By the time he died at age 82, William F. Buckley Jr. may have seemed to younger readers like just one of a thousand conservative commentators. But when he began his career more than half a century ago, liberal ideas and policies dominated and conservative thought was seen as an oxymoron. Buckley didn’t just participate in the modern conservative movement — he practically invented it. And he lived long enough to see his philosophy help reshape the world.
Had he not existed, it would have been impossible to dream him up. The Yale-educated, devoutly Catholic scion of an oil tycoon, Buckley became famous for his advocacy of ideas that were far outside the mainstream, as well as an eccentric style and arch wit that some found charming and others found affected. Never one to use a concise word when he could find a four-syllable synonym, he came as a shock to those who thought of right-wingers as ignorant provincials.
His energy and passion had no apparent limit. Besides his newspaper column, which he wrote until his death, Buckley produced some 50 books, founded the magazine National Review and for most of his life kept up a busy speaking schedule.
He hosted a public-television talk show, “Firing Line,” which was on the air for 33 years. He became an accomplished sailor and harpsichordist and even ran for mayor of New York in 1965 (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text).
He tutored and inspired numerous young conservatives, including George Will, David Brooks and Jonah Goldberg. His manifold efforts laid the groundwork for the failed presidential candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1964 — and the successful one of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Like any long-lived commentator, Buckley took positions that today are hard to excuse, such as his indulgence of Southern segregation in the 1950s, his defense of Joseph McCarthy and his proposal, during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, that the infected be required to get tattooed to alert potential sexual partners.
But he also strove to exile anti-Semites and other crackpots from the movement. He was willing to break with conservative orthodoxy by advocating the legalization of marijuana and, in 2006, pronouncing the Iraq war a failure. Through friendships with liberals such as economist John Kenneth Galbraith and journalist Murray Kempton, he exemplified the notion — forgotten by many modern pundits — that political disagreements don’t mandate mutual hatred.
Besides his great influence, what stands out in memory is his ability not only to accomplish so much but to enjoy it so thoroughly.
When Time magazine put him on the cover in 1967, it noted what Buckley’s life proved: “Conservatism can be fun.”
