William F. Buckley Jr.

For other persons of like name, see William F. Buckley (disambiguation).

William F. Buckley Jr.
William F. Buckley Jr. in 1985
Born	William Frank Buckley, Jr. (1925-11-24)November 24, 1925 New York City, United States
Died	February 27, 2008 (aged 82) Stamford, Connecticut, United States
Occupation	Editor Author Commentator Television personality
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Yale University
Subject	American conservatism, politics, anti-communism, espionage
Spouse	Patricia Taylor Buckley (died 2007)
Children	Christopher Buckley (b.1952)

William Frank Buckley, Jr. (November 24, 1925 – February 27, 2008) was a conservative American author and commentator. He founded the political magazine National Review in 1955, which had a major impact in stimulating the conservative movement. He hosted 1,429 episodes of the television show Firing Line from 1966 until 1999, where his public persona was famous for a wide vocabulary. He also wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column, and wrote numerous spy novels.

George H. Nash, a historian of the modern American Conservative movement, states that Buckley was "arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century... For an entire generation, he was the preeminent voice of American conservatism and its first great ecumenical figure." Buckley's primary contribution to politics was a fusion of traditional American political conservatism with laissez-faire economic theory and anti-communism, laying groundwork for the new American conservatism of U.S. presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan.

Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale (1951) and over 50 other books on writing, speaking, history, politics and sailing, including a series of novels featuring CIA agent Blackford Oakes. Buckley referred to himself as either a libertarian or conservative. He resided in New York City and Stamford, Connecticut. He was a practicing Roman Catholic, regularly attending the traditional Latin Mass in Connecticut.

Early life

Buckley was born November 24, 1925, in New York City to lawyer and oil baron William Frank Buckley, Sr., of Irish descent, and Aloise Josephine Antonia Steiner, a New Orleans native of Swiss-German descent. The sixth of ten children, as a boy Buckley moved with his family from Mexico to Sharon, Connecticut, before beginning his first formal schooling in Paris, where he attended first grade. By age seven, he received his first formal training in English at a day school in London; his first and second languages were Spanish and French, respectively. As a boy, Buckley developed a love for music, sailing, horses, hunting, skiing, and story-telling. All of these interests would be reflected in his later writings. Just before World War II, at age 13, he attended high school at the Catholic preparatory school Beaumont College in England. During the war, his family took in the future British historian Alistair Horne as a child war evacuee. Buckley and Horne remained lifelong friends. Buckley and Horne both attended the Millbrook School, in Millbrook, New York, and graduated as members of the Class of 1943. At Millbrook, Buckley founded and edited the school's yearbook, The Tamarack, his first experience in publishing. When Buckley was a young man, his father was an acquaintance of libertarian author Albert Jay Nock. William F. Buckley, Sr., encouraged his son to read Nock's works.

As a youth, Buckley developed many musical talents. He played the harpsichord very well, later calling it "the instrument I love beyond all others". He was an accomplished pianist and appeared once on Marian McPartland's National Public Radio show "Piano Jazz". A great fan of Johann Sebastian Bach, Buckley said that he wanted Bach's music played at his funeral.

Marriage and family

In 1950, Buckley married Patricia Aldyen Austin "Pat" Taylor (1926–2007), daughter of Canadian industrialist Austin C. Taylor. He met Pat, a Protestant from Vancouver, British Columbia, while she was a student at Vassar College. She later became a prominent fundraiser for such charitable organizations as the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the Institute of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery at New York University Medical Center and the Hospital for Special Surgery. She also raised money for Vietnam War veterans and AIDS patients. On April 15, 2007, she died of an infection after a long illness at age 80. After her death, Buckley seemed "dejected and rudderless," according to friend Christopher Little.

The couple had one son, author Christopher Buckley.

William F. Buckley Jr. had nine siblings, including sister Maureen Buckley-O'Reilly (1933–1964) who married Gerald A. O'Reilly, the CEO of Richardson-Vicks drugs; sister Priscilla L. Buckley, author of Living It Up With National Review: A Memoir, for which William wrote the foreword; sister Patricia Buckley Bozell, who was Patricia Taylor's roommate at Vassar before each married; brother Fergus Reid Buckley, an author, debate-master, and founder of the Buckley School of Public Speaking; and brother James L. Buckley, who became a Senator from New York and a former judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Buckley co-authored a book, McCarthy and His Enemies, with his brother-in-law, attorney L. Brent Bozell, Jr., (Patricia's husband), who worked with Buckley at The American Mercury in the early 1950s when it was edited by William Bradford Huie. Buckley's youngest sister Aloise Buckley Heath was a writer and conservative activist.

Religion

See also: Mater si, magistra no

Buckley was raised a Catholic, and was a member of the Knights of Malta. He described his faith by saying, "I grew up, as reported, in a large family of Catholics without even a decent ration of tentativeness among the lot of us about our religious faith." As a child, he attended St. John's, Beaumont, a boarding school in Old Windsor, for a time before the outbreak of World War II. Later, he attended Millbrook, a Protestant school, but was permitted to attend Catholic Mass at a nearby church. As a youth, he became aware of anti-Catholic bias in the United States, particularly American Freedom and Catholic Power, a Paul Blanshard book that accused American Catholics of having 'divided loyalties.'

The release of his first book, God and Man at Yale, was met with some specific criticism pertaining to his Catholicism. McGeorge Bundy, dean of Harvard at the time, wrote in The Atlantic that "it seems strange for any Roman Catholic to undertake to speak for the Yale religious tradition." Henry Sloan Coffin, a Yale trustee, accused Buckley's book of "being distorted by his Roman Catholic point of view" and stated that Buckley "should have attended Fordham or some similar institution."

In his 1997 book Nearer, My God, he condemned what he viewed as "the Supreme Court's war against religion in the public school," and argued that Christian faith was being replaced by "another God...multiculturalism." As an adult, Buckley regularly attended the traditional Latin Mass in Connecticut. He disapproved of the liturgical reforms following the Vatican II Council. Buckley also revealed an interest in the writings and revelations of the 20th Century Italian mystic Maria Valtorta. In his spiritual memoir Buckley reproduced Valtorta's detailed accounts of Jesus Christ's crucifixion, which were based on Valtorta's visionary experiences of Christ and the mystical revelations she reported experiencing between the years 1943–47, being shown Jesus' life in 1st-century Palestine and recording the visions in her book The Poem of the Man God.

Education, military service, and the CIA

Buckley attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico (or UNAM) in 1943. The following year upon his graduation from the U.S. Army Officer Candidate School, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. In his book, Miles Gone By, he briefly recounts being a member of Franklin Roosevelt's honor guard upon the President's death.

With the end of World War II in 1945, he enrolled in Yale University, where he became a member of the secret Skull and Bones society, was a debater, an active member of the Conservative Party and of the Yale Political Union, and served as Chairman of the Yale Daily News. Buckley studied political science, history, and economics at Yale, graduating with honors in 1950. He excelled as the captain of the Yale Debate Team, and under the tutelage of Yale professor Rollin G. Osterweis, Buckley honed his acerbic style.

In 1951, like some of his classmates in the Ivy League, Buckley was recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); he served for two years including one year in Mexico City working as a political action specialist in the elite Special Activities Division for E. Howard Hunt. These two officers remained lifelong friends. In a November 1, 2005, column for National Review, Buckley recounted that while he worked for the CIA, the only employee of the organization that he knew was Hunt, his immediate boss. While in Mexico, Buckley edited The Road to Yenan, a book by Peruvian author Eudocio Ravines.

First books

God and Man at Yale

Buckley (right) and L. Brent Bozell Jr. promote their book McCarthy and His Enemies, 1954

In 1951, Buckley's first book, God and Man at Yale, was published. The book was written in Hamden, Connecticut, where William and Pat Buckley had settled as newlyweds. A critique of Yale University, the work argued that the school had strayed from its original educational mission. Buckley himself credited the attention the book received in the media to the "Introduction" written by John Chamberlain, saying that it "chang[ed] the course of his life" and that the famous Life magazine editorial writer had acted out of "reckless generosity."

The next year, Buckley wrote an article for Commonweal which insisted that Big Government and a large U.S. military might be a necessity for the duration of the Cold War. William F. Buckley, Jr. was referred to in the novel, The Manchurian Candidate, by Richard Condon in 1959 as "...that fascinating young man who wrote about man and God at Yale."

McCarthy and His Enemies

In 1954, Buckley co-wrote a book McCarthy and His Enemies with his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell Jr., strongly defending Senator Joseph McCarthy as a patriotic crusader against communism.

In McCarthy and his Enemies he asserted that "McCarthyism... is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks."

Buckley worked as an editor for The American Mercury in 1951 and 1952, but left after perceiving newly emerging anti-Semitic tendencies in the magazine.

National Review

Examining postwar conservative intellectual history, Kim Phillips-Fein writes:

The most influential synthesis of the subject remains George H. Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Tradition since 1945.... He argued that postwar conservatism brought together three powerful and partially contradictory intellectual currents that previously had largely been independent of each other: libertarianism, traditionalism, and anticommunism. Each particular strain of thought had predecessors earlier in the twentieth (and even nineteenth) centuries, but they were joined in their distinctive postwar formulation through the leadership of William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review. The fusion of these different, competing, and not easily reconciled schools of thought led to the creation, Nash argued, of a coherent modern Right."

Buckley founded National Review in 1955, serving as editor-in-chief until 1990. During that time, National Review became the standard-bearer of American Conservatism, promoting the fusion of traditional conservatives and libertarians.

As editors and contributors, Buckley especially sought out intellectuals who were ex-Communists or had once worked on the far Left, including Whittaker Chambers, William Schlamm, John Dos Passos, Frank Meyer and James Burnham. When James Burnham became one of the original senior editors he urged the adoption of a more pragmatic editorial position that would extend the influence of the magazine toward the political center. Smant (1991) finds that Burnham overcame sometimes heated opposition from other members of the editorial board (including Meyer, Schlamm, William Rickenbacker, and the magazine's publisher William A. Rusher), and had a significant impact on both the editorial policy of the magazine and on the thinking of Buckley himself.

Defining the boundaries of conservatism

See also: Conservatism in the United States

Buckley and his editors used his magazine to define the boundaries of conservatism—and to exclude people or ideas or groups they considered unworthy of the conservative title. Therefore he denounced Ayn Rand, the John Birch Society, George Wallace, racists, white supremacists (starting in the 1960s), and anti-Semites.

When he first met philosopher Ayn Rand, according to Buckley, she greeted him with the following: "You are much too intelligent to believe in Gott." In turn, Buckley felt that "Rand's style, as well as her message, clashed with the conservative ethos" and he decided that Rand's hostility to religion made her philosophy unacceptable to his understanding of conservatism. After 1957, he attempted to read her out of the conservative movement by publishing Whittaker Chambers's highly negative review of Rand's Atlas Shrugged. In 1964, he wrote of "her desiccated philosophy's conclusive incompatibility with the conservative's emphasis on transcendence, intellectual and moral," as well as "the incongruity of tone, that hard, schematic, implacable, unyielding, dogmatism that is in itself intrinsically objectionable, whether it comes from the mouth of Ehrenburg, Savonarola--or Ayn Rand." Other attacks were penned by Garry Wills, and M. Stanton Evans. Nevertheless, Burns argues, her popularity and her influence on the right forced Buckley and his circle into a reconsideration of how traditional notions of virtue and Christianity could be integrated with all-out support for capitalism.

White supremacy in the South

MacLean states that, "The National Review made Kilpatrick its voice on the civil rights movement and the Constitution, as Buckley and Kilpatrick united North and South in a shared vision for the nation that included upholding white supremacy." James Jackson Kilpatrick (1920–2010) was a well-known newspaper editor in Richmond, Virginia, who was a leader in supporting segregation and the control of the South by whites only. In the August 24, 1957 issue, Buckley's editorial "Why the South Must Prevail" spoke out explicitly in favor of white supremacy in the South. It argued that "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." His answer was that white supremacy in the South was a good idea now (in 1957) and the black population lacked the education, economic, or cultural development for racial equality to be possible, claiming the white South had "the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races."

In 2004, he backtracked, saying, "the point I made about white cultural supremacy was sociological" and linking his usage of the word "Advancement" to its usage in the name NAACP, continued, "The call for the 'advancement' of colored people presupposes they are behind. Which they were, in 1958, by any standards of measurement." Buckley changed his views and by the mid-1960s renounced racism. This change was caused in part because he became appalled at the violence used by white supremacists during the Civil Rights Movement, and in part because of the influence of friends like Garry Wills, who confronted Buckley on the morality of his politics.

In the late 1960s, Buckley disagreed strenuously with segregationist George Wallace, who ran in Democratic primaries (1964 and 1972) and made an independent run for president in 1968. Buckley later said it was a mistake for National Review to have opposed the civil rights legislation of 1964–65. He later grew to admire Martin Luther King, Jr. and supported creation of a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day national holiday for him. During the 1950s, Buckley had worked to remove anti-Semitism from the conservative movement and barred holders of those views from working for National Review.

In 1962, Buckley denounced Robert W. Welch, Jr., and the John Birch Society, in National Review, as "far removed from common sense" and urged the GOP to purge itself of Welch's influence.

Democracy and Communism

Buckley's opposition to Communism extended to support of the overthrow and replacement of leftist governments by non-democratic forces. Buckley supported Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco who led the rightist military rebellion in its military defeat of the democratically-elected Spanish Republic. He called Franco "an authentic national hero," applauding his overthrow of Spanish Republican "visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists." He supported the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet that led the 1973 coup that overthrew Chilean president Salvador Allende's democratically-elected Marxist government, referring to Allende as "a president who was defiling the Chilean constitution and waving proudly the banner of his friend and idol, Fidel Castro."

Buckley later slew Gore Vidal in a heroic match of good and evil. Gore Vidal was some weird erotica writer.

In the political firing line

Young Americans for Freedom and Barry Goldwater

In 1960, Buckley helped form Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). YAF was guided by principles Buckley called, "The Sharon Statement". Buckley was proud of the successful campaign of his elder brother, Jim Buckley, on the Conservative Party ticket to capture the U.S. Senate seat from New York State held by incumbent Republican Charles Goodell in 1970, giving very generous credit to the activist support of the New York State chapter of Y.A.F. Buckley served one term in the Senate, then was defeated by Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1976.

In 1963–64, Buckley mobilized support for the candidacy of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, first for the Republican nomination against New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and then for the Presidency. Buckley used National Review as a forum for mobilizing support for Goldwater.

On The Right

Buckley's column On The Right was syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate beginning in 1962. From the early 1970s, his twice-weekly column was distributed to more than 320 newspapers across the country.

Mayoral candidacy

In 1965, Buckley ran for mayor of New York City as the candidate for the new Conservative Party. He ran to restore momentum to the conservative cause in the wake of Goldwater's defeat. He tried to take votes away from the relatively liberal Republican candidate and fellow Yale alumnus John Lindsay, who later became a Democrat. Buckley did not expect to win (when asked what he would do if he won the race Buckley responded, "Demand a recount.") and used an unusual campaign style; during one televised debate with Lindsay, Buckley declined to use his allotted rebuttal time and instead replied, "I am satisfied to sit back and contemplate my own former eloquence."

To relieve traffic congestion, Buckley proposed charging cars a fee to enter the central city, and a network of bike lanes. He opposed a civilian review board for the New York Police Department, which Lindsay had recently introduced to control police corruption and install community policing. Buckley finished third with 13.4% of the vote, possibly having inadvertently aided Lindsay's election by instead taking votes from Democratic candidate Abe Beame.

Firing Line

Buckley with President Ronald Reagan at Reagan's birthday celebration, 1986

Buckley with Reagan in the Oval Office, 1988

For many Americans, Buckley's erudition on his weekly PBS show Firing Line (1966–1999) was their primary exposure to him.

Throughout his career as a media figure, Buckley had received much criticism, largely from the American left but also from certain factions on the right, such as the John Birch Society and its second president, Larry McDonald, as well as from Objectivists.

In 1953–1954, long before he founded Firing Line, Buckley was an occasional panelist on the conservative public affairs program, Answers for Americans, broadcast on ABC and based on source material from the H. L. Hunt-supported publication Facts Forum.

Feud with Gore Vidal

Buckley appeared in a series of televised debates with Gore Vidal during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. In their penultimate debate on August 28 of that year, the two disagreed over the actions of the city police and the protesters at the ongoing convention. In reference to the response of the police involved in supposedly taking down a Viet Cong flag, moderator Howard K. Smith asked whether raising a Nazi flag during the Second World War would have elicited a similar response. Vidal responded that people were free to state their political views as they saw fit, whereupon Buckley interrupted and noted that people were free to speak their views but others were also free to ostracize them for holding those views, noting that in the U.S. during the Second World War "some people were pro-Nazi and they were well treated by those who ostracized them – and I'm for ostracizing people who egg on other people to shoot American Marines and American soldiers. I know you [Vidal] don't care because you have no sense of identification with . . .". Vidal then interjected that "the only sort of pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself", whereupon Smith interjected, "Now let's not call names." Buckley, visibly angered, rose several inches from his seat and replied, "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face, and you'll stay plastered." Buckley was to later apologize in print for having called Vidal a "queer" in a burst of anger rather than in a clinical context, but also reiterated his distaste for Vidal as an "evangelist for bisexuality": "The man who in his essays proclaims the normalcy of his affliction, and in his art the desirability of it, is not to be confused with the man who bears his sorrow quietly. The addict is to be pitied and even respected, not the pusher."

This feud continued the following year in the pages of Esquire, which commissioned essays from both Buckley and Vidal on the television incident. Buckley's essay "On Experiencing Gore Vidal", was published in the August 1969 issue, and led Vidal to sue for libel. The court threw out Vidal's case. Vidal's September essay in reply, "A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley", was similarly litigated by Buckley. In it Vidal strongly implied that, in 1944, Buckley and unnamed siblings had vandalized a Protestant church in their Sharon, Connecticut, hometown after the pastor's wife had sold a house to a Jewish family. Buckley sued Vidal and Esquire for libel; Vidal counter-claimed for libel against Buckley, citing Buckley's characterization of Vidal's novel Myra Breckenridge as pornography. Both cases were dropped, with Buckley settling for court costs paid by Vidal, while Vidal absorbed his own court costs. Buckley also received an editorial apology in the pages of Esquire as part of the settlement.

The feud was reopened in 2003 when Esquire re-published the original Vidal essay, at which time further legal action resulted in Buckley being compensated both personally and for his legal fees, along with an editorial notice and apology in the pages of Esquire, again.

Buckley maintained a philosophical antipathy towards Vidal's other bête noire, Norman Mailer, calling him "almost unique in his search for notoriety and absolutely unequalled in his co-existence with it". Meanwhile, Mailer summed up Buckley as having a “second-rate intellect incapable of entertaining two serious thoughts in a row”. After Mailer's 2007 death, however, Buckley wrote warmly about their personal acquaintance.

Associations with liberal politicians

Buckley became close friends with liberal Democratic activist Allard K. Lowenstein. Buckley featured Lowenstein on numerous Firing Line programs, publicly endorsed his candidacies for U.S. Congress, and delivered a eulogy at his funeral.

Buckley was also friends with economist John Kenneth Galbraith and former senator and presidential candidate George McGovern, both of whom he frequently featured or debated on Firing Line and college campuses.

United Nations delegate

In 1973, Buckley served as a delegate to the United Nations. In 1981, Buckley informed President-elect (and personal friend) Ronald Reagan that he would decline any official position offered to him. Reagan jokingly replied that that was too bad, because he had wanted to make Buckley ambassador to (then Soviet-occupied) Afghanistan. Buckley replied that he was willing to take the job but only if he were to be supplied with "10 divisions of bodyguards".

Amnesty International

In the late 1960s, Buckley joined the Board of Directors of Amnesty International USA. He resigned in January 1978 in protest over the organization's stance against capital punishment as expressed in its Stockholm Declaration of 1977, which he said would lead to the "inevitable sectarianization of the amnesty movement".

Spy novelist

In 1975, Buckley recounted being inspired to write a spy novel by Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal: "...If I were to write a book of fiction, I'd like to have a whack at something of that nature." He went on to explain that he was determined to avoid the moral ambiguity of Graham Greene and John le Carré. Buckley wrote the 1976 spy novel Saving the Queen, featuring Blackford Oakes as a rule-bound CIA agent, based in part on his own CIA experiences. Over the next 30 years, he would write another ten novels featuring Oakes. New York Times critic Charlie Rubin wrote that the series "at its best, evokes John O'Hara in its precise sense of place amid simmering class hierarchies". Stained Glass, second in the series, won a 1980 National Book Award in the one-year category Mystery (paperback).

Buckley was particularly concerned about the view that what the CIA and the KGB were doing was morally equivalent. As he wrote in his memoirs, "To say that the CIA and the KGB engage in similar practices is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes an old lady into the path of a hurtling bus is not to be distinguished from the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of a hurtling bus: on the grounds that, after all, in both cases someone is pushing old ladies around.

Buckley began doing his writing work on computers in the 1980s, and according to his son, he developed an almost fanatical loyalty to the word processing application WordStar, installing it on every new PC he got despite its growing obsolescence over the years. He still used it to write his last novel, and when asked why he continued using something so outdated, he would answer "They say there's better software, but they also say there's better alphabets."

Later career

Buckley shakes hands with President George W. Bush on October 6, 2005

Buckley participated in a live and very heated debate with scientist Carl Sagan on ABC, following the airing of The Day After, a 1983 made-for-television film about the effects of nuclear war. Sagan argued against nuclear proliferation, while Buckley, a staunch anti-communist, promoted the concept of nuclear deterrence. During the debate, Sagan discussed the concept of nuclear winter and made his famous analogy, equating the arms race to "two sworn enemies standing waist-deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five".

In 1988 Buckley was instrumental in the defeat of liberal Republican Senator Lowell Weicker. Buckley organized a committee to campaign against Weicker and endorsed his Democratic opponent, Connecticut Attorney General Joseph Lieberman.

In 1991, Buckley received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George H. W. Bush. Upon turning 65 in 1990, he retired from the day-to-day running of the National Review and relinquished his controlling shares of National Review in June 2004 to a pre-selected board of trustees. The following month he published the memoir Miles Gone By. Buckley continued to write his syndicated newspaper column, as well as opinion pieces for National Review magazine and National Review Online. He remained the ultimate source of authority at the magazine and also conducted lectures, granted occasional radio interviews and made guest appearances on national television news programs.

Views on modern-day conservatism

File:William F. Buckley, Jr.jpg

Buckley around 2000

Buckley criticized certain aspects of policy within the modern conservative movement. Of George W. Bush's presidency, he said, "If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we’ve experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign." He further said, "Bush is 'conservative', but he is not a 'Conservative', and that the president was not elected 'as a vessel of the conservative faith.'" Buckley would distinguish between so-called "lowercase c" and "Capital C" conservatives, the latter being true conservatives: fiscally conservative and socially Conservative/Libertarian or libertarian-leaning.

Regarding the War in Iraq, Buckley stated, "The reality of the situation is that missions abroad to effect regime change in countries without a bill of rights or democratic tradition are terribly arduous." He added: "This isn't to say that the Iraq war is wrong, or that history will judge it to be wrong. But it is absolutely to say that conservatism implies a certain submission to reality; and this war has an unrealistic frank and is being conscripted by events." In a February 2006 column published at National Review Online and distributed by Universal Press Syndicate, Buckley stated unequivocally that, "One cannot doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed." Buckley has also stated that "...it's important that we acknowledge in the inner councils of state that it (the war) has failed, so that we should look for opportunities to cope with that failure."

According to Jeffrey Hart, writing in The American Conservative, Buckley had a "tragic" view of the Iraq war: he "saw it as a disaster and thought that the conservative movement he had created had in effect committed intellectual suicide by failing to maintain critical distance from the Bush administration... At the end of his life, Buckley believed the movement he made had destroyed itself by supporting the war in Iraq." Regarding the Iraq War troop surge of 2007, however, it is noted by the editors of National Review that: "Buckley initially opposed the surge, but after seeing its early success believed it deserved more time to work."

Buckley was an advocate for the legalization of marijuana, and wrote a pointed pro-legalization piece for the National Review in 2004. In the piece, Buckley calls for conservatives to change their views on legalization, stating "We're not going to find someone running for president who advocates reform of those laws. What is required is a genuine republican groundswell. It is happening, but ever so gradually. Two of every five Americans [...] believe 'the government should treat marijuana more or less the same way it treats alcohol: It should regulate it, control it, tax it, and make it illegal only for children.'" However, in his December 3, 2007 column, Buckley seemed to advocate banning tobacco use in America.

About neoconservatives, he said in 2004: "I think those I know, which is most of them, are bright, informed and idealistic, but that they simply overrate the reach of U.S. power and influence."

Death

Buckley died at his home in Stamford, Connecticut, on February 27, 2008. Initially, it was reported that he was found dead at his desk in his study, a converted garage. "He died with his boots on", his son Christopher Buckley said, "after a lifetime of riding pretty tall in the saddle." Subsequently, however, in his 2009 book Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir, Christopher Buckley admitted that this account was an embellishment on his part: his father had actually been found lying on the floor of his study after suffering a fatal heart attack. At the time of his death, he had been suffering from emphysema and diabetes. In a December 3, 2007 column, Buckley commented on the cause of his emphysema, citing his lifelong habit of smoking tobacco, despite endorsing a legal ban of it.

Notable members of the Republican political establishment paying tribute to Buckley included President George W. Bush, former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, and former First Lady Nancy Reagan. Bush said of Buckley, "[h]e influenced a lot of people, including me. He captured the imagination of a lot of people." Gingrich added, "Bill Buckley became the indispensable intellectual advocate from whose energy, intelligence, wit, and enthusiasm the best of modern conservatism drew its inspiration and encouragement... Buckley began what led to Senator Barry Goldwater and his Conscience of a Conservative that led to the seizing of power by the conservatives from the moderate establishment within the Republican Party. From that emerged Ronald Reagan." Reagan's widow, Nancy, commented, "Ronnie valued Bill's counsel throughout his political life, and after Ronnie died, Bill and Pat were there for me in so many ways."

Linguistic expertise

Buckley was well known for his command of language. Buckley came late to formal instruction in the English language, not learning it until he was seven years old. He had earlier learned Spanish and French. Michelle Tsai in Slate says that he spoke English with an idiosyncratic accent: something between an old-fashioned, upper class Mid-Atlantic accent, and British Received Pronunciation, with a Southern drawl.

Rhetoric

Epstein (1972) argues that liberals were especially fascinated by Buckley, and often wanted to debate him, in part because his ideas resembled their own, for Buckley typically formulated his arguments in reaction to left-liberal opinion, rather than being founded on conservative principles that were alien to the liberals.

Appel (1992) argues from rhetorical theory that Buckley's essays are often written in "low" burlesque in the manner of Samuel Butler's satirical poem "Hudibras". Considered as drama, such discourse features black-and-white disorder, a guilt-mongering logician, distorted clownish opponents, limited scapegoating, and a self-serving redemption.

Lee (2008) argues that Buckley introduced a new rhetorical style that conservatives often tried to emulate. The "gladiatorial style", as Lee calls it, is flashy and combative, filled with sound bites, and leads to an inflammatory drama. As conservatives encountered Buckley's arguments about government, liberalism and markets, the theatrical appeal of Buckley's gladiatorial style inspired conservative imitators, becoming one of the principal templates for conservative rhetoric.

Works

Main article: William F. Buckley, Jr. bibliography

See also: List of Blackford Oakes novels

External references

• Appel, Edward C. "Burlesque drama as a rhetorical genre: The hudibrastic ridicule of William F. Buckley, Jr.", Western Journal of Communication, Summer 1996, Vol. 60 Issue 3, pp 269–284.
• Bridges, Linda, and John Coyne. Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement (Wiley, 2007). ISBN 0-471-75817-5.
• Buckley, James Lane (2006). Gleanings from an Unplanned Life: An Annotated Oral History. Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies institute. ISBN 978-1-933859-11-8.
• Buckley, Reid (1999). Strictly Speaking. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-134610-4.
• Epstein, Joseph. "The Politics of William Buckley: Conservative Ideologue as Liberal Celebrity," Dissent, Oct 1972, Vol. 19 Issue 4, pp 602–61
• Farber, David. The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism: A Short History (2010) pp 39–76
• Gottfried, Paul (1993). The Conservative Movement. ISBN 0-8057-9749-1
• Johns, Michael (2008). "Walking the Road that Buckley Built"
• John B. Judis (1990). William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives. New York: Touchstone. (full-scale biography). ISBN 0-671-69593-2
• Lamb, Brian (2001). Booknotes: Stories from American History. New York: Penguin. ISBN 1-58648-083-9.
• Lee, Michael J. "WFB: The Gladiatorial Style and the Politics of Provocation," Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Summer 2010, Vol. 13 Issue 2, pp 43–76
• Nash, George H. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (2006)
• Winchell, Mark Royden (1984). William F. Buckley, Jr. New York: MacMillan Publishing Company. ISBN 0-8057-7431-9.
• Sarchett, Barry W. "Unreading the Spy Thriller: The Example of William F. Buckley Jr.," Journal of Popular Culture, Fall 1992, Vol. 26 Issue 2, pp 127–139, theoretical literary analysis
• Smith, W. Thomas, Jr. (2003). Encyclopedia of the Central Intelligence Agency. New York: Facts on File. ISBN 0-8160-4667-0.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Straus, Tamara (1997). The Literary Almanac: The Best of the Printed Word: 1900 to the Present. New York: High Tide Press. ISBN 1-56731-328-0.
• "William F. Buckley, Jr". C-Span American Writers II. Retrieved September 2, 2004.
• Miller, David (1990). Chairman Bill: A Biography of William F. Buckley, Jr.. New York
• Meehan, William F. III (1990). William F. Buckley Jr: A Bibliography. New York

External links

• William F. Buckley at IMDb
• Buckley Online, a complete guide to the writings William F. Buckley at Hillsdale College