PBS’s American Masters doesn’t trade in sainthood. Its finest portraits render their subjects in chiaroscuro—equal parts dignity and defect. The Incomparable Mr. Buckley upholds that tradition in profiling William F. Buckley Jr.—founder of National Review, master of televised debate, literary showman, and the man who gave postwar American conservatism its polished voice and prickly conscience.
He was born in 1925 in New York City, the sixth of ten children in a sprawling, hyper-articulate Catholic family. His father, William Sr., was an oil magnate and ideological absolutist with Southern landholdings and a Calvinist’s faith in capitalism. His mother, Aloise Steiner Buckley, a Southern belle with gentler bearing, provided music, charm, and restraint. Together, they presided over a household where French, Latin, logic, and loyalty to God and property were daily fare. It was not a home so much as a crucible.
The family’s wealth insulated the Buckley children, but it also armed them. William Jr. emerged with the accent of a 19th-century baronet, the posture of a fencing master, and the moral certitude of a bishop. He entered Yale as if into inheritance. And when Yale failed to meet his expectations, he turned on it—with glittering vehemence.
God and Man at Yale, published in 1951, was a bombshell disguised as a senior thesis. Its argument: that the university had betrayed its Christian and individualist roots, surrendering to collectivism and atheism. The prose was provocatively archaic, yet the thrust was unmistakably modern. This was not merely a critique of education—it was a blueprint for counter-revolution. The American conservative movement, until then diffuse and culturally marginal, had found its polemicist.
By 1955, Buckley had founded National Review. It was not just a magazine—it was an ideological citadel. In its pages, Buckley defined a new conservatism: urbane, anti-communist, economically libertarian, and socially hierarchical. His prose was a blend of rococo elegance and dry contempt. He did not argue for approval; he argued to reign. Readers didn’t just agree—they aspired.
He published more than fifty books: political commentaries, spy thrillers, religious meditations, memoirs. The Unmaking of a Mayor was equal parts political comedy and civic dissection. Nearer, My God offered a rare glimpse into his spiritual reflections. Even his novels—clever, if a bit baroque—carried the same crisp posture as his public self. He made ideology feel like a private club with a sommelier.
And yet, the costs of that ascent remain part of the record. Buckley was, by any honest reading, a segregationist. His 1957 essay Why the South Must Prevail asserted the right of white Southerners to govern over Black citizens—not as a matter of prejudice, but, he claimed, of civilizational necessity. That Buckley later retracted this position matters. That he held it at all matters more. The documentary makes no excuses.
One of his starkest reckonings came in 1965 at the Cambridge Union, in debate with James Baldwin. Baldwin’s speech—incandescent, unsparing—laid bare America’s betrayal of its Black citizens. Buckley followed with wit, erudition, and rhetorical flair—but also with a visible tightness, as if aware that history had tilted toward Baldwin before a word had been spoken. The moment was not a defeat, but it was a humbling—a rare crack in Buckley’s polished armor, and the documentary captures it without editorializing. It trusts the camera, the silence, the afterglow of Baldwin’s thunder.
The film wisely returns often to Firing Line, Buckley’s long-running television program, which aired 1,504 episodes over 33 years. Here, Buckley became both emissary and gatekeeper of conservative thought. He hosted everyone from Noam Chomsky to Ronald Reagan, playing both swordfighter and salon host. The set was minimalist. The conversations were maximalist. Viewers didn’t just tune in—they were initiated.
And there was the persona: the arched brow, the patrician drawl, the looping syntax that seemed to tango with itself. Buckley’s charisma was not merely linguistic. It was theatrical. The man performed intelligence—something his detractors dismissed as pretense but which his admirers saw as the very soul of elite engagement. That twinkle in his eye, that knowing pause—it wasn’t smugness. It was seduction.
No portrait of Buckley is complete without his role in grooming the political ascent of Ronald Reagan. The conservative movement, once the province of marginal pamphleteers and country-club grumblers, found in Buckley an architect—and in Reagan, a frontman. Buckley gave conservatism the vocabulary of gravitas; Reagan gave it the smile. The 1960s and ’70s saw Buckley tirelessly promoting Reagan as the movement’s ideal statesman: optimistic, disciplined, ideologically sound.
Buckley consulted with Reagan directly, advised on messaging, and defended him in print long before the political winds changed. It was Buckley who helped airbrush the John Birch Society and its paranoiac fringe out of the picture, insisting conservatism must not slip into lunacy. His expulsion of the Birchers was an act of philosophical self-respect. Reagan’s election in 1980 was, in no small part, the flowering of seeds planted in the editorial gardens of National Review.
But Buckley’s movement, like all movements, mutated. Today’s conservative landscape—rife with populism, grievance, and performative antagonism—bears only passing resemblance to the patrician discourse of Firing Line. Buckley believed ideas should be sharpened like swords, not hurled like bricks. He disdained conspiracy theories, theatrical outrage, and demagoguery. The very populism he once sought to discipline now rages, unkempt and unlettered, across the platforms of American life.
It is not merely that he would have opposed Trumpism. It’s that he would not have known quite where to begin. Where Buckley once sparred with Chomsky in syntax-rich combat, today’s heirs trade memes and innuendo. Figures like Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and their ilk owe more to televised resentment than rhetorical discipline. Buckley’s diction would be mocked; his detachment misunderstood as weakness.
The documentary touches on this transformation gently—perhaps too gently. But it raises the question: if Buckley founded the temple, did he fail to guard its altar? Or did he simply not foresee the day the velvet ropes would be trampled by the mob?
The film doesn’t avoid the personal. It gives due place to Patricia Buckley, his wife of more than five decades. She was not merely a society figure. She was a partner in the truest sense—a co-conspirator in charm and civility. Her death in 2007 shattered him. The documentary doesn’t overstate it, but you see it—in the thinning voice, the retreat from public jousts. Buckley without Patricia was a violinist without strings. He would later confess in a rare interview with Charlie Rose that he no longer wished to live. The twinkle, by then, had flickered into memory.
In his final years, Buckley grew more reflective. He questioned the Iraq War. He distanced himself from the Bush administration. And his writing—especially in Miles Gone By—betrayed an awareness that the world he helped shape was moving on without him. He died in 2008 of emphysema, a slow, diminishing ailment for a man once defined by verbal flight. The voice that had launched a movement finally quieted. And yet, the echoes endure.
What The Incomparable Mr. Buckley accomplishes—gently, but thoroughly—is the restoration of contradiction. Buckley the libertarian who praised Franco. Buckley the Catholic who denounced anti-Semitism but flirted with eugenics. Buckley the champion of free speech who occasionally reached for the censor’s glove. Buckley the gentleman who once threatened to punch Gore Vidal in the face. He was a colossus built of paradoxes.
The film omits his son, Christopher Buckley—himself a novelist and satirist—whose political journey diverged from his father’s but never lost affection. One suspects the exclusion was more editorial constraint than avoidance. Still, a nod might have added dimension to the portrait.
He was not easy to love, but impossible to ignore. He wielded ideas like foils, slicing through sentiment with style. He was wrong—sometimes deeply—but never dull. And in an age that increasingly rewards volume over voice, William F. Buckley Jr. remains a paradox worth revisiting: the radical traditionalist, the gracious elitist, the missionary of manners.
Verdict
A masterwork of biography that neither flatters nor flinches. The documentary invites us not to genuflect before Buckley, but to wrestle with him. His legacy, like his syntax, was elaborate, contradictory, and enduring. The modern right may no longer speak in his accent—but it still stirs in the cathedral he built.
R. M. Sydnor
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