Range Rovers

The New York Post, December 21, 2025

Range Rovers

Why New Yorkers from all walks of life can put a gun on their holiday wish list

All I want for Christmas is a snub-nosed .38. Some .38 Special ammunition would be nice too. This holiday season, we should all be thinking of our firearms wish list.

A year ago, I never thought I would be one of those rare New Yorkers to navigate the city’s byzantine gun laws. Nor did I quite anticipate the peace of mind that comes with firearms ownership.

But I did it, earning my own license to carry a concealed pistol. I now practice weekly at the range just down the block from my office with my own registered revolver. You can do it, too.

Sure, we’ve heard the stories of onerous regulations, invasive questioning and endless delays. Compared with much of the country, the application process remains a burden. But I am here to tell you it is no longer impossible. As I found, it can even be a rewarding experience. And if you want that Centennial-style hammerless Airweight in your stocking, you first need a license to carry it. 

James Panero never thought he’d be one of those rare New Yorkers to navigate the city’s byzantine gun laws — but the process has gotten easier thanks to the Supreme Court. Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

My story began when I inherited an old service revolver from my father, Carl. A New York-based architect, one who had worked on designs for the World Trade Center and JFK Airport, he had taken to firearms when I was a teenager in the 1990s. He enjoyed the sport and comradery of the range, which he said reminded him of his time in Army basic training. He also saw it as a means for some father-son bonding and a reconnection with our Italian roots. 

James Panero visits Ground Zero in 2014 with his father, Carl, who worked with Minoru Yamasaki as senior staff architect designing the World Trade Center. Courtesy of James Panero

I well remember the day he first took me to John Jovino Gun Shop. The storied retailer shuttered after 109 years during the 2020 lockdowns, but at the time, the store in Little Italy was thriving as it sported an oversized pistol hanging from its sign. Dad had me pick out my own bolt-action .22 rifle. He then slipped next door to resupply his homemade winemaking operation, another Italian pastime. At an upscale range near Wall Street, now long defunct, he shot his pistol while I practiced my aim with the small, rimfire rifle. All the while, a five-gallon glass carboy of red wine fermented in our highrise West Side apartment. 

Decades later, when the time came to transfer his gun, a blued .357 Magnum manufactured by Smith & Wesson in the 1960s, I paid my first of many visits to the Westside Rifle and Pistol Range. Operating out of a basement space on West 20th Street since 1964, the range is an enduring lifeline for city gun owners. Here you can take training classes, join its shooting club, use its services as a federal firearms-licensed dealer (known as FFL) or simply try out one of its .22 rifles (no license required). 

I have done it all. But first, I sat down with Westside’s owner, Darren Leung. “I am amazed we survived,” he said of his holdout range in the heart of Gotham. “But by the good grace of God and some great members, we’re still here.”

James brings his father’s gun — now his — to the range in a locked case. Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

Leung went on to explain the consequences of the landmark 2022 Supreme Court ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen and what it meant for gun licensing in the city.

He also noted the uptick in interest in personal firearms following the 2020 riots, the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and the all-too-routine evidence that you cannot always rely on others to protect you and your loved ones. “Better to have a gun and not need it than to need it and not have it,” said Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the Russian founder of the Jewish Defense Organization and famous Zionist. That might well be the motto here too.

Back in my father’s day, most city gun owners could only expect to receive what was known as a premise permit. That meant you could take your firearm, unloaded in a locked container, to and from the range, and that was it. The Bruen decision changed that.

James’ story began when he inherited an old service revolver from his father. Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

Before Bruen, New York required its firearms applicants to show what it called “proper cause” to receive an unrestricted license. This effectively meant only diamond dealers and cash couriers could obtain anything beyond a premise permit. In 2022, the Supreme Court thought otherwise.

“We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need,” wrote Justice Clarence Thomas, delivering the scathing opinion of the court in Bruen. 

“That is not how the First Amendment works when it comes to unpopular speech or the free exercise of religion. It is not how the Sixth Amendment works when it comes to a defendant’s right to confront the witnesses against him. And it is not how the Second Amendment works when it comes to public carry for self-defense.”

With the high court ruling that the “Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home,” tens of thousands of new firearms applications flooded in.

James practices weekly at the range just down the block from his Manhattan office with his own registered revolver. Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

Leung suggested to me that the premise permit would likely be phased out. New Yorkers should now apply for concealed carry. The NYPD licensing division handles all applications through its website. The system is an improvement over the old paper forms and the need for exact postal money orders hand-delivered to One Police Plaza. I should also add that the NYPD licensing officers who reached out to me as my application was in process were all friendly and professional.

Nevertheless, the online application has many, many steps, and it is best approached in stages. The biggest hurdle of the application process is the 18-hour training class. But here what might have been a challenge proved to be a highlight.

The author finished his weekend course with a paper test — and has gotten better since.Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

Each month, Westside offers sessions compacted into a single intensive weekend course. The spaces fill, so sign up early. Two dozen of us met in the cluttered Westside classroom. We sat on broken-down school desks with patriotic flags lining the walls.

The diversity of students there was a reflection of town. I sat next to the son of a police officer. Behind me was a young woman in a designer coat. Next to her, a man was speaking English as a second language. Some were longtime gun owners upgrading from premise permits. Others had never touched a firearm until the day we gathered. 

Our instructor was Glenn Herman, a wry, wiry native of Greenwich Village dressed head to toe in black (his website is appropriately titled newyorkcityguns.com). As he sprinkled in stories of his bar mitzvah, over two days we learned about the history of rifling, the relative advantages between revolvers and semi-automatics, the uses of hollow-point rounds versus full metal jacket, different holster options, sight pictures, misfires, hangfires, squib loads, the isosceles over the Weaver stance and the fundamentals of firearm safety (always point it in a safe direction, always assume it is loaded and always keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire). 

Herman ended the first day by showing us the Glock he keeps in his black fanny pack. “I’m getting older and don’t care what I look like,” he explained.

10

A diverse group of New Yorkers take aim at the Westside range in the heart of Manhattan.Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

For day two, things got heavier, as we reviewed the true challenges of New York’s gun laws and the legal implications of concealed carry. In response to Bruen, the Legislature imposed a host of new restrictions under its so-called sensitive-place law. These regulations state that you cannot bring a licensed firearm, loaded or unloaded, through much of town, including parks, public transport, restaurants and the “Times Square Exclusion Zone.” Haven’t you seen the signs?

Such restrictions will almost certainly be challenged on constitutional grounds, as they effectively nullify the protections of Bruen. Nevertheless, until then, law-abiding New Yorkers must remain cognizant of the many new impositions. Of course, we should not assume the same cognizance of New York’s criminal class.

Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

Before we finished the weekend course with a paper test and a live-fire drill with a 9-millimeter semi-automatic, Herman went over the ethical challenges that come with concealed carry.

“The city will be different for you when you have a loaded firearm,” he explained. “You must train your mind first to be nonviolent. Cultivate a mindset where your instincts are good and deadly force is used only after all other options have been exhausted, where you have nowhere left to escape, and life is on the line.”

Herman guided us to further study with such gun gurus as Massad Ayoob. His online tutorials on the many nuances of firearms literacy, from grip and stance to legal implications and how to talk to law enforcement, are all must-see.

Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

With the testing done and paperwork submitted, I received my appointment for police fingerprinting.

A few months later, my temporary approval came in, which meant I could finalize the process of getting my dad’s revolver on my license.

In many states, you can simply walk into a gun shop and walk out with a pistol. You can also inherit a firearm like anything else.

Not so in New York. Each firearm must pass through a dealer and be registered to your license before it can be released.

You can also only register one firearm every 90 days. Again, Westside shepherded this process along for me and held onto my pistol until it was cleared.

Tamara Beckwith/NY Post

But I got it, and my concealed-carry license arrived in the mail.

The approval meant I could join the Westside range and shoot whenever I liked.

The old basement range, which has changed little since a scene from “Taxi Driver” was filmed there half a century ago, welcomes all with its donuts and coffee and bonhomie. 

I am no great marksman, but I can see incremental improvements in my weekly practice.

Lining up a gun with a target is easy. Keeping it on target as you pull the trigger and handle its recoil, and doing this consistently, is the challenge.

I think of my father firing that same gun. The smell of the gunpowder takes me back to those teenage years with him on the range.

The author poses with his father, Carl Panero, on Gramercy Park after his daughter’s baby naming at the National Arts Club in 2010. Courtesy of James Panero

Still, I wouldn’t mind trying out a smaller pistol.

My Magnum is too large and heavy for pocket carry.

A smaller five-shooter might be in order. Or maybe I should go for a Colt 1911.

Most shooters have moved away from wheel guns altogether in favor of plastic semi-automatic 9-millimeters, such as the Glock.

In any case, it’s nice to have options on your holiday wish list. I’m sure Jabotinsky would agree.

America Beautiful

THE NEW CRITERION, December 2025

America Beautiful

On President Trump’s architectural agenda.

Take a walk by 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as I recently did, and you might be surprised to find the White House still there as you remember it. You should be forgiven for assuming otherwise, considering the images that have recently played out of wrecking crews tearing away at walls and windows and the commentary that has surrounded this undertaking. “AIA Condemns Demolition of the White House East Wing and Calls for Transparency in Public Architecture,” read a statement by the American Institute of Architects. “Donald Trump’s East Wing demolition trashes First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s queer legacy,” declared The Advocate. “‘Dictator-for-life vibes’: our architecture critic on Trump’s bulletproof ballroom bling,” blared The Guardian. “Why did he pick an architect whose speciality is Catholic churches?” the subhead asked.

A better question, beyond the hyperbole, bad-faith arguments, and elitist bigotry, is how successful the president’s many cultural and architectural projects will actually be. With more initiatives revealed by the day, the answer looks to place Trump among our greatest builder-presidents, in line with Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt. As Americans embrace his classical, representational, and traditional undertakings, the only real destruction is the loss of the establishment’s cultural hegemony.

The new White House State Ballroom, to be constructed over the former East Wing, is the latest case in point. Trump’s critics may denounce the two-term president as a “king” for the fact they did not vote for him. Far from a royal palace, however, his plans reveal a democratic executive with the popular intelligence of a lifetime in real estate. With funding secured by private donations made through the Trust for the National Mall, rather than by taxpayer revenue (a fact his critics bemoan), Trump has set out to leave a lasting legacy on the White House grounds free of charge.

During Trump’s first term, in a project overseen by the First Lady, the residential architect Steven W. Spandle updated the White House tennis pavilion. That initiative, which replaced Barack Obama’s basketball court and changing-room trailer, faced its own host of critics. Yet the result proved to be a sensitive new addition that restored the elegance of a sport first introduced to the White House by Theodore Roosevelt.

The ballroom likewise updates the East Wing in a similar idiom for a new and much-needed function. Its lead architect is James McCrery II, a seasoned practitioner who began as a modernist working for Peter Eisenman but rededicated his life to classicism under the mentorship of Allan Greenberg. A restrained, classical exterior that borrows from the White House’s existing colonnades, fanlights, cornices, and buff stonework will open onto a more exuberant interior of Corinthian columns and coffered ceilings. Until now, large White House receptions have been relegated to unsightly tents on the South Lawn. With a deferential design that works to conceal its massing, the ballroom will finally provide a secure indoor venue for essential functions such as state dinners while maintaining the East Wing’s existing functions. “Take a breath, folks,” read an editorial in The Wall Street Journal on “Trump’s Big, Beautiful Ballroom.” “There really is a case for a larger hall at the White House for holding big state dinners and other events.” With a capacity approaching a thousand guests (numbers have varied), the venue will also make the president’s home, and the president himself, more accessible to more Americans than before. In a democratic society, such openness might be considered a good thing.

As with any reuse, the project starts with demolition. Here few will admit that the East Wing is not the historical White House at all. It is a side structure, of relatively recent vintage, set apart and built over the presidential bunker. Until now, if we even knew it existed, most of us probably needed a map to find it on the executive grounds. The wing is located about as close to the Treasury Department as to the historical White House. Standing at the White House fence on Pennsylvania Avenue, you realize how distant the site truly is.

Such an architectural update does not represent a tear in the essential fabric of our democratic republic, or even so much as a historical snag. For over a century, the nerve center of the White House has been the West Wing, not the East Wing. First designed by McKim, Mead & White under Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, the West Wing allowed the executive staff to work outside of the White House’s second-floor living quarters for the first time. William Howard Taft added the Oval Office to the West Wing soon after. The East Wing has been far less significant to the history of the White House, serving as a coatroom, a reception hall, and most recently as the offices of the First Lady.

Regardless of any section’s particular significance, however, the White House has been updated by every president, at times more directly than by its current occupant. Critics complained about Jefferson’s additions, too, but presidents have wide latitude in overseeing changes at the White House and even a duty to keep the executive mansion updated and vital. The White House outbuildings have evolved even more over time, with greenhouses, swimming pools, bowling alleys, and movie theaters coming and going, and far more grandiose plans than Trump’s ballroom put forward over the years. In “Unbuilt White Houses of the Nineteenth Century,” William Bushong details these proposals for the White House Historical Association. Under the presidency of Harry Truman, the White House was even gutted, with bulldozers rolling through the empty shell of the historical structure. Just imagine the outcry if Trump had sent bulldozers through the Lincoln Bedroom.

Read my interview on Trump’s architecture with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (December 8, 2025)

We should not be surprised by the political capital that Trump, a president who grew up working with the built environment, is now spending on cultural projects or his understanding of the transformative power of architecture and art. Through his career in real estate, we knew he exhibited a New York toughness and early on learned the power of the wrecking ball in getting things done. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he made his mark through the brash development of Midtown’s Grand Hyatt New York and his Trump Tower on Fifty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue. Both involved the construction of glass towers through the partial or full demolition of historical structures, both as it happens designed by Warren & Wetmore: the Hotel Commodore in Grand Central’s Terminal City and the flagship store of Bonwit Teller.

We might rightly criticize the loss of architectural history replaced by smoked windows and bronze cladding, but Trump demonstrated what it took to build successful projects in what at the time appeared to be a moribund city. His understanding of style has also evolved since then into a more nuanced appreciation of classicism and historical preservation. Following his purchase of Mar-a-Lago in 1985, he restored Marjorie Merriweather Post’s derelict Palm Beach residence designed by Marion Sims Wyeth and Joseph Urban to its original splendor, first as a private home, then as a club property, and finally as his own weekend White House—fulfilling a wish of Post’s that it be used as a presidential property.

At the heart of President Trump’s appeal has been the promise of restoration: the “again” of “Make America Great Again.” What began as a return to American values is now compounded by his own return to power after a Herculean campaign and the prospect of the U.S. semiquincentennial in 2026—the upcoming jubilee that was just about ignored throughout the Biden interregnum.

In the summer of 2020, near the end of his first term, Trump also witnessed what was nothing less than an attempted revolution to overturn the American order. Genuine insurrectionists intermingled with criminals and permissive gatekeepers to target not just statues of American heroes and history but also the classical plinths and pillars representing our national foundations. In “A classical illness,” appearing in these pages in September 2020, I noted how “the association of classical forms with an illegitimate order has long been a central tenet of anti-liberal ideology.”

Trump is ever mindful of the history of radicalism and the capacity of classicism to reflect a return to order. In his second term, this embrace has been unabashed, with a classical eclecticism that is gilded, colorful, and light-filled rather than mere academic historicism. He has promoted shovel-ready projects with a hard deadline of July 4, 2026, the date of the national jubilee. Informed by advocates for classicism such as Justin Shubow of the National Civic Art Society, the president has also pushed new design guidance, in particular the classical mandate behind the executive order “Making Federal Architecture Great Again”—put forward in the final days of his first term, overruled by Biden as one of his first acts in office, and now recodified. The order overturns sixty years of Olympian modernism enforced as house style that has seen increasingly oppressive results, from the recent borg-like Orrin G. Hatch United States Courthouse in Salt Lake City to the dysplastic polyp of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago—which in its metastasis has usurped historic Olmsted parkland, a fact first criticized in these pages by John Vinci (see “The Obama Library double parks,” December 2016).

Trump’s executive order has far-reaching consequences and is now being extended to infrastructure projects and other sectors under federal purview. Now is the time for Trump to turn his White House wrecking crew on the other eyesores of the federal district’s Brutalist era, from the FBI Headquarters, to the Department of Education, to the Postal Service Headquarters. Taken to its conclusion, his executive order has the potential to restore Washington as a classical city. It also nudges cities such as New York closer than ever to restoring their own classical inheritance. Thanks to its many tireless advocates, we might even see the reconstruction of McKim, Mead & White’s Pennsylvania Station (the original track layout and even some stairwells conveniently remain in place following its 1963 demolition).

Through it all, critics will continue to smear America’s classical heritage. In an astonishing display of racial bigotry, the Smithsonian’s own National Museum of African American History and Culture has labeled the “primacy of Western (Greek, Roman) and Judeo-Christian tradition” as one of the “aspects and assumptions of whiteness.” In The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman ties classical architecture to “images of antebellum America” and “authoritarian regimes of the past.” One wonders what such critics would have said if a leftist mob had taken their blowtorches and spray cans to the East Wing. Just this past October, The New York Times saw fit to hail an exhibition in Los Angeles of sculptures made from the desecrated parts of historical statues, taken down in such riots, as “the year’s boldest show.”

Trump’s righteous response has been to redouble his own classical initiatives in the face of elitist opprobrium. In part this has meant commissioning new classical projects. Not long after the classical advocate Catesby Leigh made the case in The American Mind for the construction of a triumphal arch in Washington, timed to commemorate the semiquincentennial, Trump could be seen with the model of an “Independence Arch” sited on an empty roundabout across the Arlington Memorial Bridge from the Lincoln Memorial. Borrowing from Roman, French, and American precedent, such an arch would extend to Washington the examples set in New York around the turn of the last century by McKim, Mead & White’s Washington Arch in Washington Square Park (originally a temporary wooden structure), Charles R. Lamb’s temporary Dewey Arch by Madison Square, and John Hemenway Duncan’s Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza.

Another example of Trump’s classical retort has been his forthcoming National Garden of American Heroes. This initiative picks up from where such institutions as the original Hall of Fame for Great Americans, at New York University’s former Bronx campus, left off (see my “Hall of flame,” November 2017). By commissioning new statues of Americans “chosen for embodying the American spirit of daring and defiance, excellence and adventure, courage and confidence, loyalty and love,” as its executive order spells out, the National Garden aims to “reflect the awesome splendor of our country’s timeless exceptionalism.” Addressing the riots of the years prior, the language of the garden’s executive order is explicit in its response:

Across this Nation, belief in the greatness and goodness of America has come under attack in recent months and years by a dangerous anti-American extremism that seeks to dismantle our country’s history, institutions, and very identity. The heroes of 1776 have been desecrated, with statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin vandalized and toppled. The dead who gave their lives to end slavery and save the Union during the Civil War have been dishonored, with monuments to Abraham Lincoln, Hans Christian Heg, and the courageous 54th Regiment left damaged and disfigured. The brave warriors who saved freedom from Nazi fascism have been disgraced with a memorial to World War II veterans defaced with the hammer and sickle of Soviet communism.

Last summer, I served as a peer reviewer for the applications that came in response to this program’s open call. What they revealed was a deep bench of realistic artists working without fanfare in traditional stone and bronze. Emboldened by the American story, able to craft “lifelike or realistic representations of the persons they depict, not abstract or modernist representations,” as mandated by the 2020 executive order, they appear set to invigorate the nation’s foundries and ateliers as never before. The best applicants were those who rose above mere representation to seek out the heroic idealism of their chosen subjects through astonishing craftsmanship and attention to material and finish. The challenge will be to complete these ambitious commissions by July 4, 2026, and have them installed in the National Garden’s to-be-determined location.

In line with the National Garden have been Trump’s efforts to restore those statues attacked in the riots of the last decade. Grants have already gone out to piece together the shattered fragments of monuments to Christopher Columbus. Here we can hope that Trump will push his restoratory agenda to maximal effect. No statue should be canceled by the rioters’ veto or those institutions and municipalities that fell under their sway.

A primary goal should be the restoration of Theodore Roosevelt’s equestrian statue to the New York State memorial dedicated to the twenty-sixth president, in front of the American Museum of Natural History. Sculpted by James Earle Fraser after Verrocchio’s equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleioni, the sculpture was integral to John Russell Pope’s design for his Roosevelt Rotunda as it looked out from the triumphal arch framing the museum’s entryway. The heroic statue was racially inclusive, pairing Roosevelt with personifications of Africa and the Americas standing “for Roosevelt’s friendliness to all races,” as Fraser explained. A 2018 memorial commission had even determined the monument should stay. Nevertheless, in 2020 the city under Bill de Blasio along with the museum director Ellen Futter decreed the statue to be a “hurtful” symbol of “systemic racism,” and so it went. A counteroffensive now fashioned in the manner of Trump’s review of American universities could finally bring such municipalities and institutions to heel until the return of this cultural patrimony, along with the funds to pay for the statues’ upkeep and protection.

Over a hundred years ago, a movement called City Beautiful undertook a wave of architectural and urban reform. American municipalities, in particular the nation’s capital under Daniel Burnham, reached new heights of enlightened public planning through the studied application of Beaux-Arts and classical design. On the eve of the U.S. semiquincentennial, after half a century of radical deformation, an America Beautiful movement now appears ready to reinvigorate this classical inheritance with monumental fanfare and a president built for such restoration.

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.