william f. buckley--10/20/25

20 Oct 2025

william f. buckley--10/20/25

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Today's selection-- from Buckley Sam Tanehaus. by In 1951, the audacious twenty-six year old William F. “Bill” Buckley launched the modern conservative movement using his father’s money to promote his highly provocative new book, God and Man at Yale:

“At 9:30, the young women were all announced and received in the drawing room. And then, for the debutantes and their dates, and the many single men from Yale, came hours of dancing. Will Buckley had hired Lester Lanin, Manhattan's premier society bandleader, to provide the live music. The party went long past midnight, into the early hours—couples drifted away on the lawn, under the stars and the towering dark crowns of the trees. Back in Northampton on a chill Sunday, the spell of the ‘unique, dream-like, astounding weekend’ still lingered in the mind of Sylvia Plath. 'A hundred moons twining in dark leaves, music spilling out and echoing inside my head.’

“Then came the second event. While Maureen made her entrance into society, her brother Bill prepared to mount his assault on the political and cultural establishment—again with no expense spared. First, on Saturday, October 12, a buffet dinner at Great Elm ‘with many friends and celebrities present.’ There was a second party at Sherry's, the newly renovated restaurant in the Metropolitan Opera's Beaux Arts palace on Broadway.

“Three days later, on Monday, October 15, God and Man at Yale was published. The meticulous campaign—the planning and the furor—worked. Buckley meant to provoke, and he did.

“‘This book,’ Buckley told his readers, ‘will be branded as the product of an aberrant who takes the Wrong Side, i.e., the side that disagrees with the “liberals.” But I ask reasonable observers to look out for evasive and irrelevant answers, for rebuttal by epithet, for flowery anathemas; and I ask the educators to whom I address myself in so large a part to demonstrate their touted receptivity, to practice the open-mindedness to which they claim.’

“He was right, to judge from the first and most widely noted blow, struck in The Atlantic Monthly by McGeorge Bundy, a young professor of government at Harvard. A clever choice of reviewer, he had been the ‘bright man’ of his Yale class (1940) and a Bones man (and a pro-World War II interventionist). Only six years older than Buckley, Bundy pronounced him, in a lengthy essay, a ‘twisted, ignorant young man’ whose sins included concealing his ‘ardent’ Catholicism, which put him at odds with Yale's Protestant tradition. The review, prepared in consultation with Yale administrators—as Buckley instantly recognized—emphasized the anti-Catholic line Yale itself had developed in its counteroffensive.’

“More attacks followed, some accusing him of fascist leanings. Buckley himself relied heavily on ad hominem argument-the list of courses and professors teemed with epithets. In debate his instinct was to overstate. So it was in print too. He was forced to retract his characterization of Brand Blanshard as an atheist after the philosopher wrote him to say it wasn't true.

Buckley in 1985

“But there were ringing defenses from important conservative writers—from the ex-radical Max Eastman (The American Mer cury) and Felix Morley (Barron's), along with praise from the poet and journalist Selden Rodman (Saturday Review), plus the influential columnists Raymond Moley and George Sokolsky.

“That Buckley was so young increased the interest. He sprang into celebrity at the same moment that Time magazine with deft trend-spotting had labeled his age cohort the ‘silent generation’ docile young conformists, content with things as they were, their ambitions reaching no further than a Wall Street job and comfort able house in the suburbs. Against all this came a self-proclaimed ‘radical conservative,’ or, in Time's phrase, 'rebel in reverse.’ Life, the other mass-circulation Luce publication, likened Buckley to the ‘brat who comes to the party and tells the guests that their birthday boy is secretly a dope addict.’

“In this if in little else, Bill Buckley resembled another ‘twisted young man,’’ J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, who also blazed up from the dreary ‘consensus’ in 1951, to expose the reign of hypo critical adult ‘phonies.’

“The five-thousand-copy first printing sold out in a week. Regnery couldn't keep up. Taking out an ad in The New York Times at the end of October, again paid for by the author, the publisher promised '’books will be available again in bookstores by Thursday, November 1st.’ The second printing, and a third, went almost as quickly as the first, God and Man at Yale sold well enough to get a window display at the Brentano's on Fifth Avenue and land a place on the Herald Tribune best-seller list. On November 25, the day after Buckley's twenty-sixth birthday, God and Man at Yale crept onto the Times's best-seller list in sixteenth and last place. A week later it was gone, but the bell had been rung. God and Man at Yale was a certified best-seller. And it continued to sell: a total of twenty-three thousand copies by year's end; an improbable success.

“Buckley later said the tumult caught him by surprise, and no doubt it did. But it didn't happen by chance. Regnery had mounted the most strenuous promotion campaign in its young history, and the author was involved in every step, spelling out tasks in a memo, including ‘forming a committee at Yale’ to promote the book.These were not received as idle wishes from a self-involved first author: Bill had behind him the power of his father's purse. In the fall, Will wrote Regnery two checks, each for five thousand dollars, on top of the first three thousand; there would later be another four thousand dollars, and more after that. This sum paid for ads in the Yale Alumni Magazine, The New York Times (one in the daily, plus a full-page ad in the Book Review), the Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, and the Times—Herald, and fifty thousand copies of a circular (forty thousand of them sent to Yale alumni).

“But money alone wasn't enough to create so impassioned a response to a book whose subject seemed so dry and intimidating. Timing accounted for much of the interest. So did Buckley's persona, captured in the dust jacket photo: the boyish author gazing from the back of the book with aristocratic hauteur, above a list of campus triumphs. Yale Daily News chairman, champion debater, class orator, plus ‘the Fence Club, Elizabethan Club, Torch Honor Society, and Skull and Bones.’

“The conservative press thrilled to the arrival of this genteel version of Joe McCarthy, a man who named names and disclosed the contents of secret syllabuses distributed by ‘pink’' Yale professors, revealing what ‘really went on’ in the hidden chambers of the ivory tower.

“The right had always had thundering polemicists. Buckley came forward as its first intellectual entertainer.

“And Yale inadvertently helped him out with its panicked response. The anxiety began as early as the spring, when Buckley had published a precis of his argument in Human Events, quoting some of the same textbook passages cited in his book. Concerned alumni had written Woodbridge Hall asking if it was really true, as Buckley had written, that while Harvard led the Ivies in ‘infiltra tion of the [federal] bureaucracy’ with radicals, Yale was doing a ‘more systematic’ job of indoctrinating undergraduates in ‘the merits of the Leviathan State.’ In reply, Yale explained to its alumni that Buckley was not to be taken seriously. He was a ‘militant Catholic,’ in thrall to Vatican teachings.

“Yale's official assault on Buckley drew on a best-selling anti-Catholic tract of the moment, American Freedom and Catholic Power. Its author, Paul Blanshard, the brother of Buckley's Yale target Brand, warned that America's thirty million Catholics about one in five of the total population—might owe their first loyalty to the Vatican. To some this sounded like religious bigotry. ‘You have smeared him,’ one indignant alumnus told President Griswold. The university's Catholic chaplain, Reverend Edward O'Brien, also protested. Jewish alumni wondered if they too were expected to adopt a pose of respectful silence on campus controversies in a university with a long history of anti-Semitism. Buckley's argument had caught Yale out in one set of contradictions; the administration's reaction to its publication exposed another. Official Yale hoped the book would go away but also strenuously tried to discredit the charges and the accuser even as it capitalized on the controversy to make appeals to donors and alumni. The administration hastily assembled a committee to investigate that is, exonerate—itself. YALE SURVEY FINDS NO RED INFLUENCE OR THREATS TO ACADEMIC FREEDOM, read the headline on page one of The New York Times. ‘A spokesman for the university said to night that while the committee had actually been named early in August—two months before it was announced and two months be fore the appearance of the Buckley book—it might be assumed that the Yale administration had been aware of the imminent pub lication of the book, and that it was “one” of the factors that brought the committee into existence.’

“Buckley, in fact, had said nothing about ‘Red’ influence: his book was plainly an attack not on the Communist conspiracy but on liberal hegemony. But by suggesting the book was an exercise in Red-baiting, Yale drew on the McCarthy—driven passions coursing through the country. And it worked: within days of the Yale report, its most munificent alumnus, Paul Mellon, made a five-million dollar bequest. This too was front-page news.

“What ultimately troubled Woodbridge Hall wasn't Buckley the extremist but Buckley the muckraker who had shone a bright beam directly into Yale's ‘twilight zone of hypocrisy.’ This was the book's news, and the reason copies were being grabbed off the shelves. When Buckley wrote, ‘I know examples of Yale's fundraising techniques that would appear shocking except for the fact that latitude must be given to those men who devote their lives to furthering the cause, as they understand it, of education,’ the tone was not one of wild attack but of ironic, even amused forbearance and it implied Buckley had even more secrets to reveal, for he had infiltrated the ivory tower. This detachment and wit were what impressed a genuine man of the left, the journalist I. F. Stone. Stone was just as scornful of the new Cold War orthodoxy as Buck ley and was delighted to find Bill ‘an able and engaging fellow, with a sharp eye for liberalistic bunkum.’

“Not since Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, a closely argued critique of planned economies published in 1944, had a serious book from the right stirred so much reaction. This inspired Henry Regnery to send a copy to Faber, the English book publishing firm, in the hope of getting an edition there. One of Faber's editors was the Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot, a conservative who had recently published a book of his own essays, Christianity and Culture, that touched on themes similar to Buckley's. ‘Thank you …for sending me Mr. Buckley's book, which interested me very much,’ Eliot wrote to Regnery—though his interest fell short of wanting to republish the book. ‘While I thought that he made one or two serious mistakes of strategy, I am glad to hear that it has attracted so much attention.’ Regnery passed along this gentle rejection, thinking the young author would be grateful to learn that so eminent a literary man had taken the time to read this book and had liked what it had to say.

“But while Bill Buckley might be ahead of most other twenty-six year-olds, he was twenty-six nevertheless. His inner Young Mahster reared up to tell Regnery, ‘I am astounded and disappointed by the superficiality of T. S. Eliot's remarks about my book.’

“The review that most accurately conveyed Buckley's politics was in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. The reviewer, Peter Viereck, was a leading writer in the group known as the new conservatives, centrists suspicious of all ideologies, left and right alike. Viereck came by this distrust honestly. His father was the pro-Nazi propagandist George Sylvester Viereck, who was twice convicted of sedition and spent six years in prison before his release in 1947.

“From this vantage point, Viereck grasped much that Buckley's more conventional critics missed. Blinded by bigotry— ‘Catholic baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals,’ Viereck was soon to write—Buckley's Vatican—fixated detractors missed that Buckley's politics came not out of the Church but out of the prewar isolationist right, the ‘outworn Old Guard antithesis to the outworn Marxist thesis,’ Viereck wrote. Buckley, he added,

“damns communism, our main enemy, not half so violently as lesser enemies like the income tax and inheritance tax. Words will really fail you when you reach the book's final ‘message’: trustees and alumni should violate the legally established academic freedom to “banish from the classroom" not merely communists but all professors deviating from Adam Smith!...If

the laboring mountain of the new campus of conservatism can turn out no humane and imaginative Churchill but merely this product of nar;ow economic privilege, then we might need a revolt against the revolt against revolt.

“Nevertheless, "this important, symptomatic and widely hailed book is a necessary counterbalance against the smug Comrade Blimps of the left.’

“What Viereck couldn't see—but then neither could many others-was that God and Man at Yale was more than an audacious performance by a very young man. It contained the seeds of a modern movement.”