Summing up William F. Buckley’s achievements over the past half-century, the deputy director of public liaison at the White House, Timothy Goeglein, spoke of “a hopeful, cheerful, gladsome conservatism.” He was among those delivering remarks at the Pierre hotel last night at a celebration of Mr. Buckley’s 80th birthday. In describing the author and former television host, Mr. Goeglein invoked many words including sailboats, J.S. Bach, Gstaad, and Brooks Brothers ties worn askew.

Mr. Buckley’s son, Christopher Buckley, recalled growing up in Connecticut, where the family house was “celebrity central,” with intellectuals visiting: “I had little use for Max Eastman, Norman Mailer, John Kenneth Galbraith, Malcolm Muggeridge. But when my father took me to the set of ‘Firing Line’ where his guest was Robert Vaughn from “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’ – from that day on, I was in awe of my father.”

Mr. Buckley recalled the time “Nightline” host Ted Koppel devoted a show to his father as “Firing Line” was concluding its long run. He recalled Mr. Koppel asking his father, at the end of the show, “Bill, we have one minute left. Would you care to sum up your 35 years in television?” His father replied, “No.”

“No is usually a one-syllable word,” Mr. Buckley added, saying his father managed to stretch it out to at least four.

The Knickerbocker asked some in attendance for comments about the elder Mr. Buckley. “What he did over the last 50 years is a great achievement: creating American conservatism as a major intellectual and political force,” Weekly Standard’s editor, William Kristol, said, adding that without him it’s hard to believe it would have happened as it did. “He was the indispensable man,” Mr. Kristol said. Actor Tom Selleck said, “Bill’s influence had a lot to do with his ability to make friends.” Roger Kimball remarked, “He rescued conservatism from the parochial outreaches of irrelevance and placed it at the center of the national stage.”

Others in attendance included Tom Wolfe, Henry Kissinger, and Mike Wallace.

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CAMBRIDGE ON THE HUDSON

Columbia University professor Simon Schama,a fellow at Christ’s College from 1966 to 1976, related the best comment he’d ever heard uttered about history on Monday night. In the early 1970s, two American tourists were admiring the gate of Christ’s College at Cambridge University, and one remarked to the other, “Oh, Mabel, don’t you just love history: It’s so old!”

One half of a millennium is old, and Christ’s College celebrated its quincentenary this week with a panel at the New-York Historical Society exploring “Why History Matters.” The evening, co-sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, raised proceeds for student scholarships at the college.

Famous alumni of the college include the poet John Milton, naturalist Charles Darwin, and historian John Harold Plumb. Gilder Lehrman Institute president James Basker introduced Mr. Schama, mentioning a reviewer who had praised Mr. Schama as someone who could characterize like Tacitus, narrate like Macaulay, and quip like A.J.P. Taylor. “[But] I won’t burden him with too much expectation” this evening, Mr. Basker said to audience laughter.

Mr. Schama discussed Thucydides, whom he said undergraduates in his nonfiction narrative class found to be humorless. He asks his students to vote for which writer they would most and least like to spend time with on a desert island. “Thucydides is always the one they so do not want to spend time with,” he said. Mr. Schama waxed poetic: History at its best can harness the power of imagination to illuminate what it’s like to be human, the way poetry or a great novel does. Quoting W.H. Auden, he said that through history, one can “break bread with the dead.”

Columbia professor Eric Foner expressed skepticism with drawing historical analogies to present events: “I don’t think Iraq has a heck a lot to do with Vietnam.” He said Reconstruction after the Civil War (a specialty about which he has written) had virtually nothing to do with the reconstruction of Iraq, despite journalists calling to ask him about it.

Mr. Foner argued that “history doesn’t give us direct answers” to such questions but can be a frame of mind and a mode of critical analysis: “It’s a way of thinking, it’s not a set of answers.” He added, “You can study the history of immigration in America, but it doesn’t tell you what immigration policy should be at this moment. On the other hand, if you don’t know about the history of immigration in America and all its ups and downs, you’re going to be in a worse position” to evaluate policy choices.

He said historians should probably stay out of policy formulation, but Mr. Schama disagreed, saying historians should not avoid going near power out of fear it would somehow corrupt one’s integrity.

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BLACKBURN’S MORALITY

Cambridge University philosopher Simon Blackburn discussed the Greeks that same evening downtown at New York University, delivering the Lewis Frumkes Lecture, sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Science, Dean Catharine Stimpson, and the department of philosophy. He examined the argument by the sophist Thrasymachus in Plato’s “Republic” – that morality is nothing other than “the advantage of the stronger party.” Mr. Blackburn’s elucidation included a discussion of what he described as “one of the coldest passages” ever narrated, in which Thucydides describes the Athenians’ dialogue with the neutral Melians prior to slaughtering and enslaving them.

Seen were a host of philosophical talent, including Stephen Schiffer, Peter Unger, Paul Horwich, Jeremy Waldron, Thomas Nagel, Ned Block, Paul Boghossian (the NYU faculty member whom Brian Leiter’s blog reported Wednesday has decided not to decamp to Princeton), Colin McGinn, Liam Murphy, Arthur Danto, historian of philosophy Anthony Gottlieb, and cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner.