Sam Tanenhaus, New York Times, October 2, 2005.

Excerpt:

Forty years after it was decided, the mayoral race of 1965 remains one of the most memorable elections in New York history. It was also one of the strangest, thanks in large part to the candidacy of William F. Buckley Jr. It was odd enough that Buckley, author, magazine editor, columnist, debater and gadfly – with no experience in practical politics – should have sought this most thankless of jobs. Odder still that his campaign style invited comparisons with Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, Noel Coward and Mort Sahl. But oddest of all was that he was taken seriously – seriously enough to confound opponents, observers and analysts and throw the election up for grabs. Although it wasn’t clear at the time, Buckley’s bid for office was an important chapter in one of the crucial events in modern political history, the transformation of the consensus politics of the peak cold-war years of the 1950’s and early 60’s, its agenda set by liberals, into the more polarized politics of our era, ruled by conservatives.

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