George Will has been writing books and newspaper columns from a conservative point of view for close to a half century, since William F. Buckley Jr. hired him in 1972 as the Washington editor of National Review. Soon after taking that post, and propelled by his writings for the magazine, he signed on as a regular columnist for The Washington Post (winning a Pulitzer Prize for that work in 1977), and later as a weekly commentator for abc News and, still later, for Fox News. From the beginning, he has sprinkled his columns with historical references and quotations to illuminate the themes he sought to advance, a style that has won him a following across the political spectrum at the same time that it demonstrated that there were conservatives who could engage liberals in debates over ideas and political philosophy. Next to Buckley himself, Will has done more to make the case for conservative ideas over these many decades than any other writer.
This is not to say that he has written or spoken as a down-the-line Republican. Indeed, he has been as critical of Republican as of Democratic presidents—perhaps more so. He took Richard Nixon to task over Watergate, Ronald Reagan over the deficits he accumulated while in office, George H. W. Bush for inept political leadership, and George W. Bush for launching an invasion of Iraq on a nation-building agenda. It would be an understatement to say that he disapproves of Donald Trump, writing that he hoped that Hillary Clinton would defeat him in a fifty-state sweep. (Fortunately, he does not mention the forty-fifth president in the volume under review.) He has nurtured a reputation for being independent and unpredictable in his judgments, and not always consistent through his long career. Whatever his views on particular issues, he has never been a party man, an ideologue, or a card-carrying member of a political movement.
He has never been a party man, an ideologue, or a card-carrying member of a political movement.
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