A Farewell To Imperfect Greatness


   On the afternoon of February 27th, William F. Buckley Jr. was found dead in his study at his Stamford, CT home, sitting at his desk.  In the words of his son, Christopher, “he died with his boots on.”  Buckley’s career spanned almost six decades of books, essays, newspaper and magazine columns, and television, and was almost single handedly responsible for bringing American political conservatism to prominence after it was nearly extinct in the post-Depression years.  His youth, combined with a powerful intellect and a laser-sharp wit, made conservatism hip and fresh at a time when liberal/progressive ideology had all but taken over American public life and relegated conservatives to the status of contrarian minority, and laid the foundations upon which would be built the Reagan Era.

   From the outset, Buckley was no shrinking violet.  Born into a wealthy oil family and educated abroad (he didn't learn English until he was seven years old, Spanish and French being his first and second languages, respectively), he graduated from Yale in 1950 and published his first book, God And Man At Yale, a stinging critique of what he saw as the faculty’s attempts to purge religion from the student body and replace it with a liberal ideology, the next year.  (He apparently thought it best to let everyone know where he stood straightaway, a character trait which defined the rest of his public life.)  Critics, mostly left-leaning Yale faculty members, dismissed the book, and Buckley, as irrelevant.

   Mistake!  In 1955, Buckley co-founded National Review, with this statement of purpose:

“Middle-of-the-Road, qua Middle of the Road, is politically, intellectually, and morally repugnant. We shall recommend policies for the simple reason that we consider them right (rather than ‘non-controversial’); and we consider them right because they are based on principles we deem right (rather than on popularity polls)...The New Deal revolution, for instance, could hardly have happened save for the cumulative impact of The Nation and The New Republic, and a few other publications, on several American college generations during the twenties and thirties.”

and liberals have been paying for their underestimation of Buckley ever since.  His erudition and biting humor would be a bane of liberals’ existence while gaining the grudging respect of his political adversaries.
  Through the years, he made enemies of people like Ayn Rand, who was so angered by his publication of a scathing review of Atlas Shrugged written by Whittaker Chambers that “for the rest of her life, she would walk theatrically out of any room I entered!”  And there was the now-legendary debate with Gore Vidal at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago where, after an initially intelligent and well-mannered exchange of opinions, Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi,” and Buckley responded with, “Now listen you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in your goddamned face and you'll stay plastered.”  That ignited a feud which continued until at least 2005.  Buckley also tackled some of the nut jobs in the conservative movement, denouncing the John Birch Society during his run for mayor of New York City in 1965.  He stepped down at National Review in 1990, though he remained editor-at-large, publishing regular editorials in the magazine in addition to his twice-weekly column On The Right, which was syndicated in over 200 papers nationwide.  

   Buckley was an ideologue, not a party man.  He was a vocal critic of the Iraq War, calling it “anything but conservative,” and saying that its failure alone would render the Bush presidency a failure.  Because, as Buckley put it, “conservatism implies a certain submission to reality,” his position on drug legalization put him at odds with most Republicans because he argued that the ill effects of the War on Drugs were demonstrably worse than the effects of the drugs themselves.  And he sure didn't make any new friends in the party when he did an interview in Playboy Magazine in 1970, although he explained that he'd done it “to communicate my ideas to my son!”

   He was also an imperfect man.  In a 1957 National Review column, he came out on the wrong side of history in his support of the segregationist South, writing:

“The central question that emerges…is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”

And in a lighter cultural vein, the accomplished harpsichordist and passionate lover of Bach referred to the Beatles as “the crowned heads of anti-music.”  Nobody bats .1000 and, considering the free pass given to such mistaken ideologues of the South as Strom Thurmond and Robert Byrd, one can forgive a flawed position from time to time, especially absent a malicious racism anywhere else in his considerable body of work.

   A prolific author of some 50+ books, both fiction and nonfiction, his collected papers (which were donated to Yale) weighed in at seven tons.  His television show, Firing Line, covered 33 years and 1,504 episodes, making it the longest-running public-affairs show with a single host in television history.

   Essayist, novelist, columnist, television host, unapologetic conservative, proud Roman Catholic and Anglophile, intellectual, social critic; Buckley was all these things and more when he died at his desk, presumably from complications from emphysema and diabetes.  Nobody knows what happened in that study on Wednesday afternoon, but with those final breaths came the end of an era in modern American political life, and what remains is darker, dumber, and whole lot less funny.  In Pace Requiescat, Mr. Buckley; you will be missed.