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February 28, 2008

William F. Buckley Jr., 82, Dies;

Sesquipedalian Spark of Right

By DOUGLAS MARTIN 

William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, arched eyebrows and arefined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American politicaldiscourse, died on Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 82.

Mr. Buckley suffered from diabetes and emphysema, his son, Christopher, said, although theexact cause of death was not immediately known. He was found at his desk in the study of hishome, his son said. “He might have been working on a column,”  Christopher Buckley said.

William Buckley, with his winningly capricious personality, his use of ten-dollar words and adarting tongue writers loved to compare to an anteater‟s, was the popular host of one of television‟s longest-running programs, “Firing Line,” and founded and shepherded theinfluential conservative magazine National Review.

He also found time to write more than 50 books, varying from sailing odysseys to spy novelsto dissertations on harpsichord fingering to celebrations of his own dashing daily life. Heedited at least five more.

In 2007, he published a history of the magazine called “Cancel Your Own GoddamSubscription” and a political novel, “The Rake.” His personal memoir of Senator  Barry M.Goldwater  is scheduled to be published this spring, and he was working on a similar volumeon President Ronald Reagan at his death.

The more than 4.5 million words of his 5,600 newspaper columns, titled “On the Right,”would fill 45 more medium-size books. His collected papers, which were donated to Yale,

weigh seven tons.

Mr. Buckley‟s greatest achievement was making conservatism — not just electoralRepublicanism, but conservatism as a system of ideas — respectable in liberal postwar America. He mobilized the young enthusiasts who helped nominate Mr. Goldwater in 1964and saw his dreams fulfilled when Mr. Reagan and the Bushes captured the Oval Office.

President Bush said Wednesday that Mr. Buckley “brought conservative thought into the political mainstream, and helped lay the intellectual foundation for America‟s victory in theCold War.”

To Mr. Buckley‟s enormous delight, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the historian, termed him “thescourge of liberalism.” 

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In remarks at National Review‟s 30th anniversary in 1985, President Reagan joked that he picked up his first issue of the magazine in a plain brown wrapper and still anxiously awaitedhis copy every two weeks —  “without the wrapper.” 

“You didn‟t just part the Red Sea — you rolled it back, dried it up and left exposed, for all

the world to see, the naked desert that is statism,” Mr. Reagan said. 

“And then, as if that weren‟t enough,” the president continued, “you gave the worldsomething different, something in its weariness it desperately needed, the sound of laughter and the sight of the rich, green uplands of freedom.” 

War on Liberal Order 

The liberal primacy Mr. Buckley challenged had begun with the New Deal and so acceleratedin the next generation that Lionel Trilling, one of America‟s leading intellectuals, wrote in1950: “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole

intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that there are no conservative or reactionary ideasin general circulation.” 

Mr. Buckley declared war on this liberal order, beginning with his blistering assault on Yale,from which he graduated with honors in 1950, as a den of atheistic collectivism.

“All great biblical stories begin with Genesis,” George Will wrote in National Review in1980. “And before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwate r, and before therewas Barry Goldwater there was National Review, and before there was National Reviewthere was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind, and the spark in 1980 has become aconflagration.” 

Mr. Buckley wove the tapestry of what became the new American conservatism fromlibertarian writers like Max Eastman, “free market” economists like Milton Friedman, traditionalist scholars like Russell Kirk and anti-Communist writers like Whittaker Chambers. He argued for a conservatism based on the national interest and a higher morality.

He found his most receptive audience in young conservatives who were energized by BarryGoldwater‟s emergence at the Republican convention in 1960 as the right-wing alternative to

 Nixon. Some met in September 1960 at the Buckley family home in Sharon, Conn., to formYoung Americans for Freedom. Their numbers — and influence — grew.

 Nicholas Lemann observed in Washington Monthly in 1988 that during the Reaganadministration “the 5,000 middle-level officials, journalists and policy intellectuals that ittakes to run a government” were “deeply influenced by Buckley‟s example.” He suggestedthat neither moderate Washington insiders nor “Ed Meese-style provincial conservatives”could have pulled off the Reagan tax cut and other policy transformations.

Speaking of the true believers, Mr. Lemann continued, “Some of these people had been personally groomed by Buckley, and most of the rest saw him as a role model.” 

Mr. Buckley rose to prominence with a generation of talented writers fascinated by political

themes, people with names like Mailer, Capote, Vidal, Styron and Baldwin. Like the others,he was a magnet for controversy. Even people on the right — from members of the John

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Birch Society to disciples of the author  Ayn Rand to George Wallace to moderateRepublicans — frequently pounced on him.

People of many political stripes came to see his life as something of an art form — fromracing through city streets on a motorcycle to a quixotic campaign for mayor of New York in

1965 to voicing startling opinions like favoring the decriminalization of marijuana. He wasoften described as liberals‟ favorite conservative, particularly after suavely playing host to anadaptation of  Evelyn Waugh‟s “Brideshead Revisited” on public television in 1982. 

 Norman Mailer  may indeed have dismissed Mr. Buckley as a “second-rate intellect incapableof entertaining two serious thoughts in a row,” but he could not help admiring his stage

 presence.

“No other act can project simultaneous hints that he is in the act of playing Commodore of the Yacht Club, Joseph Goebbels, Robert Mitchum, Maverick, Savonarola, the nice prepschool kid next door and the snows of yesteryear,” Mr. Mailer said in an interview with

Harper‟s Magazine in 1967. 

Mr. Buckley‟s vocabulary, sparkling with phrases from distant eras and described innewspaper and magazine profiles as sesquipedalian (characterized by the use of long words),

 became the stuff of legend. Less kind commentators preferred the adjective “pleonastic”(using more words than necessary).

And, inescapably, there was that aurora of pure mischief. In 1985, David Remnick , writing inThe Washington Post, said, “He has the eyes of a child who has just dis played a horrid usefor the microwave oven and the family cat.”

William Francis Buckley was born in Manhattan on Nov. 24, 1925, the sixth of the 10children of Aloise Steiner Buckley and William Frank Buckley. His parents had intended toname him after his father, but the priest who christened him insisted on a saint‟s name, soFrancis was chosen.

When the younger William Buckley was 5, he asked to change his middle name to Frank andhis parents agreed. At that point, he became William F. Buckley Jr.

The elder Mr. Buckley made a small fortune in the oil fields of Mexico and Venezuela andeducated his children with personal tutors at Great Elm, the family estate in Sharon, Conn.

They also attended exclusive Roman Catholic schools in England and France.

Family‟s Deep Catholicism 

Young William absorbed his family‟s conservatism along with its deep Roman Catholicism.At 14, he followed his brothers to the Millbrook School, a preparatory school 15 miles acrossthe New York line from Sharon.

In his spare time at Millbrook, young Bill typed schoolmates‟ papers for them, charging $1 a paper, with a 25-cent surcharge for correcting the grammar.

He graduated from Millbrook in 1943, then spent a half a year at the University of Mexicostudying Spanish, which had been his first language. He served in the Army from 1944 to

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1946 and managed to make second lieutenant after first putting colleagues off with hismannerisms.

In his 1988 book, “William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives,” John B. Judisquoted Mr . Buckley‟s sister Patricia as saying that the Army experience changed Mr.

Buckley. “He got to understand people more,” she said. 

Mr. Buckley then entered Yale, where he studied political science, economics and history;established himself as a fearsome debater; was elected chairman of The Yale Daily News;and joined Skull and Bones, the university‟s most prestigious secret society.  

As a senior, he was given the honor of delivering the speech for Yale‟s Alumni Daycelebration, but was replaced after Yale‟s administration objected to his strong attacks on theuniversity. He responded by writing his critique in the book that brought him to nationalattention, in part because he gave the publisher, Regnery, $10,000 to advertise it.

Published in 1951, “God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of „Academic Freedom,‟ ”charged the powers at Yale with having an atheistic and collectivist bent and called for thefiring of faculty members who advocated values out of line with what he saw as Yale‟straditional values.

After a year in the Central Intelligence Agency in Mexico City (his case officer was E.Howard Hunt, who went on to participate in the Watergate break-in), Mr. Buckley went towork for the American Mercury magazine, but resigned to write on his own.

Over the next few years, Mr. Buckley worked as a freelance writer and lecturer and wrote asecond book with his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell. Published in 1954, “McCarthy and HisEnemies” was a sturdy defense of the senator from Wisconsin, who was then at the height of his campaign against communists, liberals and the Democratic Party. The book made the

 New York Times best-seller list.

In 1955, Mr. Buckley started National Review as a voice for “the disciples of truth, whodefend the organic moral order,” with a $100,000 gift from his father and $290,000 fromoutside donors. The first issue, which came out in November, claimed the publication “standsathwart history yelling Stop.” 

It proved it by lining up squarely behind Southern segregationists, saying that Southern

whites had the right to impose their ideas on blacks who were as yet culturally and politicallyinferior to them. After some conservatives objected, Mr. Buckley suggested instead that bothuneducated whites and blacks should be denied the vote.

Mr. Buckley did not accord automatic support to Republicans. For President Dwight D.Eisenhower , whom National Review was founded in part to oppose, the magazine ultimatelymanaged only a memorably tepid endorsement: “We prefer Ike.” 

Circulation increased from 16,000 in 1957 to 70,000 at the time of Goldwater‟s candidacy in1964, to 115,000 in 1972. It is now 166,000. The magazine has always had to be subsidized

 by readers‟ donations, supplemented by Mr. Buckley‟s lecturing fees. 

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Along with offering a forum to big-gun conservatives like Russell Kirk, James Burnham andRobert Nisbet, National Review cultivated the career of several younger writers, includingGarry Wills, Joan Didion and John Leonard, who would shake off the conservativeattachment and go their leftward ways.

 National Review also helped define the conservative movement by isolating cranks from Mr.Buckley‟s chosen mainstream. 

“Bill was responsible for rejecting the John Birch Society and the other kooks who passed off anti-Semitism or some such as conservatism,” Hugh Kenner, a biographer of  Ezra Pound anda frequent contributor to National Review, told The Washington Post. “Without Bill — if hehad decided to become an academic or a businessman or something else — without him,there probably would be no respectable conservative movement in this country.”  

Mr. Buckley‟s personal visibility was magnified by his “Firing Line” program, which ranfrom 1966 to 1999. First carried on WOR-TV and then on public television, it became the

longest-running program with a single host — beating out Johnny Carson  by three years. Hetaped 1,504 programs, including debates on scores of topics like “Resolved: The women‟smovement has been disastrous.” 

There were exchanges on foreign policy with Norman Thomas, feminism with GermaineGreer, and race relations with James Baldwin. Not a few viewers thought Mr. Buckley‟stoothy grin before he scored a point resembled nothing so much as a switchblade.

To the New York City politician Mark Green, he purred: “You‟ve been on the show close to100 times over the years. Tell me, Mark, have you learned anything yet?” 

At age 50, Mr. Buckley crossed the Atlantic Ocean in his sailboat and became a novelist.Eleven of his novels are spy tales starring Blackford Oakes, who fights for the American wayand beds the Queen of England in the first book.

Others of his books included a historical novel with Elvis Presley as a significant character,another about the Nuremberg trials, a reasoned critique of anti-Semitism and journals thatmore than succeeded in dramatizing a life of taste and wealth — his own.

Mr. Buckley‟s spirit of fun was apparent in his 1965 campaign for mayor of New York on theticket of the Conservative Party. When asked what he would do if he won, he answered,

“Demand a recount.” He got 13.4 percent of the vote.

In retrospect, the mayoral campaign came to be seen as the beginning of the RepublicanParty‟s successful courtship of working-class whites who later became “Reagan Democrats.” 

Unlike his brother James, who served as a United States senator from New York, Mr.Buckley generally avoided official government posts. He did serve from 1969 to 1972 as a

 presidential appointee to the National Advisory Commission on Information and as a member of the United States delegation to the United Nations in 1973.

In his last years, as honors like the Presidential Medal of Freedom came his way, Mr.

Buckley gradually loosened his grip on his intellectual empire. In 1998, he ended his freneticschedule of public speeches, about 70 a year over 40 years, he once estimated. In 1999, he

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stopped “Firing Line,” and in 2004, he relinquished his voting stock in National Review. Hewrote his last spy novel (the 11th in his series), sold his sailboat and stopped playing theharpsichord publicly.

But he began a new historical novel and kept up his columns, including one on the

“bewitching power” of “The Sopranos” television series. He commanded wide attention bycriticizing the Iraq war as a failure.

On April 15, 2007, his wife, the former Patricia Aldyen Austin Taylor, died. Mr. and Mrs.Buckley called each other “Ducky.” 

He is survived by his son, Christopher, of Washington; his sisters, Priscilla L. Buckley of Sharon, Conn., Patricia Buckley Bozell of Washington, and Carol Buckley of Columbia,S.C.; his brothers, James L., of Sharon, and F. Reid, of Camden, S.C.; a granddaughter; and agrandson.

In the end it was Mr. Buckley‟s graceful, often self -deprecating wit that endeared him toothers. In his spy novel “Who‟s on First,” he described the possible impact of his NationalReview through his character Boris Bolgin.

“ „Do you ever read the National Review, Jozsef?‟ asks Boris Bolgin, the chief of  KGB counter intelligence for Western Europe. „It is edited by this young bourgeois fanatic.‟ ”