SHARON UNSTATEMENT: The Looming Buckley/ Tanenhaus Biography Fiasco

Bill Buckley chose Sam Tanenhaus as his authorized biographer. It's not the least stupid thing he did.

Peter Brimelow writes: Sam Tanenhaus’ incredibly-long-awaited authorized biography of William F. Buckley (pub. date June 3) is being heralded with massive Regime Media trumpeting.

Tanenhaus did not bother to interview me, which I assume means he ignores the entire post-Reagan Dissident Right critique of Buckley. More to the point, he did not interview John O’Sullivan (NR Editor 1988-1997 and still an “Editor At Large”).

Here’s an account of Tanenhaus doing a local victory lap (paid for by whom?) and disparaging Buckley. It was sent to me by a politically-conscious eyewitness.

Tanenhaus gave a talk, “The Buckleys of Sharon,” in Sharon, in rural northwest Connecticut in the foothills of the Berkshire mountains, on April 16 2025. Originally scheduled to be held at the Sharon Historical Society, the talk had to be held at the Town Hall because of high interest.

The Buckley family bought Great Elm, an estate near the center of Sharon, in the late 1920s. The family (ultimately 10 children) lived there while WFB Sr managed his oil exploration interests in NYC, returning at the weekends. Tanenhaus saw fit to describe this to his Sharon audience as being “among the bars and honky tonks of Manhattan”.

The most significant comment Tanenhaus made was that his editors had forced him to cut out over 100 pages on the history of the Buckley ancestors. He said they told him no one would be interested.

Obviously this is absurd—look at the interest in Ancestry.com or 23 & Me. However it is a phenomenon I have noticed in recently published biographies. Perhaps publishers have decided to repress the material because of its implicit hereditarianism.

But Tanenhaus’ relative lack of comment on the alleged topic of his talk was even odder.

In brief, the lecture was a extraordinary procession of smears on WFB and his family. About the only things positive Tanehuas allowed, apart from acknowledging WFB’s fabled charm, was that they taxied their servants to church, and that he never heard WFB say anything negative about Gore Vidal. (In contrast, Tanenhaus said he never heard Vidal say any not negative about Buckley).

We were told that WFB was not thought exceptional by the family—he was the 6^th child. His oldest sister Aloise Buckley (Heath) according to Tanenhaus, held this position. (Unlike Jr and 4 other of his siblings she does not have her own Wikipedia entry, although she did herself have 10 children.) Maybe Tanenhaus’ biography will support this claim

Tanenhaus reported WFB was faced with entering the local Prep School, Millbrook at a lower grade than his immediately older brother, the future Senator James Buckley. To avoid this he went to summer school, but supposedly spent all his time yachting and so was unsuccessful.

Tanenhaus breathlessly recounted that WFB at school was very active in the America First movement, the attempt to avoid U.S. engagement in World War II, as was his father. This occasioned WFB’s first political writing and, I gather, speaking. Tanenhaus did not report this with approval.

With great glee, Tanenhaus did report that, at some point in about the late 40s some of Buckley’s sisters and friends did some petty vandalism in the Sharon Episcopal Church, which is just across the road from the Great Elm main house. There was no suggestion that WFB was involved.

Tanenhaus suggested this was a great scandal in Sharon, which at that time was was mainly Protestant.

Why this atrocity happened was not explained. I have heard there were girlish spats between the Buckleys and the daughters of the Episcopalian minister, although at other times they socialized. That Tanenhaus did not address this is odd.

He also claimed that there was a similar anti-semitic incident in the neighboring town, but he did not expand on it. This impacted the audience much more than desecrating the Episcopal Church. The demographics of Sharon, now a major New York weekend community, are much changed.

Oddly, Tanenhaus did not mention that the Buckley family paid for the Sharon Catholic Church’s bells.

On Buckley’s much-noted accent, Tanenhaus retailed that WFB claimed his diction was influenced by his first language being Spanish, learned from his nannies. Tanenhaus insinuated that this meant the Buckley parents were little involved with their small children.

That was about all as far as the Sharon stories went. The fact that WFB Jr founded Young Americans For Freedom, not an inconsequential outfit in its day, in a meeting at Great Elm, was unmentioned. Nor that the founding manifesto was called the Sharon Statement, nor that the event is commemorated by a small monument in the Great Elm grounds.

I would have thought that would have interested his Sharon audience. But of course, that would have entailed explaining what YAF was, which Tanenhaus apparently found unimportant.

There were two events in Buckley’s public life celebrated as great defeats for WFB by the Left, somewhat like the Army/McCarthy hearings.

One was the 1965 Oxford Union debate against James Baldwin "The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro."

Of course in such a venue at such a time, Buckley stood no chance.

But Tanenhaus made the peculiar argument that WFB was tone-deaf to Baldwin’s style, which he said was derived from the cadences of the King James Bible via the tradition of Black preaching. He suggested that the WFB, being a Catholic, would be ignorant of this.

To me, this reflects the lack of comprehension of Christian culture that Tanenhaus also displayed in his Whittaker Chambers biography. To him, as a New York Jewish intellectual, it was entirely natural that Chambers would become a Communist. But it was not.

The Gore Vidal/Buckley row on television at the time of the ’68 Democratic convention also seemed to give Tanenhaus great pleasure. His book looks like being a cheering squad for Vidal.