The father of us all
William F. Buckley, Jr. is dead at age 82.
This one’s huge and personal. What I’m experiencing feels like genuine grief.
No one could have designed a more perfect founder for the modern conservative movement. As the linked obit points out, he was a renaissance man (magazine founder, columnist, sailor, harpsichordist, spy novelist, television show host), one of the planet’s most formidable intellects, handsome, suave, socially gracious and, when the situation called for it, a little impish.
Most of all, he was the complete conservative. In this election year, we’re hearing a lot about the three pillars, or stool legs, of fully thought-out conservatism:
- a sense of world affairs, history, and American and Western exceptionalism informed by an accurate understanding of human nature
- free-market economics
- the conviction that absolute right and wrong exist, as does almighty God, the author of the universe
His most significant legacy, National Review magazine, indisputably the most important periodical in America for the last fifty-two years, is in good hands with its current staff of editors and contributors.
It’s such a pattern, and fittingly so, to see one spouse pass shortly after another in marriages characterized by the deepest and most affectionate companoinship, and this has been the case here, Buckley’s wife Pat having passed in April last year.
It’s time for me to straighten up, quit fooling around, give more than lip service to this giant’s function in my life as an example of being an excellent human being.
I really and completely believe in what he stood for. I hereby vow to his memory to more consistently act like it.
And this modest blog will never flinch from upholding and defending it.
February 27th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
We so agree here. I loved the man too. A truly great American voice and personality. Someone to emulate, for sure. I also used his ideas, especially when they fit mine, regarding the drug war and the current war in Iraq. He was the first one I went to to check my sometimes liberal views and I often tempered those views after reviewing his. A great debater. A great writer. A great moralist (Catholic chainsmoker, liked his sauce but generally held it well) too, and, yes, one of the planet’s most formidable intellects.
He even slummed with Mailer. Stay tuned for eloquent encomiums from respected figures of all ilk worldwide.
February 27th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
And often humble and self-effacing, a mark of true greatness: In 1965, he 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 V. Lindsay, who later became a Democrat. When asked what he would 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.”)
February 27th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
According to Buckley, the war in Iraq was “anything but conservative.”
“The reality of the situation is that missions abroad to effect regime change in countries without a bill of rights or democratic tradition are terribly arduous.” He added: “This isn’t to say that the Iraq war is wrong, or that history will judge it to be wrong. But it is absolutely to say that conservatism implies a certain submission to reality; and this war has an unrealistic frank and is being conscripted by events”. In a February 2006 column published at National Review Online and distributed by Universal Press Syndicate, Buckley stated unequivocally that, “One cannot doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed.” Buckley has also stated that “…it’s important that we acknowledge in the inner councils of state that it (the war) has failed, so that we should look for opportunities to cope with that failure.”