The Great Excommunicator

When Sam Tanenhaus agreed in 1998 to write a biography of William F. Buckley Jr., it would have been hard to name an American who deserved one more. Less than a decade after the defeat of communism, the conservative movement was so firmly in the saddle that even Democratic president Bill Clinton was extolling the virtues of deregulated markets and military strength. There had always been a conservative disposition among the American citizenry. But there had been no conservative movement worthy of the name until 1955, when the twenty-nine-year-old Yale grad “Bill” Buckley founded his weekly magazine, National Review.