William F. Buckley, Jr

American social critic and author

• Born: November 24, 1925
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: February 27, 2008
• Place of death: Stamford, Connecticut

As founder of the ultraconservative magazine National Review, and as a columnist, television talk-show host, editor, and author, Buckley was a critical voice in American conservative politics.

Early Life

William F. Buckley, Jr., was born into the large Roman Catholic family of a wealthy Texaslawyer and oilman who had business interests in the United States and abroad. When Mexican oil holdings were nationalized and confiscated in 1922, William, Sr., developed a strong hatred of socialism and communism, which he instilled in his children.

When Buckley was one year old the family moved to Venezuela, and three years later they began a three-year stay in Europe. Buckley was tutored privately and, when the family returned to Europe from their home in Sharon, Connecticut, he attended school in France and England. A year in the English Jesuit institution of St. John Beaumont seems to have had an especially strong impact on the young Buckley. Returning to Connecticut after the outbreak of war, he attended and graduated from the Protestant Millbrook School in New York in 1943. He joined the U.S. Army, attended Officer Candidate School, and gained the rank of second lieutenant. He trained with the artillery in Texas, finding his fluent Spanish (gained from Mexican nannies) very useful. After a year at a Mexican university, he entered Yale University in 1946 and fell under the intellectual influence of Wilmoore Kendall, a neoconservative former Trotskyite. He graduated in 1950 with a B.A. in political science, economics, and history.

While at Yale, Buckley became very active politically and grew to resent what he saw as the firm grip that intolerant liberalism and secularism had on his school. In 1951 he struck back with the book God and Man at Yale , a strong critique of his alma mater that brought him onto the public stage. In the meantime he had settled in Hamden, Connecticut, and married Patricia Austin Taylor (July 6, 1950), with whom he had a son, Christopher, in 1952. Buckley also had joined what was a new Central Intelligence Agency, in which he served for six months in Mexico City.

Life’s Work

In March, 1952, Buckley became associate editor of the conservative magazine American Mercury. After less than a year he quit that position to freelance as an author and editor. This led to a partnership with Time magazine’s Willi Schlamm, an Austrian former communist and a Jew, who helped raise funds for a new conservative magazine, National Review . Buckley’s credentials as a conservative were bolstered by his book McCarthy and His Enemies (1954), and by September, 1955, Buckley, Schlamm, and partner Frank Meyer had raised $290,000. The first issue of National Review (November 19, 1955) included Buckley as editor in chief and publisher, had a print run of 7,500 copies, and had 2,000 subscribers. William Rusher became publisher in 1957, and by 1960 circulation had risen to 44,000.

More strident than American Mercury or Freeman, National Review promised to “Stand athwart history, yelling Stop!” Buckley and his staff defined a conservatism that moved from the excesses of McCarthyite extremism, international isolationism, Ayn Rand’s secular materialism, and the John Birch Society’s social bigotry and “crackpottery.” Though resistant to federally mandated desegregation in the South, they decried blatantly racist segregationists. They helped support small-government democracy, individualism, free-market capitalism, strong military defense, and the political and social values of America’s founding generation. They strongly opposed communism and New Deal liberalism. Buckley served as editor in chief of National Review until stepping down in 1990, by which time the magazine’s circulation had reached 150,000.

Refusing to support the moderate Republicanism of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon, Buckley decided to expand his brand of conservatism. In 1962 he helped found the national student group Young Americans for Freedom and started a syndicated newspaper opinion column, “On the Right,” which appeared in 250 papers by decade’s end. Published debates with liberals such as novelist Norman Mailer (1962, in Playboy magazine) and African American activist and writer James Baldwin (1965, in The New York Times Magazine) led to personal notoriety, while the relative popularity of conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater in his unsuccessful run for president in 1964 convinced Buckley to run for New York mayor in 1965. He ran as a Conservative Party candidate against liberal Republican John Lindsay, in what was a less than serious campaign that highlighted Buckley’s wit, suavity, and skill as a speaker and debater. Losing with only 13.4 percent of the vote, he recorded the experience in his book The Unmaking of a Mayor (1966).

In 1966, Buckley launched his Emmy Award-winning television talk show Firing Line . Rather than interview his guests, Buckley engaged them in lively debate, further articulating his conservative (leaning libertarian) views on a vast array of topics. America’s growing unease with radical politics, increasing violence on university campuses and city streets, the failures of the Great Society, and disturbing changes in the Roman Catholic Church after Vatican II gave Buckley plenty to work with in the early years. Spanning the thirty-three years between 1966 and 1999, the 1,504 Firing Line broadcasts made Buckley one of America’s most recognizable and popular conservatives.

Buckley served as a member of the U.S. Information Agency Advisory Committee (1969-1972) and as public member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, the only public or governmental positions he ever held. In his later years much of his effort went into writing, including a popular series of novels revolving around the American spy Blackford Oakes. After hearing Buckley lambaste the film Three Days of the Condor, his editor at Doubleday, Sam Vaughn, suggested he write his own novel: Buckley’s Saving the Queen appeared in 1976. The last in the series, Last Call for Blackford Oakes , was published in 2005, bringing the number in the series to fifty-seven. Several of his other books are meditations on his own life, on religion, and on his love of sailing his most notable nonprofessional pursuit. Other books collect his shorter writings, and still others deal with the written and spoken word, with which he was so familiar.

Buckley died on February 27, 2008, at his home in Stamford, Connecticut. He was eighty-two years old and had been living with diabetes and emphysema.

Significance

The large stack of Buckley’s awards most for his writing and broadcasting and honorary university degrees (including Notre Dame, William and Mary, New York Law School, and Yale) attests to his success in the public forum. Aided by personal charm, humor, and a joie de vivre, Buckley played a huge role in making conservatism attractive and popular. His multivalent efforts as editor, columnist, author, and television personality helped shape Goldwater conservatism in the mid-1960’s, Reaganism in the late 1970’s and 1980’s, and Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” in the mid-1990’s. Buckley can be credited with many of the successes that the conservative movement in America has enjoyed since Goldwater’s defeat in 1964.

Bibliography

Bridges, Linda, and John R. Coyne, Jr. Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement. New York: Wiley, 2007. Buckley’s colleagues provide an accurate if sympathetic and anecdotal picture of Buckley, National Review, and their roles in the rise of American political and cultural conservatism beginning in the mid-1960’s.

Buckley, William F., Jr. The Fall of the Berlin Wall. New York: Wiley, 2004. A historical, journalistic, and personal account of the most dramatic symbol of the fall of the political system most reviled by American conservatives.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. God and Man at Yale. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2001. Reprint of Buckley’s first (1951) literary blast against the political and cultural left is aimed at his alma mater. He finds that atheism, communism, and irresponsible liberalism undermine the academic responsibility of one of America’s great universities.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography. New York: Regnery, 2004. Buckley himself collected fifty of his essays and literary fragments that span his adult life and many professional and personal interests.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith. New York: Harvest Books, 1998. Buckley, a Roman Catholic, provides a series of thoughtful and very personal meditations on his faith and the Church, not sparing the latter the criticism of one who has seen the changes that liberalization has brought to Catholicism in America and the world.

Buckley, William F., Jr., and L. Brent Bozell. McCarthy and His Enemies. New York: Regnery, 1995. A reissue of the 1954 evaluation of the anticommunist that recognizes and outlines the real threats against which McCarthy railed. Also laments the senator’s weaknesses as an opponent of Soviet influence in America.

Judis, John B. William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. While recognizing Buckley’s vital role in conservative and Republican politics, journalist Judis portrays him as a spent force fighting the battles of previous generations.

Nash, George H. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, Since 1945. New ed. Wilmington, Del: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2006. One of the best histories of American conservatism, first published in 1976 and revised in 1996. Includes discussion of Buckley’s influence on the movement. This edition includes a new preface and conclusion. Recommended.