From National Review Online:

A beautiful tribute, especially the last line, from their forum of appreciations for WFB.

A Friend I've Never Met

Like many Americans these days, I get my first news each morning via the Internet. And like so many others, this means first clicking on National Review On-line. So it was most fitting this morning that I learned of Bill Buckley's death from your brief news alert.

I spent much of today reminiscing about the loss of a friend who I never met personally. I am one of the thousands of Americans Mr. Buckley touched in a deep and abiding way through his singular eloquence and signature erudition in untiring advocacy of conservative ideals and values. In the mid 1970s, though newly married and beginning to make my own way in the world, I found myself seemingly without the companionship of others who thought and felt as I did. Then I happened upon a copy of National Review, and found Bill Buckley and his sterling company of like-minded associates.

I had been thinking of Mr. Buckley the past several days. This is about the time of year that I begin looking for his remarkable solicitations for financial support. I will miss receiving these letters. Although I was able to respond only a few times the past 30 years, it was not for lack of wanting, or caring. I will miss these solicitations so very dearly, as I will miss him.

One year ago this week, my beloved paternal father died. Today, my beloved intellectual father died. Tomorrow, I turn 60. As the years inexorably pass, it begins to seem like death is not only not final, but is not lonely, either.

Randy Mazzeo, Martinsburg, West Virginia

From Human Events:
Katrina Nation

by Patrick J. Buchanan
(more by this author)

Posted 02/29/2008 ET
Updated 02/29/2008 ET

When Woodrow Wilson went to Congress to ask for a declaration of war in 1917, the U.S. Army was ranked 17th in the world, behind Portugal.

On Armistice Day, 19 months later, there were 2 million doughboys in France, where they had helped to break the back of Gen. Ludendorff's theretofore invincible army in its final offensive, and 2 million more in the United States ready to march on Berlin.

No other nation could have done that.

After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, FDR demanded that a disarmed America "build 50,000 planes" -- a seemingly impossible number, but one America met and exceeded.

Starting from scratch in 1941, the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos designed, built, tested and detonated three atomic bombs by August 1945 to end the war.

After Sputnik humiliated America, Wernher Von Braun and the boys at Redstone Arsenal had a satellite up in three months. In 1961, JFK declared we were going to the moon and would be there before the decade was out. Cynics scoffed. This writer was at Canaveral to watch Apollo 11 lift off in the summer of 1969.

Whatever became of that can-do nation?

In August 2005, Katrina swept through New Orleans and left 30,000 people stranded at the Superdome and Convention Center. Though the floodwater was shallow and stagnant and New Orleans is a port city with boats all over the place, it took six days and the 82nd Airborne to rescue the stranded.

Compare our performance in Katrina with that of the Brits in 1941, who sent hundreds of boats across the Channel to pull 350,000 British and French troops off the continent in one week in the Miracle of Dunkirk. The Brits weren't going to let Goering's fighters deter them from going across and bringing their boys home.

What occasions these reflections is this morning's lead story in The Washington Post: "'Virtual Fence' Along Border to Be Delayed: U.S. Retooling High-Tech Barrier After 28-Mile Project Fails."

The opening paragraphs:

"The Bush administration has scaled back plans to quickly build a 'virtual fence' along the U.S.-Mexico border, delaying completion of the first phase of the project by at least three years and shifting away from a network of tower-mounted sensors and surveillance gear. ...
"Technical problems discovered in a 28-mile pilot project south of Tucson prompted the change in plans. ..."

Thus, building the first 100 miles of "virtual fence" will take Bush longer than it took FDR to win World War II. The admission of failure comes two years after Bush announced plans for "the most technologically advanced border initiative in American history."

"The virtual fence," writes the Post, "was to complement a physical fence that the administration now says will include 370 miles of pedestrian fencing and 300 miles of vehicle barriers to be completed by the end of this year. The GAO says this portion of the project may also be delayed and that its total cost cannot be determined. The president's 2009 budget does not propose funds to add fencing beyond the 700 or so miles meant to be completed by this year."

In short, these characters cannot build a virtual fence and won't complete a physical fence.
If the nation is fed up with Republicans, who can blame them?

Securing a border is not that difficult. In 1954, President Eisenhower sent an Army general to Texas to do it. He began repatriating thousands of Mexicans and had the situation in hand within a year. Along the San Diego corridor, a crude fence of corrugated steel matting from U.S. airfields in Vietnam has stopped illegal trucks from crossing, cut back 90 percent on the illegal alien traffic, and virtually eliminated murders and assaults in the border area.

Measures taken lately at the state and federal level, though grudgingly by the administration, have begun to bear fruit.

After Arizonans voted to cut off all social benefits to residents who could not prove they were in the country legally came reports of people pulling their kids out of public schools and leaving the state.

From the border come reports that added Border Patrol agents have reduced the number of illegal aliens apprehended, suggesting word has gone out south of the border that it is no longer so easy to walk in. And deportations of criminal aliens, long demanded, is actually going up.

Let it be said: Our border can be secured; the illegal aliens can be sent home; the magnets that draw them here can be turned off. This crisis can be resolved if the courage and will are there. Unfortunately, we have a government that does not seem to care and probable nominees neither of whom is committed in his heart to doing it.

Given the manifest will of the people that this invasion from the south be halted and rolled back, the 2008 election is shaping up as yet further confirmation that American democracy is a fraud.

Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of "The Death of the West," "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire" and "Where the Right Went Wrong."

From The Hartford Courant
Review: Bruce Springsteen in Hartford
By Eric R. Danton

Before the lights came up, before the storm let loose, Bruce Springsteen stood alone at center stage, a shadow in the dark.

With his back to the audience filling the XL Center to capacity Thursday night, Springsteen seemed to savor that one last moment of anticipation, adulation rippling through the crowd to wash over him, arms raised as if he were conducting the warbling, off-key version of “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” pouring from the calliope spotlighted at the back of the stage.

Then the music started, the lights came up on “So Young and in Love” and he was the Boss once more, swinging around his microphone stand like it was a lamp post on a warm summer’s night.

It was the first show on the second leg of Springsteen’s “Magic” tour, and there was a different kind of intensity to his performance than the barn-burner of a concert he gave in Hartford last October to kick off the first leg of the tour.

Many of the songs he chose this time had a more somber edge, though there were certainly moments of pure rock ’n’ roll abandon. “The Promised Land” was one of them, and Springsteen sang about wanting just one chance to transcend grim reality in pursuit of a dream. Or “She’s the One,” the crowd joining in on the joyful refrain as Clarence Clemons’ saxophone rang off the back wall of the arena.

Much of his 23-song set, though, was about what happens when reality overtakes dreams. Springsteen sounded a note of walled-off desperation on “The River,” and tried to make sense of crumbling love on “Loose Ends.” He reprised the chilling, bone-weary political allegory “Magic,” with Soozie Tyrell adding mournful violin and harmony vocals, and murmured about a power both seductive and dark on “Devil’s Arcade.”

Through it all, though, he poured all of himself into his songs, and he gave the E Street Band plenty of room to shine, too. Clemons played huge sax licks on “Radio Nowhere,” guitarist Little Steven Van Zandt played a lean, dirty blues riff on “Reason to Believe” and shared Springsteen's microphone throughout, and guitarist Nils Lofgren traded verses with Springsteen on “Janey Don’t Lose Heart.”

Springsteen’s wife, Patti Scialfa, was absent while she attended to a different sort of gig. “We have three teenagers at home, so we live in constant fear of the house burning down,” he said by way of explanation. “It must be watched.”

After the anguished anti-war song “Last to Die” and an audience sing-along on “Long Walk Home,” Springsteen ratcheted up the energy level once more, ending the main set with a version of “Badlands” that seethed through the verses and exploded into the chorus.

No Springsteen encore would be complete without “Born to Run” — complete with house lights on and crowd singing at top volume — but he dug deeper into his catalog, too, for “Kitty’s Back.” He also played “Girls in Their Summer Clothes” and “Backstreets” before ending with “American Land.”

Set list
1. So Young and in Love
2. Radio Nowhere
3. Lonesome Day
4. Gypsy Biker
5. Magic
6. Reason to Believe
7. Loose Ends
8. She's the One
9. Livin' in the Future
10. The Promised Land
11. Waiting on a Sunny Day
12. Janey Don't Lose Heart
13. The River
14. Devil's Arcade
15. The Rising
16. Last to Die
17. Long Walk Home
18. Badlands
Encore
19. Girls in Their Summer Clothes
20. Backstreets
21. Kitty's Back
22. Born to Run
23. American Land

(Photos by Stephen Dunn/The Hartford Courant)

From The Wall Street Journal:
May We Not Lose His Kind
By Peggy Noonan

February 29, 2008

He was sui generis, wasn't he? The complete American original, a national treasure, a man whose energy was a kind of optimism, and whose attitude toward life, even when things seemed to others bleak, was summed up in something he said to a friend: "Despair is a mortal sin."

I am not sure conservatives feel despair at Bill Buckley's leaving--he was 82 and had done great work in a lifetime filled with pleasure--but I know they, and many others, are sad, and shaken somehow. On Wednesday, after word came that he had left us, in a television studio where I'd gone to try and speak of some of his greatness, a celebrated liberal academic looked at me stricken, and said he'd just heard the news. "I can't imagine a world without Bill Buckley in it," he said. I said, "Oh, that is exactly it."

It is. What a space he filled.

It is commonplace to say that Bill Buckley brought American conservatism into the mainstream. That's not quite how I see it. To me he came along in the middle of the last century and reminded demoralized American conservatism that it existed. That it was real, that it was in fact a majority political entity, and that it was inherently mainstream. This was after the serious drubbing inflicted by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal and the rise of modern liberalism. Modern liberalism at that point was a real something, a palpable movement formed by FDR and continued by others. Opposing it was . . . what exactly? Robert Taft? The ghost of Calvin Coolidge? Buckley said in effect, Well, there's something known as American conservatism, though it does not even call itself that. It's been calling itself "voting Republican" or "not liking the New Deal." But it is a very American approach to life, and it has to do with knowing that the government is not your master, that America is good, that freedom is good and must be defended, and communism is very, very bad.

He explained, remoralized, brought together those who saw it as he did, and began the process whereby American conservatism came to know itself again. And he did it primarily through a magazine, which he with no modesty decided was going to be the central and most important organ of resurgent conservatism. National Review would be highly literate, philosophical, witty, of the moment, with an élan, a teasing quality that made you feel you didn't just get a subscription, you joined something. You entered a world of thought.

I thought it beautiful and inspiring that he was open to, eager for, friendships from all sides, that even though he cared passionately about political questions, politics was not all, cannot be all, that people can be liked for their essence, for their humor and good nature and intelligence, for their attitude toward life itself. He and his wife, Pat, were friends with lefties and righties, from National Review to the Paris Review. It was moving too that his interests were so broad, that he could go from an appreciation of the metaphors of Norman Mailer to essays on classical music to an extended debate with his beloved friend the actor David Niven on the best brands of peanut butters. When I saw him last he was in a conversation with the historian Paul Johnson on the relative merits of the work of the artist Raeburn.

His broad-gaugedness, his refusal to be limited, seemed to me a reflection in part of a central conservative tenet, as famously expressed by Samuel Johnson. "How small of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure." When you have it right about laws and kings, and what life is, then your politics become grounded in the facts of life. And once they are grounded, you don't have to hold to them so desperately. You can relax and have fun. Just because you're serious doesn't mean you're grim.

* * *

Buckley was a one-man refutation of Hollywood's idea of a conservative. He was rising in the 1950s and early '60s, and Hollywood's idea of a conservative was still Mr. Potter, the nasty old man of "It's a Wonderful Life," who would make a world of grubby Pottersvilles if he could, who cared only about money and the joy of bullying idealists. Bill Buckley's persona, as the first famous conservative of the modern media age, said no to all that. Conservatives are brilliant, capacious, full of delight at the world and full of mischief, too. That's what he was. He upended old clichés.

This was no small thing, changing this template. Ronald Reagan was the other who changed it, by being a sunny man, a happy one. They were friends, admired each other, had two separate and complementary roles. Reagan was in the game of winning votes, of persuading, of leading a political movement that catapulted him to two terms as governor of California, the nation's biggest state, at a time when conservatives were seemingly on the defensive but in retrospect were rising to new heights. He would speak to normal people and persuade them of the efficacy of conservative solutions to pressing problems. Buckley's job was not reaching on-the-ground voters, or reaching voters at all, and his attitude toward his abilities in that area was reflected in his merry answer when asked what he would do if he won the mayoralty of New York. "Demand a recount," he famously replied. His role was speaking to those thirsting for a coherent worldview, for an intellectual and moral attitude grounded in truth. He provided intellectual ballast. Inspired in part by him, voters went on to support Reagan. Both could have existed without the other, but Buckley's work would have been less satisfying, less realized, without Reagan and his presidency, and Reagan's leadership would have been more difficult, and also somehow less satisfying, without Buckley.

* * *

I share here a fear. It is not that the conservative movement is ending, that Bill's death is the period on a long chapter. The house he helped build had--has--many mansions. Conservatism will endure if it is rooted in truth, and in the truths of life. It is.

It is rather that with the loss of Bill Buckley we are, as a nation, losing not only a great man. When Jackie Onassis died, a friend of mine who knew her called me and said, with such woe, "Oh, we are losing her kind." He meant the elegant, the cultivated, the refined. I thought of this with Bill's passing, that we are losing his kind--people who were deeply, broadly educated in great universities when they taught deeply and broadly, who held deep views of life and the world and art and all the things that make life more delicious and more meaningful. We have work to do as a culture in bringing up future generations that are so well rounded, so full and so inspiring.

Bill Buckley lived a great American life. His heroism was very American--the individualist at work in the world, the defender of great creeds and great beliefs going forth with spirit, style and joy. May we not lose his kind. For now, "Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels take thee to thy rest."

From The Washington Post:
A Life Athwart History
By George Will

WASHINGTON -- Those who think Jack Nicholson's neon smile is the last word in smiles never saw William F. Buckley's. It could light up an auditorium; it did light up half a century of elegant advocacy that made him an engaging public intellectual and the 20th century's most consequential journalist.

Before there could be Ronald Reagan's presidency, there had to be Barry Goldwater's candidacy. It made conservatism confident and placed the Republican Party in the hands of its adherents.

Before there could be Goldwater's insurgency, there had to be National Review magazine. From the creative clutter of its Manhattan offices flowed the ideological electricity that powered the transformation of American conservatism from a mere sensibility into a fighting faith and a blueprint for governance.

Before there was National Review, there was Buckley, spoiling for a philosophic fight, to be followed, of course, by a flute of champagne with his adversaries. He was 29 when, in 1955, he launched National Review with the vow that it "stands athwart history, yelling Stop." Actually, it helped Bill take history by the lapels, shake it to get its attention, and then propel it in a new direction. Bill died Wednesday in his home, in his study, at his desk, diligent at his life-long task of putting words together well and to good use.

Before his intervention -- often laconic in manner, always passionate in purpose -- in the plodding political arguments within the flaccid liberal consensus of the post-World War II intelligentsia, conservatism's face was that of another Yale man, Robert Taft, somewhat dour, often sour, three-piece suits, wire-rim glasses. The word "fun" did not spring to mind.

The fun began when Bill picked up his clipboard, and conservatives' spirits, by bringing his distinctive brio and elan to political skirmishing. When young Goldwater decided to give politics a fling, he wrote to his brother: "It ain't for life and it might be fun." He was half right: Politics became his life and it was fun, all the way. Politics was not Bill's life -- he had many competing and compensating enthusiasms -- but it mattered to him, and he mattered to the course of political events.

One clue to Bill's talent for friendship surely is his fondness for this thought of Harold Nicolson's: "Only one person in a thousand is a bore, and he is interesting because he is one person in a thousand." Consider this from Bill's introduction to a collection of his writings titled "The Jeweler's Eye: A Book of Irresistible Political Reflections":

"The title is, of course, a calculated effrontery, the relic of an impromptu answer I gave once to a tenacious young interviewer who, toward the end of a very long session, asked me what opinion did I have of myself. I replied that I thought of myself as a perfectly average middle-aged American, with, however, a jeweler's eye for political truths. I suppressed a smile -- and watched him carefully record my words in his notebook. Having done so, he looked up and asked, 'Who gave you your jeweler's eye?' 'God,' I said, tilting my head skyward just a little. He wrote that down -- the journalism schools warn you not to risk committing anything to memory. 'Well,' -- he rose to go, smiling at last -- 'that settles that!' We have become friends."

Pat, Bill's beloved wife of 56 years, died last April. During the memorial service for her at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, a friend read lines from "Vitae Summa Brevis" by a poet she admired, Ernest Dowson:

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:

Out of a misty dream

Our path emerges for a while, then closes

Within a dream.

Bill's final dream was to see her again, a consummation of which his faith assured him. He had an aptitude for love -- of his son, his church, his harpsichord, language, wine, skiing, sailing.

He began his 60-year voyage on the turbulent waters of American controversy by tacking into the wind with a polemical book, "God and Man at Yale" (1951), that was a lovers' quarrel with his alma mater. And so at Pat's service the achingly beautiful voices of Yale's Whiffenpoofs were raised in their signature song about the tables down at Mory's, "the place where Louis dwells":

We will serenade our Louis

While life and voice shall last

Then we'll pass and be forgotten with the rest

Bill's distinctive voice permeated, and improved, his era. It will be forgotten by no one who had the delight of hearing it.

georgewill@washpost.com

From The American Spectator:
Conservatism's Heart and Soul
By Alfred S. Regnery

Published 2/28/2008 12:08:07 AM

To say that Bill Buckley caused a sensation, when he first emerged on the scene with the publication of God and Man at Yale in the spring of 1951, would be an understatement. Just 25 and a recent Yale graduate, he was well known on campus, having been the editor of the Yale Daily News where his editorials were debated, reviled, and praised. But, as wrote John Chamberlain in his preface to the book, nearly everybody on campus thought young Buckley was fighting a losing fight. He was, they thought, on the side of the past.

Yale was in the throes of celebrating its 250th anniversary, and was braced for a rousing good time and expecting praise from every quarter. But the celebration would soon be upstaged by Buckley's first book, which reported that, contrary to what it was telling its donors and trustees, Yale was not a Christian institution but instead promoting socialism and collectivism. It noted that academic freedom was a hoax as far as anything other than leftists was concerned, and suggested that the alumni should begin to direct the course of education at Yale instead of the administration and faculty.

Within weeks after the book appeared, Buckley was a national phenomenon, and the publisher was having a hard time keeping the book in stock. Yale was, of course, outraged, as was the entire liberal establishment. It was bad enough having such charges made against Yale at all. But the fact that they came from a recent graduate, the editor of the college paper, and someone whose wit and debating skills exceeded those of the outraged made the entire affair untenable. The liberal establishment fell obediently into line and launched attack after attack against Buckley.

McGeorge Bundy, a Yale graduate who would later become a confidante of LBJ and head of the Ford Foundation, was, at the time, teaching at Harvard. In his review for the Atlantic Monthly, which eventually became Yale's official response, Bundy accused Buckley of being a "twisted and ignorant young man" and claimed that the book was "dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory." Others blasted Buckley for his Catholicism which, they said, was his motivation for attacking Yale. William Sloane Coffin, Yale's chaplain, sniffed that Buckley should have gone to Fordham or some other suitably Catholic institution.

Buckley, in his first of thousands of confrontations with the left, could not have been happier; every blast was opportunity for a counterattack, each of which was more polished, more astute, and more cutting than the original blast.


GOD AND MAN AT YALE was Buckley's opening salvo. He never let up. He told me, a couple of years ago, that he never had any free and unfilled time -- he was, he said, busy from the minute he got up (early) in the morning until he went to bed (late) at night. He had just finished, before he died, a book on Barry Goldwater, to be published in May, and was working on another on Ronald Reagan. He died at his desk.

Buckley became the heart and soul of the conservative movement. It had no better advocate, no better promoter, no better theoretician, and his contribution to not only conservatism but American political life as a whole will remain unmatched for years to come. But he was more than a philosopher, more than a polemicist, more than a great writer. He was also a whole man, whose humanness was best exemplified by three attributes -- attributes that made him the person he was: generosity, civility, and friendship.

Bill Buckley was an enormously generous man. Although he was in constant demand, constantly on the go, constantly in the news, he always made time for people who needed a boost. Whenever I asked his advice, or asked him to write a blurb for a book I was publishing, or an introduction, he would take time from his busy schedule to confer, or to write what I needed, always without remuneration. When I was working on my book Upstream, he gave me two days of uninterrupted time before my tape recorder in what became one of the most valuable interviews that I did, full of insights, stories, reminiscences and wisdom. Regardless of who he was talking to or the topic, Buckley exuded civility and good humor, often devastating some liberal with whom he was arguing with the most impish smile imaginable. And although friendships probably came naturally to Buckley, he worked on them as well, and the result was simply an astounding collection of people whom he could call friends.

Few people are so fortunate as to leave their mark on the world. In Bill Buckley, the world has lost someone who certainly did leave his. The conservative movement is fortunate to be able to claim him as its own.


Alfred S. Regnery is publisher of The American Spectator and author of the new book Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism (Threshold/Simon & Schuster).

From The American Spectator: William F. Buckley, RIP

By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.

Published 2/28/2008 12:08:30 AM

WASHINGTON -- William F. Buckley, Jr. who died Wednesday, appropriately enough in his study, was one of the most stupendous educated Americans of the 20th century. He was among the founders of the American conservative movement that crept out of the New Deal years advocating market economics, traditional social values, and aggressive resistance to communism. Such ideas were viewed disdainfully by the reigning orthodoxy, liberalism, but by the 1980s Buckley's positions had pretty much defeated liberalism wherever democratic elections could be held. Without him this change would have been either impossible or much delayed. He brought together serious intellectuals, for instance James Burnham and Russell Kirk, to found what became modern conservatism's first great organ of opinion, National Review. He and his colleagues wrote important books that served as the foundation of their movement and made them and their political leader, Senator Barry Goldwater, popular figures in the early 1960s. Even members of the liberal media nodded in respect, at least until Goldwater allowed himself to be drafted as the Republican presidential candidate in 1964. From that point on, the liberals' template was set. Conservatives were stupid, warmongers, and bigots, through the Reagan years, the Gingrich years, and right up to the present. But in the early 1960s this was not the liberal consensus. Some respect was shown. It was in those years that Buckley was everywhere assisting in the founding of conservatism's student wing, the Young Americans for Freedom, its ideological forum, the American Conservative Union, and the Conservative Party of New York. He began what was soon one of the most popular syndicated columns and in 1966 a weekly television debate series that became public television's longest-running talk show. For years, he lectured and debated a couple of nights a week. In an era when intellect still flourished Buckley was the finest debater in the country. Often he turned up on college campuses, which is where I met him at the beginning of a friendship lasting forty years. I had just founded my anti-radical magazine at Indiana University and invited him to lecture. His arrival was a whirlwind. He visited my pals on the world champion Indiana University swimming team, reminding me that his Yale roommate was also an Olympian. He had to visit a bar named "The Stardust," telling me that it was the site where Hoagy Carmichael wrote, said Bill, "the greatest jazz song of the twentieth century." And at a reception given for him by my fellow students he fit right in. A professor nearby confided, "That man will be forever young. He will look like that as an old man." Alas that was not to be. Bill just burned himself out, and -- devout Catholic that he was -- in his last months longed for the hereafter. As his friend, the writer Taki Theodoracopulos put it, Bill "was looking forward to being united with Pat," his recently deceased wife. In his 82 years, Bill covered a lot of ground. Along with founding a political movement he became a national figure as much for his superior sophistication as for politics. The feat will not be duplicated. He played the harpsichord, painted (I have an oil of his in my library) and sailed trans-atlantically. All of that -- and he ran a third-party race for mayor of New York. In a new and authoritative history of modern conservatism's evolution, Alfred Regnery describes Bill's 1965 mayoral race as one of the three great political campaigns that put modern conservatism on the map, along with Goldwater's 1964 defeat and Ronald Reagan's 1980 victory. It also launched Bill as an enduring national figure. With it and his weekly television show, fame enhaloed him. One could not walk through an airport with him or down a street in a major urban center without encountering autograph seekers. Not often recalled is how Bill's life changed over his half century on the national scene. At first he was an energetic herald of the new conservatism, a rigorist for the conservative position. After the excitement of his mayoral race, however, he became much more political. By 1968 he had trimmed back his conservative orthodoxy and actively counseled the Nixon campaign. He encouraged other conservatives to join the Nixon Administration. He held minor posts in the Administration. Through all the ideological backsliding of the Nixon years Bill stood by the president. In fact, he became more of a fixture in the Nixon Administration than he would become in the administration of his close personal friend, Ronald Reagan. The explanation is Watergate. Bill stuck by Nixon until the autumn of 1973. The experience left him permanently disappointed in Nixon and stunned by the brutality of politics. At the height of Bill's political phase he beheld dreams of the presidency. He entertained the idea of mounting a Conservative Party campaign in 1970 for Robert Kennedy's old Senate seat, and using the Senate as a springboard to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Watergate dampened his ardor. His biographer, John Judis, tells us that Bill resolved to write a novel, sail his sailboat across the Atlantic, and perform Bach on his harpsichord with a professional orchestra. That is precisely what he did and more. He buzzed the Titanic from a submarine, and his drift from politics continued. Bill had many gifts, and one was a sense of the times in which he lived. He had a prevenient sense for shifts in the Zeitgeist. Increasingly in the 1970s and 1980s I think he recognized that high intelligence was leaving the world of political thought. When he began his campaign to advance modern conservatism he was surrounded by learned, highly intelligent intellectuals on both the left and the right. As the years went on, they all passed away. His cofounders at National Review were among the first to go. Burnham and Kirk died long ago. Now even his adversaries are gone. His old debating opponent John Kenneth Galbraith died a few years back. Recently Norman Mailer and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. withdrew. Practically all the great figures of the ideological battles of Bill's life are gone. And so the baton is passed. On the conservative side it passes from Buckley to Ann Coulter. I do not know as much about the liberal side. R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator, a contributing editor to the New York Sun, and an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute. His The Clinton Crack-Up: The Boy President's Life After the White House has recently been published by Thomas Nelson Inc.

From The Corner at NRO: A perfect quote...

Grief

[Peter Robinson]

On an airplane all day today, I just now exchanged emails with Jeffrey Hart, who, three decades ago in Hanover, introduced me to WFB. When we heard the news, I discovered, Jeff and I had had the same thought, recalling the speech by William Gerard Hamilton at the end of Boswell's Life of Johnson. Replace "Johnson" with "Buckley," and you have what we're feeling, Jeff and I—and every friend of the American conservative movement, and even, for that matter, two-thirds of its enemies.

He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. – Buckley is dead. – Let us go to the next best: There is nobody; - no man can be said to put you in mind of Buckley.

The New York Times

William F. Buckley Jr. in his office at National Review, about 1965.

From Human Events:
William F. Buckley: R.I.P., Enfant Terrible
by Ann Coulter

Posted 02/27/2008 ET

William F. Buckley was the original enfant terrible.

As with Ronald Reagan, everyone prefers to remember great men when they weren't being great, but later, when they were being admired. Having changed the world, there came a point when Buckley no longer needed to shock it.

But to call Buckley an "enfant terrible" and then to recall only his days as a grandee is like calling a liberal actress "courageous." Back in the day, Buckley truly was courageous. I prefer to remember the Buckley who scandalized to the bien-pensant.

Other tributes will contain the obvious quotes about demanding a recount if he won the New York mayoral election and trusting the first 100 names in the Boston telephone book more than the Harvard faculty. I shall revel in the "terrible" aspects of the enfant terrible.

Buckley's first book, "God and Man at Yale," was met with the usual thoughtful critiques of anyone who challenges the liberal establishment. Frank Ashburn wrote in the Saturday Review: "The book is one which has the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night. There will undoubtedly be robed figures who gather to it, but the hoods will not be academic. They will cover the face."

The president of Yale sent alumni thousands of copies of McGeorge Bundy's review of the book from the Atlantic Monthly calling Buckley a "twisted and ignorant young man." Other reviews bordered on the hyperbolic. One critic simply burst into tears, then transcribed his entire crying jag word for word.

Buckley's next book, "McCarthy and His Enemies," written with L. Brent Bozell, proved that normal people didn't have to wait for the Venona Papers to be declassified to see that the Democratic Party was collaborating with fascists. The book -- and the left's reaction thereto -- demonstrated that liberals could tolerate a communist sympathizer, but never a Joe McCarthy sympathizer.

Relevant to Republicans' predicament today, National Review did not endorse a candidate for president in 1956, correctly concluding that Dwight Eisenhower was not a conservative, however great a military leader he had been. In his defense, Ike never demanded that camps housing enemy detainees be closed down.

Nor would National Review endorse liberal Republican Richard Nixon, waiting until 1964 to enthusiastically support a candidate for president who had no hope of winning. Barry Goldwater, though given the right things to say -- often by Buckley or Bozell, who wrote Goldwater's "Conscience of a Conservative" -- was not particularly bright.

But the Goldwater candidacy, Buckley believed, would provide "the well-planted seeds of hope," eventually fulfilled by Ronald Reagan. Goldwater was sort of the army ant on whose body Reagan walked to greatness. Thanks, Barry. When later challenged on Reagan's intellectual stature, Buckley said: "Of course, he will always tend to reach first for an anecdote. But then, so does the New Testament."

With liberal Republicans still bothering everyone even after Reagan, Buckley went all out against liberal Republican Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. When Democrat Joe Lieberman challenged Weicker for the Senate in 1988, National Review ran an article subtly titled: "Does Lowell Weicker Make You Sick?"

Buckley started a political action committee to support Lieberman, explaining, "We want to pass the word that it's OK to vote for the other guy or stay at home." The good thing about Lieberman, Buckley said, was that he "doesn't have the tendency of appalling you every time he opens his mouth."

That same year, when the radical chic composer Leonard Bernstein complained about the smearing of the word "liberal," Buckley replied: "Lenny does not realize that one of the reasons the 'L' word is discredited is that it was handled by such as Leonard Bernstein." The composer was so unnerved by this remark that, just to cheer himself up, he invited several extra Black Panthers to his next cocktail party.

When Arthur Schlesinger Jr. objected to his words being used as a jacket-flap endorsement on one of Buckley's books in 1963, Buckley replied by telegram:

"MY OFFICE HAS COPY OF ORIGINAL TAPE. TELL ARTHUR THAT'LL TEACH HIM TO USE UNCTION IN POLITICAL DEBATE BUT NOT TO TAKE IT SO HARD: NO ONE BELIEVES ANYTHING HE SAYS ANYWAY."

In a famous exchange with Gore Vidal in 1968, Vidal said to Buckley: "As far as I am concerned, the only crypto Nazi I can think of is yourself."

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."

Years later, in 1985, Buckley said of the incident: "We both acted irresponsibly. I'm not a Nazi, but he is, I suppose, a fag."

Writing in defense of the rich in 1967, Buckley said: "My guess is, that the last man to corner the soybean market, whoever he was, put at least as much time and creative energy into the cornering of it as, say, Norman Mailer put into his latest novel and produced something far more bearable -- better a rise in the price of soybeans than 'Why Are We in Vietnam?'" (For you kids out there, Norman Mailer was an America-hating drunkard who wrote books.)

Some of Buckley's best lines were uttered in court during a lengthy libel trial in the '80s against National Review brought by the Liberty Lobby, which was then countersued by National Review. (The Liberty Lobby lost and NR won.)

Irritated by attorney Mark Lane's questions, Buckley asked the judge: "Your Honor, when he asks a ludicrous question, how am I supposed to behave?"

In response to another of Lane's questions, Buckley said: "I decline to answer that question; it's too stupid."

When asked if he had "referred to Jesse Jackson as an ignoramus," Buckley said, "If I didn't, I should have."

Buckley may have been a conservative celebrity, but there was a lot more to him than a bow tie and a sailboat.

William F. Buckley Jr., R.I.P
By Roger Kimball

February 27th, 2008

(Originally posted on Roger’s Rules)

This morning, I got the very sad news that my friend William F. Buckley Jr. died earlier today. He was 82. I cannot say that the news was entirely unexpected—Bill had been seriously ill for months—but it was nevertheless shocking. I am one of a host of Bill’s friends who contributed a few words about him to NRO. I’d like also to share some portions of the review I wrote of his “literary autobiography,” Miles Gone By, partly because it allows me to speak about him in the present tense:

“My God, he does everything,” my friend said. “Skis, plays the harpsichord, sails across the Pacific, writes novels …” I was chatting with one of the foremost jurists of our age, a man who is himself hardly innocent of superlative achievement. But when William F. Buckley, Jr.’s, new omnibus came up in conversation, my friend declared himself disgusted at the spectacle of so much energy and accomplishment.

By “disgusted” he of course meant “awed,” and I knew what he meant. The skiing, the harpsichord, the sailing, etc., are mere avocations. The main events are National Review, Firing Line, a syndicated column, and four-plus decades on the lecture circuit (seventy engagements a year: ponder that). How does he do it?

Miles Gone By is subtitled “A Literary Autobiography.” It isn’t really an autobiography, if for no other reason than that Mr. Buckley is much too interested in the world around him to dwell on himself. In an amusing piece about managing the tedium of social life (itself worth the price of the volume), he recalls the French political philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenal telling him that “every subject in the whole world is more interesting than oneself.” This was, Mr. Buckley winks, “some years before writing his autobiography.”

Miles Gone By is as near as Mr. Buckley will ever come writing an autobiography. He plays some part in all of the dozens of pieces he has collected here, but usually as a foil for the exhibition of another personality, event, or idea. In this sense, Miles Gone By is less autobiography than heterobiography: the gaze is cast firmly outwards, not inward. The model is not Augustine or even Montaigne; it certainly is not (thank God) Rousseau. What we have here is a chronicle of things done, not passions suffered, of people met, not feelings scrutinized, of issues debated, not emotions spent. That is doubtless one reason the book is such fun to read: it has the velocity and freshness of piqued curiosity—I almost said of a well-made martini.

Every life can be characterized by one or two governing attitudes. Perhaps the word that best characterizes Mr. Buckley is “relish.” The depth and variousness of this book reflect the depth and variousness of his pleasures. It is a cheerful book, a convivial book, somehow a youthful book, though Mr. Buckley himself is no youngster. Just about everything in it has appeared before, but by some synergistic literary alchemy, the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Mr. Buckley opens the book with a few pieces about his family (he was in the middle of ten children), growing up in Sharon, Connecticut, going off to boarding school in England. He includes moving memorials to his mother and father. I wish I had known his father. Not only did he amass an impressive wine cellar—the list of clarets reproduced in the book is an invitation to envy—but he also had the right attitude about the Internal Revenue Service. Contemplating the irremediably acquisitive disposition of that organization—in particular, their proprietary interest in one’s estate—he cleverly managed to distribute to his children the vast majority of his goods and chattels before his death. So successful was he that when his will was probated, the children each got a check for $44. Not bad for a man who had made a respectable pile in the oil business. (Alas, no one can think of everything: a few month’s later an IRS agent appeared and exhibited an unhealthy interest in that wine cellar the deceased had spent many years populating.)

Miles Gone By collects pieces about Mr. Buckley’s passions (wine, music, sailing, skiing), the personalities he has encountered (he seems to know everyone who is anyone), and some of the positions he has defended. The longest piece in the book is his introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of God and Man at Yale. Published in 1951, the book catapulted its twenty-four-year-old author to an atmosphere of hostile notoriety from which he never completely descended.

It is difficult at this distance to recreate the stir—no, the tornado—that book made. Remember the apoplexy that The Closing of the American Mind occasioned in the mid-1980s? My how the left-wing academic established loved (and continues to love) to hate that book! Double that enmity, treble it: that was the reception which greeted God and Man at Yale. Mr. Buckley’s opening credo that “the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world” was simply not to be borne. His codicil—“I further believe that the struggle between individualism [i.e., conservatism] and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level”—transformed disbelief into rage. The liberal establishment, Dwight Macdonald observed at the time, “reacted with all of the grace and agility of an elephant cornered by a mouse.” McGeorge Bundy pronounced anathema upon the book in The Atlantic Monthly. The well known Yale philosopher T. M. Greene deployed the word “fascist” three times in as many sentences. “What more,” Professor Greene asked, “could Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin ask for?” Well, as Mr. Buckley observes, “they asked for, and got, a great deal more.”

In retrospect, the reaction to Gamay (as the book was nicknamed by the publisher) is party amusing, partly frightening. The amusing part arises from the elephant-cornered-by-mouse aspect Dwight Macdonald mentioned. The frightening part comes when you realize how contemporary Mr. Buckley’s travails seem. Professor Greene went on to pontificate that

What is required is more not less tolerance—not the tolerance of indifference, but the tolerance of honest respect for divergent convictions and the determination of all that such divergent opinions be heard without administrative censorship. I try my best in the classroom to expound and defend my faith, when it is relevant, as honestly and persuasively as I can. But I can do so only because many of my colleagues are expounding and defending their contrasting faiths, or skepticism, as openly and honestly as I am mine.

Sound familiar? But this, Mr. Buckley rightly notes, is “ne plus ultra relativism, idiot nihilism.” No ethical code requires “honest respect” for any divergent opinion. “Complete moral tolerance,” James Fitzjames Stephen noted in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873), “is possible only when men have become completely indifferent to each other—that is to say, when society is at an end.” Besides, Professor Greene’s aria about tolerance would have been sweeter—or at least ostensibly more plausible—had he deigned to practice what he preached. “An honest respect by him for my divergent conviction,” Mr. Buckley writes, “would have been an arresting application at once of his theoretical and his charitable convictions.”

The nerve that Mr. Buckley struck with Gamay is still smarting; indeed, it is throbbing uncontrollably, as anyone who has contemplated the discrepancy between proclamations of “diversity” on campuses and the practice of enforcing a politically correct orthodoxy on any contentious subject. There is plenty of room for diversity, so long as you embrace the left-liberal dogma. Diverge from that dogma and you will find that the rhetoric of diversity has been replaced by talk of “prejudice,” “hate speech,” and the entire lexicon of liberal denunciation.

God and Man at Yale is full of observations that are at least as pertinent today as they were when penned fifty-odd years ago. Consider the issue of academic freedom. How much irresponsible politicking and smug posturing has been protected by the misuse of that privilege! As Mr. Buckley saw in the early 1950s, the phrase “academic freedom” is often little more than “a handy slogan that is constantly wielded to bludgeon into impotence numberless citizens who waste away with frustration as they view in their children and their children’s children the results of laissez-faire education.”

Mr. Buckley is especially good at exposing certain strategies of rhetorical (or perhaps I mean “moral”) evasion—for example, “the technique of associating oneself for institutional convenience with a general position but disparaging it wherever it is engaged in wars or skirmishes along its frontiers.” For example, Mr. Buckley was sharply upbraided for describing a certain economics professor as “collectivist” when the man himself had professed his belief in individual initiative, the free market, etc. Er, yes, but said professor also went on to advocate “diminishing the inequality of income and wealth,” to which end he proposed a tax of 75 to 99 percent on incomes over $100,000, confiscatory taxes on inheritance “aimed at the goal of ending transmissions of hereditary fortunes,” government-subsidized family allowances, a government-guarantee of full employment, and … Well, you get the picture. If you do not find those proposals breathtakingly collectivist, you need to see a doctor.

Mr. Buckley’s reflections on the reception of God and Man at Yale are probably the intellectual high point of Miles Gone By. The aesthetic peaks are distributed much more widely. Most of the book is given over to 1) the people Mr. Buckley has known socially or professionally and 2) scenes from his vocation and avocations.

One of the nice things about being conservative is that you run into many exotic human specimens. Unburdened by the ideology of “diversity,” conservatives tend to cultivate genuine diversity in their interests and acquaintances. I wish I had known many of the people Mr. Buckley recalls in this book—not just the celebrities: Clare Booth Luce, Roanld Reagan, David Niven, Alistair Cooke, Whittaker Chambers, Vladimir Horowtiz, et al. Sure, it would have been amusing to meet them, but how about characters like Wilmoore Kendall, a thorn in the side of the Yale administration for many years until he offered to let them by out his tenure contract for $40,000 (money ain’t what it used to be)? Kendall had been a teacher of Mr. Buckley’s at Yale and an important figure in the early years of National Review. At one editorial meeting of NR, Kendall announced that he had no objection to a proposed course of action, “provided that we would agree to change the denomination of National Review on the cover from “A Weekly Journal of Opinion” to “A Journal of Jacobinical Thought.”

Or how about Frank Meyer, another early NR stalwart? last illness, Meyer converted to Catholicism. But it was a struggle. Mr. Buckley reports that Meyer, from his bed of woe, complaining that “the only remaining intellectual obstacle to his conversion was the collectivist implication lurking in the formulation ‘the communion of saints’ in the Apostles’ Creed.” Then there is James Burnham, the political philosopher Mr. Buckley describes as “the dominant intellectual influence” on National Review. I have read a fair amount of Burnham’s work, and I believe he is one of the most under-rated political thinkers of the last century. It is a pity we have no one of his perspicacity with us today: a man of his insight would come in handy in our present muddles.

One piece that I missed in Miles Gone By was Mr. Buckley’s long evisceration of that malevolent fantasist, Gore Vidal, which appeared in the late 1960s in (I believe) Harper’s. It’s a perfect illustration of Hazlitt’s observation that “Those who lack delicacy hold us in their power.” Still, I understand why he decided against including it: it is about a supremely distasteful figure, and the caustic tone is at odds with this book’s dominant music which is by turns celebratory and elegiac. Sailers will be particularly moved by the several excerpts from Mr. Buckley’s adventures at sea. No one writes about sailing with his combination of brio and technical mastery. The most recent piece in Miles Gone By is “Aweigh,” which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly this summer. It recounts Mr. Buckley’s recent decision to sell his boat Patito. It is edged with quiet melancholy, that story, as farewells are wont to be. But I feel sure that in selling Patito Mr. Buckley, far from giving up the boat, was confirming his status as admiral emeritus in perpetuity.

Marilyn K. Yee/The New York Times

William F. Buckley Jr. in his National Review office, 1984

From The New York Times:
William F. Buckley Jr. Is Dead at 82
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn.

Mr Buckley, 82, suffered from diabetes and emphysema, his son Christopher said, although the exact cause of death was not immediately known. He was found at his desk in the study of his home, his son said. “He might have been working on a column,” Mr. Buckley said.

Mr. Buckley’s winningly capricious personality, replete with ten-dollar words and a darting tongue writers loved to compare with an anteater’s, hosted one of television’s longest-running programs, “Firing Line,” and founded and shepherded the influential conservative magazine National Review.

He also found time to write at least 55 books, ranging from sailing odysseys to spy novels to celebrations of his own dashing daily life, and to edit five more. His political novel “The Rake” was published last August, and a book looking back at the National Review’s history in November; a personal memoir of Barry Goldwater is due to be publication in April, and Mr. Buckley was working on a similar book about Ronald Reagan for release in the fall.

The more than 4.5 million words of his 5,600 biweekly newspaper columns, “On the Right,” would fill 45 more medium-sized books.

Mr. Buckley’s greatest achievement was making conservatism — not just electoral Republicanism, but conservatism as a system of ideas — respectable in liberal post-World War II America. He mobilized the young enthusiasts who helped nominate Barry Goldwater in 1964, and saw his dreams fulfilled when Reagan and the Bushes captured the Oval Office.

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

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 awaited his biweekly edition — “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 world something different, something in its weariness it desperately needed, the sound of laughter and the sight of the rich, green uplands of freedom.”

The liberal advance had begun with the New Deal, and so accelerated in the next generation that Lionel Trilling, one of America’s leading intellectuals, wrote in 1950: “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 ideas in general circulation.”

Mr. Buckley declared war on this liberal order, beginning with his blistering assault on Yale as a traitorous den of atheistic collectivism immediately after his graduation (with honors) from the university.

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

Mr. Buckley weaved the tapestry of what became the new American conservatism from libertarian writers like Max Eastman, free market economists like Milton Friedman, traditionalist scholars like Russell Kirk and anti-Communist writers like Whittaker Chambers. But the persuasiveness of his argument hinged not on these perhaps arcane sources, but on his own tightly argued case for a conservatism based on the national interest and a higher morality.

His most receptive audience became young conservatives first energized by Barry Goldwater’s emergence at the Republican convention in 1960 as the right-wing alternative to Nixon. Some met in Sept., 1960, at Mr. Buckley’s Connecticut estate to form Young Americans for Freedom. Their numbers — and influence — grew.

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

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, names like Mailer, Capote, Vidal, Styron and Baldwin. Like the others, he attracted controversy like a magnet. Even conservatives — from members of the John Birch Society to disciples of conservative author Ayn Rand to George Wallace to moderate Republicans — frequently pounced on him.

Many of varied political stripes came to see his life as something of an art form — from racing through city streets on a motorcycle to a quixotic campaign for mayor of New York in 1965 to startling opinions like favoring the decriminalization of marijuana. He was often described as liberals’ favorite conservative, particularly after suavely hosting an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” on public television in 1982.

Norman Mailer may indeed have dismissed Mr. Buckley as a “second-rate intellect incapable of 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 prep school kid next door, and the snows of yesteryear,” Mr. Mailer said in an interview with Harpers in 1967.

Mr. Buckley’s vocabulary, sparkling with phrases from distant eras and described in newspaper and magazine profiles as sesquipedalian (characterized by the use of long words) became the stuff of legend. Less kind commentators called him “pleonastic” (use of more words than necessary).

And, inescapably, there was that aurora of pure mischief. In 1985, David Remnick, writing in The Washington Post, said, “He has the eyes of a child who has just displayed a horrid use for the microwave oven and the family cat.”

William Francis Buckley Jr., was born in Manhattan on Nov. 24, 1925, the sixth of the 10 children of Aloise Steiner Buckley and William Frank Buckley. (His parents intended to name him William Frank Buckley Jr., but the priest who christened him insisted Frank was out because there is no Saint Frank. But when Bill Jr. was 5, he insisted on switching to Frank and became Jr. at that point.)

The elder Mr. Buckley made a fortune in the oil fields of Mexico, and educated 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.

Young William absorbed his family’s conservatism along with its deep Catholicism. At 6, he wrote the King of England demanding he repay his country’s war debt. At 14, he followed his brothers to the Millbrook School, a preparatory school 15 miles across the New York state 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 did not neglect politics, showing up uninvited to a faculty meeting to complain about a teacher abridging his right to free speech and ardently opposing United States’ involvement in World War II. His father wrote him to suggest he “learn to be more moderate in the expression of your views.”

He graduated from Millbrook in 1943, then spent a half a year at the University of Mexico studying Spanish, which had been his first language. He served in the Army from 1944 to 1946, and managed to make second lieutenant after first putting colleagues off with his mannerisms.

“I think the army experience did something to Bill,” his sister, Patricia, told John B. Judis for his 1988 biography, “William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint Of the Conservative.” “He got to understand people more.”

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 most prestigious secret society.

As a senior, he was given the honor of delivering the speech for Yale’s Alumni Day celebration, but was replaced after the university’s administration objected to his strong attacks on the university. He responded by writing his critique in the book that brought him to national attention, 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 the firing of faculty members who advocated values not in accord with those that the institution should be upholding — which was to say, his own.

Among the avalanche of negative reviews, the one in Atlantic by McGeorge Bundy, a Yale graduate, was conspicuous. He found the book “dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author.”

But Peter Viereck, writing in The New York Times Sunday Book Review viewed the book as “a necessary counterbalance.”

After a year in the Central Intelligence Agency in Mexico City (his case officer was E. Howard Hunt, who went on to win celebrity for his part in the Watergate break-in), Mr. Buckley went to work for the American Mercury magazine, but resigned after spotting anti-Semitic tendencies in the magazine.

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

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

It proved it by lining up squarely behind Southern segregationists, saying blacks should be denied the vote. After some conservatives objected, Mr. Buckley suggested instead that both uneducated whites and blacks should not be allowed to vote.

Mr. Buckley did not accord automatic support to Republicans, starting with Eisenhower’s campaign for re-election in 1956. National Review’s tepid endorsement: “We prefer Ike.”

Circulation increased from 16,000 in 1957 to 125,000 at the time of Goldwater’s candidacy in 1964, and leveled off to around 100,000 in 1980. It is now 155,000. The magazine has always had to be subsidized by readers’ donations.

Along with offering a forum to big-gun conservatives like Russell Kirk, James Burnham and Robert Nisbet, National Review cultivated the career of several younger writers, including Garry Wills, Joan Didion and John Leonard, who would shake off the conservative attachment 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 and a frequent contributor to National Review told The Washington Post. “Without Bill — if he had 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 ran from 1966 to 1999. First carried on WOR-TV and then on the Public Broadcasting Service, it became the longest running show hosted by a single host — beating out Johnny Carson by three years. He led the conservative team in 1,504 debates on topics like “Resolved: The women’s movement has been disastrous.”

There were exchanges on foreign policy with the likes of Norman Thomas; feminism with Germaine Greer and race relations with James Baldwin. Not a few viewers thought Mr. Buckley’s toothy grin before he scored a point resembled nothing so much as a switchblade.

To New York City politician Mark Green, he purred, “You’ve been on the show close to 100 times over the years. Tell me, Mark, have you learned anything yet.”

But Harold Macmillan, former prime minister of Britain, flummoxed the master. “Isn’t this show over yet?” he asked.

At age 50, Mr. Buckley added two pursuits to his repertoire — he took up the harpsichord and became novelist. Some 10 of the novels are spy tales starring Blackford Oakes, who fights for the American way and bedded the Queen of England in the first book.

Others of his books included a historical novel with Elvis Presley as a significant character, another starring Fidel Castro, a reasoned critique of anti-Semitism, and journals that more than succeeded dramatizing a life of taste and wealth — his own. For example, in “Cruising Speed: A Documentary,” published in 1971, he discussed the kind of meals he liked to eat.

“Rawle could give us anything, beginning with lobster Newburgh and ending with Baked Alaska,” he wrote. “We settle on a fish chowder, of which he is surely the supreme practitioner, and cheese and bacon sandwiches, grilled, with a most prickly Riesling picked up at St. Barts for peanuts,” he wrote.

Mr. Buckley’s spirit of fun was apparent in his 1965 campaign for mayor of New York on the ticket 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.

For Murray Kempton, one of his many friends on the left, the Buckley press conference style called up “an Edwardian resident commissioner reading aloud the 39 articles of the Anglican establishment to a conscript of assembled Zulus.”

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.

The merits of the argument aside, Mr. Buckley irrevocably proved that his brand of candor did not lend itself to public life when an Op-Ed article he wrote for The New York Times offered a partial cure for the AIDS epidemic: “Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm to prevent common needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of homosexuals,” he wrote.

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 frenetic schedule of public speeches (some 70 a year over 40 years, he once estimated). In 1999, he stopped “Firing Line,” and in 2004, he relinquished his voting stock in National Review. He wrote his last spy novel the 11th in his series), sold his sailboat and stopped playing the harpsichord 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 by criticizing the Iraq war as a failure.

On April 15, 2007, his wife, the former Patricia Alden Austin Taylor, who had carved out a formidable reputation as a socialite and philanthropist but considered her role as a homemaker, mother and wife most important, died. Mr. and Mrs. Buckley called each other “Ducky.”

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

In the end it was Mr. Buckley’s graceful, often self-deprecating wit that endeared him to others. In his spy novel “Who’s on First,” he described the possible impact of his National Review 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.’ ”

An earlier version of this article included an outdated reference to books Mr. Buckley published in 2007 and to the total number of books he wrote.

From Entertainment Weekly:
Remembering Christian rock maverick Larry Norman
by Chris Willman

Feb 26, 2008

Larry Norman, the singer/songwriter often referred to as “the father of Christian rock,” died Sunday at age 60 after years of declining health. His first two solo albums, Upon This Rock (originally released on Capitol in 1969) and Only Visiting This Planet (issued by Verve in 1972), are widely considered the first Christian rock albums of any real significance. All these decades later, they’re probably still the two best. Fans of contemporary Christian music (or CCM, as it’s come to be known) often claim that their heroes could be mainstream stars if only they didn’t sing about Jesus. Usually, that’s a lot of malarkey, but in Norman’s case, it happened to be true: A lot of his early work wouldn’t sound at all out of place between Wings and the Stones on a classic rock station, if not for his (usually) righteous lyrical concerns. How far his influence really extended is up for debate, given the relatively few records he sold — although as unlikely an acolyte as Frank Black of the Pixies has cited him as a hero and even recorded his songs. "Larry was my door into the music business, and he was the most Christlike person I ever met," Black said in a statement Monday.

For quite a few years, the sum total of the Christian rock genre was pretty much Larry Norman. It may be difficult now — at a time when bands like Paramore find wide acceptance in both the Christian and mainstream worlds (and almost a quarter-century on from the advent of Stryper) — to remember a time when there was no such thing as CCM, and when, if any such thing did pop up, it was greeted with distrust and scorn on either side of the evangelical/pop divide. The Beatles were about to break up, yet the cutting edge of Christian music was still represented by the folksy/choral records made by Ralph Carmichael, better known as Billy Graham’s musical director. Then along came an unsmiling, almost sneering guy who, like Johnny Cash, usually dressed all in black, though, unlike Cash, he had whiteish blond hair down past his chest. And he was singing about salvation and the rapture, with humor and sass, in a voice that clearly owed a lot to Mick Jagger’s cocky intonation. In the church vs. counterculture world of the ‘60s and early ‘70s, this officially counted as cognitive dissonance, and maybe it still does.

Norman initially appeared on the rock scene as part of the San Jose-based group People, which had a No. 7 hit on the Billboard chart in 1968 with “I Love You,” a remake of a Zombies tune. Though he was the principal songwriter, he quit the band about the time their first album came out. (Reportedly, the other members wanted to convert him to Scientology; also they and/or Capitol had managed to override Norman’s choice for the debut album’s title, which was originally set to be We Need a Whole Lot More of Jesus and a Lot Less Rock ‘N’ Roll.) Capitol kept him on for one solo album, Upon This Rock, which introduced a venerable end-times anthem, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.” He moved over to Verve for a follow-up, Only Visiting This Planet, which has been voted the best Christian album of all time by CCM magazine, the longtime bible — if you will — of the business. It didn’t sell much, but whatever born-again kids there were out there with Fender guitars all had a copy and wore out the grooves. Beatles producer George Martin got a credit for production assistance (it was recorded at Martin’s London studio), and you can feel Martin’s influence, if not his direct touch, in some of the LP’s fully orchestrated rockers. Here, Norman was taking a more holistic approach, lyrically: The album opener and first single, “I’ve Got to Learn to Live Without You,” was a lost-love lament that used the word “baby,” which didn’t necessarily endear him to rock-hating fundamentalists. Social commentary tracks like the Vietnam-themed “Six O’Clock News” confounded some of the faithful, too. Even signature God-rock tunes like “Why Don’t You Look Into Jesus” didn’t quite make it onto the folk-mass circuit; maybe it was lines like “Gonorrhea on Valentine’s Day/And you’re still looking for the perfect lay.”

Norman made one last album for a secular label, So Long Ago the Garden (on Verve’s sister imprint, MGM), in 1973. It marked the only time he recorded an entire album free of explicit Christian content, and besides some love-and-loneliness tracks, it included novel standouts like “Christmas Time,” a rocking condemnation of Xmas commercialism, and the tune I’d consider his masterpiece, “Nightmare #71,” a funny, rambling, overtly Dylan-influenced dreamscape that wittily invoked the names of deceased silent-screen stars amid allusions to the Book of Revelation. But even a less Jesus-y Norman couldn’t sell records.

From that point on, he tended to preach to the converted, despite declared intentions otherwise, and the songs he wrote in the later parts of his career tended to be explicitly evangelical, if not evangelistic, often to their needlessly preachy detriment. He made one more terrific-sounding LP, 1976’s In Another Land, which sounded like it had a major-label budget, even though he released it on his own imprint through Word, the Christian conglomerate. Soon after, at the height of his popularity in the evangelical world, Norman sang at the White House at the invitation of President Carter. But from 1980 on, his discography becomes difficult to track, as he self-released literally dozens of projects, mostly live albums and outtakes collections. His shot at making it in the mainstream had passed, but Norman was too much of a maverick to really make nice with the burgeoning Christian music community, still paranoid over the rejection he suffered when he was the lone long-haired born-again on the landscape. Norman built a confusing mythology around himself, laid out in copious liner notes that accompanied most of the LPs — with claims that Pete Townshend had been inspired by one of Norman's early rock operas to write Tommy, or that he was somehow indirectly responsible for Dylan’s conversion or baptism, or that he’d influenced or even become pals with U2. Was it all true? Which of his myriad records were official releases and which were bootlegs? Norman’s weirdnesses finally got too tiring to sort out, even for most fans, and his profile shrank. (Eventually, the singer blamed his erratic later output on a head injury suffered in a plane mishap in 1978.)

But though he remained the eternal misfit in and out of Christian music, there were acknowledgments, as well, in the later part of his life. Norman was inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2001, along with his first hero, Elvis Presley. A tribute album with acts like DC Talk was produced in the ‘90s. And support came from unlikely quarters. Frank Black recorded one of his apocalyptic ballads, “Six-Sixty-Six,” on his first solo album, and a biography reported that Black and producer Steve Albini bonded over their Larry Norman fandom in the studio while making the first Pixies album, which was named after a Norman lyric. When the ailing Norman did his “farewell concert” in Oregon a few years ago, Black even showed up to duet with him on “Watch What You’re Doing” — the song that was the source of the “Come on, pilgrim!” line that became the title of the Pixies’ debut.

A press release issued by Norman’s brother says that “at the time of his death, he was working on an album with Frank Black and Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse, which will be released later this year.” A message the singer dictated from his hospital bed the day before his death, posted on his website, reads in part: “I feel like a prize in a box of cracker jacks with God's hand reaching down to pick me up... My wounds are getting bigger. I have trouble breathing. I am ready to fly home... Goodbye, farewell, we will meet again.”

Personal aside: I grew up in a suburban environment where parents were thrusting nascent Christian rock albums on their kids, hoping to provide a theologically sound or wholesome alternative to Bowie, Alice Cooper, the Stones, et al. Most of the records were mediocre and a chore to sit through, but Larry Norman’s were the ones you actually looked forward to — not just because the finest ones were of the same quality as anything on FM radio, but because he was just strange enough that you felt like he might be capable of throwing your parents as well as you for a loop. One of my favorite memories of Norman involves attending a concert in the ‘70s in Akron, Ohio. I was sitting next to a youth pastor who was glowing with the thought that the boys he’d brought along were being exposed to positive religious values in songs like “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?” Then, somebody shouted out a request for one of Norman’s least explicable songs, “Pardon Me,” a haunting ballad about an attempted seduction that happens to be entirely free of recognizable Christian content but has its share of worldly sensuality and loneliness. I remember looking over and watching the grin on the youth leader’s face turn into a puzzled grimace as Norman sang lines like “Pardon me, kissing you like I'm afraid/But I feel I'm being played…/Close your eyes, and pretend that you are me/See how empty it can be/Making love if love's not really there/Watch me go, watch me walk away alone/As your clothing comes undone/And you pull the ribbon from your hair.” Of course, I got a big smile on my face as the youth pastor’s disappeared, because, as a rock kid, I lived for status quo-breaking moments like that one, when a "Christian concert" could turn into something altogether less predictable. He didn’t always follow through on his early promise, but that’s the Larry Norman I’ll remember — the maverick who never deviated from his chosen mission in search of any big brass ring, but who didn’t give many second thoughts to subverting the expectations of fellow believers, either

The Outlaw
John Fischer

Wednesday, February, 27, 2008

Some say he was an outlaw, that he roamed across the land,With a band of unschooled ruffians and few old fishermen,No one knew just where he came from, or exactly what he'd done,But they said it must be something bad that kept him on the run.

Some say he was the Son of God, a man above all men--That he came to be a servant and to set us free from sin,And that's who I believe he is, cause that's what I believe;And I think we should get ready, cause it's time for us to leave.- Larry Norman

Well, maybe not time for all of us, but most certainly time for Larry to leave. He's already gone, in fact. He left this earth last Sunday morning at 2:45 a.m., and the world has lost a prophet. There are undoubtedly those who would challenge me on that last statement, but I will not recant. Sure he had enemies among his friends, and he created much of that. He was an enigma -- an iconoclast. He could be so far off you wondered if he was only visiting this planet, but he could be so on the mark that you could only credit the truth and light of the Holy Spirit for it. Indeed, the first verse of his song "Outlaw," quoted above, could have as easily been written about him. No one knew where he came from, but many wished he would go back to wherever that was. He was an outlaw to everything established, and for that he embodied the renegade nature of Christ's first coming.

When you think of it, a guy with shoulder-length blond hair who sang about "sipping whiskey from a paper cup," "gonorrhea on Valentines Day and you're still looking for the perfect lay," and "shooting junk till your half insane," is probably not going to go over very well with the 11 o'clock Sunday morning worship crowd, especially 35 years ago. But then again, he wasn't speaking to those folks anyway. And to his credit, he never adjusted, like the rest of us did, to the Christian culture that grew out of the movement he helped found. He never compromised for a living. He stayed an outlaw until his death.

For these, and other reasons, I have always likened Larry to John the Baptist -- a non-conformist living in the desert wearing funny clothes, eating weird foods and hearing voices no one else heard. After having the dubious distinction of being the one to baptize Jesus and prepare the way of the Lord, John lost his head for sticking his neck into King Herod's private life. Larry stuck his neck out lots of places where people didn't think it belonged. It's a wonder he hadn't lost his head sooner.

In a time of spiritual revolution, Larry Norman carried the torch. He was and will remain through his enigmatic music, a voice crying in the wilderness. I celebrate Larry's final one-way trip to heaven, and if I know him well enough, I would guess he would want us all to make sure we were ready to leave ourselves.One way, one way to Heaven, hold up high your hand.Follow, free and forgiven, Children of the Lamb.