Free Republic

Many prominent young bloggers say its time conservatives altered their fortunes and cast off those intellectual dead weights who stir up irrational fear. Time to throw off those whose intellectual bankruptcy has left the conservative movement with no credibility in the eyes of the American people. No, they’re not calling for the removal of those writers and political leaders who told us that if we didn’t give the Treasury $700 billion to distribute to corporate America, the world as we know it would end, thus undermining free-market economics. Rather, the talk from young political guns Patrick Ruffini and Jon Henke...

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...

The editor of The New York Times Book Review and the paper's "Week in Review" section, Sam Tanenhaus is the biographer of Whittaker Chambers and is at work on the life of William F. Buckley Jr. In a new, short book, The Death of Conservatism, he argues that the right needs to find its footing for the good of the country. In an e-mail exchange with Jon Meacham, Tanenhaus reflected on the book's themes. Excerpts:

The most important lesson of his career is that there are limits to accommodation. 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?" ... The most important lesson of his career is that there are limits to accommodation. Buckley came to fame in the early 1950s after two decades of liberal Democratic dominance, the Fair Deal of Harry Truman having followed the New Deal of FDR. When Republicans finally recaptured Congress and the White House in 1952, it...

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. . . ....

he story of the two-bedroom, one-bath shack on West Hopi Street, is the story of this year's financial panic, told in 576 square feet. It helps explain how a series of bad decisions can add up to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Less than two years ago, Integrity Funding LLC, a local lender, gave a $103,000 mortgage to the owner, Marvene Halterman, an unemployed woman with a long list of creditors and, by her own account, a long history of drug and alcohol abuse. For a $350 fee, an appraiser hired by Integrity, Michael T. Asher, valued...

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...

THE DEBATE absolutely disposed of the question, Can Dan Quayle speak and think in public? The moat built around him by the Bush people during tbe past two months was largely responsible for giving out the impression that he was a basket case of illiteracy, and one or two comments caught from him during that period did much to excite suspicion that that was the case. But for ninety minutes he spoke well, trenchantly, and with a mature sense of priorities. Oh, he did the irritating things-if he reminds us one more time that he wrote the Joint Training Partnership...

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,...

After a lifetime of being his father’s son, and yet having achieved fame and success in his own right, suddenly, at age 56, the author is unbound. “There is something ironically liberating when the father figure dies,” he said, sitting in his study, surrounded by his books and family mementos, including the manual Royal typewriter on which, he believes, his father wrote the 1951 classic, “God and Man at Yale.” *** As to his own father, it was “a complicated relationship,” he said. Early on, the elder Mr. Buckley was enthusiastic about his son’s writing. But as the son racked...

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...

The truth few wish to utter is that the GOP has abandoned many conservatives, who mostly nurse their angst in private. Those chickens we keep hearing about have indeed come home to roost. Years of pandering to the extreme wing — the “kooks” the senior Buckley tried to separate from the right — have created a party no longer attentive to its principles. Instead, as Christopher Buckley pointed out in a blog post on thedailybeast.com explaining his departure from National Review, eight years of “conservatism” have brought us “a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere,...

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...

It always saddens me to disagree with a friend, especially when I hold the friend in high professional regard. I have great personal affection for Christopher Buckley, and I harbor unbounded admiration for his talents as a satirist. He is an immensely engaging chap–a draught of champagne (the real stuff, not some domestic sparkler) on legs–and a boon travel companion to boot. Someday, we may amaze the world with our co-authored travelogue/political thriller about our journeys in and around Nootka. But that is a saga for another occasion. At the moment, I am feeling glum because Christo has broadcast a...

The son of William F. Buckley has decided—shock!—to vote for a Democrat. 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 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...

Click the pic. 

Bethany Was Near Jerusalem A homily on the occasion of the Memorial of William F. Buckley Jr. By Rev. George W. Rutler Editor's Note: The following homily was preached on the occasion of the Memorial Mass for Repose of the Soul of William F. Buckley Jr. on April 4, 2008, at St. Patrick's Cathedral. “Now Bethany was near Jerusalem. . . . ” John 11:18 In the village of Bethany was the house of Mary and her sister Martha and their brother Lazarus. There Jesus wept when Lazarus died, and then he called into the tomb and Lazarus came forth...

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...

Buckley Remembered at St. Patrick's Cathedral By Fred Lucas CNSNews.com Staff Writer April 04, 2008 New York (CNSNews.com) - William F. Buckley, Jr. changed American politics and culture to a degree that many would call him incomparable. Still, Henry Kissinger found a comparison when commemorating Buckley at a crowded St. Patrick's Cathedral Friday. "He wrote as Mozart composed, with inspiration. Bill never needed a second draft," Kissinger, a former secretary of state, said during the memorial service for the icon of conservatism, journalism and politics. "Bill Buckley's conservatism is about the liberation of the human spirit," Kissinger said. "All of...

The long-term implications of Buckley's stands were enormous. By remaking the conservative movement in his own image, in which the emphasis was on anti-communism and a libertarian skepticism of government power, he ensured that it, and the Republican Party, which it came to dominate, would be a place where Jew-haters were unwelcome. That enabled liberal Jews, such as Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, to feel comfortable making common cause with the right on a host of issues as he began his own journey away from the left. Though expectations that the Jews would ditch liberalism en masse were always unrealistic, the...

The recent death of conservative commentator William F. Buckley reminded me of when I lived in Boston in the mid-1990s, when, for lack of a better term, I became a "born-again" conservative. Although I already considered myself a conservative, one day I came across The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk. I had never heard of the book or the author, but I thought it might be worth a look. It changed my life. Kirk outlined a conservative tradition steeped in the philosophy of everyone from English statesman Edmund Burke to poet T.S. Eliot; he even devoted an entire chapter to...

Was there any major American personality in the last half-century who seemed more remote from the sensibilities of most American Jews than William F. Buckley? Buckley, who passed away last week at the age of 83, was the fervent Catholic patrician whose work helped create the modern American conservative movement in the 1950s at a time when nothing could have been more removed from the thinking of most Jews in this country than his National Review. Though much has changed in the 53 years since NR's debut, given that most Jews are still, at the very least, reliable supporters of...

The death of William F. Buckley Jr. last week brought several calls with reminders of his connection to South Texas. His grandfather, John Buckley, came to Duval County in 1874 from Ontario, Canada. He was involved in raising sheep. Back then, South Texas was sheep country. John Buckley, the patriarch of the family, ran for sheriff of Duval County as a Democrat in 1888. He lost to Republican L.L. Wright. Buckley sued for fraud, claiming that forces loyal to Wright failed to count votes from precincts favoring Buckley. He also charged that Wright brought in illegal voters from Nueces and...

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." One of the perks of being a liberal is disdaining people who are not liberals. However, as of 1954, Trilling's dismissive attitude toward conservatives' intellectual landscape was painfully close to the truth. Trilling wrote ten years after Friedrich Hayek's landmark counterattack against the left in his book "The Road to Serfdom." But that was a book with great impact on a relatively small number of people at the time, though its...

Conservatives face difficult times in today's political world and ever-shifting culture, but they will live to fight another day, concluded four scholars at a book forum Tuesday at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. At the event, "The 'Right' Books: The Past, Present, and Future of Conservatism," authors Donald Critchlow, Jacob Heilbrunn, Mark Smith, and John Samples praised the lifetime work of conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr., who died last week, Feb. 27, at the age of 82. Buckley had founded the influential conservative magazine National Review in 1955, wrote numerous books, and saw his twice-weekly column syndicated...

Don’t believe the obituaries. William F. Buckley is still very much with us. Just as John F. Kennedy continues to inspire successive generations of liberals, so too will Buckley continue to motivate conservatives in the present and future. Buckley’s goal—establishing economic, social and foreign-policy conservatism as the default political template of the United States—has yet to be fully reached, but he has encouraged millions to make his dream a reality. It is not unreasonable to characterize Buckley as the Martin Luther King Jr. of the conservative movement. Both men rose to prominence in the 1950s by challenging political philosophies that...

For Conservatives, the Buckley Doesn't Stop Here By Donald Lambro Monday, March 3, 2008 WASHINGTON -- William Buckley's pioneering influence in the creation of the modern American conservative movement has been well documented since his passing last week. But little if any attention has been given to the influence and impact he had upon a younger generation of foot soldiers in that movement in the 1950s and 1960s, when he burst upon the political scene with the publication of his indictment of liberal academics, "God And Man At Yale," and with the founding of National Review magazine. The movement he...

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....

March 01, 2008, 9:00 a.m. ‘It’s the Epigoni, Stupid’William F. Buckley Jr. stood athwart history and changed its course. By Mark Steyn If you were running one of those Frank Luntz machine-wired focus groups to produce the ideal conservative leader for America, I doubt you’d come up with an urbane patrician harpsichordist semi-resident in Switzerland and partial to words like “eremitical� and “periphrastic.� “It’s the epigoni, stupid� is not a useful campaign slogan — although, in fact, a distressingly large number of political candidates are certainly epigoni (“a second-rate imitator�). But William F. Buckley Jr. was a first-rate original,...

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...

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...

"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. But he was driven, all right, and restless, and never allowed himself much ease on his own account. There was never a moment, after taping some session at Firing Line, where mere recourse to some local joint was in prospect. He was always...

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...

Conservative intellectual William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder of National Reivew, died Wednesday morning at the age of 82. The editors of National Review are hardly an impartial source, but they are nevertheless largely correct when they write that "he created modern conservatism as an intellectual and then a political movement." Buckley's central contribution was to forge an alliance between religious traditionalists, pro-free-marketers, and foreign policy hawks. National Review describes this task as convincing "anti-Communists, traditionalists, constitutionalists, and enthusiasts for free markets" to "all...take shelter under the same tent." The idea that was supposed to hold up this conservative "big...

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...

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...

In what may well be one of the last published articles he wrote, William F. Buckley Jr. recalls the problems that arose when the John Birchers got too close to Barry Goldwater’s Presidential Campaign: The society had been founded in 1958 by an earnest and capable entrepreneur named Robert Welch, a candy man, who brought together little clusters of American conservatives, most of them businessmen. He demanded two undistracted days in exchange for his willingness to give his seminar on the Communist menace to the United States, which he believed was more thoroughgoing and far-reaching than anyone else in America...

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...

From 1969, but still very relavent today. (sic)

WASHINGTON -- Those who think Jack Nicholson's neon smile is the last word in smiles never saw William F. Buckley's. It could light up an auditorium; it did light up half a century of elegant advocacy that made him an engaging public intellectual and the 20th century's most consequential journalist. Before there could be Ronald Reagan's presidency, there had to be Barry Goldwater's candidacy. It made conservatism confident and placed the Republican Party in the hands of its adherents. Before there could be Goldwater's insurgency, there had to be National Review magazine. From the creative clutter of its Manhattan offices...

PRAGUE -- Whenever Bill Buckley was profiled in the media, he was usually pinned firmly to words such as "impish" and "gadfly." It is easy to understand why. He was a wit - and a reckless wit at that. Asked what he would first do if elected mayor of New York in 1965, he replied: "Demand a recount." Bores cling to the consoling thought that such a sharp wit must also be frivolous and ineffectual, but Bill was one of the most effectual men of our time. He sailed several oceans. He played the harpsichord. He authored (annually on his...

Thirty years ago I was fresh out of college, with no particular career path chosen, and decided I’d like to be a nationally-syndicated columnist. I’d learn rather quickly that before being one, one has to become one, and to qualify on that caliber one has to demonstrate a talent which this young man didn’t possess. Bill Buckley told me so. I’d penned a couple of practice pieces, one having something to do with Jimmy Carter’s choice of Muhammad Ali as his ambassador-at-large to Africa, another on something equally memorable, and sent them to Bill, asking for his critique. Now, Bill...

It looks like Time magazine has dispensed with the quaint custom of showing at least a little respect for the recently deceased. This story by Richard Corliss begins a long sneer in the direction of William F. Buckley, Jr. starting with its very title, "William F. Buckley: Mandarin of Right-Wing TV." From that low point, Corliss continues his descent into his ill-mannered septic tank as he blames Buckley for inspiring what Corliss describes as "partisan political harangue as infotainment" following an appearance on the Jack Paar show in 1962: Few viewers realized that those two evenings 46 years ago would birth a durable...

In the early months of l962, there was restiveness in certain political quarters of the Right. The concern was primarily the growing strength of the Soviet Union, and the reiteration by its leaders of their designs on the free world. Some of the actors keenly concerned felt that Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona was a natural leader in the days ahead. But it seemed inconceivable that an anti-establishment gadfly like Goldwater could be nominated as the spokesman-head of a political party. And it was embarrassing that the only political organization in town that dared suggest this radical proposal—the GOP’s nominating...