San Tanenhaus On Bill Buckley
The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan
Andrew Sullivan
4.6 • 836 Ratings
🗓️ 23 May 2025
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sam is a biographer, historian, and journalist. He used to be the editor of the New York Times Book Review, a features writer for Vanity Fair, and a writer for Prospect magazine. He’s currently a contributing writer for the Washington Post. His many books include The Death of Conservatism and Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, and his new one is Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America.
It’s a huge tome — almost 1,000 pages! — but fascinating, with new and startling revelations, and a breeze to read. It’s crack to me, of course, and we went long — a Rogan-worthy three hours. But I loved it, and hope you do too. It’s not just about Buckley; it’s about now, and how Buckleyism is more similar to Trumpism than I initially understood. It’s about American conservatism as a whole.
For three clips of our convo — Buckley as a humane segregationist, his isolationism even after Pearl Harbor, and getting gay-baited by Gore Vidal — head to our YouTube page.
Other topics: me dragging Sam to a drag show in Ptown; the elite upbringing of Buckley during the Depression; his bigoted but charitable dad who struck rich with oil; his Southern mom who birthed a dozen kids; why the polyglot Buckley didn’t learn English until age 7; aspiring to be a priest or a pianist; a middle child craving the approval of dad; a poor student at first; his pranks and recklessness; being the big man on campus at Yale; leading the Yale Daily News; skewering liberal profs; his deep Catholicism; God and Man at Yale; Skull and Bones; his stint in the Army; Charles Lindbergh and America First; defending Joe McCarthy until the bitter end and beyond; launching National Review; Joan Didion; Birchers; Brown v. Board; Albert Jay Nock; Evelyn Waugh; Whittaker Chambers; Brent Bozell; Willmoore Kendall; James Burnham; Orwell; Hitchens; Russell Kirk; not liking Ike; underestimating Goldwater; Nixon and the Southern Strategy; Buckley’s ties to Watergate; getting snubbed by Reagan; Julian Bond and John Lewis on Firing Line; the epic debate with James Baldwin; George Will; Michael Lind; David Brooks and David Frum; Rick Hertzberg; Buckley’s wife a fag hag who raised money for AIDS; Roy Cohn; Bill Rusher; Scott Bessent; how Buckley was a forerunner for Trump; and much more. It’s a Rogan-length pod.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson on the Biden cover-up, Walter Isaacson on Ben Franklin, Robert Merry on President McKinley, Tara Zahra on the last revolt against globalization after WWI, N.S. Lyons on the Trump era, Arthur C. Brooks on the science of happiness, and Paul Elie on crypto-religion in ‘80s pop culture. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to [email protected].
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Hi there. Welcome to another dishcast. |
| 0:32.4 | I have finally made it to Provincetown. |
| 0:34.7 | This is the first dishcast from the Outer Cape for the summer. |
| 0:41.2 | Yesterday, the temperature as we were walking down Commercial Street after dinner was, |
| 0:46.0 | feels like 34 degrees, which I have to say was a wonderful relief from D.C. and almost instantly, I can breathe. I mean, the pollen's not here |
| 0:56.6 | yet quite, but it's going to come, but nothing's like that pollen in D.C. I feel liberated from |
| 1:02.4 | that air. It's so awful, that city. We have some really interesting guests coming up. |
| 1:08.7 | I'm going to grill Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson on their Biden book, or rather |
| 1:14.3 | all the people around Biden. Walter Isaacson is going to come on, and we're just going to talk |
| 1:19.2 | about Ben Franklin for a change, just because I want to talk about some great Americans as we |
| 1:24.8 | sort of despair of the country, which we probably shouldn't, and a little |
| 1:29.1 | perspective is always helpful. Tarazara, an interesting historian who's written about the period |
| 1:35.6 | between the world wars and how anti-globalization was a huge force in the world in that period and how that period can help us understand today. |
| 1:47.7 | We have Arthur Brooks coming on to talk about the science of happiness. |
| 1:51.4 | And then my old friend Paul Eli has written a really lovely book called The Last Supper, |
| 1:57.5 | Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s, which is all about what he calls |
| 2:03.5 | crypto-religious art in the 80s. |
| 2:07.3 | So, U2, Shinaid O'Connor, Leonard Cohen, the whole shebang. |
| 2:12.6 | It's a really interesting exploration of how those elements combined to make the 80s a very interesting |
| 2:20.1 | cultural moment. |
| 2:22.3 | But today, a book I was looking forward to for a long time that I finally got to read. |
| 2:29.3 | It's a big book, but I did not get bored for a minute. |
... |
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