W. JAMES ANTLE III
As an undergraduate, I spent long hours in the basement of
Beeghly Library with a stack of magazines to my right and a little
blue notepad to my left. Well into the night, I would transcribe
paragraphs and jot down statistics. It may have appeared studious
but, as my professors can attest, it had little to do with my
coursework. Instead I was carefully studying back issues of
National Review, as if I’d discovered ancient tablets
inscribed with the wisdom of the ancients. It seemed like that kind
of discovery to me.
While I learned a great deal from his writing, it wasn’t the
first time William F. Buckley, Jr. interfered with my formal
education. In high school, I devoured old anthologies of his
columns and essays. Admiring his mordant wit and elegant prose, I
also sought something more intellectually stimulating than my
youthful Republican partisanship — something very difficult to
find behind enemy lines in Massachusetts. My senior year, I
borrowed from the school library a copy of The Governor
Listeth, along with Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose,
and kept them until they threatened to withhold my diploma.
The collected works of William Buckley weren’t exactly on my
assigned reading list, but in one very real sense I was preparing
for class. That little blue notepad contained some of the arguments
and data I would marshal against foes with tenure and without, in
debates with students and teachers alike. In retrospect, I’m sure I
was often obnoxious — certainly closer to Animal House
than Firing Line — but occasionally I was able to ensure
that conservative ideas got a hearing they otherwise would have
been denied. If Buckley’s generation of conservatives could resist
the liberal zeitgeist, why couldn’t some College Republican at a
pampered liberal arts school?
Although I would later come to know some of the young writers he
mentored personally, my only direct encounter with Buckley was at a
lecture toward the end of his public speaking career. He was asked
what he thought about a Texas governor who was said to be mulling a
presidential bid. Buckley was complimentary, but proceeded to
explain the distinction between being conservative and being
a conservative. “Brilliant,” a friend whispered, sounding
more like a groupie than a Burkean.
Brilliant indeed. Thank you, Professor Buckley. Class
dismissed.
W. James Antle III is associate editor of The
American Spectator.
******
MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY
“Pursue I-95 to Exit 9.” So began the summons to meet Bill
Buckley himself last May. In front of pictures of Bill Buckley the
toddler, and a portrait Bill Buckley the young founder of
National Review, sat Bill Buckley the old man, and my new
acquaintance. And he was bored with me already. After two minutes
spent answering my questions about James Burnham, he asked me to
talk about my girlfriend, Marissa, instead. He advised me to stop
dawdling and marry her. He had lost his wife just a month
earlier.
I met Bill because I had gently teased him in the Washington
Monthly. He loved a joke at his own expense. When he mentioned
his scathing obituary of Murray Rothbard, I informed him that he
had earned the eternal hatred of many libertarians upon publishing
it. “That’s the one to hate me for,” he said and smiled.
Bill was the most generous man I’ve ever known. He frequently
rescued old and new friends from financial adversity. But he
managed to be even more self-sacrificing of his time and
reputation. He never just gave someone a meal, or money, or a
thoughtful recommendation. He gave himself.
On my subsequent visits he invited me to join him for the Latin
Liturgy we both loved. He asked for Marissa’s address, no doubt
planning some surprise kindness. Three weeks ago, I called him to
cancel dinner plans we made together. I was ill and feared for his
health. I was also plotting to take his advice that following week.
In front of me now are pictures of Bill Buckley the Yale Graduate,
and Bill Buckley the television personality. I wish I had told
Bill, my new friend, the happy result.
Michael Brendan Dougherty is associate editor at
the American
Conservative.
******
HAYWOOD H. HILLYER III
Bill Buckley deeply influenced many young minds for the better
— even at a great distance. A copy of National Review
discovered in a New Orleans physician’s office in 1958 gave this
newly minted conservative a refreshing, stimulating alternative
both to the leftist indoctrination on my college campus and to some
right-wing rags that exuded a distressing whiff of
anti-Semitism.
But Buckley’s biggest contribution to the spread of intelligent
conservatism specifically among college youth came in September of
1960. He, with his large extended family of siblings and in-laws,
hosted more than a 100 students one weekend in Sharon Connecticut
at Great Elm, his parents’ estate — presided over by his mother, a
wonderfully warm lady from New Orleans who made this somewhat shy
traveler feel at home. This “Sharon Conference” produced Young
Americans for Freedom, which proceeded to plant seeds of
conservative activism on many college campuses, and grew to provide
many of the foot-soldiers of the Draft Goldwater movement and
eventual leaders of the Reagan Revolution.
Bill Buckley and his colleagues were perfect hosts for this
gathering. They gave guidance but not dictation as the group made
the decisions on names, mission statement, and organization.
Buckley even joked, when we set an upper age limit for this new
organization, that at two months short of age 35 he himself barely
qualified — but in hindsight what was remarkable was that at such
a young age he already was seen as the unchallenged leader of this
new national movement. In retrospect, he made only one minor
mistake: He allowed this enthusiast to pin a “Buckley for Congress”
pin on his lapel. (His New Orleans cousin, Ross Buckley, was
running a groundbreaking but necessarily unsuccessful campaign for
the U.S. House seat of the powerful Hale Boggs.) The campaign
button caused some confusion among the attendees: Their hopes were
falsely raised for a WFB political campaign that year, when in
truth it would be five more years before their host would put his
name on the ballot in New York City and famously say his reaction
to (an impossible) victory would be to “demand a recount.”
Haywood H. Hillyer III is a former Republican
National Committeeman from Louisiana.
******
G. TRACY MEHAN, III
Attending college in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a lonely
pursuit for a conservative. There really was no conservative
movement as the term is understood today mostly in the context of
electoral politics. There was only Buckley.
In his magazine, his columns, his television show, and books he
waged, literally, a one-man guerrilla action against the regnant
Zeitgeist. His writings were canonical.
It was Buckley, and Buckley alone, who provided support,
intellectual resources, and inspiration for those not ready to
march in lockstep with the times.
Thinking back on the countless viewings of Firing Line,
and the wonderful dialogue and debate that went on there, with
friend and foe alike, it is painful to compare the current fair on
cable television and, yes, conservative talk radio. It is swill
compared to a fine wine.
Other commentators will certainly describe, at length, William
F. Buckley, Jr.’s many accomplishments. But his untiring defense of
the integrity of unborn children will surely weigh heavily in his
favor in the higher realm for which he has now departed.
I distinctly recall the marvelous article by federal judge and
philosopher Judge John Noonan, which Buckley ran as a cover story
in NR. It was a magisterial piece outlining the flaws of
Roe and Doe with logic and scholarship nowhere to
be found on the pages of any other opinion magazines in the early
1970s.
But Buckley went further and supported the Human Life
Review, right out of the offices of NR, which became
the forum for the small band of thinking, committed people
who made the right-to-life movement the force it is in American
politics, a movement nearly absent in most parts of the Western
world.
May he rest in peace.
G. Tracy Mehan, III, served at EPA in the
administrations of both presidents Bush.
******
JOEL MILLER
Rush Limbaugh interviewed Bill Buckley in the mid-'90s for his
radio show. I remember listening, but now after more than a decade
I recall only one comment. Discussing his faith, Buckley affirmed
that, yes, he was a Christian. But that he thought perhaps he
wasn’t a very good one. He wasn’t being coy. The thing that struck
me was the humility of it.
Though his first book addressed the encroachments of atheism in
academia, Buckley never shoved his faith in the face of others. The
reason was simple enough. He claimed that was he wasn’t
evangelistically inclined or theologically expert. But his faith
informed his life and work nonetheless. Limbaugh interviewed
Buckley in part to promote his then-latest novel Brothers No
More, a morally charged tale of love and hubris, faith and
sin. And wasn’t the very act of standing athwart history yelling
“Stop!” rooted not in fears of technology or progressive plots, but
rather in his knowledge that modernism was rolling over values and
obligations that transcended the passing of time, values that
Buckley believed emanated from Christian truth?
But always with humility. Asked after the publication of his
book Nearer, My God, about the steadfastness of his faith,
why he never succumbed to doubt or skepticism, his answer was
simple: “Grace.” Characteristic of this amicable nature, he could
on the one hand say that “the duel between Christianity and atheism
is the most important in the world” (God and Man at Yale),
and still affirm that Christians could welcome the company of
atheists because “faith is a gift and that, therefore, there is no
accounting for the bad fortune that has beset those who do not
believe or have the good fortune that has befallen those who do”
(The Jeweler’s Eye).
Now Buckley is with God, the same God that sparked his
imagination, informed his thoughts, and peeked through his prose.
And as a model for integrating belief into vocation, for folding
faith into one’s work, I think perhaps that he was a very good
Christian indeed.
Joel Miller is the Business and Culture publisher
for Thomas Nelson Publishers.
******
WLADY PLESZCZYNSKI
He was larger in life than anyone I’ve known. As a practical
matter, it’s safe to say if not for him I’d not be here, nor would
this publication, and who knows about our readership. But because
he was so alive for everyone, we could all take him for granted,
secure and content that he was a constant presence who made us all
look better, a giant intellect, a princely, kindly human being, the
perfect gentleman, and a fearless and brilliant defender of all
that was important.
Death is never more perfidious than when it arrives at the
cruelest time. For many decades, this time of year would have found
Buckley in Gstaad, Switzerland, where as only he could he would
combine skiing and work for what I always hoped were many blissful
weeks on end. It was heartbreaking to read several years ago that
for reasons of health he would no longer be able to winter in
Gstaad. If there was one man on earth who should never have been
deprived of what he had earned, it was he.
His life was a study in tirelessness and unimaginable
productivity. If only I had kept count of the many conservative
dinners and other gatherings at which I heard him speak, though
always the next night he had another conservative event to attend
and honor with his presence, often in a town or city hundreds if
thousands of miles away. Cruising Speed and
Overdrive chronicled that style of life in the most
irresistible manner. In writing it down, he was perhaps trying to
find a way to keep up with himself. Regardless, beyond the
camaraderie, bonhomie, and joie de vivre conveyed in those
books, one could detect in them the real purpose of his activity —
the building and nurturing of conservative institutions and
conservatism as such. He was not only an American original. He was
an American Founder.
Wlady Pleszczynski is editorial director and website
editor of The American Spectator.
