American conservative intellectual and journalist, born in 1925, the sixth of 11 children in a devoutly Catholic family. He published his first bestseller at 25, founded National Review at 29 and created the television programme "Firing Line" at 40. The show ran for 1,505 episodes, making it one of the longest-running public-affairs programmes in American history. Over his career he wrote more than 50 books, including 20 novels.
Buckley was arguably the 20th century's most influential journalist, credited with shaping modern American conservatism from the post-FDR era through Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential candidacy to Ronald Reagan's presidency. He helped knit together the strands of traditionalism, free-market economics and anti-communism into a coherent movement. Sam Tanenhaus describes him as a "performing ideologue", early to recognise "that politics was becoming a large public spectacle". His only fear was being bored, and he had an instrumental approach to fact. He applauded bullies such as the red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy when they were on his side.
In 1965 Buckley ran for mayor of New York as the Conservative candidate, aiming to steal votes from a liberal Republican. His celebrity, sophistication about television, and willingness to say just what he thought made him popular as a kind of anti-politician. His fulmination about crime and esteem for the police drew support from Democrats as well as Republicans. He came in third, but Richard Nixon saw him as a grave threat who could shift the party radically to the right. Over the next decade Buckley did just that.
His proudest "Firing Line" episode, of 1,505, was in 1978: a debate with Reagan over the Panama Canal treaty. Reagan, with his populist instincts, opposed the treaty; Buckley wanted to know if America would take human rights and sovereignty seriously, or be distracted by "the irrelevance of prideful exercises, suitable rather to the peacock than to the lion".
For years Buckley favoured denying black Americans, among others, the vote. His record on race evolved considerably later: he called for a black president and defended civil-rights legislation.
Buckley was raised in the isolationist, America-first Republicanism of the 1930s, by a father who "despised Jews with an intensity he made no effort to conceal", wrote his biographer Sam Tanenhaus. In 1956 National Review called Israel "the first racist state in modern history". The six-day war in 1967, when Israel defeated Arab states backed by the Soviet Union, changed Buckley's mind. When Pat Buchanan, a Republican presidential candidate, revived the America-first message in the 1990s and combined it with pro-labour politics—previewing Donald Trump's own populism—Buckley wrote that Buchanan's anti-Israel fulminations "amounted to antisemitism".
Buckley broke with the Republican Party over the Iraq war. He died in 2008. A biography by Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America (Random House, 1,040 pages), was published in 2025.
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