Right-hand man

A new bio of the man who helped the Republican movement rebuild itself from the ashes, only to hand it to Trump.

- BY HENRY COOKE

There was a time not so long ago when the Republican right in America flirted with extinction.

Democrats won every presidential election bar two from 1932 to 1964, using their dominance to build a “New Deal” in the 1930s and 1940s and a “Great Society” in the 1960s. The party’s only two losses were to the war hero Dwight D Eisenhower, who governed as a centrist moderate happy to bed in the New Deal rather than roll it back. And when the right of the Republican Party finally got a candidate in line with their views with Barry Goldwater in 1964, he lost in a record-breaking landslide.

But it was in this era of repeated defeat that the right managed to remake itself into an election-winning force whose descendants now control the US almost completely. And there is no one man more central to that journey than journalist and activist William F Buckley, the subject of a magisterial new biography by Sam Tanenhaus. I recommend it to anyone interested in US politics.