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February 27, 2008

William F. Buckley Jr. Is Dead at 82

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic

exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a
refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism
to the center of American political discourse, died
Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn.
Mr Buckley, 82, suffered from diabetes and
emphysema, his son Christopher said, although the
exact cause of death was not immediately known. He
was found at his desk in the study of his home, his
son said. “He might have been working on a
column,” Mr. Buckley said.
Mr. Buckley’s winningly capricious personality,
replete with ten-dollar words and a darting tongue
William F. Buckley Jr. in 2004
writers loved to compare with an anteater’s, hosted
one of television’s longest-running programs, “Firing
Line,” and founded and shepherded the influential conservative magazine, “National
Review.”
He also found time to write at least 55 books, ranging from sailing odysseys to spy
novels to celebrations of his own dashing daily life, and to edit five more. His political
novel “The Rake” was published last August, and a book looking back at the National
Review’s history in November; a personal memoir of Barry Goldwater is due to be
publication in April, and Mr. Buckley was working on a similar book about Ronald
Reagan for release in the fall.
The more than 4.5 million words of his 5,600 biweekly newspaper columns, “On the
Right,” would fill 45 more medium-sized books.
Mr. Buckley’s greatest achievement was making conservatism — not just electoral
Republicanism, but conservatism as a system of ideas — respectable in liberal post-
World War II America. He mobilized the young enthusiasts who helped nominate
Barry Goldwater in 1964, and saw his dreams fulfilled when Reagan and the Bushes
captured the Oval Office.
To Mr. Buckley’s enormous delight, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the historian, termed
him “the scourge of liberalism.”
In remarks at National Review’s 30th anniversary in 1985, President Reagan joked
that he picked up his first issue of the magazine in a plain brown wrapper and still
anxiously awaited his biweekly edition — “without the wrapper.”
“You didn’t just part the Red Sea — you rolled it back, dried it up and left exposed,
for all the world to see, the naked desert that is statism,” Mr. Reagan said.
“And then, as if that weren’t enough,” the president continued, “you gave the world
something different, something in its weariness it desperately needed, the sound of
laughter and the sight of the rich, green uplands of freedom.”
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The liberal advance had begun with the New Deal, and so accelerated in the next
generation that Lionel Trilling, one of America’s leading intellectuals, wrote in 1950:
“In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the
sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that there are no conservative or
reactionary ideas in general circulation.”
Mr. Buckley declared war on this liberal order, beginning with his blistering assault on
Yale as a traitorous den of atheistic collectivism immediately after his graduation
(with honors) from the university.
“All great biblical stories begin with Genesis,” George Will wrote in the National
Review in 1980. “And before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater,
and before there was Barry Goldwater there was National Review, and before there
was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind, and the spark in
1980 has become a conflagration.”
Mr. Buckley weaved the tapestry of what became the new American conservatism
from libertarian writers like Max Eastman, free market economists like Milton
Friedman, traditionalist scholars like Russell Kirk and anti-Communist writers like
Whittaker Chambers. But the persuasiveness of his argument hinged not on these
perhaps arcane sources, but on his own tightly argued case for a conservatism based
on the national interest and a higher morality.
His most receptive audience became young conservatives first energized by Barry
Goldwater’s emergence at the Republican convention in 1960 as the right-wing
alternative to Nixon. Some met in Sept., 1960, at Mr. Buckley’s Connecticut estate to
form Young Americans for Freedom. Their numbers — and influence — grew.
Nicholas Lemann observed in Washington Monthly in 1988 that during the Reagan
administration “the 5,000 middle-level officials, journalists and policy intellectuals
that it takes to run a government” were “deeply influenced by Buckley’s example.”
He suggested that neither moderate Washington insiders nor “Ed Meese-style
provincial conservatives” could have pulled off the Reagan tax cut and other reforms.
Speaking of the true believers, Mr. Lemann continued, “Some of these people had
been personally groomed by Buckley, and most of the rest saw him as a role model.”
Mr. Buckley rose to prominence with a generation of talented writers fascinated by
political themes, names like Mailer, Capote, Vidal, Styron and Baldwin. Like the
others, he attracted controversy like a magnet. Even conservatives — from members
of the John Birch Society to disciples of conservative author Ayn Rand to George
Wallace to moderate Republicans — frequently pounced on him.
Many of varied political stripes came to see his life as something of an art form —
from racing through city streets on a motorcycle to a quixotic campaign for mayor of
New York in 1965 to startling opinions like favoring the decriminalization of
marijuana. He was often described as liberals’ favorite conservative, particularly after
suavely hosting an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” on public
television in 1982.
Norman Mailer may indeed have dismissed Mr. Buckley as a “second-rate intellect
incapable of entertaining two serious thoughts in a row,” but he could not help
admiring his stage presence.
“No other act can project simultaneous hints that he is in the act of playing
Commodore of the Yacht Club, Joseph Goebbels, Robert Mitchum, Maverick,
Savonarola, the nice prep school kid next door, and the snows of yesteryear,” Mr.
Mailer said in an interview with Harpers in 1967.
Mr. Buckley’s vocabulary, sparkling with phrases from distant eras and described in
newspaper and magazine profiles as sesquipedalian (characterized by the use of long
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words) became the stuff of legend. Less kind commentators called him “pleonastic”
(use of more words than necessary).
And, inescapably, there was that aurora of pure mischief. In 1985, David Remnick,
writing in The Washington Post, said, “He has the eyes of a child who has just
displayed a horrid use for the microwave oven and the family cat.”
William Francis Buckley Jr., was born in Manhattan on Nov. 24, 1925, the sixth of the
10 children of Aloise Steiner Buckley and William Frank Buckley Jr. (John B. Judis
relates in his 1988 biography, “William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint Of the
Conservative,” that he was christened with the middle name Francis instead of Frank,
according to his sister, Patricia, because there was no saint named Frank. Later, in
“Who’s Who” entries and elsewhere, he used Frank.)
The elder Mr. Buckley made a fortune in the oil fields of Mexico, and educated his
children with personal tutors at Great Elm, the family estate in Sharon, Conn. They
also attended exclusive Roman Catholic schools in England and France.
Young William absorbed his family’s conservatism along with its deep Catholicism. At
6, he wrote the King of England demanding he repay his country’s war debt. At 14,
he followed his brothers to the Millbrook School, a preparatory school 15 miles across
the New York state line from Sharon.
In his spare time at Millbrook, young Bill typed schoolmates’ papers for them,
charging $1 a paper, with a 25-cent surcharge for correcting the grammar.
He did not neglect politics, showing up uninvited to a faculty meeting to complain
about a teacher abridging his right to free speech and ardently opposing United
States’ involvement in World War II. His father wrote him to suggest he “learn to be
more moderate in the expression of your views.”
He graduated from Millbrook in 1943, then spent a half a year at the University of
Mexico studying Spanish, which had been his first language. He served in the Army
from 1944 to 1946, and managed to make second lieutenant after first putting
colleagues off with his mannerisms.
“I think the army experience did something to Bill,” his sister, Patricia, told Mr. Judis.
“He got to understand people more.”
Mr. Buckley then entered Yale where he studied political science, economics and
history; established himself as a fearsome debater; was elected chairman of the Yale
Daily News, and joined Skull and Bones, the most prestigious secret society.
As a senior, he was given the honor of delivering the speech for Yale’s Alumni Day
celebration, but was replaced after the university’s administration objected to his
strong attacks on the university. He responded by writing his critique in the book that
brought him to national attention, in part because he gave the publisher, Regnery,
$10,000 to advertise it.
Published in 1951, “God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom,’”
charged the powers at Yale with having an atheistic and collectivist bent and called
for the firing of faculty members who advocated values not in accord with those that
the institution should be upholding — which was to say, his own.
Among the avalanche of negative reviews, the one in Atlantic by McGeorge Bundy, a
Yale graduate, was conspicuous. He found the book “dishonest in its use of facts,
false in its theory, and a discredit to its author.”
But Peter Viereck, writing in The New York Times Sunday Book Review viewed the
book as “a necessary counterbalance.”
After a year in the Central Intelligence Agency in Mexico City (his case officer was E.
Howard Hunt, who went on to win celebrity for his part in the Watergate break-in),
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Mr. Buckley went to work for the American Mercury magazine, but resigned after
spotting anti-Semitic tendencies in the magazine.
Over the next few years, Mr. Buckley worked as a freelance writer and lecturer, and
wrote a second book with L. Brent Bozell, his brother-in-law. Published in 1954,
“McCarthy and His Enemies” was a sturdy defense of the senator from Wisconsin who
was then in the throes of his campaign against communists, liberals and the
Democratic Party.
In 1955, Mr. Buckley started National Review as voice for “the disciples of truth, who
defend the organic moral order” with a $100,000 gift from his father. The first issue,
which came out in November, claimed the publication “stands athwart history yelling
Stop.”
It proved it by lining up squarely behind Southern segregationists, saying blacks
should be denied the vote. After some conservatives objected, Mr. Buckley suggested
instead that both uneducated whites and blacks should not be allowed to vote.
Mr. Buckley did not accord automatic support to Republicans, starting with
Eisenhower’s campaign for re-election in 1956. National Review’s tepid endorsement:
“We prefer Ike.”
Circulation increased from 16,000 in 1957 to 125,000 at the time of Goldwater’s
candidacy in 1964, and leveled off to around 100,000 in 1980. It is now 155,000. The
magazine has always had to be subsidized by readers’ donations.
Along with offering a forum to big-gun conservatives like Russell Kirk, James Burnham
and Robert Nisbet, National Review cultivated the career of several younger writers,
including Garry Wills, Joan Didion and John Leonard, who would shake off the
conservative attachment and go their leftward ways.
National Review also helped define the conservative movement by isolating cranks
from Mr. Buckley’s chosen mainstream.
“Bill was responsible or rejecting the John Birch Society and the other kooks who
passed off anti-Semitism or some such as conservatism,” Hugh Kenner, a biographer
of Ezra Pound and a frequent contributor to National Review told The Washington
Post. “Without Bill — if he had decided to become an academic or a businessman or
something else — without him, there probably would be no respectable conservative
movement in this country.”
Mr. Buckley’s personal visibility was magnified by his “Firing Line” program which ran
from 1966 to 1999. First carried on WOR-TV and then on the Public Broadcasting
Service, it became the longest running show hosted by a single host — beating out
Johnny Carson by three years. He led the conservative team in 1,504 debates on
topics like “Resolved: The women’s movement has been disastrous.”
There were exchanges on foreign policy with the likes of Norman Thomas; feminism
with Germaine Greer and race relations with James Baldwin. Not a few viewers
thought Mr. Buckley’s toothy grin before he scored a point resembled nothing so
much as a switchblade.
To New York City politician Mark Green, he purred, “You’ve been on the show close to
100 times over the years. Tell me, Mark, have you learned anything yet.”
But Harold Macmillan, former prime minister of Britain, flummoxed the master. “Isn’t
this show over yet?” he asked.
At age 50, Mr. Buckley added two pursuits to his repertoire — he took up the
harpsichord and became novelist. Some 10 of the novels are spy tales starring
Blackford Oakes, who fights for the American way and bedded the Queen of England
in the first book.
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Others of his books included a historical novel with Elvis Presley as a significant
character, another starring Fidel Castro, a reasoned critique of anti-Semitism, and
journals that more than succeeded dramatizing a life of taste and wealth — his own.
For example, in “Cruising Speed: A Documentary,” published in 1971, he discussed
the kind of meals he liked to eat.
“Rawle could give us anything, beginning with lobster Newburgh and ending with
Baked Alaska,” he wrote. “We settle on a fish chowder, of which he is surely the
supreme practitioner, and cheese and bacon sandwiches, grilled, with a most prickly
Riesling picked up at St. Barts for peanuts,” he wrote.
Mr. Buckley’s spirit of fun was apparent in his 1965 campaign for mayor of New York
on the ticket of the Conservative Party. When asked what he would do if he won, he
answered, “Demand a recount.” He got 13.4 percent of the vote.
For Murray Kempton, one of his many friends on the left, the Buckley press
conference style called up “an Edwardian resident commissioner reading aloud the
39 articles of the Anglican establishment to a conscript of assembled Zulus.”
Unlike his brother James who served as a United States senator from New York, Mr.
Buckley generally avoided official government posts. He did serve from 1969 to 1972
as a presidential appointee to the National Advisory Commission on Information, and
as a member of the United States delegation to the United Nations in 1973.
The merits of the argument aside, Mr. Buckley irrevocably proved that his brand of
candor did not lend itself to public life when an Op-Ed article he wrote for The New
York Times offered a partial cure for the AIDS epidemic: “Everyone detected with
AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm to prevent common needle users, and
on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of homosexuals,” he wrote.
In his last years, as honors like the Presidential Medal of Freedom came his way, Mr.
Buckley gradually loosened his grip on his intellectual empire. In 1998, he ended his
frenetic schedule of public speeches (some 70 a year over 40 years, he once
estimated). In 1999, he stopped “Firing Line,” and in 2004, he relinquished his voting
stock in National Review. He wrote his last spy novel the 11th in his series), sold his
sailboat and stopped playing the harpsichord publicly.
But he began a new historical novel and kept up his columns, including one on the
“bewitching power” of “The Sopranos” television series. He commanded wide
attention by criticizing the Iraq war as a failure.
On April 15, 2007, his wife, the former Patricia Alden Austin Taylor, who had carved
out a formidable reputation as a socialite and philanthropist but considered her role
as a homemaker, mother and wife most important, died. Mr. and Mrs. Buckley called
each other “Ducky.”
He is survived by his son, Christopher, of Washington, D.C.; his sisters Priscilla L.
Buckley, of Sharon, Conn., Patricia Buckley Bozell, of Washington, D.C., and Carol
Buckley, of Columbia, S.C.; his brothers James L., of Sharon, and F. Reid, of Camden,
S.C., a granddaughter and a grandson
In the end it was Mr. Buckley’s graceful, often self-deprecating wit that endeared him
to others. In his spy novel “Who’s on First,” he described the possible impact of his
National Review through his character Boris Bolgin.
“ ‘Do you ever read the National Review, Jozsef?’ asks Boris Bolgin, the chief of KGB
counter intelligence for Western Europe, ‘it is edited by this young bourgeois fanatic.’
”

An earlier version of this article included an outdated reference to books Mr. Buckley
published in 2007 and to the total number of books he wrote