When Sam Tanenhaus wrote to William F. Buckley in 1990 to ask the conservative icon for an interview, Buckley was “about as famous a public figure as you could be in America,” Tanenhaus said during “The Man Who Built a Movement: How William F. Buckley Invented Modern Conservativism,” an event hosted Oct. 9 by the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S). 

Credit: Kate Blackwood

“He was on television every week, he edited this famous magazine, he was a bestselling novelist and memoirist. He was a huge celebrity. And I was nobody from nowhere.”

Yet Buckley invited Tanenhaus – just starting out as a writer at the time – to his home and into a years-long correspondence, eventually choosing him to write his biography. Tanenhaus published “Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America” this year after decades of research, and he shared stories about his quest to shape this “big American story about a big American life” during his conversation with Peter John Loewen, the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Tanenhaus, now the author of several books with top newspaper credentials as former editor-in-chief of both the New York Times’ Book Review and the Week in Review and a Times writer at large, visited Cornell Oct. 6-10 as the fall Zubrow Distinguished Visiting Journalist in A&S. He met with students and faculty, attended classes and taught a masterclass on op-eds and narrative writing. He told stories every step of the way and reminded his listeners – many of them accomplished or aspiring writers themselves – that politically complex and even morally ambiguous material makes for great storytelling. 

Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences website.