William F. Buckley Jr. – författare

No two people were more important to American conservatism in the postwar era than William F. Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan. Buckley''s writings provided the intellectual underpinnings, while Reagan brought the conservative movement out of the wilderness and into the White House.

The pair met in 1961 when Reagan introduced a speech by Buckley. When nobody could turn on the microphone, Reagan climbed out a window, walked along a ledge to the locked control room, broke in, and flipped the correct switch. Buckley later described this moment as "a nifty allegory of Reagan''s approach to foreign policy: the calm appraisal of a situation, the willingness to take risks, and then the decisive moment leading to lights and sound."

For over thirty years, the two men shared jokes and vacations, advised each other on politics, and counseled each other''s children. When Reagan was elected president, Buckley wrote him to say that Reagan should not offer him any position in the new administration; Reagan wrote back saying he had hoped to appoint Buckley US Ambassador to Afghanistan (then under Soviet occupation). For the rest of his term, Reagan called Buckley "Mr. Ambassador." On the day the Soviets withdrew, he wrote Buckley to congratulate him for single-handedly driving out the Red Army "without ever leaving Kabul."

Yet for all the words that have been written about him, Ronald Reagan remains an enigma. His former speechwriter Peggy Noonan called him "paradox all the way down," and even his son Ron Reagan despaired of ever truly knowing him. But Reagan was not an enigma to William F. Buckley, Jr. They understood and taught each other for decades, and together they changed history.

The Reagan I Knew traces the evolution of an extraordinary friendship between two American political giants.

This is the book that launched Buckley''s career—and a movement. As a young recent graduate, Buckley took on Yale''s professional and administrative staffs, citing their hypocritical withdrawal from the tenets upon which the institution was built. Yale was founded on the belief that God exists, and thus virtue and individualism represent immutable cornerstones of education. But when Buckley wrote this scathing expos├®, the institution had made an about-face: Yale was expounding collectivism and agnosticism. This classic work shows Buckley as he ever was: dauntless, venturesome, bold, and valiant.

More than half a century later, experience the extraordinary work that began the modern conservative movement.

William F. Buckley''s bestselling Blackford Oakes novels have set a new standard for stylish espionage entertainment. Now Buckley sends Oakes on his most thrilling adventure yet.

The year is 1964. Faced with a hard-hitting presidential campaign and a deteriorating situation in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson dispatches Oakes and a swashbuckling soldier of fortune named Tucker on secret missions to Southeast Asia. Tucker is to figure out how to interdict military traffic along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Oakes is to supervise a secret operation in the Gulf of Tonkin, an operation that will give Johnson the excuse he needs for a greater US military role in Vietnam.

Filled with the intrigue, wit, and historical detail that have distinguished the previous novels of the series, Tucker''s Last Stand is William F. Buckley Jr. at his inimitable best.

James Jesus Angleton was a legend in the time of spies. Founder of US counterintelligence at the end of World War II, ruthless hunter of moles and enemies of America, his name is synonymous with skullduggery and intellectual subterfuge. William F. Buckley Jr. presents a subtle and thrilling fictional account of the spymaster''s life.

From his early involvement in the World War II underground to the waning days of the Cold War, Angleton pursued his enemies with a cool, calculating intelligence. Convinced that there was a turncoat within the CIA itself, he confused his enemy by deceptive feints in order to distort his real objective: to capture and expose a traitor. The result was near-victory for American Intelligence—and defeat for himself.

A brilliant re-creation of his world, Spytime traces the making and tragic unmaking of a man without peer and, in the end, a man without a country to serve.

Orson is a young boy whose mother works at the US Army base in Germany in the 1950s. There, he becomes a fan of a GI stationed at the base, one Elvis Presley, whose music is played over and over on the radio.

When Orson is caught stealing recordings of Elvis’ tunes from the post exchange store, the attendant publicity catches the star’s attention, and he comes to visit his young fan. Thus begins a lifelong friendship.

As Elvis’s career rockets ever higher and his behavior becomes ever more erratic, the two share many adventures. The sixties explode, and Elvis becomes the icon of the nation, while Orson, a college demonstrator, drifts away from regular life looking for something of substance to believe in.

Each man is an emblem of his times, as social conventions crumble, barriers fall, and the cultural landscape changes forever.

Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice, 1945, was the scene of a trial without precedent in history, a trial that continues to haunt the modern world. With his customary authority and audacity, William F. Buckley, Jr., has taken a pivotal moment in history and shaped it into a novel of riveting insight and understanding.

Leading the listener into the palace is interpreter-interrogator Sebastian, a young German-American whose fate is entwined with the lives and deaths of some towering figures of twentieth-century history, including Hermann Goering and Adolf Hitler. In a gripping account of war makers who must face the consequences of their actions, Nuremberg: The Reckoning flows through Warsaw, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, and finally Nuremberg, as Sebastian comes to terms with his family legacy and his national identity.

As the 1960s kick off, the Cuban missile crisis has brought the Communist threat to within miles of the United States, and extremist movements roil the American Right. Two college students, Woodroe Raynor and Leonora Goldstein, meet in the fall of 1960 before embarking on separate paths. Woodroe goes to work for the indiscriminately anti-communist John Birch Society: through his eyes, we see how anti-communism defined American politics while nearly defeating itself in its own extremism. Leonora becomes a novitiate in the libertarian-objectivist cult of novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand: through her, we witness how sexual passion shaped Rand’s movement. But a singular romance blooms as the two make their way through the tumultuous era, navigating the political fault line that would change American history.

In this autobiography, woven from personal pieces composed over the course of a celebrated writing life of more than fifty years, you’ll meet William Buckley the boy, growing up in a family of ten children; Buckley the political enfant terrible, whose debut book, God and Man at Yale, was a New York Times bestseller; Buckley the editor of the National Review, hailed as the founder of the modern conservative movement; Buckley the family man; Buckley the spy and novelist of spies; and Buckley the bon vivant. You’ll also meet Buckley’s friends: Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Clare Boothe Luce, Tom Wolfe, David Niven, and many others.

Along the way, listeners will be treated to Buckley’s romance with wine, his love of the right word, his intoxication with music, and his joy in skiing and travel.