The

The Hello and welcome to behind the news. My name is Doug Hinwood.

Several canonical laws being violated today,

just one guest and an unusually sustained focus in the right wing of the political spectrum.

We'll hear from Sam Tannenhouse about his new book, Buckley, The Life and Revolution That Changed

America, just out from Random House. Frequent listeners may know that I had a brief sojourn on

the right in late high

school and early college, and the influence of William F. Bill Buckley on my 18-year-old mind

was an important reason for it. Buckley made his debut as a conservative plemises straight out of

college with his book God and Man at Yale, published in 1951. He was the Christopher Rufo of his

time, accusing his alma mater of being

too liberal and too atheist, and demanding a purge of the professoriate. Around the same time,

he did some work for the CIA, supervised by Howard Hunt, later a major player in the Watergate

scandal, a time where the agency was dominated by Cold War liberals of the sort that also hired

Gloria Steinem.

In 1955, soon after leaving the CIA, he founded National Review,

and there followed a lifetime of Quicky Books, TV show, and innumerable public appearances.

He died at the age of 82 in 2008.

In his early days, the right was extremely marginal, but Buckley had a lot to do with making

it less so. His patrician style gave conservative ideas a force and a charm that frothing lunatics

of the right could never match. He was, as Tannenhouse put it, a performing ideologue in a very

skilled one. His TV show Firing Line, which ran from 1966 to 1999, featured conversations at a rather high intellectual level, and often with figures the left, such as Saul Olinsky, Alan Ginsberg, and Noam Chomsky, though with plenty of representation from the right, too, like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek.

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