Patricia Bozell, 81, Conservative Editor, Matriarch

Patricia Buckley Bozell, who died Saturday at 81, was a matriarch of a prominent conservative family who helped found Triumph, a Catholic journal of opinion. She had throat cancer.

She was married to L. Brent Bozell Jr., a National Review founder who ghostwrote Barry Goldwater's "The Conscience of a Conservative." The couple launched Triumph in 1966. Mrs. Bozell helped shape the journal as a bulwark against Vatican II reforms and such legislative prospects as legalized abortion.

Among her 10 children was L. Brent Bozell III, founder of the Media Research Center, a Washington, D.C-based conservative watchdog group.

Among her siblings was William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of the National Review, Priscilla Buckley, a top National Review editor, and a former New York senator, James Buckley.

Patricia Lee Buckley was born April 23, 1927, in New York City and raised in Sharon, Conn., and Camden, S.C. After an early education abroad, she graduated from the private Nightingale-Bamford School in New York.

She received her undergraduate degree from Vassar College in 1948 and the next year married Bozell. He died in 1997.

Patricia Buckley Bozell was occasionally confused with the other Pat Buckley, née Taylor, William F. Buckley's formidable wife, who died last April. To make matters more confusing, the two Patricias had been classmates at Vassar and it was William F. Buckley's sister who introduced him to his future wife.

Patricia Bozell maintained a lower profile than many in her family, but in March 1971 she made headlines when she tried to slap a radical feminist who insulted the Virgin Mary at a forum at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.

After Triumph folded in the mid-1970s, she worked as an editor at National Review and at Regnery Publishing.