Posted on 02/27/2008 8:56:30 AM PST by NormsRevenge
NEW YORK - 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").
National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/
RIP.
By my count, thread five.
U.S. President George W. Bush pays tribute to National Review Magazine and its founder William F. Buckley Jr. (L), in Washington, in this October 6, 2005 file photo. Conservative writer and commentator William F. Buckley has died at age 82, the New York Times reported on its Web site on Wednesday. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque (UNITED STATES)
William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative pioneer and television 'Firing Line' host, smiles during an interview at his home in New York on July 20, 2004. Buckley died Wednesday morning, Feb. 27, 2008. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)
the first full non-excerpt wire piece tho. ;-)
;OD
Bummer.
We have his words, his writings, his speeches....and his wonderful legacy.
Amen.
CNN just stated he died of emphysema.
He’s likely having a good long conversation with St. Peter, much to St. Peter’s pleasure, I am sure. ;-)
He will be missed as will his unique ability to provide insight on some complicated issues and people and do it gracefully and tastefully.
Surprising, for a radical lib democrat, like Dodd. His supporters on DU are probably jumping for joy.
Well said. The Earth’s loss is Heaven’s gain.
Rest....
Things don't look really good for conservatism now. But compared to when he wrote "God and Man at Yale," we are light years further along--largely because of his efforts. He had the courage to stand up and be the ONLY non-big-government, non-Keynesian in the room and to do it with wit and charm. And, the courage to keep doing it for years on end.
On a personal note, I never met him. But we have mutual acquaintances. People who knew him well invariably described him as a gentleman and a devout Christian. He is undoubtedly sitting in a place of honor today. RIP, WFB, Jr.
Great Loss for Conservatives.
Irreplaceable.
Liberals feared debating this man!
Of the Apostles, I think only Paul would be able to keep up. Peter would still be consulting his dictionary :)
He was truly a great man. He will be missed.
When his wife died past April, I knew he wouldn’t be with us for very much longer.
Rest In Peace, Mr. Buckley. Rush Limbaugh is speaking his tribute to you now.
It is our duty to continue his legacy- to educate ourselves and others about what makes conservative principles CORRECT and right.
Without Willima F. Buckley...where would we be today?
Godspeed WFB..
I believe Rush has interviewed Buckley on his show, if I’m not mistaken..
God Bless You William F.Buckley & may you Rest In Peace.
Sad news, but I’m sure he’s with God and with his wife, who went on before him last year, so I’m sure he’s very happy.
He has. Hope he reruns the interview today.
My favorite memory of Buckley was the way he used to drive Phil Donahue absolutely INSANE in old “Donahue” show days. Phil would be flapping his arms like wings and squawking like a chicken by the time Buckley got through with him. It was glorious.
My favorite works by Buckley were his many excellent newspaper columns over the years, and his tremendous “Blackford Oakes” novels. Wow.
His intellectual brilliance and ability to defeat liberals with little more than that mischievous stare and profound one liners will inspire for many years to come, and will be missed for just as long.
Blessings, Mr. Buckley. Thank you.
bookmark
Today is truly a dark day for the American Conservative movement. He was a great man and will be truly missed. It is now our task to take up the standard he carried and press on against the evil and nefarious left.
Glad he doesn’t have to live through the crap yet to come. I’m starting to really think about the whole ‘they will envy the dead’ thing lately...
My all-time favorite.
Lesson for today:
William Buckley was a CONSERVATIVE who successfully led the fight to make the Republican Party the repository of conservatism.
His loyalty was to conservatism, not to the Rockefeller/Lindsay school of Republicanism, aka Democrat-lite.
When he ran for mayor of New York, it was as a Conservative against a Republican liberal. Announcing his entry into the race, he said:
“The two-party system presupposes an adversary relationship between the two parties. That there is no such relationship in New York Mr. Lindsay makes especially clear when he proposes as running mates members of the Liberal and Democratic Parties. Mr. Lindsay’s Republican Party is a sort of personal accessory,. . . indifferent to the historic role of the Republican Party as standing in opposition to those trends of our time that are championed by the collectivist elements of the Democratic Party.”
Those words could be used today, substituting Lindsay with McCain.
It is sad that on the day William Buckley departed this world and the perpetual battlefield of good versus evil, the dark forces were in ascendancy.
Asked what is the first thing he would do if elected Mayor of New York, he said “Demand a recount.”
Maybe he can get the Man Upstairs to get us a recount/revote for these primaries.
The New York Times is already distorting his legacy and spinning things to slander Buckley. Their lack of respect is disgusting.
Yep, probably the first thing St Peter told him was, "You were spot on about Gore Vidal."
Even this wire piece that started the thread uses words like “scornful”. By the end of the day the MSM will have made Mr. Buckley into just another “mean spirited” conservative.
Stupid liberals. RIP Mr. Buckley, this Stamford native thanks you.
I will miss him so very much. I thank him for all that he gave us...may he RIP.
Growing up in New York City, his voice and pen were among the only sane sources I had. He will be missed.
My favorite WFB moment was when he debated that liberal queen Gore Vidal in the 60’s. Twisted him up like a pretzel.
During his run on Firing Line he would invite the likes of Pat Schroeder or Gary Hart or Ted Kennedy on his show. It was almost like watching him beat small children. Mr. Buckley could belch his ABC’s and sound more intelligent than any of his liberal guests.
I found the following tribute over at NRO. I think it put’s it best......
‘”I am saddened by the passing of William F. Buckley, but our loss is Heaven’s gain, and I’m sure the Good Lord told his angels to “Bring me a dictionary, Buckley’s coming.”
Terry’
mrs
Same thought crossed our minds here as well. RIP Mr. Buckley.
Two great men who were also nice guys.
article Update
—
NEW YORK - 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, transoceanic 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.”
White House press secretary Dana Perino said she informed President Bush of Buckley’s death Wednesday morning when the president was working in the Oval Office. The news “saddened everyone here at the White House,” she said. “Mr. Buckley was a longtime friend of the Bush family.”
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 of guests ranging 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 that preceded the U.S. entry into World War II. Liberals so dominated intellectual thought that 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 remained conservative (George Will, David Brooks), and some 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 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, the author and satirist (”Thank You for Smoking”).
A precocious controversialist, William was but 8 when he wrote to the king of England, demanding payment of the British war debt.
After graduating with honors from Yale University 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 CIA 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 allowed 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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