Know Your Enemy: A Complicated Man

Matt and Sam talk to Sam Tanenhaus about his long-awaited biography of William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. in 1958 (Bettmann/Getty Images)

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

This episode is one that Matt and Sam have been anticipating for years: after two-and-a-half decades of research and writing, Sam Tanenhaus’s authoritative biography of William F. Buckley Jr.—youthful booster of America First, enfant terrible at Yale, CIA agent, founder of National Review, best-selling author, brilliant television host, and more—has blessedly arrived. Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America stretches to just under 900 pages of text, before you get to the endnotes and index, an appropriately epic biography of an overstuffed, consequential life, containing far more than could be covered in a single episode. This conversation focuses on the challenges of writing a biography of a man whose archives rival those found in presidential libraries; Tanenhaus’s discovery of a newspaper the Buckleys owned in South Carolina that was essentially a mouthpiece for the White Citizens’ Council, and the southern roots of Buckley’s “northern segregationist” politics; the influence of his oilman father, who fled the revolution in Mexico and instilled anticommunist politics, as well as the Catholic faith, in his children; Buckley’s role in forging the postwar conservative movement, through National Review and his frenetic endeavors as a columnist and speaker; the controversies, disappointments, failures, and triumphs of his decades-long career; and more.

Sources:

Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America (2025)

— Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (1997)

John Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (1988)

Sam Adler-Bell, A Practical Fanatic, The Idea Letters (2025)

Alexander Chee, Mr. and Mrs. B., Longreads (2025)

Christopher H. Owen, Heaven Can Indeed Fall: The Life of Willmoore Kendall (2022)

Listen to these Know Your Enemy episodes for background on:

Brent Bozell: Keeping up with the Bozells (2021)

Willmoore Kendall: The Long Farewell to Majority Rule? (w/ Joshua Tait) (2021)

Frank Meyer: Frank Meyer, the Father of Fusionism (2021)

Joan Didion: Joan Didion, Conservative (w/ Sam Tanenhaus) (2022)