A confession: back in June of 1988, when journalist John Judis (The New Republic) published his respectable and respectful biography, William F. Buckley Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives, I violated The Nation’s traditional church-state division of labor, which guaranteed that the editor (me) would keep his hands off the autonomous back of the book. With the permission of our literary editor, I took the occasion to invite Bob Sherrill, The Nation’s take-no-prisoners White House correspondent (who had been banned from the White House as a security risk for punching out the governor of Florida’s press secretary), to write an essay-review. The idea, I suggested, would be to remind our readers of just how many lives the much-celebrated scourge of liberalism had carelessly ruined in the bad old days of McCarthyism, how irresponsibly he had spoken and behaved. It was Buckley, after all, who co-wrote a book with Brent Bozell, his brother-in-law, in which he said “McCarthyism…is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.”

Sherrill, as was his wont, obliged, observing, “What I like about this assignment, it’s a good old-fashioned hatchet job.”

At the time, Buckley was riding high. But the fact was that even by the late 1980s, Buckley was no longer the bad boy of the rad right. Although it is true that he wrote in the mid-1980s that the way to combat aids was to pass a law requiring that homosexuals get a warning tattoo on their ass, it would no longer occur to him to say, as he had in the late 1950s, that Africans will be ready for self-governance “when they stop eating each other.” His magazine may be said to have launched a movement which gave us first Barry Goldwater, and then a...

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