WASHINGTON — William F. Buckley, Jr. who died Wednesday,
appropriately enough in his study, was one of the most stupendous
educated Americans of the 20th century. He was among the founders
of the American conservative movement that crept out of the New
Deal years advocating market economics, traditional social values,
and aggressive resistance to communism. Such ideas were viewed
disdainfully by the reigning orthodoxy, liberalism, but by the
1980s Buckley’s positions had pretty much defeated liberalism
wherever democratic elections could be held. Without him this
change would have been either impossible or much delayed.
He brought together serious intellectuals, for instance James
Burnham and Russell Kirk, to found what became modern
conservatism’s first great organ of opinion, National
Review. He and his colleagues wrote important books that
served as the foundation of their movement and made them and their
political leader, Senator Barry Goldwater, popular figures in the
early 1960s. Even members of the liberal media nodded in respect,
at least until Goldwater allowed himself to be drafted as the
Republican presidential candidate in 1964. From that point on, the
liberals’ template was set. Conservatives were stupid, warmongers,
and bigots, through the Reagan years, the Gingrich years, and right
up to the present. But in the early 1960s this was not the liberal
consensus. Some respect was shown.
It was in those years that Buckley was everywhere assisting in
the founding of conservatism’s student wing, the Young Americans
for Freedom, its ideological forum, the American Conservative
Union, and the Conservative Party of New York. He began what was
soon one of the most popular syndicated columns and in 1966 a
weekly television debate series that became public television’s
longest-running talk show. For years, he lectured and debated a
couple of nights a week. In an era when intellect still flourished
Buckley was the finest debater in the country.
Often he turned up on college campuses, which is where I met him
at the beginning of a friendship lasting forty years. I had just
founded my anti-radical magazine at Indiana University and invited
him to lecture. His arrival was a whirlwind. He visited my pals on
the world champion Indiana University swimming team, reminding me
that his Yale roommate was also an Olympian. He had to visit a bar
named “The Stardust,” telling me that it was the site where Hoagy
Carmichael wrote, said Bill, “the greatest jazz song of the
twentieth century.” And at a reception given for him by my fellow
students he fit right in. A professor nearby confided, “That man
will be forever young. He will look like that as an old man.” Alas
that was not to be. Bill just burned himself out, and — devout
Catholic that he was — in his last months longed for the
hereafter. As his friend, the writer Taki Theodoracopulos put it,
Bill “was looking forward to being united with Pat,” his recently
deceased wife.
In his 82 years, Bill covered a lot of ground. Along with
founding a political movement he became a national figure as much
for his superior sophistication as for politics. The feat will not
be duplicated. He played the harpsichord, painted (I have an oil of
his in my library) and sailed trans-atlantically. All of that —
and he ran a third-party race for mayor of New York.
In a new and authoritative history of modern conservatism’s
evolution, Alfred Regnery describes Bill’s 1965 mayoral race as one
of the three great political campaigns that put modern conservatism
on the map, along with Goldwater’s 1964 defeat and Ronald Reagan’s
1980 victory. It also launched Bill as an enduring national figure.
With it and his weekly television show, fame enhaloed him. One
could not walk through an airport with him or down a street in a
major urban center without encountering autograph seekers.
Not often recalled is how Bill’s life changed over his half
century on the national scene. At first he was an energetic herald
of the new conservatism, a rigorist for the conservative position.
After the excitement of his mayoral race, however, he became much
more political. By 1968 he had trimmed back his conservative
orthodoxy and actively counseled the Nixon campaign. He encouraged
other conservatives to join the Nixon Administration. He held minor
posts in the Administration. Through all the ideological
backsliding of the Nixon years Bill stood by the president. In
fact, he became more of a fixture in the Nixon Administration than
he would become in the administration of his close personal friend,
Ronald Reagan. The explanation is Watergate. Bill stuck by Nixon
until the autumn of 1973. The experience left him permanently
disappointed in Nixon and stunned by the brutality of politics.
At the height of Bill’s political phase he beheld dreams of the
presidency. He entertained the idea of mounting a Conservative
Party campaign in 1970 for Robert Kennedy’s old Senate seat, and
using the Senate as a springboard to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Watergate dampened his ardor. His biographer, John Judis, tells us
that Bill resolved to write a novel, sail his sailboat across the
Atlantic, and perform Bach on his harpsichord with a professional
orchestra. That is precisely what he did and more. He buzzed the
Titanic from a submarine, and his drift from politics
continued.
Bill had many gifts, and one was a sense of the times in which
he lived. He had a prevenient sense for shifts in the
Zeitgeist. Increasingly in the 1970s and 1980s I think he
recognized that high intelligence was leaving the world of
political thought. When he began his campaign to advance modern
conservatism he was surrounded by learned, highly intelligent
intellectuals on both the left and the right. As the years went on,
they all passed away. His cofounders at National Review
were among the first to go. Burnham and Kirk died long ago. Now
even his adversaries are gone. His old debating opponent John
Kenneth Galbraith died a few years back. Recently Norman Mailer and
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. withdrew. Practically all the great figures
of the ideological battles of Bill’s life are gone.
And so the baton is passed. On the conservative side it passes
from Buckley to Ann Coulter. I do not know as much about the
liberal side.
