in the realm of rarefied debate – they needed to be presented compellingly to have political impact.
How did Buckley conquer this nascent attention age? How did he transform himself into the foremost journalistic and television personality of the twentieth century? The answer lies in his construction of a formidable media empire of which he was the figurehead. This empire included National Review, the magazine which saw itself as the foremost purveyor of conservative ideas, and Firing Line, a television show in which Buckley interviewed political thinkers. “Buckley was the first intellectual to go on television who didn’t try to pretend to be anything other than what he was”, Tanenhaus tells me. Buckley thought people would be amused by his distinct voice, style and manner of speaking – and they were. Crucially, what so attracted people to Buckley was simply the fact that he was so different from them. His singularity was his strength.
Conservative critics argue that Tanenhaus’ biography understates Buckley’s accomplishments by framing him chiefly as a political performer. But Tanenhaus is insistent that Buckley’s role was on par with, if not exceeding, the influence of that of a pioneering political theorist. The conservative movement needed him. “Buckley’s contribution was not to generate the arguments, but to create the space where they could happen”, Tanenhaus contends. There’s a twinkle in his eye as he adds: “He could sometimes make the arguments better than the philosophers!” Indeed, Tanenhaus’ biography deftly outlines how Buckley wove together disparate strands of political thought – anti-communism, social conservatism and economic liberalism – into a coherent philosophy known as Fusionism, a synthesis that propelled the American Right into positions of power.
Fusionism no longer holds the American Right together. The collapse of the Soviet Union stripped anti-communism of its unifying force, while the rise of right-wing populism under Trump has provoked a backlash to economic liberalism. Only social conservatism endures. Yet Buckley’s significance remains undiminished. He was instrumental in shaping modern American conservatism, constructing a media ecosystem that enabled conservatives to project their ideas to a mass audience.
Tanenhaus and I then consider an inescapable question about modern politics: did Buckley lay the groundwork for Trump’s rise? In many respects, Trump can be seen as Buckley’s political heir. Both cast themselves as leaders of a counterrevolution against an oppressive liberal orthodoxy, and both identified elite institutions – the Ivy League, legacy media, and federal bureaucracy – as strongholds of liberal dominance.
Yet Tanenhaus insists that Buckley was also markedly different from Trump: “Buckley really valued civil discourse.” Buckley’s debates unfolded in the realm of ideas and language, not invective and insult. “He liked to conduct the conversation on a higher level.”
As Tanenhaus speaks, I’m struck that these qualities in Buckley are sorely at odds with the MAGA movement today. I posit that Buckley would have felt out of place in a populist Republican Party where intellectualism is disdained and the expert class is attacked. Tanenhaus concurs, pointing out that Buckley felt most comfortable in the company of intellectuals. “I do think it would be very hard for him to reconcile himself to a universe that disdains thought and questioning and writing.” Buckley was famous for the dinner parties he held at his elegant Manhattan maisonette, which were frequented by the luminaries and leading intellectuals of his time. “Who would be the intellectuals on the Right that Buckley would invite to a dinner party today?” Tanenhaus asks. “I don’t have an answer to it.” It is a poignant vision to end on: Buckley, a man unparalleled in influence, watching on as populism engulfs the very intellectual movement he helped create. A founder at odds with his heirs.
As our conversation draws to a close, I sense in Tanenhaus an open-mindedness and a curiosity which is vanishingly rare in our contemporary political age. We live in a deeply polarised environment in which political opponents are perceived as irredeemable enemies and debate across the aisle is little more than an exercise in insult. A return to the values Tanenhaus espouses in his writing would be a welcome remedy. In striving to understand Buckley – a man whose politics he does not share – Tanenhaus models an empathy that our divided political climate so desperately needs.
