The Author of Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America on Politics, Music, and Biography Writing
Sam Tanenhaus is a journalist, biographer, and historian. He is the 2025 Zubrow Distinguished Visiting Journalist at Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences. He was previously the editor-in-chief of the New York Times Book Review and recently published an 850-page biography on William F. Buckley Jr. called Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Cornell Review: “Could you say that Buckley was the first conservative influencer, since he kind of took on more of a figurehead role?
Tanenhaus: “Yeah, that– what I have found is– it’s one reason why it’s interesting to write a book like this, is that’s the term being applied to him now.
Review: Yeah.
Tanenhaus: That would never have occurred to me when I was writing the book, but now that I hear it, yes, it makes sense as long as we all agree that an influencer is a really important person. In other words, as long as we’re not disparaging someone by calling them that.
In his era, it was called being a publicist, a promoter of ideas. “Publicist” has a different meaning for us now. And we think of an influencer doing a similar thing. For instance, I write a lot about Conservatives, and a young friend of mine was going to the University of Connecticut, this was in 2018, and he met Charlie Kirk and was very excited about him. And I thought, well, this is somebody I should write about.
Review: Yeah.
Tanenhaus: And then I went and looked at what I could find in Charlie Kirk and I thought, “well this isn’t really a serious thinker, so he’s not somebody I’m going to write about. Well, that’s how some people reacted to Buckley at the time. And then in retrospect you realize there’s a different role for somebody like that, who interfaces more with the public. That’s what Buckley’s role was.
So a Jim Burnham or a Frank Meyer or the greatest, most original thinker in that whole group was probably Willmoore Kendall, if you’ve read about him. You don’t hear so much about him anymore. He had an enormous influence on Buckley and Gary Wills. Gary Wills told me …Willmoore Kendall was the one thinker in that constellation that you needed to take seriously, that the Arguments were so compelling you had to really engage with that. With Bill Buckley no one would ever say that. What they’d say is he states it really concisely and elegantly, and with a richness of language, on all these different platforms. But he’s not an original thinker. So I think that’s the difference.
Review: I guess he’s still considered the architect of the Fusionism movement mainly because of his public facing role. Would you say that’s true or…
Tanenhaus: I would say two things. Yes, that’s one, the other is, he was a fantastic impresario and ringmaster, so he brought people together. So when I interviewed– he died long ago– the publisher of National Review, William Rusher, Bill Rush, I interviewed him in San Francisco in, I think, 2002, and I said, “When was Bill Buckley at his peak? He said that the peak was in the 1950s, which surprised me, because Buckley became more famous when he went on television in the 1960s. And Bill Rusher said the most important work Bill did was in the 50s. This was his phrase: he brought all the lions and tigers and bears together. And that’s really what fusionism means.
Review: I see.
Tanenhaus: It’s a very elevated term, it– I am not as big a subscriber to the ideology of fusionism as some other people. To my mind, and, everyone is free to disagree, I think it sounds better than it really is. I don’t think it’s that original an idea…I talk about the faith and freedom argument and to me that’s the same thing. Faith is religion, that’s the embracing value, and freedom is the market. So when Frank Meyer and Brent Bozell had their big debate, it was Freedom Vs. Virtue. To me, that sounds like Faith and Freedom.
It was Buckley who came up with the term Fusionism, almost accidentally, because he was a great user of words. And a lot of politics is about language and rhetoric. One of my Favorite Bill Buckley quotes is when he wrote an essay in defense of Reagan, when Reagan became governor of California in 1966, and conservatives felt let down by him because they expected him to strip away the government and they didn’t, and Bill Buckley said, “The important thing isn’t what Reagan is doing right now but what he said he want;s to do. So he said “Rhetoric precedes action. Rhetoric comes first. That means language.
So to come up with a term like Fusionism is hugely helpful, right? Because people feel it makes sense to them. That’s the really important thing to do. Even if it’s not a book, it’s not an argument, it’s just one word. It shows you the power of rhetoric in politics. Then, what Buckley went on to say was, “Rhetoric precedes action,” and then he said, “all-important action.” That you have to make the case first, and then you can move.
Review: I see. This leads into something that probably most people who are unfamiliar with Buckley would focus on, which is his famous mannerisms. The pen, the voice…
Tanenhaus: The eyebrows!
Review: Yes, yes… What role did this play in his popularity? How did people at the time view it? Certainly not the same as we would view it today, but–
Tanenhaus: How would we view it? Well, I would ask you how you think people would view it today.
Review: Well, it’s seen as exceedingly strange, but some assume that this was more normal at the time. What’s your opinion?
Tanenhaus: People loved it. Here’s why. He was the first intellectual. So now we’re getting into these distinctions. Wait a minute, people kind of misread my book in this way.
In a lot of interviews I’ll say as a kind of joke Bill Buckley wasn’t an intellectual, but he played one on TV. And people are offended by that, but I actually mean something more serious by it. Most people never encounter an intellectual in their normal lives. You might encounter a scholar or an academic who’s really smart or really knowledgeable. An intellectual’s something slightly different. It’s somebody who interprets the world through a set of ideas. And so when Buckley first went on television in 1966, really in the first debates he had running for mayor in 1965, which is what created the opening for him to go on television, people couldn’t take their eyes off him! Because of these mannerisms, and because of the voice, they kept listening to him.
Now, you can be that, have those quirks and be really off-putting. It was to Buckley’s advantage that he had that great smile, and he seemed to be in on the joke himself, right? It’s almost closer, we’re moving out of that phase now, when I was young, the late night TV hosts were like the biggest stars in the world. Names you haven’t even heard of. Johnny Carson would have 30 million people watching him every night, and Buckley was on his show a lot. You can see it on YouTube. Winking at the audience, or a double-take. You say something I think is bizarre, I don’t say that to you. I look at the camera. Buckley figured out early on that that’s how you connect with an audience. And because people weren’t used to seeing somebody with that vocabulary, and that Yale, patrician pedigree and all that, they became fascinated by him. So it was hugely important.
And here’s the other thing that’s odd about it. You can seem very eccentric on the one hand., but natural on the other. Because, as you said, there are odd gestures and mannerisms he had… A producer could have pulled him aside and said “Bill, you know, look at your- look what you just did on the camera? It looks a little odd,” and Buckley would have said, “Well, so what?”
So he went out in front of audiences all the time and he knew he connected well with them. That made him seem different from the idea most people had of what a conservative was like. He was more fun than they were. So all that worked to his advantage.
And now, I notice that younger people mainly know Buckley through those Firing Line debates. They go on YouTube and watch them. I see this in some of the writing about my book from younger critics. They write more about Firing Line than they do about his important books, or his column. Those days where you reached most people generally was as a columnist for a newspaper. Nowadays that almost doesn’t really exist anymore because columns aren’t syndicated. So you would write your column and you give it to whoever your syndicate was, and they would send it out to all the newspapers. That’s how most people read Buckley.
Review: Okay. Bill Buckley here, as of course you talk about in your book, has a really international background. Do you think that influenced his politics at all?
Tanenhaus: I do. Yeah. Because, first of all, his father belonged to the generation of entrepreneurs who were invited by, especially in this hemisphere, what was called peaceful penetration. They were actually invited by the leaders, often the dictators, of those regimes, to come in and develop the industry there. So Buckley grew up with the idea that governments should foster business that the best relationship between a business community and a political regime was for the regime to support business and if you know this history, there was a thing called that goes all the way back to Henry Clay–
Review: The American System.
Tanenhaus: That’s it, right? This is the international version of it. Yeah, develop the railways, right? Develop the resources, absolutely. What that also meant was, however, he developed ideas in his own home about class and caste and hierarchy.
Because both his parents were from the Deep South, they grew up in very hierarchical societies. New Orleans has a Caste system based on your background and your color. Texas, the area he grew up in, belonged to Mexico for a long time. That was the area that was contested that started the Mexican American war. The father, Bill’s father, grew up in a later period not that long after. Buckley’s father was born in 1881, and the Mexican war was fought in 1847. That’s one generation. That meant he grew up surrounded by Mexicans who thought they once owned that land– because they did! So he had a lot of respect for upper class Latin American culture. That was his model.
His father’s idea of the most cosmopolitan, erudite, sophisticated people he met were businessmen in Mexico City who spoke French. So that’s his idea of what an elite should look like. It’s very different from an American elite. And that’s what you feel with Buckley that makes him feel a little different. And also, just, the true belief in entrepreneurialism. That’s what will modernize a country. I don’t know if you’ve read Frank Fukuyama’s The End of History… he’s always defending it and saying people misread him, and people say that what he was really writing about was modernization. Not necessarily the triumph of democracy.
Yeah.
And that modernizing idea through business, technology, development, that’s something that the conservatives really embraced. And that’s why they were suspicious of big government that came in beginning with Roosevelt really. That it was going to take care of people. Well then why not let rich business people take care of them? Well we know what some of the answers are. We can’t scale it up to the level we need. We can’t cover healthcare through philanthropy, it’s just not going to work for people.
I’ll add another thing to the international background that’s really important. Another way that background was important to Buckley was because of the languages he spoke and his social ease in different cultures. What that did was to give him confidence– it’s paradoxical– to say, “Well, I can be an isolationist because I don’t hate foreign cultures.” In fact, there’s an incident you may remember in the book when he goes off to boarding school in England, and the professor of French starts saying how Americans aren’t really a true civilization.
Review: “A muddle of Europeans.”
Tanenhaus: And what does Buckley do? Put him in his place by speaking in a better French accent than he had. So that’s where it was really useful to him. That’s why the father had them educated abroad. He got that idea from the Mexican elite he met, who sent children abroad to get exposed to European culture and languages. Then you’re more confident stating your case and that was a really important component for Buckley.
Could you talk a little bit about the effects Buckley has had on how politics is done in general? We talked about how he was the first, sort of, influencer, but also yesterday you mentioned the interview or the debate where he said some unsavory things… has that kind of bled into today’s politics?
Tanenhaus: Well, you know, if you’ve seen the film Best of Enemies, that’s the argument in the film. And you probably know I’m in it, a talking head in that film.
And I mention it and people say, “Well, you produced that movie”, and I say, “I wish.” No, I was not a producer, I was just in it. But their argument, I think, is, I’m friendly with those guys, and they’ve been talking about making a separate film about Bill Buckley, so we hit it off pretty well. But I think they exaggerate a little bit how much of the name-calling came out of that one exchange with Buckley. Buckley did fifteen hundred Firing Line episodes. And some of them are conducted at such a high intellectual level we’ve never seen anything like it since.
And I’ll give you an example: look at his interview in Firing Line with Gary Wills. Have you ever seen this? I don’t know if you can see the video, but you can go to the Hoover Institution archive and download the transcript; in fact, that’s what I used for my book, because when you’re writing a book, no one’s going to hear it, you have to have the words themselves. When Wills and Buckley are debating Catholic thought and tradition, you almost can’t believe what you’re hearing. I read some of it to my wife and she said, “You can’t put that in the book, it’s just too rarified and sophisticated.”
So that, I think, was a little unfair to Buckley, the Best of Enemies portrayal, because really what he did was to import intellectual and verbal sophistication to television at a time when it really didn’t have it. One thing that separated Buckley from other intellectuals is they looked down on TV and Buckley never did. Because he wants to reach as many people as he can, he’ll do it any way he can. That’s why he formed some of those alliances with surprising people too. They were effective, Joe McCarthy for instance. So I think in that sense, Buckley was opening up the movement but as we also talked about last night, and as you know it’s a theme in the book, is that Buckley was really the first intellectual, maybe in American history, because of the moment he came along. His feel for mass media– that’s where the debates are going to be won and lost. They’re not going to be won and lost with a hand up or down vote in the House or the Senate; though they’re important, that’s not where the big battles will be fought. They’ll be fought out in the public arena, through people who have access to media. And he learned that partly through the America First movement, in Lindbergh.
You may remember that there’s an early moment in the book when they’re complaining– it sounds just like today– they complain that the press is biased against Lindbergh, all the networks, right? They aren’t carrying the speeches. It sounds so familiar. That’s why it’s in the book.
I’ll tell you one funny thing about that too: In my first draft when I had that scene, at the time of the famous Madison Square Garden speech, which the teenage Buckley actually attended, I had a line that mentioned how already media is beginning to dominate the debates, and then I had a line that said something like, “Buckley would be the genius, or the first true pioneer of this medium,” and the editors said, “This seems to be what the book is about, so don’t say it.” Which seems paradoxical, right? But that’s how you write narrative. You want the reader to see it happen over time rather than to hit them over the head with a mallet. She was very smart to say that.
Review: On that note, could you tell us a bit about the challenges working on the same biography for such a long period? Collecting all that information into a thousand page document?
Tanenhaus: Well, umm, you know about Geoff Kabaservice, right? Geoff Kabaservice was recommended to me as a researcher, he probably wasn’t thirty years old, right? Maybe he barely was. I knew the Buckley archive was so enormous I couldn’t get through it all by myself. And I didn’t have the time to do it. So if a man writes six hundred letters a week, as he did, because he’s responding to the six hundred letters he gets, that’s a lot of correspondence to read. When you see the Buckley archive, one box might be the letter a for correspondence for one year. Do you know how many pages are in a box this big, is probably five to seven thousand pages. So it’s an archive the size, and this was verified by me by an archivist that worked in the Reagan Library, it’s the size of Ronald Reagan’s archive. You cannot get through it all by yourself, and you don’t want to read every single document because a guy who writes six hundred letters per week isn’t necessarily writing six hundred important letters. So you have to filter through them. You have to find your way through it by deciding or guessing what really matters. Then as things come up, you adjust and shift. Well, what’s the big discovery I made in the book? It isn’t even in Buckley’s library: it’s in Camden, South Carolina. So that meant starting all over again.
You think, “Well, a biography should be pretty simple to write, because you know when someone’s born, you know when they die, you know when they went to college, what profession they had, when they got married, when they had children.” You have a timeline in front of you, but a timeline is not the same as a narrative. You start with a timeline but you have to develop a narrative. So, here’s how I formulate that now. This occurred to me when I was teaching a writing course last spring. You have to go from mastering your subject to mastering your material. And the material is what a writer works with. It’s not enough just to know what Buckley said and did. I have to find the throughline that keeps the reader going, what’s going to happen next. I don’t know how many people have said that once they start reading, they keep turning the pages. As much effort went into that as into the archive. I was telling a story, and that’s separate. That’s you, sitting alone with your computer. A sentence doesn’t work? Let’s try another one. This sounds ridiculous, but I’m actually a pretty fast writer. But I’m the world’s slowest thinker.
It’s about weighing the information with the broader story you want to tell. To me, that’s the pleasure of writing a book like this.
A few years after I signed the contract, I got a very big job at the NYT as the editor of the NYT book review. That means you’re running a little operation, you know it’s the equivalent, you know the staff is smaller, it’s like running a department or being a dean here, you’re responsible for so many different people, thousands of books are being sent out to reviewers, and you’re managing the staff that puts it together. In those days it was print journalism. So it’s coming out every week… it’s the most influential book reviewing vehicle in the world, you’re making decisions all the time deciding whether or not to review books… One percent of books that are published would be reviewed in the NYT book review. So the most important decision we ever make is whether or not to review a book. That’s a full time job.
Then they gave me a second job, in the 2008 election, because they knew I was interested in politics and history, and the 2008 election was the game changing election. Barack Obama, which ultimately gave us president Trump. They wanted somebody who knew some history to edit that part of the newspaper as well. And I said, “Well, what do I do with the book review?” and they said, “Well, that’s easy– you do both of them.” So, that was pretty time consuming.
And also, while Buckley was still alive, it was really hard to do. I’m aware of only one great classic biography in the modern era written of a living subject. Robert Caro’s book, the Power Broker. It’s about Robert Moses, who was a great name. It was a great idea. All nonfiction begins with the choice of subject, whether the book is going to be good or not. It doesn’t mean if you choose a good subject you’re going to write a good book. But if you choose a bad subject, you know you won’t write a good book.
Robert Moses was the creator of all the highways and bridges and parks in New York City. And Caro, Robert Caro, was the first journalist to see that somebody like that might be more important than the mayor or a governor, because he’s creating– now it seems really obvious. So he spent years on that book. It’s twice as long as mine, and half as long as what he actually wrote. And my book, originally. Was a lot longer than what you have now, even if you have to bend your knees to pick it up. But when Caro wrote that book his subject Robert Moses was still alive. It’s a classic of our literature and one of the great biographies ever written, and the subject was still alive. I’m not aware of another case of that. Really, you can’t do it until your subject has died.
I would see Buckley, and he wanted me to finish… He never spent more than two months writing a book, so he couldn’t understand why it took me so long. He wanted to see it before he died, but a lot of the things I write about I didn’t even discover until after he died. The subject begins to weigh on you.
All the while, I had Geoff Kabaservice going through the documents and creating files for me. Geoff Kabaservice, I will just say, is the greatest researcher I’ve ever encountered in any context. That is to say, something I’ve read, somebody I’ve talked to, and I know that first hand. If you know his book Rule and Ruin I reviewed it for the New York Review of Books, and I think he drew on material from 160 archives to write that book. And that’s a level of research and investigation I’ve just never encountered.
I’ll tell you something else about Jeff Cabacerves, he read the final pre-publication version of my book, the advanced reading copy, he sent me eleven single-spaced pages of corrections. “No, it wasn’t 1941, it was 1940.” That kind of thing. All the way through. And I sent it to the copyeditor, the editors at random house, and they said, “Well, I don’t know if we’re going to have time to make all of these changes,” and I said, “Yes you do.” You can’t know there’s an error and let it go into your book. Errors always get in, but you can’t commit an error knowingly in a book like this.
So my point is I had that kind of help. Yeah, going through the archive reading the correspondence, what Jeff did was to create a 350 or 400 page chronological digest of Buckley’s political correspondence. And then he put it in a file so I could search it, draw the quotes out with the exact citation each time. I think I’ve found a total of 3 typographical errors in those 350 pages. That’s how good he is. I‘ve just never seen anything like it. And I’ll say this: to my mind it’s a disgrace that he’s not a professor of history at a US college. And he wanted to do it. You probably know that’s what he wanted to do, and he couldn’t even get an interview. And I go to campuses like this– I don’t do it anymore because he’s old and very established– and say, “Why don’t you hire Geoff Kabaservice?” I’ll let you fill in the answer if you’d like in your piece… He was the most exceptional graduate student in history, won the biggest prizes at Yale University, and he could not get a job teaching at a small college anywhere.
Review: Kotlikoff, if you’re listening…
Tanenhaus: It’s not that he can’t do the scholarship, but it’s the wrong kind of scholarship, and the wrong kind of scholar. And I don’t think we should shy away from saying that.
Review: On a similar note…
Tanenhaus: Now we’re into it!
Review: I was wondering if you could discuss the trajectory that Buckley took throughout his life away from the fiery radicalism of his youth.
Tanenhaus: That happens to every– to so many of us in our lives you know. I may be sort of an obnoxious blowhard now, you should have heard me when I was 30!
So, what happened with Buckley was, yes, he began, and these terms now mean something again because they’ve come back, he began as kind of an America Firster– an anti-New-Deal America Firster. And an opponent of the Civil Rights Movement. That was the identity Buckley had in the 1950s– remember, he’s born in 1925– so by the age of 30… It’s so funny because when I was writing this book, I thought “Why am I writing about all this ancient history?” It’s like it’s happening right around us.
So he began as what he called a radical conservative. Which for you Burkeans might seem a contradiction in terms. In fact, people have said that to me. “How can you be a radical conservative, because a conservative wants to preserve, and a radical, we know what it means: you’re tearing things up by their roots, right?” And the answer is actually pretty simple: if you think the other side has totally transformed or destroyed the idea of a society you believe in, the only way to get to fight back is to tear everything up, right? And so I realized that phrase was not a kind of failure of definition. That Buckley knew exactly what he was saying.
When I interviewed one of his very best friends, the former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who’s still pretty famous, Henry Kissinger was talking about when he first met Buckley in the 1950s. He described Bill and people around him as radical conservatives. I thought, “Oh, that’s the term they used.” Buckley invented it, as far as I know, he coined it. Buckley also coined the term Liberal Establishment in National Review. Capital L, Capital E.
So Buckley began as a radical on the right, and then his side started to make inroads, and as Geoff Kabaservice points out in his book, that really came with the election of Richard Nixon. It was a shock to them, because they didn’t trust Nixon. Nixon had been Eisenhower’s vice president. Eisenhower’s moderate, and as Jeff in his book says Nixon was the first “professional Republican” elected president since Herbert Hoover in 1928, 40 years. Now, Nixon, who’s kind of a centrist and moderate, needs Bill Buckley to protect his right flank. And so Buckley becomes more and more important, not just an influencer at this point but an influential member of the Nixon administration, who was slightly outside the United States information agency. But really, through the power of his column.
In this period, by the way, political columnists, the David Brooks’ and Ross Douthats and Jamelle Bouies of that time, were more important than cabinet secretaries. Because Presidents would call them and say what should I do next.
And Buckley at that point had joined the establishment. He’s in a presidential administration. His job, he thinks, his mission, is to promote Nixon’s policies and protect the administration, defend it, against its critics! So the Joe McCarthyite of the 1950s who is going after the State Department, as they did then, is now defending the State Department! So that moderated his politics somewhat.
The other thing that happened was that because Buckley was such a social animal, he met and knew many people, and a lot of them turned out to be liberals that he personally really liked.
Review: He’s literally me.
Tanenhaus: I became very good friends with a guy who used to do a lot of sailing with Buckley. Sailing was Buckley’s passion. And he told me, and I think it’s in the book, I only talk about politics when I’m paid to do it, and he was paid a lot. And I got to know one of his sailing companions, who lived in Vermont, and he said to him, “Why do you invite me on all these sailing trips? I’m a left-wing Democrat, and I’m an atheist, and I totally believe in the authority of science as opposed to religion.” And Buckley said, “That’s why.” That’s why I want you here, it makes for a more fun conversation, right? I think this is one of Bucley’s biggest contributions that’s being overlooked: can’t we just set aside the politics for 5 minutes and talk about something else?
Review: So what do you think Buckley would make of conservatism and politics more broadly in 2025 now that we’ve changed the media environment from columns to a more decentralized system, and now that politics is now all-consuming?
Tanenhaus: Buckley was a pioneer who wanted to build an alternative media, he got that. That was really one of the goals. In a story I wrote on the Never-Trumpers– David Frum– I interviewed Geoff Kabaservice. He said what Bill Buckley wanted was a Conservative version of the NYT, which is a little different, let’s say, from a website or substack or even something like the Free Press.
He still had that institutional idea. Let’s just consider, if you look at the dedication to God and Man at Yale, right? He says, “To God and Country and to Yale.” And as I say in the book, he thought he was saving Yale! He didn’t want to destroy it. He thought he was returning Yale to its prior, better self, as he said, for the first 200 years of its history Yale did pretty well, and it’s only in the last 50 years it got off track. “I like the old Yale.” So there’s something very classically conservative about that. And I asked him once, just to show you how far back some of that goes, when Buckley was still alive the big flame throwing cable guy was Bill O’Reilly. You know that name?
Review: Yes, one of the big provocateurs…
Tanenhaus: He was. I was on his show once. Absolutely tore me apart. And I said well, Bill, what do you think of Bill O’Reilly? He said, “I don’t like him– he’s a bully.” And I said, “that’s funny, because that’s what they used to say about you!” But he liked the courtesies and the graces. That’s what was so embarrassing to him, to have that exchange with Gore Vidal.
I don’t know how comfortable he would have been with what we see now. On the other hand he was super pragmatic. And if he saw something might work, he would go for them. One difference I point out between Buckley and Charlie Kirk is they both went to campuses a lot, but Charlie would debate with students, while the very young Buckley debated professors. He came here and had debates with Clinton Rossiter, the government professor, and became his good friend. And National Review– this is how different the landscape was back then– National Review was staffed by brilliant writers and intellectuals. James Burnham, Frank Meyer, Garry Wills, Willmoore Kendall, Brent Bozell… These are some figures whose names we recognize today. They couldn’t get put in the periodical reading room in most universities they were considered so beyond the pale! So Clinton Rosseter wrote a letter Buckley could use to validate the seriousness of the publication. That’s the media culture he came out of. You could say he transformed it, took us closer to where we are now, but he had no idea where it was going to go.
If there had been twitter, Buckley would have been a genius at it. He’s a master of the one-liner, and he was an incredibly fast typist. So they would have been coming out– I think Buckley would have been a better tweeter and more active tweeter than Donald Trump and Elon Musk combined. He never slept, they’d be coming out all day long, they’d be funny, they’d be smart, they’d push peoples’ buttons and send them over the top… He liked doing that! The difference is, he assumed the day ends at a certain point and then you both have your martini or your scotch together, and that’s the thing that’s changed now.
Buckley: A Person, Not Just A Political Figure
Tanenhaus: They had five pianos and an organ in the house… I actually interviewed his childhood piano teacher. When she was 92 years old, twenty-five years ago. She said something like, “He made you think he was better than he was.” That’s what people were always saying about Buckley. “He sounds smarter than he is” She said he had bravado, that’s what it was– that he had a kind of bravado.
The last big scene in the book is when a young pianist came to play the Goldberg Variations for him. Because Buckley, near the end of his life, had lunch with two friends of his, one of them a musician. Buckley’s favorite musician was Rosalyn Turek. She was on Firing Line, and made a classic recording in Buckley’s house. So he pushes the CD, and says, you gotta hear this, this is the best Goldberg Variations you’ve ever heard. And then one of the guys, Larry Perelman, said, “That’s Simone Dinnerstein; would you like her to play for you?” And Buckley says, “Really? Do you think she would?” And Larry says “Yeah, I don’t see why not.” So, Larry sent a note. “William F. Buckley would like Simone Dinnerstein to play in his Manhattan apartment.” And this is 2007, and he’s already assuming people won’t know, because he’s retired. And I interviewed Simone Dinnerstein, of course I knew who he was, because I heard the Rosalyn Turek recordings.
The piano was really old. You know the Bösendorfer piano; they cost like 200,000 dollars, much more expensive than Steinways. They have an extra octave. Buckley had two of them.
So Simone Dinnerstein comes over, and everyone’s sitting in their chairs, waiting for her to play, except for Buckley. Buckley’s standing over at the opposite end of the piano, watching her play. Because that’s what he would do. And he would talk while she played…
And then, she sat next to him, and they just talked about music. She was afraid he was going to debate her politically. And he just talked about, um, the prep school he went to and his family, getting older and reminiscing.
Review: Can you tell us if William F. Buckley had opinions on Glenn Gould’s recordings?
Tanenhaus: He was not a Glenn Gould guy. Because, I love Glenn Gould, I don’t know if you’re a Glenn Gould guy…
Review: Yeah, I like Glenn Gould’s Bach.
Tanenhaus: There was a war between Turek and Glenn, because it was Turek who really rediscovered the Goldberg variations. I think he even says it in Firing Line, nobody ever heard of the Goldberg Variations, and she insisted they were a classic. And then Glenn Gould came along and did his own very idiosyncratic version. It was an incredible sensation, much more than Turek’s ever was. That’s what’s fun about writing these books. I don’t know anything about music, but you talk to people who do… but the word was that Buckley kind of overrated Turek. Apparently her left hand was not that great, but she was a scholar of Bach, and knew everything about him and played in a kind of scholarly way, but there were other musicians who were more natural.
I’ve got a whole bunch of Goldberg musicians I listen to. Víkingur Ólafson, have you ever heard of him? You won’t believe it. You won’t believe his Goldberg variations. He does it live, without a piece of paper in front of him, he goes through all the variations. He’s a phenom… And I also like Andre Schiff’s. A friend of mine is a big music geek, and he tells me all this stuff… I asked [Buckley] about Gould though, and he said it was good, because he just respected his artistry, but he said “He’s not my guy.”
Review: Alright. And do you know if Buckley had opinions on Serialism?
Tanenhaus: He was an eighteenth-century guy. He told me once, what the single piece of music that if someone had to hear it it would be, and he said it’s Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations.
So modern music… I think he kind of knew Ives, but he was an 18th century guy. Even in the later era, the big name for the next generation of performers, like the Itzhak Perlmans, was Brahms. Brahms was a really profound artist, and I don’t even think Buckley was a big Brahms guy. He could identify any work, but that’s not really what he listened to so much.
About some things, I don’t know, but Buckley would have had thoughts. That shows you how big he was. That you can seriously ask those questions, and you could have those conversations.”
