A man so credentialed as Alvin Felzenberg, formerly the Director of Communications for the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, an adviser to the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, and a majority staff member of the U.S. House of Representatives, might be given to the platitudes expected to bubble up from the swamp along the Potomac before the current attempt at drainage. Instead, the lucid and deft insights in his account of William F. Buckley Jr.’s adventures with various presidents are happily riveting, and untainted by the cynicism that political life confuses with sophistication. This study, based in large part on the Buckley Papers now filed at Yale, traces the evolution in Buckley’s estimation of characters and causes from his early isolationist days, and reveals an intensity of influence, especially during the Reagan years, about which Bill was sometimes surprisingly private and at other times artfully coy.

One cannot help but expect worthy insights from an author who, in another commentary a few years ago for Politico, satirized those who said Reagan was an “amiable dunce”; Ford could not walk and chew gum at the same time; Ike could not read the newspaper when his lips were chapped; and Lincoln, of course, was a fool, who wasted visitors’ time telling vulgar stories. Estimations like that sound very like the recent condescensions of “Never Trumpers,” let alone the denizens of Hollywood and university safe spaces for whom the smart presidents were Carter and Obama, even though