Difference between revisions of "William F. Buckley, Jr."

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William F. Buckley, Jr., on his long-running television show Firing Line.

William Frank Buckley Jr. (New York City, November 24, 1925 - Stamford, February 27, 2008) was born in a devoutly Roman Catholic family. Buckley was a prominent conservative author and commentator, and the founder of the National Review. He was also host of Firing Line, a talk show featured for years on the otherwise liberal public television channel PBS. He was admired on both sides of the political spectrum for his seemingly limitless vocabulary, and his intellectual wit.

Buckley's political views did not represent the future of the conservative movement as much as its past, and he did not speak out much about the big social issues that would dominate the future of politics. For example, he was mostly silent about ERA, the defining issue for the modern conservative movement. Buckley was a globalist, contrary to modern conservatives. For example, Buckley supported NAFTA and giving away the Panama Canal, despite its strategic significance and how the United States had built and paid for it. Buckley also favored legalizing marijuana.

Buckley was against collectivism, as he summed up in his book "Up From Liberalism" (1959):^[1]

Early life

Son of an oilman who made a fortune in Mexico, Buckley was educated in an English preparatory school as a teenager. He studied Spanish in Mexico City (1943, UNAM) (Buckley's first language had been Spanish, having been raised by Mexican nannies).

Prior to the outbreak of World War II, future historian Alistair Horne became an evacuee, and grew up together with Buckley. They were lifelong friends.^[2]

Buckley graduated from the Millbrook School in New York in 1943, and from Yale College in 1950.

Career

His first book exposed the failures of Yale College, "God and Man at Yale" (1951). It detailed what he saw as the collectivist and anti-Christian leanings of America's foremost school.

In 1955 Buckley founded The National Review (NR), a biweekly magazine of political opinion. Ronald Reagan was a longtime subscriber to National Review. Through the magazine he fostered the idea of a conservative movement.

Buckley belatedly supported intelligent design, a halfway position for an intellectual not willing to admit that the theory of evolution is as much a liberal hoax as global warming is.

During World War II Buckley was in the U. S. Army, but was never deployed overseas.^[3]

Buckley wrote over 50 books about history, politics and sailing, and a series of spy novels (which featured the fictitious Yale graduate Blackford Oakes) that were consistent best sellers.

Buckley, doing it his way, became one of the most influential writers and journalists of the past century – in the august company of Walter Lippmann, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and George Orwell. The latter two came to symbolize what was at stake in the spiritual and moral struggle against the totalitarian mentality. But Buckley spearheaded the counterrevolution in the West that emboldened Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul II to confront and defeat the Soviet Empire.^[4]

Even friendly biographers do not give him adequate credit in deconstructing liberalism ... Buckley did not elevate conservatism to a major political force simply because he was a charming guy, though that didn’t hurt; but because he laid bare with a penetrating logic the inconsistencies of liberal and leftist thought.^[5]

Buckley liked to go yachting, twice crossing the Atlantic himself, and playing the harpsichord. He married Patricia Alden Austin Taylor in 1950.

Death and legacy

Buckley died of a heart attack in 2008, he was 82.^[6]

Historian George H. Nash wrote of him that William F. Buckley Jr. was arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century. For an entire generation he was the preeminent voice of American conservatism and its first great ecumenical figure. He changed minds, he changed lives, and he helped to change the direction of American politics.^[7]

Quotes

• "The Founders sought out divine providence in several perspectives, as they gathered together to mint the American legacy. They staked out a claim to the “separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” entitled them. This tells us that, in their understanding, to assert persuasively the right of a people to declare their independence, something like a divine warrant is needed. The specific qualifications for such a warrant are not given—the signers were not applying for a driver’s license. Were they supplicants, appealing for divine favor? Or is it a part of our heritage that they acknowledged a transcendent authority, whose acquiescence in their enterprise they deemed themselves entitled to? We do not find any answer to that in the Constitution. But the Declaration is surely the lodestar of the Constitutional assumption."^[8]

• "Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views."

• "I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first two thousand people listed in the Boston phone book than to the faculty of Harvard University."^[9]

• "There is an inverse relationship between reliance on the state and self-reliance."

See also

• Natural Law
• Conservative links
• Young Americans for Freedom
• Duty
• Buckley rule
• Russell Kirk
• Kate O'Beirne

References

External links

• National Review Online
• William F. Buckley Jr. on Conservatism: An Interview Bill Steigerwald, Human Events, 11/19/2007
• William F. Buckley Jr. Is Dead at 82, New York Times, 2/27/2008
• Father of Conservative Movement Dies
• Biography by Lee Edwards, Ph.D.