Free Republic

William F. Buckley, Jr. Born November 24, 1925 Tribute To William F. Buckley With Rich Lowry, Richard Brookhiser, Jeff Greenfield, Garry Wills and Mona Charen

Meacham: So how bad is it, really? Your title doesn't quite declare conservatism dead. Tanenhaus: Quite bad if you prize a mature, responsible conservatism that honors America's institutions, both governmental and societal. The first great 20th-century Republican president, Theo- dore Roosevelt, supported a strong central government that emphasized the shared values and ideals of the nation's millions of citizens. He denounced the harm done by "the trusts"—big corporations. He made it his mission to conserve vast tracts of wilderness and forest. The last successful one, Ronald Reagan, liked to remind people (especially the press) he was a lifelong New Dealer...

Is he still confident that Obama will govern from the economic center as he stated in his self-congratulatory "apology" to Mum and Pup before the election? Update: A comment on this post led me to find this from Buckley: Much as I admire President Obama, I believe with something approaching certainty that his spending will bring this country to its knees. "Sustainability" is all the rage as a buzzword, but a $3.6 trillion budget is not "sustainable." Doubling the national debt is not "sustainable." Inaction in the face of $77 trillion in unfunded liabilities (Social Security, Medicare, entitlements) is not...

Christopher Buckley endorses Joe Scarborough.

The specters of both Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley have been summoned over the past week to offer two examples for Republicans facing the distresses of minority status. In actuality, the models contradict, not compliment, one another. But there is a unifying lesson to be learned. In last week’s Weekly Standard, Naomi Emery presented Reagan the Republican who used his “unfailingly gracious tone” to bring the right, the middle, and remnants of the old left into what he saw as a must-be big tent Republican Party. In the June 1 Wall Street Journal, Richard Brookhiser reminded us of Buckley...

In times of perplexity evangelical Christians ask themselves, "What would Jesus do?" Conservatives trying to regroup in the age of Obama might ask themselves, "What would William F. Buckley Jr. do?" Buckley died in 2008 after almost 60 years as a public intellectual and celebrity. His quirky and hyperarticulate defense of his ideas, in books and columns and on television, gained him celebrity, and he used his stardom to propagate his ideas. He fought in great victories -- he helped create the climate of opinion in which Ronald Reagan was elected president -- and he saw great debacles, from the...

This is a really interesting debate between the conservative and liberal intellectual heavyweights. The video is on site, and can also be found on youtube. http://www.notoriouslyconservative.com/2009/05/william-f-buckley-vs-noam-chomsky-pt-1_29.html

In a time where conservatives are struggling to make conservatism popular again, there has been much reference of President Ronald Reagan and his core principles, and rightfully so. I too reference Reagan for the successful precedent his tenure set for conservatism. However, I feel too little attention is paid to the conservative thinkers who spurred the movement which put the likes of Reagan in the White House; thinkers like Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley who, I am ashamed to say, are all-too-unfamiliar to my generation. This unfamiliarity, no doubt, can be directly attributed to generations of indoctrination primarily proliferated...

Before the current Legislative Session began, Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley spent months touring the state and promoting four "governing principles that must guide the State Legislature in achieving the mission." One of those principles was: "transparency." Unfortunately, "was" has become the key word in that sentence. Since leaving the town-hall circuit for Carson City, Buckley seems to have forgotten all about transparency. Probably the most controversial thing the legislature will do this year will be to propose record or near-record tax increases. But average Nevada citizens don't know which taxes are going to be increased, how much they'll go up,...

After endorsing the president in October, I think so far he’s living up to expectations. It’s funny: When you endorse (to use a too-fancy term in my case) a presidential candidate, as I did Barack Obama in this space last October, he sort of becomes your responsibility. Back to that in a moment. Meanwhile, I am delighted, overall, with our president’s first 100 days. I think he has struck a fine tone overseas (trans: the U.S. is less detested than it has been in recent years). He has exhibited the “first-class temperament” that persuaded me he was the man for...

To the extent that this story has a dimension beyond the purely personal, I suppose it’s an account of becoming an orphan. My mother and father died within 11 months of each other in 2007 and 2008. I do realize that “orphan” sounds like an overdramatic term for becoming parentless at age 55, but I was struck by the number of times the word occurred in the 800 or more condolence letters I received after my father died. I hadn’t, until about the seventh or eighth reference, thought of myself as an “orphan.” Now you’re an orphan. . . ....

Christopher Buckley, the Obama loving publicity seeking son of the great William F. Buckley, writes a 500 word snicker about Newt Gingrich becoming a Catholic, the Catholic Church, and conversion in general in his piece "The Audacity of Poping" for The Daily Beast. From the term "poping" to accusing the Church of thinking "like a $700-an-hour K Street lawyer," the piece only succeeds in being offensive and sad. Some lowlights of Buckley's childish rant follow: BTW: “Poping� in the headline above, which—sorry—I couldn’t resist, is the traditional, British pejorative for “becoming a Catholic.� Did you hear the news? Bertie...

Christopher Buckley, son of William, takes a non-too-gentle look at Newt Gingrich’s pending change of religion in the Daily Beast: Brace yourselves for a tsunami of punditry this weekend, when the much-married Newt Gingrich is received into the Catholic Church. This would ordinarily be a private occasion, but Newt Gingrich is not ordinary. He is (I hedge) probably the most interesting putative candidate person on the Right at this point. Google “Gingrich” and “2012” your hard drive will melt under a trillion hits. So attention to this event must and will be paid. Buckley goes into some unkind detail about...

Our choice, last fall, was between an angry 73 year old with a legislative record far from consistently conservative, who nominated as his running mate a know-nothing religious extremist; on the other side was an appealing, thoughtful man who--for a brief shining moment--seemed to be more than the sum of his ideological parts. If I had to vote all over again, I'd pull the same lever. Maybe I'm obtuse. Or maybe I just haven't yet entirely given up on the old audacity of hope.

One feels almost unpatriotic, entertaining negative thoughts about Obama’s grand plan. But it is far from clear that spending oceanic sums of money is the right corrective. That was, as Tom Lehrer would say, the week that was. President Obama gave his first State of the Union speech. Governor Jindal gave his first and possibly last Republican response. The President presented a $3.6 trillion budget, and announced that we are getting out of Iraq but not really. And Rush Limbaugh gave—as he put it, fun intended—his first nationally televised address to the nation. Hold on—there’s a typo in that paragraph....

Fri, 02/27/2009 He died a year ago today. William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder of the modern conservative movement and of its intellectual journal of opinion The National Review, was the catalyst who gave conservatives in this nation the courage to take back a government which had spiraled out of control since FDR and his New Deal. Bill succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Ronald Reagan became President and gave us those sweetly remembered halcyon days. Compared to today under the new FDR those days seem like paradise. The government that conservatives fought so hard and so long to get...

On the night that William F. Buckley met Ronald Reagan, the future president of the United States put his elbow through a plate-glass window. The year was 1961, and the two men were in Beverly Hills, where Buckley, perhaps the most famous conservative in America at the tender age of 35, was giving an address at a school auditorium. Reagan, a former Hollywood leading man dabbling in political activism — the Tim Robbins or Alec Baldwin of his But the microphone was dead, the technician was nowhere to be found and the control room was locked. As the crowd began...

Thought some might enjoy reading Mr. Buckley initial article on conservatism in NR. "The Magazines Credenda" at the end seems as topical today as in 1955. There is, we like to think, solid reason for rejoicing. Prodigious efforts, by many people, are responsible for NATIONAL REVIEW. But since it will be the policy of this magazine to reject the hypodermic approach to world affairs, we may as well start out at once, and admit that the joy is not unconfined. Let's face it: Unlike Vienna, it seems altogether possible that did NATIONAL REVIEW not exist, no one would have invented...

"Let's face it: Unlike Vienna, it seems altogether possible that did NATIONAL REVIEW not exist, no one would have invented it. The launching of a conservative weekly journal of opinion in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks like a work of supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist weekly within the walls of Buckingham Palace. It is not that, of course; if NATIONAL REVIEW is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have...

In the wreckage of their election blowout, conservatives gather to plot Sarah Palin's next career move. As I type, a boatload of bigfoot conservatives are aboard a cruise ship at an undisclosed location somewhere east of Fort Lauderdale and very west of Eden. They are sipping piña coladas and dribbling guacamole onto their chins as they chew over Topic A, namely “What the F--- Was That All About?” Mitt Romney is aboard, presumably not sipping piña coladas. His ticket for the cruise came to about $45 million, so I hope they gave him the Admiral’s Suite on A Deck. Within...

    'National Review' Allows Diverse Opinions, Former Staffer Says By S. T. Karnick (http://stkarnick.com)       A former associate editor of National Review magazine says Christopher Buckley's departure from his back-page column was not a firing, and the magazine embraces diverse viewpoints within conservatism. But that's the real problem with the contemporary right: it lacks a set of coherent principles.   Recently a well-publicized conflict at National Review magazine created a stir on the right and much schadenfreude on the left. Christopher Buckley, the son of the magazine's late founder-editor and a highly respected writer himself, announced...

How are you holding up? I am heavily medicated. What are you taking? I’m teasing. It’s just a line from one of my favorite movies, “Spinal Tap.” I feel I should be heavily medicated. In the past few weeks you’ve been pilloried by the right for a column you contributed to a Web site, “Sorry, Dad, I’m Voting for Obama.” What I mounted in The Daily Beast was an argument. It was not an attitudinal riff — it was not “John McCain is an old snarly-pants.” I presented a thoughtful argument, and it was viewed as apostasy. As a result,...

As if the mainstream media's dumpster-diving campaign against Palin isn't galling enough, the conservative elite's casually dismissive attitude toward the brightest GOP star from Alaska may be even worse. Washington insiders' common mantra is "readiness." Colin Powell dismissed Palin as not "ready to be president." Kenneth Adelman, forgetting the governor is already above his pay grade, patronizingly declared her "not close to being acceptable in high office." Their disdain is rivaled by some East Coast conservative pundits. New York Times columnist David Brooks declared Palin "a cancer," and Washington Post writer Kathleen Parker called her "clearly out of her league."...

With the rise to enduring power of president Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in 1933, a new type of Republican emerged in reaction to FDR's attractive and overawing power - the-me-too Republican. Until the election of president Reagan five decades later, these me-too Republicans supported, rather than opposed, Democratic Party policies, but claimed they would administer them better. Of course this led to a half-century of Democratic dominance of American government and politics.

In his now-infamous I'm-running-away-from-home note to National Review posted on the cyberpages of leftist publisher Tina Brown, Christopher Buckley, conservative legend William F. Buckley Jr.'s writer/novelist son, clearly stated reasons why someone like him would -- under normal circumstances -- utterly refuse to vote for someone like Barack Obama (words in italics are Buckley's): “He [Obama] is … a lefty. I am not." We'll take "Christo" (as his friends call him) at his word, for the moment. His essay is subtitled "The conservative case for Obama," but for reasons I illustrate below, I think it should be instead "A conservative's...

Christopher Buckley ’75, co-founder of the Yale Daily News magazine and son of conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. ’50, resigned Saturday from his position as a columnist at National Review, the influential magazine his father founded five years after graduating from Yale. The younger Buckley offered up his post to National Review editor Rich Lowry after Buckley’s Thursday endorsement of Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama in an online news magazine elicited a wave of outrage from National Review readers. “By Friday, I was Judas,” said Buckley in a telephone interview with the News on Tuesday night. “I thought...

Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance. Or would they? But let’s get that part out of the way. The only reason my vote would be of any interest to anyone is that my last name happens to be Buckley—a name I inherited. So in the event anyone notices or cares, the headline will be: “William F. Buckley’s Son Says He Is Pro-Obama.” I know, I know: It lacks the throw-weight of “Ron Reagan Jr....

A look at the life of William F. Buckley, leader of one of the most successful intellectual movements in American history. William F. Buckley: Right From The Start

The son of conservative icon William F. Buckley has parted ways with the magazine his father founded for committing a heretical act by National Review magazine standards: endorsing Barack Obama. In a column today entitled “Sorry, Dad, I was Sacked”on www.TheDailyBeast.com, Christopher Buckley, a well-known author also who wrote the back page column for National Review magazine, writes that the uproar over his endorsement last week of Obama over Republican John McCain prompted so much backlash that he offered his resignation—and the magazine accepted. “This offer was accepted—rather briskly! —by Rich Lowry, NR’s editor, and its publisher, the superb and...

Christopher Buckley, the author and son of the late conservative mainstay William F. Buckley, said in a telephone interview that he has resigned from the National Review, the political journal his father founded in 1955. As a result, he wrote to Richard Lowry, the editor of the National Review, and its publisher, Jack Fowler, offering to resign, and “this offer was rather briskly accepted,” Mr. Buckley said.

Christopher Buckley, in an exclusive for The Daily Beast, explains why he left The National Review, the magazine his father founded. I seem to have picked an apt title for my Daily Beast column, or blog, or whatever it’s called: “What Fresh Hell.” My last posting (if that’s what it’s called) in which I endorsed Obama, has brought about a very heaping helping of fresh hell. In fact, I think it could accurately be called a tsunami. The mail (as we used to call it in pre-cyber times) at the Beast has been running I’d say at about 7-to-1 in...

A Word on Christopher Buckley [Rich Lowry] Chris is up with a post at The Daily Beast, "Sorry, Dad, I Was Fired." I’d like to clarify this “firing” business. Over the weekend, Chris wrote us a jaunty e-mail with the subject line "A Sincere Offer," in which he offered to resign his column on NR's back page and said that if we accepted, there "would be no hard feelings, only warmest regards and understanding." We took the offer sincerely. Chris had done us the favor of writing the column beginning seven issues ago on a "trial basis" (his words), while...

In either the last week of August or the first week of September, 1970, just before I arrived at college, I had the extraordinary experience of going to Sharon, Connecticut, to the home of William Buckley. With several hundred other young conservatives (I was 17), I gathered for a couple days to validate my totally-against-the-crowd perception of life, a perception inspired in large part by William Buckley, one of the giants of the 20th century. Buckley's inspiration was not a new or different perception of life. To the contrary, his perception was an explication of life, a logical and spiritual...

I have the sad news of reporting that also succumbing to cancer on Saturday was Patricia “Trish” Bozell, beloved sister of WFB. Our sympathies to our good friend Brent and the entire Bozell family, to Priscilla, Jim, and Reid Buckley, and all friends and family. I read this from Philippians (1:12) as if St. Paul wrote it from Heaven: “To me life is Christ, and death is gain.” It's hard not to read it today as if a message from Tony and Trish, as if to say: Do not be afraid. We’re in good shape. Make sure you come and...

Like thousands before and after me, I first met William F. Buckley because of Yale. ©Steve Schapiro/Corbisbuckley A group of us from the Yale Political Union had invited the conservative magazine editor R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. to come talk to us. Tyrrell generously accepted -- and asked if he could bring his friend Bill Buckley along with him. We students were thrilled, of course, and on the appointed date Tyrrell and Buckley rocketed up from Sharon together. "Rocket" is really the word. Driving was one unique activity where Bill made up in speed for what he lacked in exactness and...

This website contains the complete writings of William F. Buckley, Jr. "Well, thanks to Hillsdale College,it is all here, a lifetime's work. Necessarily, you will find infelicities here, and maybe a deviation or two, but it is all an earnest attempt to contribute to the patrimony, preserved here thanks to Hillsdale." W.F.B.

NEW YORK (CNS) -- Mourners remembered William F. Buckley Jr. at an April 4 memorial Mass as a man of deep faith and unfailing confidence in the Catholic Church who brought people to believe in God and inspired vocations to the priesthood. "His tongue was the pen of a ready writer" and his "words were strong enough to help crack the walls of an evil empire," according to Father George W. Rutler, principal celebrant and homilist at the memorial Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. "His categories were not right and left but right and wrong," Father Rutler...

It can be said that modern conservatism knows only two times. There was the time before him and there was the time after him, and those two times could not be more contrasting. In this stark contrast lies his larger-than-life legacy, and let there be no mistake: It is a legacy that will endure the ages.

WALKING THE ROAD THAT BUCKLEY BUILT By Michael Johns It can be said that modern conservatism knows only two times. There was the time before him and there was the time after him, and those two times could not be more contrasting. In this stark contrast lies his larger-than-life legacy, and let there be no mistake: It is a legacy that will endure the ages. As word of William F. Buckley, Jr.'s passing reached his many students, admirers and colleagues late last week, it seemed each had an account (some grand, some small) of how this intellectual giant memorably impacted...

Writing in 1954, Lionel Trilling said that most conservatives do not “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

William F. Buckley’s ‘Conservative Movement’ Still-Born, Dead-On-Arrival, Decades Ago, Because it Was Godless, Against Christ, Ignored God’s Word Contact: John Lofton, 301-873-4612, 410-760-8885, JLof@aol.com MEDIA ADVISORY, March 3 /Christian Newswire/ — Recovering Republican John Lofton, Editor of TheAmericanView.com and co-host of “The American View” radio show with the Constitution Party’s 2004 Presidential candidate Michael Anthony Peroutka, has issued the following statement: “Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” – Psalm 127. The Lord Jesus Christ did not build the “conservative movement” house....

"At his desk," wrote Christopher Buckley in his email to friends, "in Stamford this morning." Well, one had somehow known that it would have to be at his desk. The late William F. Buckley Jr. was a man of incessant labor and productivity, with a slight allowance made for that saving capacity for making it appear easy.

The Buckley dinner salons were held at Bill and Patricia's Park Avenue apartment, a ground-floor maisonette at 73rd Street in Manhattan. Literary sportsman George Plimpton might be there, chatting with statesman Henry Kissinger or novelist Dominick Dunne. At the same time, standing in the corner might be a lumpy, Trotskyite-turned-Catholic intellectual talking to a nervous Yale undergraduate. There were rarely politicians to be seen at the Buckleys' elegant home, but, standing by the Bösendorfer piano in the living room, guests often heard worldclass pianist Bruce Levingston playing the same Bach concerto he would be performing the next week at Carnegie...

Here's one measure of the man and the scope of his achievement: No serious historian will be able to write about 20th-century America without discussing Bill Buckley. Before Buckley, there was no conservative movement. After Buckley, there was Ronald Reagan. Reagan was the most important American political figure of the latter half of the 20th century. No one was more central to his emergence and success than Bill Buckley. It was not just a happy coincidence that Buckley, in the course of promoting conservatism, also helped his country. It's true that he saw in conservatism a set of doctrines that...

Like John O'Sullivan, I'm currently traveling in Europe and spent [Wednesday, Feb. 28]being asked wherever I went about Bill Buckley. He is an heroic figure to many because he was right about the great question of the second half of the 20th century at a time when far too many in the West thought it boorish and vulgar to be: As a character in one of his last novels tells a self-regarding liberal, "The kind of people who have offended you since you were at college are the people who won the Cold War." Bill was not a shrill man...

Legendary conservative author and editor William F. Buckley Jr. recently visited HUMAN EVENTS to chat with HE Editors Tom Winter, Allan Ryskind and Terry Jeffrey. The topic was Buckley's new novel, Getting It Right, a highly entertaining fictionalized account of how the conservative movement, in its early years, rejected the objectivism of novelist Ayn Rand and the fanaticism of Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society. The book, published by Regnery (a sister company of HUMAN EVENTS), is now available in stores. Before it was over, the conversation among Buckley, Winter, Ryskind and Jeffrey turned to issues including modern...

Thank heavens for Peggy Noonan who so often manages, so elegantly, to articulate the meandering germs running through my brain but remaining unexpressed due to my lack of skill.In appreciating William F. Buckley today she writes: …When Jackie Onassis died, a friend of mine who knew her called me and said, with such woe, “Oh, we are losing her kind.” He meant the elegant, the cultivated, the refined. I thought of this with Bill’s passing, that we are losing his kind–people who were deeply, broadly educated in great universities when they taught deeply and broadly, who held deep views of...

The warm tributes to William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative hero who died Wednesday at age 82, have emphasized all that everyone could appreciate about him: the formidable intelligence, the capacious vocabulary, the otherworldly productivity, the playful wit, the graciousness and deep, wide-ranging friendships. He was a beloved figure who had entered American lore and, in that sense, belonged to all of us. But in the fond reminiscences, it shouldn't be forgotten what he hated. Buckley was an anti-Communist to the marrow of his bones, whose lifelong mission was to crush Marxist totalitarianism. In this, he was uncompromising, relentless, and...

Buckley and Reagan: The Qualities of Conservative Greatness by Bruce Walker As conservatives bemoan the apparent descent of conservatism into a swamp, we would do well to remember the two men who most personify conservatism in America. One of those two men, William F. Buckley, has just passed away. The other man, Ronald Reagan died four years ago (also in the middle of a presidential campaign.) These two men were more than conservative icons, they were American icons. No Leftist will ever be as loved by Americans as that "Arch-Conservative" Reagan and no Leftist will ever be as respected and...

Many of us are guilty of romanticizing our heroes. So please forgive me when I say that author, journalist, talk-show host and intellectual William F. Buckley Jr., who died this week, deserves all the sparkling words of tribute showered on him from every corner of the political world. Trying to list his accomplishments would eat this column up — but let's just mention the 5,600 newspaper columns he authored, along with hundreds of articles in the National Review, 1,429 "Firing Line" television shows and 55 books. Buckley was all the things his eulogizers declared. But more than that, he possessed...