Neil is off this week doing super-secret stuff: all will be revealed eventually. But today, I am delighted to offer an episode featuring former New York Times journalist Sam Tanenhaus. The author of two previous books on conservatism in the United States, including a biography of anti-Communist Whittaker Chambers, Sam joined me to talk about his new volume about a man who did more than almost anyone else to move the Republican Party to the right. So, join Sam and me in a conversation about Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America (Random House, 2025).

President Ronald Reagan (right) with William F Buckley in The White House Residence during his private 75th birthday party, February 7, 1986. Image courtesy of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library/Wikimedia Commons

Show notes:

* We begin with a famous, televised quarrel between William F. Buckley and novelist Gore Vidal at the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami, in which Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” and Buckley responded by calling Vidal a “queer” and threatening to hit him.

* Sam mentions another podcast, Know Your Enemy, a show about the American right produced by Dissent.

* Buckley’s archive at Yale, as Sam points out, is enormous: you can take a look at the finding aid here.

* Oilman William F. Buckley, Sr.’s plan to raise his family in Mexico was thwarted by the success of the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910 and ended in 1920.

* Sam refers to Louis Menand’s review of Buckley (May 26, 2025).

* Claire and Sam discuss The National Review, the conservative magazine of ideas that Buckley founded and ran for nearly 50 years, and which still exists in magazine and online formats.

* Discussing the large number of gay men in Bill and Pat Buckley’s social and professional circles, Sam references Christopher Buckley’s memoir, Losing Mum and Pup (Twelve, 2009).

* Claire and Sam discuss the 1965 debate between Buckley and Black writer James Baldwin at the Cambridge Union—Baldwin won the debate.

* Listeners who want to learn more about extremism and the rise of the New Right may wish to read David Austin Walsh, Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right (Yale University Press, 2024).

* Pat Buckley, a major figure in her own right, died in 2007: you can learn more about her here.

* Sam brings up Midge Decter, a neoconservative intellectual and writer.

Short takes:

* Fifty years ago this week, William J. Brink of the New York Daily News wrote a headline for the ages. “Ford to City: Drop Dead” was an epic Bronx cheer in response to President Gerald Ford’s dithery response to the New York City budget crisis. The headline “had the benefit of truth-telling, at a time when truth was easier to discern and less open to argument,” Bill Brink, the headline writer’s son and a senior editor at The New York Times, writes. But it is also emblematic of a certain moment in journalism that Brink, Sr. was eminently suited to. “For Nixon’s famous visit to China, he decided to have a calligrapher draw Chinese characters for a front-page message to Nixon. But as deadline approached, my father panicked over the accuracy of the characters. He went around to Chinese restaurants to show the page to workers, and he wasn’t satisfied until three of them verified that the message was correct.” (October 30, 2025)

* They had to find that $150 million for Bari Weiss somewhere, right? No, seriously, Paramount need $2 billion, which means cutting 1,000 jobs—at least. “As part of the cuts, the network has closed its Johannesburg bureau and is cancelling its CBS Mornings Plus and CBS Evening News Plus streaming shows,” Jeremy Barr reports at The Guardian. “The network’s Saturday-morning program will undergo a format change, according to a source with knowledge of the changes who was not authorized to comment.” And of course: “The network’s race and culture unit was gutted.” (October 29, 2025)

* Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against Kenvue, the maker of Tylenol, on the specious grounds (recently publicized by President Donald Trump and contradicted by his own FDA) that the pain reliever causes autism. “Paxton, a candidate for US Senate and a major supporter of Donald Trump, has spent much of his time as attorney general focused on pregnancy—more specifically, forcing women to stay pregnant against their will,” Bess Levin writes at Vanity Fair. “He has supported extreme abortion bans, made June 24 (the day Roe v. Wade was overturned) an annual holiday for the attorney general’s office, and sued the Biden administration after it said hospitals must perform life-saving abortions even in states that ban the practice.” At the same time, Paxton’s wife is divorcing him on, as she put it, “Biblical grounds,” which we presume means that he violated one of the Ten Commandments—maybe the one about the ox and the ass? (October 29, 2025)

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