Mr. Buckley in his office at the National Review in 1965. Mr. Buckley's winningly capricious personality, replete with ten-dollar words and a darting tongue writers loved to compare with an anteater's, hosted one of television's longest-running programs, "Firing Line," and founded and shepherded the National Review.
Photo: Sam Falk/The New York Times
Mr. Buckley at a press conference in 1965. His 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.
Photo: John Lindsay/Associated Press
Mr. Buckley at a benefit in 1972. His vocabulary, sparkling with phrases from distant eras and described in newspaper and magazine profiles as sesquipedalian (characterized by the use of long words) became the stuff of legend. Less kind commentators called him "pleonastic" (use of more words than necessary).
Photo: Michael Evans/The New York Times
William Francis Buckley Jr., seen at his National Review office in 2004, was born in Manhattan on Nov. 24, 1925, the sixth of the 10 children of Aloise Steiner Buckley and William Frank Buckley Jr. 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.
Photo: Vincent Laforet/The New York Times
In his last years, as honors like the Presidential Medal of Freedom came his way, Mr. Buckley - shown here in the office of his Stamford, Conn., home in 2005 - gradually loosened his grip on his intellectual empire. In 1998, he ended his frenetic schedule of public speeches. In 1999, he stopped "Firing Line," and in 2004, he relinquished his voting stock in National Review. 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.
Photo: Suzy Allman for The New York Times