Do the words “The Wills Watch” mean anything to you? If you’re a conservative of a certain age whose political views were shaped by reading William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review in the 1970s, I’m sure they will. The “Wills” in question is Garry Wills, the prolific journalist, critic, and historian who, apart from scientific matters, seems to specialize in just about everything under the sun—while devoting particular attention to American politics and history, Roman Catholicism, and Classical antiquity.

Wills began his writing career at National Review in 1957, thanks to Buckley. “But,” as Wills writes in his new memoir, Outside Looking In, “the convulsions of the 1960s and their aftermath tore many people apart, and they did that with us.”[1] That is to say, in a twelve-year period Wills grew increasingly estranged from the kind of conservatism espoused in the pages of National Review and moved from right to left on the contentious issues then roiling American society: principally civil rights and the Vietnam War. By the end of the 1960s, estrangement had led to irreconcilable differences; Wills and Buckley parted ways.

Sadly, the separation was not amicable. Enter “The Wills Watch,” a recurring feature of the magazine, which was usually written by the late Joseph Sobran. (Ironically, Sobran would himself be forced out of National Review many years later, in the wake of columns of his that Buckley deemed to be “contextually anti-Semitic.”) “The Wills Watch” existed to chronicle Wills’s post–National Review