There is much more within Flying High than all that this conveys; much more, indeed, than seems possible to fit within two hundred-odd pages. There are vignettes of lunches with National Review’s early editors and a description of the magazine’s editorial process. Buckley recounts Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s visit to the United States in 1959 and the warm welcome National Review planned to give him (dyeing the East River red was one idea), and he imaginatively reconstructs what Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, assigned as Khrushchev’s escort during the communist’s American sojourn, might have discussed with his aides. Nelson Rockefeller, New York governor and Goldwater’s liberal rival within the Republican Party, gets a chapter, as does Karl Hess, the Goldwater speechwriter and early contributor to National Review who later became an antiwar activist and radical libertarian. There is even an account in the book’s prologue of an expedition to Antarctica on which Goldwater and Buckley were companions.

As charming as these stories are, the most important facets of Flying High are those that show how the conservative movement coalesced around Goldwater, despite the disparate nature of its constituent parts. Conservatism today is not more fractious or politically disadvantaged than the brilliant, often cantankerous scholars, journalists, and activists who came together to back Goldwater in the early 1960s. Some on the Right look back fondly to those days as conservatism’s Golden Age. As Buckley’s book reveals, however, reclaiming the spirit of the earlier conservative movement requires more than just returning to the 1960s—it requires rediscovering figures like Manion and Bozell, as well as Goldwater himself.