William F. Buckley Jr. dies at 82

[Woodmonkey]

William F. Buckley Jr. dies at 82


William F. Buckley Jr., the erudite Ivy Leaguer and conservative herald who showered huge and scornful words on liberalism as he observed, abetted and cheered on the right's post-World War II rise from the fringes to the White House, died Wednesday. He was 82.

His assistant Linda Bridges said Buckley was found dead by his cook at his home in Stamford, Conn. The cause of death was unknown, but he had been ill with emphysema, she said.

Editor, columnist, novelist, debater, TV talk show star of "Firing Line," harpsichordist, trans-oceanic sailor and even a good-natured loser in a New York mayor's race, Buckley worked at a daunting pace, taking as little as 20 minutes to write a column for his magazine, the National Review.

Yet on the platform he was all handsome, reptilian languor, flexing his imposing vocabulary ever so slowly, accenting each point with an arched brow or rolling tongue and savoring an opponent's discomfort with wide-eyed glee.

"I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition," he wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1986. "I asked myself the other day, `Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?' I couldn't think of anyone."

Buckley had for years been withdrawing from public life, starting in 1990 when he stepped down as top editor of the National Review. In December 1999, he closed down "Firing Line" after a 23-year run, when guests ranged from Richard Nixon to Allen Ginsberg. "You've got to end sometime and I'd just as soon not die onstage," he told the audience.

"For people of my generation, Bill Buckley was pretty much the first intelligent, witty, well-educated conservative one saw on television," fellow conservative William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, said at the time the show ended. "He legitimized conservatism as an intellectual movement and therefore as a political movement."

Fifty years earlier, few could have imagined such a triumph. Conservatives had been marginalized by a generation of discredited stands — from opposing Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to the isolationism which preceded the U.S. entry into World War II. Liberals so dominated intellectual thought that the critic Lionel Trilling claimed there were "no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation."

Buckley founded the biweekly magazine National Review in 1955, declaring that he proposed to stand "athwart history, yelling `Stop' at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who urge it." Not only did he help revive conservative ideology, especially unbending anti-Communism and free market economics, his persona was a dynamic break from such dour right-wing predecessors as Sen. Robert Taft.

Although it perpetually lost money, the National Review built its circulation from 16,000 in 1957 to 125,000 in 1964, the year conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater was the Republican presidential candidate. The magazine claimed a circulation of 155,000 when Buckley relinquished control in 2004, citing concerns about his mortality, and over the years the National Review attracted numerous young writers, some who remained conservative (George Will, David Brooks), and some who didn't (Joan Didion, Garry Wills).

"I was very fond of him," Didion said Wednesday. "Everyone was, even if they didn't agree with him."

Born Nov. 24, 1925, in New York City, William Frank Buckley Jr. was the sixth of 10 children of a a multimillionaire with oil holdings in seven countries. The son spent his early childhood in France and England, in exclusive Roman Catholic schools.

His prominent family also included his brother James, who became a one-term senator from New York in the 1970s; his socialite wife, Pat, who died in April 2007; and their son, Christopher, a noted author and satirist ("Thank You for Smoking").

A precocious controversialist, William was but 8 years old when he wrote to the king of England, demanding payment of the British war debt.

After graduating with honors from Yale in 1950, Buckley married Patricia Alden Austin Taylor, spent a "hedonistic summer" and then excoriated his alma mater for what he regarded as its anti-religious and collectivist leanings in "God and Man at Yale," published in 1951.

Buckley spent a year as a low-level agent for the Central Intelligence Agency in Mexico, work he later dismissed as boring.

With his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, Buckley wrote a defense of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1954, "McCarthy and His Enemies." While condemning some of the senator's anti-communist excesses, the book praised a "movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks."

In 1960, Buckley helped found Young Americans for Freedom, and in 1961, he was among the founders of the Conservative Party in New York. Buckley was the party's candidate for mayor of New York in 1965, waging a campaign that was in part a lark — he proposed an elevated bikeway on Second Avenue — but that also reflected a deep distaste for the liberal Republicanism of Mayor John V. Lindsay. Asked what he would do if he won, Buckley said, "I'd demand a recount."

He wrote the first of his successful spy thrillers, "Saving the Queen," in 1976, introducing Ivy League hero Blackford Oakes. Oakes was permitted a dash of sex — with the Queen of England, no less — and Buckley permitted himself to take positions at odds with conservative orthodoxy. He advocated the decriminalization of marijuana, supported the treaty ceding control of the Panama Canal and came to oppose the Iraq war.

Buckley also took on the archconservative John Birch Society, a growing force in the 1950s and 1960s. "Buckley's articles cost the Birchers their respectability with conservatives," Richard Nixon once said. "I couldn't have accomplished that. Liberals couldn't have, either."

Although he boasted he would never debate a Communist "because there isn't much to say to someone who believes the moon is made of green cheese," Buckley got on well with political foes. His friends included such liberals as John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who despised Buckley's "wrathful conservatism," but came to admire him for his "wit, his passion for the harpsichord, his human decency, even for his compulsion to epater the liberals."

Buckley was also capable of deep and genuine dislikes. In a 1968 television debate, when left-wing novelist and critic Gore Vidal called him a "pro-war-crypto-Nazi," Buckley snarled an anti-gay slur and threatened to "sock you in your ... face and you'll stay plastered." Their feud continued in print, leading to mutual libel suits that were either dismissed (Vidal's) or settled out of court (Buckley's).

The National Review defended the Vietnam War, opposed civil rights legislation and once declared that "the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail." Buckley also had little use for the music of the counterculture, once calling the Beatles "so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of antimusic."

The National Review could do little to prevent Goldwater's landslide defeat in 1964, but as conservatives gained influence so did Buckley and his magazine. The long rise would culminate in 1980 when Buckley's good friend, Ronald Reagan, was elected president. The outsiders were now in, a development Buckley accepted with a touch of rue.

"It's true. I had much more fun criticizing than praising," he told the Washington Post in 1985. "I criticize Reagan from time to time, but it's nothing like Carter or Johnson."

Buckley's memoir about Goldwater, "Flying High," was coming out this spring, and his son said he was working on a book about Reagan.

Buckley so loved a good argument — especially when he won — that he compiled a book of bickering in "Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription," published in 2007 and featuring correspondence with the famous (Nixon, Reagan) and the merely annoyed.

"Mr. Buckley," one non-fan wrote in 1967, "you are the mouthpiece of that evil rabble that depends on fraud, perjury, dirty tricks, anything at all that suits their purposes. I would trust a snake before I would trust you or anybody you support."

Responded Buckley: "What would you do if I supported the snake?"

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[Woodmonkey]

William F. Buckley, Amiable Combatant

If being a conservative always led to a life like William F. Buckley Jr.'s, there would be no more liberals left. Who imagined that the life of the mind could be so damn fun? The mansions and yachts, the cocktails and champagne and cigars, the fabulous wife, the Who's Who of friends, the bottomless supply of anecdotes and witty ripostes, the nude swims at midnight to clear one's head for another glorious day tomorrow - and, somehow wedged in, enough career accomplishments for five large lives.

Buckley, who died Wednesday at 82, will merit his place on the front page of the New York Times because of his key role in the signal political phenomenon of late 20th-century America: the rise of conservatism. When he came on the scene nearly 60 years ago, the New Deal coalition was at its zenith and the Right was a disspirited collection of isolationists, Red-baiters, Babbitts and anti-Semites. The handsome young man with the accent polished at a British boarding school nominated himself chief spokesman for the conservative movement - a post that had been vacant since Wall Street crashed and Lindbergh fell for Hitler.

His father (an oilman) and father-in-law (gold, oil and timber) had been thoughtful enough to provide for a lifetime of high comfort. But Buckley leveraged his wealth with energy, passion and cheerful relentlessness. He wrote books laying out the conservative world view, launched a magazine, National Review, to nurture and promote conservatism, and created one of the longest-running shows in public television history, Firing Line, to broadcast his views to millions - laying the groundwork for the countless pundits who dominate the airwaves today.

Along the way, Buckley made many things look easy - he dashed off bestselling spy novels, composed newspaper columns in spare half-hours, breezed through Bach on his harpsichord, even ran for mayor of New York City. The trickiest, and most important one, though was the way he glided from the intellectual to the conversational. He could translate the lofty ideas of Milton Friedman and Russell Kirk into table talk; he was a sort of jet-set Samuel Johnson, if only grumpy old Johnson had known the joys of Gstaad in ski season.

Certainly Buckley could get things completely wrong - including the very important issue of civil rights. But what made him formidable, even more than his energy and charm, was the number of things he got right. Buckley almost single-handedly drove anti-Semitism out of acceptable conservative thought. He championed Whittaker Chambers through the Alger Hiss affair. He was leery of Ayn Rand, Richard Nixon and the Iraq War. Most of all, he was a staunch anti-Communist. His brilliant, slashing speech in New York on the eve of Soviet premier Nikita Kruschev's 1960 visit to the United Nations foreshadowed by nearly a quarter-century the words of Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall. "Khrushchev cannot take permanent advantage of our temporary disadvantage, for it is the West he is fighting," Buckley assured a crowd at Carnegie Hall. "In the end, we will bury him."

If Reagan was the conservative messiah, as many gloomy Republicans seem to think this year, then Buckley was his John the Baptist, the voice in the wilderness preparing the way.

A dedicated sailor, Buckley knew he must steer by a fixed star, and his was the idea of human freedom. In the early 1980s, I organized a lecture series at the University of Denver, and Bill was one of our speakers. I remember an audience member asking him to name the person whose philosophy was most at odds with his own. I imagine we all expected to hear Stalin or Castro or Chomsky. "B.F. Skinner," Buckley answered instantly - the psychologist who argued that notions of freedom and human dignity were anachronisms in a scientific age.

That was the evening when I discovered, as thousands of others did, the kindness at the core of this celebrated intellectual combatant. He sat all evening with me chatting amiably without once making me feel ignorant, which I was. (I still cringe to remember that I tried to persuade him Steinbeck's Travels With Charley was a masterpiece.) I really believed I had the famous debater in a corner when I pointed out that giant corporations like Chrysler shouldn't denounce big government and then expect a bailout when they mismanage themselves into bankruptcy. Buckley gave me his familiar hop of the eyebrows and quick intake of breath, flashed the signature eye-twinkle and answered, "I think if Lee Iacocca were here with us, he would answer" - pause, grin - "[bleep] you."

A sure applause line in Barack Obama's speeches this year holds that "it's possible to disagree without being disagreeable." William F. Buckley proved that again and again. View this article on Time.com

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