Everything about William F Buckley Jr totally explained
William Frank Buckley, Jr. (
November 24 1925 –
February 27 2008) was an
American author and
conservative commentator. He founded the political
magazine National Review in 1955, hosted 1429 episodes of the television show
Firing Line from
1966 until
1999, and was a nationally
syndicated newspaper columnist. His writing style was famed for its
erudition, wit, and use of uncommon words.
Buckley was "arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century," according to George H. Nash, a historian of the modern American conservative movement. "For an entire generation he was the preeminent voice of American conservatism and its first great ecumenical figure." Buckley's primary intellectual achievement was to
fuse traditional American political conservatism with
economic libertarianism and
anti-communism, laying the groundwork for the modern American conservatism of US Presidential candidate
Barry Goldwater and US President
Ronald Reagan.
Buckley came on the public scene with his critical book
God and Man at Yale (1951); among over fifty further books on writing, speaking,
history,
politics and
sailing, were a series of novels featuring
CIA agent
Blackford Oakes. Buckley referred to himself "on and off" as either libertarian or conservative. He resided in
New York City and
Stamford, Connecticut, and often signed his name as "
WFB." He was a practicing
Catholic, regularly attending the traditional
Latin Mass in Connecticut.
Early life
Buckley was born in
New York City to
lawyer and
oil baron
William Frank Buckley, Sr., of
Irish-Catholic descent, and Aloise Josephine Antonia Steiner, a native of
New Orleans and of
Swiss-German descent. The sixth of ten children, as a boy Buckley moved with his family from South America 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
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 life-long 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.
In his younger years, Buckley developed many talents; he played the
harpsichord very well. 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 Alden Austin "Pat" Taylor (
1926 –
2007), daughter of
industrialist Austin C. Taylor. He met Pat, a
Protestant from
Vancouver,
British Columbia, while she was a student at
Vassar College in
Poughkeepsie, New York. She later became a prominent charity fundraiser for such 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's friend, Christopher Little, said Buckley "seemed dejected and rudderless."
The couple had one son, author
Christopher Buckley. Buckley took great pride in the success of his son, and in his final years would frequently call friends late at night to read them passages from "Christo's" latest book.
Buckley had nine siblings, including sister
Maureen Buckley-O'Reilly, who married Gerald O'Reilly and had several children before suddenly dying of a brain aneurysm in 1966; sister
Priscilla L. Buckley, author of for which William wrote the foreword; sister Patricia Lee Buckley Bozell, who was Patricia Taylor's roommmate 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, a former senior judge of the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and a former
US Senator from
New York. William and James appeared together on
Firing Line. Buckley co-authored a book,
McCarthy and His Enemies, with his brother-in-law attorney
L. Brent Bozell Jr. (Patricia's husband).
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 US Army
Officer Candidate School, he was commissioned as a second
lieutenant in the
US Army. In his book,
Miles Gone By, he briefly recounts being a member of
Franklin Roosevelt's honor guard when the president died.
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,
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, albeit with some reservations, as a
patriotic crusader against
communism.
National Review, Young Americans for Freedom, Barry Goldwater
Buckley worked as an editor for
The American Mercury in 1951 and 1952, but left after spotting
anti-Semitic tendencies in the magazine. He then 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. Buckley was a defender of
McCarthyism, writing a book in 1954
McCarthy and his Enemies, in which he asserted that "McCarthyism ... is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks."
In 1957, Buckley published
a review
of
Ayn Rand's
Atlas Shrugged by
Whittaker Chambers, ostensibly "reading her out of the conservative movement."
Objectivists have accused Chambers of merely skimming the novel. Buckley said that Rand never forgave him for publishing the review and that "for the rest of her life, she'd walk theatrically out of any room I entered!"
Also in 1957, Buckley came out in support of the
segregationist South, famously Buckley changed his views and by the mid-1960s renounced racism. This change was caused in part because of his reaction to the tactics used by white supremacists against 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. By the late 1960s, Buckley disagreed strenuously with segregationist
George Wallace, and 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 national holiday for him.
As late as 2004, he defended his statement, at least the part referring to African Americans not being "advanced". He pointed out the word "Advancement" in the name
NAACP and continued, "The call for the 'advancement' of colored people presupposes they're behind. Which they were, in 1958, by any standards of measurement."
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. In the early 1960's, at Sharon, Connecticut, Buckley founded the conservative political youth group, "Young Americans for Freedom" (YAF). Young Americans for Freedom was guided by principles Buckley called, "The Sharon Statement." The sucessful campaign of his elder brother
Jim Buckley's to capture the U. S. Senate seat from New York State held by incumbent Republican
Charles Goodell on the Conservative Party ticket in 1970 was due, in large part, to the activist support of the New York State chapter of Y.A.F. A Congressman representing New York's old 43rd Congressional District, Goodell had been appointed to the Senate by Barry Goldwater's arch-nemesis
Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican Governor of New York, to fill the seat vacated by the assassination of
Robert F. Kennedy, a Democrat. In the Senate, Goodell had moved to the left and thus incurred the emnity of conservatives in the New York State Republican Party, who threw in their lot with Jim Buckley. Buckley served one term in the Senate, then was defeated by Democract
Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1976. (Goodell's son
Roger is the commissioner of the National Football League.)
Mayoral candidacy
In 1965, Buckley ran for
mayor of New York City as the candidate for the young
Conservative Party, because of his dissatisfaction with the very
liberal Republican candidate and fellow Yale alumnus
John Lindsay, who later became a Democrat. When asked what he'd do if he won the race, Buckley issued his classic response, "I'd demand a recount." (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. (Mayor
Bloomberg has supported such car-toll plans for New York City in the 2000s, but changes were blocked by the New York State legislature.) Buckley finished third with 13.4% of the vote, having unintentionally aided Lindsay's election by taking votes from Democratic candidate
Abe Beame.
Buckley wasn't the first member of his family to run for a big-city mayoral position. His cousin
Elliot Ross Buckley ran in 1962 as the Republican candidate for mayor of
New Orleans but was easily defeated by the Democrat
Victor Schiro. Elliot Buckley's New Orleans race was said to have paralleled and foreshadowed Bill Buckley's campaign three years later.
Firing Line
For many Americans, Buckley's erudite style on his weekly
PBS show
Firing Line (1966–1999) was their primary exposure to him. In it he displayed a scholarly, non-confrontational, and humorous conservatism and was known for his facial expressions, gestures and probing questions of his guests.
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, as well as from
Objectivists.
Feud with Gore Vidal
Buckley appeared in a series of televised debates with
Gore Vidal during the
1968 Democratic Party convention. In their penultimate debate on
August 28 of that year, the two disagreed over the actions of the Chicago police and the protesters at the ongoing Democratic Convention in Chicago. After Buckley responded to Vidal's argument by stating that Vidal's position was "so naive" and referring to protesters as "some people were pro-Nazi," Vidal called Buckley a “Crypto-
Nazi", to which Buckley 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.”
This feud continued the following year in the pages of
Esquire Magazine, which commissioned an essay 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. Vidal also 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 re-opened 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 editorial notice and apology in the pages of
Esquire.
Spy novelist
In 1975, in an interview in the
Paris Review, 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; Buckley based the novel in part on his own CIA experiences. Over the next 30 years, Buckley would write another 10 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."
Buckley was particularly concerned about the view that what the CIA and the KGB were doing were morally equivalent. As he wrote in his memoirs, "I said to Johnny Carson that 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 isn't 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.
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".
Later career
Buckley participated in an ABC live and very heated debate with scientist
Carl Sagan, following the airing of
The Day After, a
1983 made-for-television movie 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 Lieberman defeated Weicker by only about 10,000 votes, with critical margins coming from conservative areas of the state that strongly backed
George H. W. Bush for President.
In 1991, Buckley received the
Presidential Medal of Freedom from
President George H. W. Bush. Buckley retired as active editor from
National Review in 1990, and made guest appearances on national television news programs.
Views on modern-day conservatism
Buckley had recently criticized certain aspects of policy within the modern conservative movement. Of
George W. Bush's presidency, he said, "If you'd a
European prime minister who experienced what we’ve experienced it would be expected that he'd retire or resign." He has said, "Bush is conservative, but he isn't a conservative", and that the president wasn't elected "as a vessel of the conservative faith." 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's 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 can't 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."
Over the course of his career, Buckley's views changed on some issues, such as
drug legalization, which he came to favor. In his
December 3 2007 column, Buckley advocated 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, at age 82; he was found dead at his desk in the study. "He died with his boots on," his son said, "after a lifetime of riding pretty tall in the saddle."
In a
December 3 2007 column, Buckley commented on the cause of his emphysema:
Half a year ago my wife died, technically from an infection, but manifestly, at least in part, from a body weakened by 60 years of nonstop smoking. I stayed off the cigarettes but went to the idiocy of cigars inhaled, and suffer now from emphysema, which seems determined to outpace heart disease as a human killer. Stick me in a confessional and ask the question: Sir, if you'd the authority, would you forbid smoking in America? You'd get a solemn and contrite, Yes. 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." Buckley came late to formal instruction in the English language, not learning it until he was seven years old (his first language was Spanish, learned in Mexico, and his second French, learned in Paris). As a consequence, he spoke English with an idiosyncratic accent: something between an old-fashioned, upper class Mid-Atlantic accent and British Received Pronunciation. Impressionist David Frye included Buckley in his portfolio in the 1960s and 1970s, mastering Buckley's quirky mannerisms, such as his deliberate speech pattern, his use of pen or pencil as a prop, and his tendency to grin and open his eyes wide when making a self-satisfying verbal point.
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