The Case Against Buckley

THE UNIVERSITY BOOKMAN, October 2025

The Case Against Buckley

A review of “Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America,“ by Sam Tanenhaus

Less than a mile separates the Catholic cemetery of Saint Bernard, the burial site of William F. Buckley Jr., off Sharon Valley Road, from the heights of the old Sharon Burial Ground. Yet the distance could not be more pronounced. The geography of this northwest corner of Connecticut explains much of the social and spiritual counter-insurgency that defined this father of modern American conservatism. Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America, the long-awaited biography by Sam Tanenhaus, does compelling work here in Sharon, in its early chapters describing Buckley’s large Catholic family engaged in its own forms of guerrilla warfare against the town’s Protestant establishment.

Despite the appearances of old wealth, the Buckleys were upstart outsiders. The patriarch William Frank Buckley Sr. (Will, as opposed to his namesake Bill) was the son of a Texas sheriff who gambled big on foreign oil exploration. After losing their homestead in Mexico to a leftist insurrection, the Buckleys decamped to New York, where Bill was born, and then to Sharon’s Taconic highlands by way of Paris and London.

Settling into an estate off South Main Street that he named Great Elm, Will and his wife Aloise just about reached the physical heights of town, but the working-class Irish who inhabited Sharon Valley remained their spiritual kin. In the eighteenth century, the valley’s Webatuck Creek powered the first Sharon mills. A century later, iron production came to the valley along with the laborers to work its kilns. When the Buckleys arrived in 1923, they “worshiped in pews alongside the descendants of Sharon’s working class,” as Tanenhaus writes, “who in earlier times had been drawn to the Northwest Corner by jobs in its iron industry.” 

Today the Buckleys are mostly gone from Great Elm. The estate was subdivided and sold over the years after Will’s death, along with his diminishing financial legacy. The family’s unassuming plot in the back of Saint Bernard is what remains of their eternal presence. Will and Aloise are depicted on a central memorial stone as the roots of an elm. Markers of their ten children, including the sister Mary Ann who died two days after birth, are the fallen leaves surrounding them. Only here do we find the flat headstone of William F. Buckley Jr and his wife, Patricia. Christopher Buckley, their satirist son and only child, still much alive, has already added his own marker to the assembly. His epitaph reads: “TOMB IT MAY CONCERN.”

Isolationist, Anglophobic, and anti-Progressive, Will and Aloise were the family’s conservative font. Aloise, from New Orleans, who maintained a winter home with Will in Camden, South Carolina, presented a confederate spirit. Will was a man who “worshiped three earthly things: learning, beauty, and his family,” as Buckley said of his father. He was also a Texas gambler, one who was burned in a game newly rigged by Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and their class of managerial Protestant elite. Tutored by contrast in the contrapuntalism of Bach, raised as a family in semi-seclusion, several of his children became involved in conservative journalism and politics: Pricilla as managing editor of her brother’s National Review; James as United States senator on the New York Conservative Party line and federal judge; Patricia as a founder of the Catholic magazine Triumph and spouse to Brent Bozell, who was Bill’s Yale co-conspirator, co-author of the book McCarthy and his Enemies, and ghostwriter of Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative. 

Across his 1040 pages, Tanenhaus is exhaustive and exhausting as the many bodies in Buckley’s orbit get their due. The chapter on the creation of the 1960 Sharon Statement of conservative principles by a hundred Young Americans for Freedom members convened by Buckley for the weekend at Great Elm is especially compelling. The YAF member who collected the notes and typed them up through the night back in her room at the Hotchkiss Inn was Annette Courtemanche, a sophomore at Molloy University. Four years later, she became Mrs. Russell Kirk.    

Albert Jay Nock, Willmoore Kendall, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and Frank Meyer each exerted their own gravitational pull on Buckley’s trajectory as the conservative isolationism of America First gave way to Cold War anti-Communism. Founded in 1955, Buckley’s National Review meanwhile mentored a generation of younger writers, including no less than Arlene Croce, Joan Didion, John Leonard, Renata Adler, Garry Wills, Hugh Kenner, and Guy Davenport. An undergraduate Betty Friedan (née Goldstein) makes a cameo as the Buckley sisters’ protector at Smith. At the same time, a nineteen-year-old Sylvia Plath appears at Maureen Buckley’s debutante ball at Great Elm.  

Readers of this book may have differing opinions about where its narrative turns against its subject. In the endless section on civil rights, there are hints that Tanenhaus intends to burden Buckley in his missteps, distractions, and peccadilloes. At a certain point, Tanenhaus seems to turn his focus on everything Buckley should have done but didn’t, such as finishing an ambitious book project titled Revolt Against the Masses rather than attending to his many novels (I was his writing assistant for one of them), columns, and television appearances (and the yearly income he needed to maintain National Review). As he aligns himself with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, Buckley, in Tanenhaus’s telling, falls short of his intellectual promise and softens in the trappings of power and prestige.    

There is ultimately less “life” here than a focus on the “Revolution That Changed America.” As the chapters roll on, Buckley appears increasingly inert, passive, and surprisingly silent—a reactive presence within unfolding events. A charitable interpretation would be to say that Tanenhaus rejects the “great man” theory of history, that we are merely the sum of historical forces applied to us. In elevating Buckley’s faults over his features, more likely than not, this book is designed to impugn the American conservative movement by diminishing the singular leader who created it. 

In any case, by the end, it becomes clear that Tanenhaus never really gets Buckley, no matter how many words he deploys to describe the revolution around him. The long delay in this book’s completion, some twenty-seven years in the making, is just one indication of a biographer who loses the thread of his subject and becomes increasingly indignant as he looks over the remaining stitches. 

From the geography of Sharon to the faculty at Yale, Buckley took on an entrenched progressive elite. His greatest achievement was to manifest an alternative American aristocracy, a counter-elite that took full form in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Buckley was a “Catholic aristocrat of the Spanish persuasion,” as a friend once said. He understood the spiritual dimension that informed America’s social and political dynamics. His famous quip about preferring to be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University was more a slam against the progressive Ivy League than a positive appraisal of the average Bostonian. At the time Buckley attended Yale, the school maintained admissions caps on Jewish and Catholic applicants in equal measure. So when Yale University sent its plenipotentiary, McGeorge Bundy, out to slam God and Man at Yale, Buckley’s 1951 broadside against the school’s progressive professoriate, Bundy centered his attack on Buckley’s Catholicism.

Buckley may have never finished Revolt Against the Masses, his answer to Ortega y Gasset. Instead, life itself, fully lived, became his revolt played out across a multitude of media. From restoring God to “man at Yale” to taking on Godless Communism, Buckley waged a holy war aimed at the highest levels of American society—and he largely won. Nevertheless, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America is a tome that proves the progressive elite still exists, and that not everyone has been won over by his revolution that changed America.

Churchill's Chutzpah

NEW YORK POST, October 26, 2025

Churchill’s Chutzpah

Royal biographer Andrew Morton sizes up the America-loving icon

Not just any biographer gets portrayed in a Netflix series. But Andrew Morton is no ordinary biographer.

Morton released “Diana: Her True Story” in 1992. The source of his blockbuster biography was the princess herself, a fact Morton only revealed after Diana’s death. The details of those melancholy interviews, recorded secretly on cassette tape, appeared in the fifth season of “The Crown.”

“In a funny kind of way, the actual buildup to the Diana book was more dramatic than they portrayed it,” Morton tells The Post. “We swept the room for bugs. There was a lot of counterintelligence work going on there.”

Morton is in New York for the launch of “Winston and the Windsors: How Churchill Shaped a Royal Dynasty,” his latest book on the royal family. As he marks the publication of his 25th biography, Morton is soft-spoken as he enters the grand library of the gilded-age clubhouse where he has just given a reading. It could be the memory of bugged rooms still stings.

“What a beautiful library. It’s almost as big as mine,” he says in his clipped Yorkshire English.

While “Winston and the Windsors” tracks the connection of Britain’s greatest prime minister to the lives of six monarchs, the conversation first turns to New York. Many fail to realize the English statesman was, in fact, half Brooklynite. Churchill’s mother, Jennie Jerome, was born in Cobble Hill in 1854. A “dollar princess,” she married into the British aristocracy and conferred a certain New-York toughness in her America-loving son.

“He’s got the English bulldog and the New York chutzpah,” says Morton. “And unlike many of those who’ve been born in palaces and in high places, he was pushy, he was shovy. He used his elbows to get where he wanted. He didn’t wait for the glittering prizes to fall into his lap. He opened them up, opened the wrapping, and consumed them.”

If New York was part inspiration, the city almost once did him in as well. In December 1931, just up Fifth Avenue from where Morton now spoke, at 76th Street, Churchill was struck down by an unemployed motorist from Yonkers. Churchill had exited a taxi in the middle of the street and forgotten to notice the flow of American traffic.

“It was bad enough to make headlines around the world,” Morton notes, as Churchill was whisked away to Lenox Hill Hospital, saying on intake he was a friend of the king. “And for the king to ask his advisers to get him on the phone, in the days when transatlantic phone calls were tricky, it was a measure of his fame or infamy.”

Churchill at the time was a 57-year-old member of Parliament in need of money after the 1929 stock-market crash, and he made the best of a bad situation. “All the New York papers sent people along to try and interview him. A girl dressed up as a nurse. She was caught by a detective,” Morton recounts.

Instead of giving away the story, Churchill sold his accident to a British newspaper. “So he goes in, and he tries to waft away the nurses and the doctors because he’s on the phone, dictating 2,000 words or whatever on ‘my New York misadventure.’ For which he’s paid the princely sum of $2,500. Which enables him to go off to the Bahamas on holiday.”

The accident also provided Churchill with a doctor’s note for a “naturally indefinite” amount of alcohol to be consumed each day, “especially at mealtimes” — a not-so-sobering script to receive during American Prohibition.

Such New York chutzpah may be one reason Churchill gets admired more today in America than in Great Britain.

“Revisionist history,” Morton laments of the British reception. “Churchill is accused of all kinds of heinous crimes, which he had nothing to do with.” In America, however, “he was someone whom both sides of the aisle admired. When he spoke at Congress, he got standing ovations. People on both sides of the aisle believed him because he’d been right about the German expansionism of the 1930s just as when he gave his famous Iron Curtain speech in 1946. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Trump ordered the bust of Churchill as one of the first things back into the Oval Office.”

For Churchill, the transatlantic affection was mutual. “His big idea,” adds Morton, “was always follow America, always go with America. He believed that Britain’s future lay with America, and America’s future lay with Britain. Yes, and together they could do great things.”

“Winston and the Windsors” covers Churchill’s life across six monarchs, from his birth during Queen Victoria’s reign through Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII, George VI and, finally, Elizabeth II. “There’ve been lots of politicians and statesmen who have advised a single president or prime minister,” says Morton, but “there’s not been a politician or statesman who has advised a whole dynasty as Churchill did.” 

The frequent turnover tells us much about Churchill’s long 63 years of public service as well as something of the era’s royal disorder. Such turmoil came to a head in 1936 with the freshly minted Edward VIII’s abdication over his twice-divorced American lover and intended wife, Wallis Simpson.

Surprisingly, as someone who cared both for the monarchy and the new monarch, “Churchill felt that Mrs. Simpson was a good thing for Edward VIII,” says Morton. “Because as Prince of Wales, he was often drunk. He was late to events. His timekeeping was poor. He let people down. And Wallis emphasized the need for manners. She gave him calm, so that all these ticks and things that he did, he became calmer.”

Churchill spent much political capital defending Edward, whose intended marriage stirred up a constitutional crisis. “He’s concerned that politicians can tell the monarch who he can or can’t marry. And that’s overstepping the bounds of the constitution,” Morton says of Churchill’s view of the critics.

“He speaks in Parliament again, and he’s howled down for asking for more time,” Morton explains of Churchill’s defense of the beleaguered royal. A confidant tells Churchill, “In three minutes or five minutes, you’ve done more damage to yourself and the monarchy than anybody could have.”

“So Churchill is a lonely, forlorn figure. But when it comes to the actual days of the abdication, he speaks in the House of Parliament very convincingly, and some people are moved to tears.” 

“Edward gave up his throne and the greatest empire we’ve all ever seen,” Morton says. “He was in love with her.”

Churchill stayed loyal to Edward and Wallis, says Morton, even as the royal family swept them aside and the former king drew close to Hitler and his Nazi ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop.

“It was a great relief to everybody when he finally left because he was in the pocket of Hitler and Ribbentrop,” says Morton, adding, “Ribbentrop was alleged to have had an affair with Wallis.”

And yet even when this started to come out, Churchill didn’t turn away.

“One of the things about Churchill is that he’s very, very loyal to his friends. He was loyal to the nth degree.”

As George VI replaced Edward VIII and Britain entered World War II, Churchill “did a signal service in making the monarchy seem relevant and sympathetic,” says Morton. “When Buckingham Palace was bombed, there’s a famous photograph of Churchill, George VI and the queen going through the rubble. He was the great showman. He got the press there to take pictures of them because he was talking to an audience of one, and that was Roosevelt.”

In its darkest hour, as the Nazis made final preparations for an invasion of the English homeland, Britain’s last hope was America. 

“They pulled out all the diamonds and rubies from the crown jewels, put them in a hatbox and hid them in the basement of Windsor Castle,” Morton says of the royals, persuaded by Churchill to stay put in England rather than flee to Canada. “The queen was learning to shoot and would shoot rats as target practice. Churchill didn’t expect to live more than three weeks.”

Churchill and the new king drew close through the war. “George VI proved to be an admirable counselor and a silent drum” for the prime minister, says Morton. “The king would be let in on these secrets by Churchill, who was carrying this great burden with him. And George VI helped carry that burden.”

When George VI died in 1952 at the age of 56, Churchill became a surrogate parent to Elizabeth II as she ascended the throne at just 25 years old. “He was a father figure, not just to her but to the family,” says Morton.

Asked how Churchill might have viewed this biographer’s other famous princess, “He would have been enamored with Diana,” Morton replies. “What senior statesman, and I include Henry Kissinger and others, wasn’t enamored by Diana?”

Thinking about what happened just up the street nearly a century ago, what would the world be like if Churchill hadn’t survived that car crash?

“We might all be wearing brownshirts,” Morton says of the fascist garb, shifting in his seat. “Churchill was blessed with good luck. He took part in the last-ever cavalry charge. He was lucky to escape injury in the Boer War. He was fortunate not to be pulverized by shells in the First World War when he went back to the trenches after the disaster of the Dardanelles. A series of fortunate events saved him.”

“But it is also fortunate for us,” Morton concludes. “Absolutely fortunate.”

Mock stars

NEW YORK POST, October 14, 2025

Mock stars

The famous forgers who fooled everyone — even the experts

In the words of Cole Porter, “Is it the good turtle soup or merely the mock?” Art Fraud: 50 Fakes That Fooled the Art World,” the new book by Susie Hodge, will leave you wondering whether any work of art is the real McCoy. “Art fraud is rife,” Hodge begins. “Many experts believe that as much as 50 per cent of all art on the market today is forgery.”

If the 50% statistic sounds phony, you don’t know the half of it. “Art Fraud” casts a gimlet eye on the most famous forgery cases to reveal the truth behind the art world’s worst-kept secret. From the greatest experts on down to the most naïve online bidders, just about anyone can, and will at some point, be duped by the mock.

Of course, artists have always traced out the styles and techniques of others. The ancient Romans made such a business of copying Greek sculptures that scholars still cannot chisel out the source of one discus thrower from the next. Even the greatest artists played the copy game. In the Renaissance, Michelangelo passed off one of his cupids as a Roman original. Canova painted a fake self-portrait by Giorgione. And so on.

“Good artists copy; great artists steal,” said Pablo Picasso, an artist well known for taking up other artists’ innovations as his own (bonjour, Georges Braque).

The Louvre has a longstanding tradition of artists who come to copy the works on the museum’s walls. Manet even met Degas when he was copying a Velázquez painting. But there’s a difference between just duplicating a work of art and passing it off as someone else’s. At the Louvre, a copy must be stamped and cannot be created in the same size as the original. The strict French regulation tells us much about the slippery slope between copy and fraud and the latter’s temptations.

“Art Fraud” offers quick sketches of the range of famous fakers who went that extra step and succeeded in passing off their art as someone else’s, at least for a time. (Of course, it’s very possible the best of them have never been caught.) “Art Fraud” considers their various techniques and motivations — and frankly will leave you with a newfound respect for the fraudulent arts.

Often, it’s not just about the money. Ego plays a role as forgers pass off their own work as the creation of a master, whether old or modern. Sometimes forgers want to expose the art market and disrupt the way works are collected and esteemed, creating forgeries in the process that are designed to be exposed. And sometimes the forger is just another victim, paid a pittance by unscrupulous dealers to create fakes under false pretense, not even aware their creations are being used to defraud.

Alceo Dossena didn’t know dealers were passing off his recreations of Gothic and Renaissance sculpture as the real deal.

The Italian sculptor Alceo Dossena (1878-1937) was one such sad case. A student of the Old Masters, in the early 20th century he demonstrated an uncanny ability to carve sculptures in the Gothic and Renaissance style and artificially age them in a way that could fool even the top experts of his time. Two Roman dealers, Alfredo Fasoli and Romano Palesi, ordered up plenty from Dossena, convincing him he was creating work for an American church that had requested new statuary that looked old and weathered.

Carving in the styles of Simone Martini, Giovanni Pisano, Donatello, Michelangelo and Giambologna, Dossena artificially aged his creations in baths of urine. He scraped them, baked them and darkened their finishes to add 500 years of wear to order. Fasoli and Palesi paid Dossena a fraction of the millions they took in as his misattributed work made its way into the collections of Helen Clay Frick, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre. Only when new X-ray technology was applied to his sculpture, revealing modern nails, did the ruse begin to come to light.

In another era, Dossena might have been hailed as an esteemed artist in his own right. “We had witnessed the reincarnation of a Renaissance master and an Attic sculptor,” said the German art historian Hans Cürlis once the deception was discovered. Alfred Frankfurter, the editor of Art News, wrote of the “quality of sincerity in Dossena, the almost incredible ability of the man to have worked without affectation and without malevolence in the spirit of the dead past and its masters.” Dossena was cleared of any crime and continued to sculpt, but few wanted his work once the world learned the artist behind it was not an Old Master but just old Alceo Dossena.

The Dutch painter Henricus “Han” van Meegeren (1889-1947) had no such illusions. The most famous faker of all, he tossed off dozens of Vermeers and other works purportedly from the Dutch Golden Age and made the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars. At one time the Dutch art expert Abraham Bredius praised the work, declaring, “It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, untouched, on the original canvas, and without any restoration — just as it left the painter’s studio. And what a picture!”

American soldiers found in a Nazi leader’s home the work “Christ and the Adulteress” — which everyone wrongly believed Vermeer painted.

As van Meegeren sourced old canvases and ground his own pigments, his work convinced even the dreaded Nazi Hermann Göring, who traded away genuine looted art for a van Meegeren fake. Only after the war, when van Meegeren faced the death penalty for despoiling Dutch heritage during Nazi occupation, did he admit to his deception. Painting a fake Vermeer in front of an audience, he proved the only loser in his deception was the dead Reichsmarschall.

Han van Meegeren paints a “Vermeer” before an audience — proving he was a forger, not a Nazi collaborator.

Through van Meegeren’s use of modern Bakelite plastic to harden his paints, subsequent false canvases continue to turn up, most recently at London’s Courtauld Institute in 2011. The case of the American forger Mark Landis (b. 1955) is particularly compelling. Never interested in money, he created fake pictures and fake personas to enjoy the attention that would be lavished on him as a museum donor. Drawing works in a matter of hours with materials purchased at Walmart, he stated, “I felt an impulse to give away pictures. I’d watched so much TV and learned about philanthropists — wealthy people who gave to others — so I gave a picture away, and I was treated with so much respect and deference and friendship. Those are things I had never experienced before. I really liked it, and I got addicted to it.”

Mark Landis quickly made copies (bottom) of famous works like Charles Courtney Curran’s “Three Women” (top).

To pass off a fake, forgers need not only period materials and a convincing style but also a plausible backstory or what the art world calls provenance. The British painter John Myatt (b. 1945) at one time advertised himself as a copyist for hire. His materials were far from historical — emulsion paint and K-Y jelly. Nevertheless, his accomplice John Drewe created convincing backstories by adding fake documents to artist archives and replacing pages in art catalogues, creating historical records for work that in fact never existed.

The most recent headline case of art fraud, involving the loss of tens of millions of dollars and shuttering of New York’s oldest art gallery, now reads like a copy of Alceo Dossena. The art dealer Glafira Rosales claimed to have discovered a trove of modern masterpieces. Her source was a mysterious “Mr. X Junior,” whose father, she said, had secretly collected the work through a gay liaison.

The reality was far more prosaic: Pei-Shen Qian, an immigrant living in Queens, unknowingly painted the abstractions in a garage to order. Like that modern nail in Dossena’s statue, an ahistorical pigment was the nail in the coffin.

Art frauds can be easy to spot in retrospect but are far more challenging in the moment. Nowadays, few would say a van Meegeren is anything but a van Meegeren. The stories in “Art Fraud” reveal how people believe what others believe. We accept labels and defer to experts. This is especially the case when there’s little to gain from exposing the lie aside from knowing the truth.

Today, as we look to a future of generative artificial intelligence and “deep fakes,” the only real certainty is the unreliability of anything we may see. Copy that.