Review by Choice Review
Beginning in the 1950s, the conservative movement gradually transformed American politics. As the influence of their ideas grew, conservatives had to face numerous issues. Should they focus on purity of ideas or compromise to broaden their appeal? How should they deal with association with fringe groups like the John Birch Society? How important was a strong stance against communism and how much should Joe McCarthy be backed? Should they seek the allure of entrée into circles of power with the inevitable need to accommodate short-term politics? How should they cope with the tendencies toward elitism and lack of sympathies regarding the problems minorities faced? The career of William F. Buckley encapsulates all these issues, and this book does a remarkably good job of presenting these dilemmas by tracking the evolution of Buckley's thought about and public engagement with these matters. This is a very engaging and informative book. The author has a terrific talent for creating a narrative that moves along but simultaneously conveys the essential information in some detail. For anyone seeking insights into the role of Buckley in pushing the conservative message, this is an excellent book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels. --Jeffrey M. Stonecash, Syracuse University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY: Never judge a book by its title. Alvin S. Felzenberg's "A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr." is a gracefully written and richly informative book, but it's not a narrowly focused study of the relationships between one of the 20th century's leading political commentators and a series of American presidents, which were not very significant. (The exception was Buckley's singularly important friendship with Ronald Reagan, which Felzenberg explores in a pair of illuminating chapters.) Neither does the book tell the story of its subject's "political odyssey." Rather than taking the form of a journey from one place to another, or a voyage of discovery that ends where it began, Buckley's life is noteworthy for its constancy. He was born (in 1925) into a conservative Catholic family, he devoted his life to forging and popularizing the ideology that galvanized the conservative movement, and he died (in 2008) a conservative and a Catholic. Yes, there were important incremental adjustments along the way, as, like any thoughtful person, Buckley learned from intelligent interlocutors and responded to changes in the world around him. But his core political convictions remained remarkably consistent: opposition (in the name of individualism and free enterprise) to the size and growth of the federal government; insistence on defending traditional Judeo-Christian morality against all forms of "moral equivalency"; and a belief that American foreign policy should be oriented toward the defense of freedom against the threat of totalitarianism, especially Soviet Communism. (Buckley joined the America First Committee as an adolescent, but he permanently abandoned his youthful isolationism as soon as the United States entered World War II.) If there's an odyssey recounted in the book, it's that of conservatism itself - the ideology and electoral coalition that started to coalesce with Barry Goldwater's insurgent presidential campaign in 1964, took control of the Republican Party when Reagan won the White House in 1980, and held the G.O.P. firmly in its grip through the presidency of George W. Bush. That's where Felzenberg's story ends, but it's where conservatism's travails begin - or rather, it's where they resurface. Reading the book in light of events since Buckley's death - including the Sarah Palin sensation of 2008, the Anybody but Romney procession during the Republican primaries of 2012, but most of all Donald Trump's shockingly successful populist insurrection in 2016 - one realizes the passages that provide the most illumination are those in which Felzenberg highlights what Buckley himself described as his greatest achievement: purging the conservative movement of "extremists, bigots, kooks, anti-Semites and racists." The first such act of ideological excommunication came in the pages of National Review in 1957, two years after Buckley founded the magazine. (National Review would always play a crucial role in Buckley's efforts at boundary definition and policing, but so would his syndicated column and erudite public affairs program, "Firing Line," which premiered in 1966 and stayed on the air for an astonishing 33 years.) When Buckley assigned a review of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" to Whittaker Chambers, a Communist turned fervent anti-Communist and devout Catholic, he must have known the sparks would fly. To call the review an evisceration is to understate its severity. For Chambers, Rand's novel was morally obscene, a shrill and dogmatic exercise in political propaganda that promoted a form of inverted Marxism in which a coterie of capitalist supermen do battle with and justly triumph over throngs of resentful, parasitic "looters." Buckley himself would criticize Rand in similar terms on many occasions over the years, including in a decidedly mixed appreciation written on the occasion of her death in 1981. Four years after Chambers's review, Buckley took aim at the John Birch Society and its founder, Robert Welch. The two men met in 1952 and at first saw themselves as allies and ideological compatriots. These were years when Buckley and National Review were flamboyantly right-wing - denouncing President Eisenhower for an absence of ideological fortitude, treating Senator Joseph McCarthy as an American hero, defending Southern segregation and opposing the early civil rights movement in blatantly racist terms, and advocating the military "rollback" of the Soviet Union from Central and Eastern Europe. On all these matters, Buckley and Welch found common cause. But by the early 1960s, Buckley's most intellectually formidable colleagues (Chambers and the political theorist James Burnham) had prevailed on him to make the magazine more politically responsible. At the same time, Welch was moving in the opposite direction, founding the John Birch Society in 1958 to promote the view that Soviet spies had penetrated the highest levels of the United States government. Over the coming years, Welch and his organization would accuse a long list of public figures of acting as Communist agents, including Eisenhower himself, Eisenhower's secretary of state John Foster Dulles, and the young Henry Kissinger. The Birch Society also launched a campaign to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren for using the Supreme Court to prepare the way for a Communist takeover of the country. In April 1961, Buckley wrote the first of several editorials blasting Welch for spreading conspiracy theories that were both implausible on their face and likely to do considerable political harm to the conservative cause they both professed to believe in. Hundreds of angry letters streamed into the offices of the magazine, subscriptions were canceled, prominent donors withdrew their support, and the magazine's staffsplit into polarized factions. To his considerable credit, Buckley kept up the assault on Welch and the Birchers, ultimately establishing that the conservative movement would not tolerate conspiratorial forms of argument. Buckley responded similarly to George Wallace during his third-party presidential run in 1968. Making a play for many of the voters who had cast ballots for Goldwater four years earlier, Wallace portrayed himself as more conservative than the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon. Buckley disagreed, calling Wallace a "dangerous man" and a "welfare populist" who stoked anger and resentment among blue-collar voters and favored increased federal spending, provided it went only to whites and did nothing to further civil rights for African-Americans. In his final act of excommunication, Buckley took a stand against the paleoconservative Pat Buchanan in 1991 for expressing opposition to the Persian Gulf war in terms that were both incendiary and undeniably anti-Semitic. (Buchanan had claimed that the only two groups clamoring for war were "the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States" and described Congress as "Israeli-occupied territory.") Later that year, Buckley sought to expose and root out remaining vestiges of anti-Semitism on the right in a lengthy essay that filled an entire issue of National Review. Those were the factions of the right that Buckley aimed to exclude from the conservative movement: proudly plutocratic libertarians; conspiracy theorists; angry, race-baiting populists; and paleocons dabbling in ethnic demonization. Sound familiar? If it was once possible for members of the conservative movement to tell themselves that these factions had been driven into the political wilderness for good, recent events tell a more disconcerting story. Even when one side of a political argument appears to prevail decisively, it rarely succeeds in vanquishing the losers, who often live on to fight another day, sometimes years or decades later, more powerful and politically formidable than ever before. Felzenberg, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, has produced an accomplished and admiring biography that paints a portrait of a man toiling joyfully to define and elevate a political movement. But the book also, perhaps unintentionally, vindicates a cluster of enduring truths taught by the wisest conservatives down through the ages - that elevated things are fragile, and that nothing lasts forever, or even as long as we may wish. The rise of Donald Trump and overturning of so much that Buckley stood for doesn't quite cast a shadow of tragedy over his life's work. But it does evoke a mood that can only be described as wistful. 0 Buckley felt his finest achievement was purging the conservative movement of kooks and bigots. DAMON LINKER, a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com, is the author of "The Theocons" and "The Religious Test."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 24, 2017]
Review by Library Journal Review
William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008) was the enfant terrible among conservative journalists after World War II. As the founding editor of the National Review and host of the TV series Firing Line, he challenged liberals for a place within the ongoing political dialog. Historian -Felzenberg (Univ. of Pennsylvania Annenberg Sch. for Communication; The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't)) explains what motivated the young Irish Catholic upstart, the sixth of ten children, to challenge the status quo at Yale University and beyond. In many ways, the Buckley family mirrored the Kennedy clan; one crucial difference stemmed from Buckley's "Southern belle" mother and Texas-born father. This insightful work sheds light on Buckley's friendship with Ronald and Nancy Reagan, both before and during their time in the White House. Eventually, Buckley changed his perspective on racial issues and spoke out against the John Birch Society. VERDICT Felzenberg writes positively about Buckley's media success in this well-researched work that will appeal to both conservatives and liberals seeking to understand "democratic politics" and Buckley's accomplishments as an author, commentator, and leader.-William D. -Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An admiring look at the career of William F. Buckley Jr. (1925-2008), public contrarian.Presidential historian Felzenberg (Annenberg School for Communication, Univ. of Pennsylvania; The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game, 2008, etc.) praises the "elegance, humor, wit, and grace" that Buckley brought to his many roles as "writer and editor, debater, publicist, organizer, political candidate, activist, and networker extraordinaire." From his student days at Yale until his death, Buckley publicized and honed an unwavering conservative ideology, which Felzenberg asserts offered "a respectable alternative" to the nation's pervasive "liberal orthodoxy." Arguing that Buckley was hugely influential, the author more convincingly portrays him as an audacious gadfly and provocateur. The sixth of 10 children, he learned early how to speak his mind and garner the attention he coveted. Even as a schoolboy, Buckley "was judgmental about others and was anything but shy about voicing disapproval of people and views he disliked." That behavior persisted throughout his life, as he attacked communism, atheism, and liberal values. He supported Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist campaign, and he was "strident in his criticism of Dwight D. Eisenhower" as well as his successors, with the notable exception of Ronald Reagan. Until late in his life, he vehemently opposed efforts to protect the civil rights of African-Americans. Whites, he insisted, were "the more advanced race" and therefore "entitled to govern." An ardent Catholic, he condemned homosexuality. Besides a prolific output of books, Buckley founded and edited the National Review, a magazine, Felzenberg writes, with only "minimal" influence on national policy. TV appearances showcased Buckley's "quick wit, magnetic personality, and well-developed media savvy," turning him into a celebrity. His notoriety expanded in 1966, when he launched Firing Line, a TV program featuring feisty verbal combat. The author does not consider Buckley as a brother, father, and husband (his wife, "his best friend" and supporter, is hardly mentioned), focusing instead on his relationships with politicians. A well-delineated portrait of an impassioned conservative. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
