William F. Buckley, Jr., 82, Godfather of Modern Conservatism

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The New York Sun

William F. Buckley, Jr., who died yesterday at 82, was the intellectual godfather of the modern conservative movement, standing “athwart history” and driving the movement to victory.

In his books, his long-running television program, syndicated columns, and most saliently from his bully pulpit at the National Review, Buckley barraged America with calls for individual liberty, free markets, traditional morality at home, and muscular defense abroad. Equally as important for the conservative movement was his discovery and nurturing of its greatest talents, from Whittaker Chambers and Russell Kirk in the 1950s to George Will and David Brooks in subsequent decades.

From not-so-humble beginnings in 1956, he built National Review into a premier journal of opinion. Its influence was seminal and affirmed when President Reagan addressed the magazine’s 30th anniversary party, saying, “The man standing before you now was a Democrat when he picked up his first issue in a plain brown wrapper; and even now, as an occupant of public housing, he awaits as anxiously as ever his biweekly edition — without the wrapper.”

Buckley was courageous — or cussed — enough to publish a book-length defense of Senator McCarthy on the eve of the Army-McCarthy Hearings in 1954. Catholic in both the capital and small c sense, he welcomed many flavors of conservatism into the National Review tent. But he insisted that Ayn Rand, and the John Birch Society’s anti-Semites, had no place in his magazine or his movement. Soldier, sailor, spy, and one-time candidate for mayor of New York, Buckley made his passions public, from the inevitable politics to the pleasures of transoceanic sailing. He played his harpsichord — a graduation gift from his father — well enough to play with symphony orchestras.

Buckley published 45 books, but never a political manifesto, perhaps because his movement inspired intellectual diversity. But he did find time to write more than a dozen novels, many of them thrillers starring a CIA operative called Blackford Oakes, drawing in part on his own experience as an agent stationed in Mexico. Buckley’s control agent was E. Howard Hunt.

Possessed of a suave, patrician manner, he nevertheless mixed it up with all comers on “Firing Line,” his long-running interview show. Any doubts inspired by his laconic delivery were cleared by his rebuke to Gore Vidal when the two were election commentators on ABC-TV in 1968. Mr. Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi.” Buckley retorted: “Now, listen you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face. And you’ll stay plastered.”

Buckley came by the patrician manners honestly. His father amassed a fortune in Mexican oil, and the ten Buckley children — William was the sixth — were educated by private tutors in France and England and at Great Elm, the family estate Sharon, Conn. He inherited his father’s conservative politics, and, the story goes, wrote a letter to the King of England at age 6 demanding repayment of World War I loans. (Nor was he done pestering the royals: his character Oakes beds the Queen.) Buckley served in the Army in World War II. In 1946, he matriculated at Yale, where he joined Skull and Bones and was chairman of the Yale Daily News. After graduation in 1950, he married the formidable Patricia Aldyn Austin Taylor of Toronto. He stayed at Yale for a year as an adjunct faculty member in Spanish while writing the book that would make his reputation.

“God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom,'” published when the author was just 26, was the literary sensation of 1951. Buckley wrote that the university had fallen away from its original purpose of producing patriotic, Christian leaders and had made a shibboleth of academic freedom. Buckley found himself attacked in the Atlantic by McGeorge Bundy, a Yale alumnus who wrote that the book was “dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author.” The University of Chicago revoked its contract with Buckley’s publisher, Henry Regnery, for its “Great Books” series. The Reverend Henry Sloane Coffin, president of Union Theological Seminary, Yale ’97 and a Bonesman himself, asked Buckley, “Why do you want to turn Yale education over to a bunch of boobs?” In the 2007 Buckley biography “Strictly Right,” he said: “Since Mr. Coffin had been chairman of the Educational Policy Committee of the Yale Corporation, it struck me that if indeed the alumni were boobs he bore a considerable procreative responsibility.”

Buckley worked briefly for the American Mercury, but H.L. Mencken’s libertarian citadel was stormed by an anti-Semitic entrepreneur, and Buckley became a freelancer. His next book project, with his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell, was “McCarthy and His Enemies,” in which he conceded some excesses but claimed that they were overbalanced by the need to fight communism.

He founded the National Review in 1955. The magazine was studded with talent, including Kirk, the libertarian Max Eastman, and a young economist named Milton Friedman. The publisher’s statement in the first issue announced that the journal stood “athwart history, yelling ‘Stop’ at a time when no one is inclined to do so.” Layout was sparse; the printing stock resembled butcher paper. As with many Buckley projects, the sniping began early. Murray Kempton — later a close friend — said it was plain boring. In Commentary, the critic Dwight MacDonald wrote that it was edited by “embittered, resentful” individuals, the “intellectually underprivileged who feel themselves excluded from a world they believe is ruled by liberals.” The headline for that piece, “Scrambled Eggheads on the Right,” was the work of Commentary’s editor, Norman Podhoretz. Mr. Podhoretz — then a liberal — recalls strained relations with Buckley. But as was the case with many Buckley sparring partners, the two eventually became close friends. “I was moving rightward while he moved somewhat leftward,” Mr. Podhoretz said. “We met somewhere right of center at some point.”

Despite or because of the critics, circulation quickly grew to 125,000 in 1964, when the magazine’s ideological soulmate Barry Goldwater ran for President. The following year, Buckley ran for mayor. He lost with just 13.4% of the vote, but the campaign inspired another book, “The Unmaking of a Mayor,” and a great quote: When asked what he would do if he won, he replied, “Demand a recount!”

Though Buckley was always a Republican, with the exception of Goldwater, National Review had been lukewarm on the party’s presidential candidates. “We prefer Ike,” was the magazine’s endorsement in 1956. Buckley never supported Nixon much, and broke with him over wage and price controls in the 1970s.

Buckley famously once said, “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” In 1981, though, the magazine had its man in the White House and the Buckley ascendancy had, in some sense arrived.

Buckley was very much his own man, though. He had broken with his party over the Panama Canal — he supported President Carter’s treaty returning it to Panama. At the height of President Reagan’s War on Drugs, he came out for decriminalizing marijuana (and later all drugs). In recent years, while keeping his criticism of President Bush somewhat muted, he had made it clear that he regarded the Iraq war as at best a misadventure and that defeat should be admitted.

Having retired from the NR in 1990, he maintained a hectic pace of public speaking and writing. He was prolific to the end — there is at least one novel in the pipeline. Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion and an old Buckley confederate, recalled that Buckley once called in search of one of his trademark big words.

“It means taking pleasure in the misfortune of others,” Buckley said.

Mr. Kimball’s wife answered, “Schadenfreude.”

“How perfectly Buckleyesque that he should have forgotten it,” Mr. Kimball said, “It named an emotion that was as foreign to him as joy was native.”

William Frank Buckley, Jr.

Born November 24, 1925, in Manhattan; died February 27 at his home in Stamford, Conn. after suffering from diabetes and emphysema; survived by his son, Christopher Buckley and two grandchildren; his wife, Patricia, died last April.


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