For conservatives who recall William F. Buckley Jr. in his prime and the American conservative movement in its emergence, this book will likely generate nostalgia—and perhaps some political ennui. In rendering a tender but honest insiders’ narrative of Buckley and National Review, the authors inevitably lead the reader to a depressing comparison between the fervent and coherent conservatism of yesteryear and the fractured and often misguided movement of today. Just as naturally, the reader might compare the vibrant, pertinent, brilliantly packaged National Review of Buckley’s day with the scattered, unfocused, sometimes ill-mannered magazine we see now. One element of the story that doesn’t change is Buckley himself.

But Strictly Right isn’t, strictly speaking, a biography. It lacks the personal focus and depth of research to qualify for that designation. Rather, it presents a half-century of American political history from the perspective of National Review and its remarkable leader. On those terms, it succeeds admirably.

The authors are veterans of the magazine and the movement they write about. Both were recruited from academe to the magazine’s rarefied precincts by Buckley himself. Bridges has devoted just about her entire adult life to the magazine, including ten years as managing editor. Coyne, NR’s leading political writer before bolting to Washington to write speeches for Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon, has nurtured a National Review byline for the better part of four decades.

Relying in part on their memories and the lore they know so well, they sprinkle their narrative with amusing and telling anecdotes that give life and meaning to the central players. They enrich the oft-told story of Buckley and his magazine with fresh sketches and insights.

Of particular value is the authors’ portrayal of Buckley’s brilliance not just as polemicist and political showman but also as executive, strategist, and leader. It wasn’t simply automatic that National Review, once founded, would have a profound impact on American politics. The 29-year-old Buckley took charge of an intellectually motley crew that, while in agreement about the Western crisis posed by Russian bolshevism and domestic collectivism, agreed on just about nothing else. The players included, as the authors note, “libertarians and Burkeans, free-marketeers and Southern Agrarians, Madisonians and European monarchists.” It fell to the young man to forge a degree of coherence out of these powerful sentiments.

He did so with unsentimental adroitness. The idea for the magazine had originated with William S. Schlamm, a refugee from both Austria and Henry Luce’s Time-Life empire, who also had identified the young Buckley as the right man to head the enterprise. But when Schlamm and another magazine stalwart, James Burnham, became embroiled in irreconcilable ideological disputes, Buckley sided with Burnham and allowed Schlamm to storm off. It was the right choice, notwithstanding that Schlamm’s worldview matched Buckley’s more closely than Burnham’s did. Burnham soon emerged as a powerful force at the magazine, second only to Buckley in his contribution to the journal’s ultimate success.

Buckley displayed similar shrewdness in crafting the magazine’s positions on delicate issues of the day. He boldly excoriated John Birch Society head Robert Welch for splitting the conservative movement with the “extravagance” of his accusatory rhetoric. He did so, however, with characteristic political deftness, only after getting a nod of assent from Barry Goldwater himself. When his staff became hopelessly split over whether it should support or spurn the 1960 presidential candidacy of Richard Nixon, Buckley wrote the editorial himself. Neither supporting nor rejecting the man, he issued a plea, “directed as much to Buckley’s colleagues as to NR’s readers,” for each side to concede that the other’s position fit reasonably within the conservative ambit.

And the authors remind us of Buckley’s brilliance in capturing the zeitgeist at crucial moments. Particularly poignant was his speech to the national convention of Young Americans for Freedom on Sept. 11, 1964—just before the electorate would cast ballots on behalf of Barry Goldwater or Lyndon Johnson. Those in attendance had expected a fiery exhortation to march on to a brilliant November victory. Instead, he stilled the audience with the line, “I speak … about the impending defeat of Barry Goldwater.”

Following gasps, Buckley exhorted conservatives to embrace reality: “It is wrong to assume that we shall overcome; and therefore it is right to reason to the necessity of guarding against the utter disarray that sometimes follows a stunning defeat.” Rather, he said, they must honor Goldwater’s “political nobility” in placing himself and the conservative outlook before the American people. They could do that by “showing not a moment’s dismay on Nov. 4” and resolving to “emerge smiling, confident in the knowledge that we weakened those [adversarial] walls, that they will never again stand so firmly against us.” His words went beyond eloquence to capture just the right sentiment for that particular audience at that particular moment.

Bridges and Coyne shed fresh insight into the famous Buckley frenzy of professional and personal activity—the magazine, the column, the television show, the books, the lecture tours, the whirlwind social schedule, the sailing expeditions, the ski vacations. He managed all this, they suggest, through his brilliance as an executive. He surrounded himself with ultra-smart and omnicompetent people, then decisively rendered his judgments, delegated the follow-through, and moved on to the next item, never looking back.

This was one of the first things that changed in 1990, when Buckley turned the NR editorship over to John O’Sullivan. While able to maintain the magazine’s editorial heritage during his eight-year tenure, O’Sullivan lacked his predecessor’s organizational brilliance. That soon turned out to be the least of the erosions to beset National Review and the movement it represented. To the many competing strains of political thought with which Buckley grappled as a young man at the helm of his fledgling journal, there now was added the neoconservative impulse, which essentially captured the magazine just as it overtook the Bush administration.

This outlook, not so much a political philosophy as a political temperament, led Bush to Iraq and a quagmire that likely will seal the fate of Republicans, in much the same way that Vietnam sealed the fate of Democrats 40 years ago. And it has led National Review into a reactive defense of a war whose philosophical underpinnings include large elements of Wilsonian humanitarianism—an outlook that nearly all NR conservatives from the early years fundamentally despised.

That in turn led NR’s current editor, Rich Lowry, to publish what was perhaps the most reprehensible article ever to appear in the magazine—an April 2003 piece by former Bush speechwriter David Frum that questioned the patriotism of antiwar conservatives and linked opposition to the invasion of Iraq with anti-Semitism, white supremacism, and xenophobia.

The magnitude of this lapse later was captured with anguished eloquence in The American Spectator by Neal B. Freeman, a onetime Buckley protégé and former NR board member, who made clear just how far removed it was from the magazine’s editorial heritage. The authors of Strictly Right seek a more evenhanded approach, quoting former NR publisher William Rusher as saying Frum’s subjects weren’t unpatriotic, just “simply, desperately, wrong.”

But Buckley himself, after supporting the war in the early months, underwent a powerful conversion in mid-2004. “Ours is a failed mission,” he declared, and went on to question whether the mission’s ultimate rationale for success—the U.S. capacity to forge democracy in the Middle East—had any realistic basis at all. He went so far as to question whether Bush’s second inaugural address, articulating the heady goal of eradicating tyranny in the world, represents any kind of conservatism.

Bridges and Coyne report this conversion, but they don’t explore its underlying significance—namely, that American conservatism has fallen upon hard times. In the early years, the magazine resided in the hands of a jumble of excitable intellectuals with a host of variegated opinions but two shared convictions: the imperative of thwarting communism abroad and reversing collectivism at home. From that little group, there emerged, with the aid of Buckley’s long-headed sagacity, a coherent political philosophy that evolved and adjusted to external events to gain ever greater sway in political discourse and become America’s leading political force.

Now that force seems spent. In its place is a discredited president who calls himself a conservative but presides over a massive federal build-up and employs Wilsonian rhetoric to justify a failed foreign war. William F. Buckley Jr. remains steadfast, but his magazine now seems unmoored from fundamental conservative tenets. Across the political landscape, there is hardly a potential statesman to be seen who represents the legacy of Ronald Reagan, let alone Barry Goldwater.

Rather like a smooth, flat stone tossed across the water, the authors skip a bit too much on the surface of events, generating both interest and amusement but leaving the reader inevitably wishing for more. But assessed on its own terms, the book gives good value as a chatty, charming bit of storytelling that, in providing an understanding of yesteryear, offers insight into the realities of today.
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Robert W. Merry, editor in chief of Congressional Quarterly, is the author of books on postwar journalists Joseph and Stewart Alsop and American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War.