The June issue of The Atlantic features an excerpt from Sam Tanenhaus’s long-awaited biography of the conservative intellectual and polemicist William F. Buckley Jr. That book—Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America—will be published by Penguin Random House on June 3. Buckley exerted enormous influence not only on American politics but also on how political debate was waged (more and more, on television).
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“I shall not seek, nor will I accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
Those are the words not of President Joe Biden, who announced his withdrawal from the 2024 campaign on Sunday, but of a previous president who took himself out of the running: Lyndon B.
William Whitworth, the editor of The Atlantic from 1980 to 1999, had a soft voice and an Arkansas accent that 50 years of living in New York and New England never much eroded. It was as much a part of him as his love of jazz, his understated sartorial consistency, and his deep dismay when encountering the misuse of lie and lay, a battle he knew he had lost but continued to fight.
A few years ago, the novelist and short-story writer Lauren Groff reflected on what had launched one of the more sparkling literary careers of recent years:
When C. Michael Curtis pulled my short story “L. DeBard and Aliette” from the slush pile in 2005, I was in my first semester in graduate school at Madison.