Judis, John B. William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. 528 pages.

When William F. Buckley, Jr., founded The National Review in 1955, U.S. conservatives were our "stupid party" (as J.S. Mill called England's Tories). Real intellectuals, it seemed then, derived from the New Deal -- or the left. Conservative thinking, such as it was, had mixed and mostly dubious antecedents: e.g., American nativism; pre-"Vatican II" Catholicism; the mystical anticommunism of Whittaker Chambers; or the cultish (as it seemed then) laissez-faire of Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek.

Buckley and his magazine changed all that. John Judis's massive biography details how Buckley helped create conservative readers and institutions (e.g., Young Americans for Freedom) that made politicians like Goldwater and Reagan possible. As a Yalie and a CIA agent, and as the dutiful son of a rich oil wildcatter who was also a devout Catholic, Buckley's own life bridged many of the varieties of conservatism that later would fuse in the Reagan 80s -- and which now may once again be coming apart. Judis's account also suggests (to me, at least) that politics remains for Buckley the intellectual game he first practiced as a brilliant, devout, eager-to-please child on his father's estate.

-- Steve Badrich
ISBN 0-671-45494-3

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