David Frum talks to Sam Tanenhaus on his biography of William F Buckley. Frum assumes most listeners are already familiar with other interviews Tanenhaus has done (notably w/Andrew Sullivan) and tries to focus more on Buckley's personality and his relationships to set up the continuity and contrast with our current political environment.

I remember asking Bill Buckley—and you and I both knew him, and we’ll explain to listeners and viewers: This is not a presumptuous thing, to call him Bill; people who worked in the mail room at National Review called him Bill. And so, at one point, I asked him what he thought of the PBS debaters, who, in those years—we’re going back a long time—were Mark Shields and David Gergen. And I was very impressed by Gergen, and Bill Buckley said, I don’t like him so much. And I said, Why is that? [Buckley] said, He gives too much to the other side. And that surprised me a little bit because I thought that was part of the Buckley genius, was to give something to the other side. But part of him was drawn—this is a theme in the book, as you know—to the rougher, harsher, coarser characters in our political culture, in our lives.

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One of the reasons it’s hard is—so Bill Buckley succeeded beyond all—if you had asked Bill Buckley, the young Bill Buckley of 1955, What would success look like in the year 2005?, and he would describe a transformation of the Republican Party into a conservative party; consistent political success of people who identify themselves as conservative; competition to be the most conservative; National Review, of course, surviving half a century. Okay, and the wishing genie would say, Granted. You got it all, everything you imagine in 1955 you wanted. Only, when you get there, it turns out that’s not exactly what he had in mind. And I think that’s one of the things he was wrestling with when he died in 2008, is he’d won, but it wasn’t—he had imagined something that was more intellectual, more rarefied, where people like Rush Limbaugh would have their place, but the leadership would look more like people like Bill Buckley. And that’s not what happened. And so it’s this kind of complicated tangle of getting what you want, only to discover when you get it, it wasn’t quite what you thought you had in mind.