Today is one of the most significant days in the history of American conservatism.
As I’m sure most of you have learned, National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr. died earlier today at his home in Stamford, Connecticut.
Those of us who with access to the Internet have at our fingertips a plethora of sources for conservative opinion. But, back in 1955, before Buckley, a few months shy of his thirtieth birthday, founded National Review, there was no such source.
There, he brought together numerous conservative thinkers, representing a broad range of viewpoints, demonstrating the intellectual diversity of the conservative movement. He was one of the first to champion Ronald Reagan. The two were close friends and the Gipper regularly read Buckley’s biweekly magazine.
I have subscribed to National Review on and off since my freshman year in college. I met Buckley only once, at a fundraiser for the magazine held in Los Angels in 2005. He was cordial, but due to the press of the crowd — and the presence of some of his California friends — I did not have much time to engage this intellectual.
When I was friendly with Marvin Liebman in the mid-1990s, he remembered his friend fondly, noting how their friendship did not change when Liebman came out as gay to Buckley.
Others who knew Buckley who well have written more thoughtful tributes than I ever could. Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic nominee for Vice President calls him a Remarkable Man. The magazine celebrates its founder here while offering a plethora of tributes on its home page.
And there are a greater variety of tributes in the Corner, including a video tribute from my Athena.
In a review of a collection of Buckley’s speeches, Let Us Talk of Many Things, Charles Kesler reflects on Buckley’s legacy in The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine of opinion founded forty years after Buckley’s. The very existence of the Weekly Standard being a tribute to Buckley, another periodical standing up for freedom and against collectivism. It may well not exist had its founders not had the example of the success of the National Review as inspiration.
As one who, through this blog, has gained some recognition as a conservative writer, I realize how indebted I, as are all conservatives who manage to make public our views, am to Buckley. For, 53 years ago, he got the ball rolling in providing the first major national forum for conservative opinion.
The other magazines, radio programs, TV shows and now web-pages and blogs followed in his footsteps. While we are saddened by this man’s passing, we are grateful for the example he provided and the inspiration he offered. Bill Buckley was in man ways the godfather of conservative punditry. The lonely voice decrying the advancing collective menace in 1955 has become a multitude in 2008.
Rest in Peace, William F. Buckley, Jr. Your accomplishments will long outlive you.
Today, those of us conservatives have found a forum for our political views recall that conservative pioneer who founded the first such forum.
I talked with Leibman on the phone back in the early 1990s when I first came out. I thought I was all alone as a gay conservative, and the man with a deep voice was telling me there were others. The contact was made through National Review, for which I am grateful.
Mr Buckley has my great respect for his impact on our country. I am sure he was instrumental in me having the values that I do as an American Conservative. Though I must say I haven’t read much of anything that he has written.
Having Ronald Reagan as President during my ages 7 – 15 is something I’ve come to realize was a rare experience that many people will probably not have… a true visionary President during formative years.
Without Buckley there would not have been Reagan.
I hope they’re giving each other a big hug right now.
Dan, whether or not one is a self-described conservative, we should all take measure of the man who transcended his time and, like some intellectual construct of Napoleone di Buonaparte approaching Cairo, he was the right man, in the right place, at the right time with the right idea.
Just like Russell Kirk, a less-reknown conservative intellectual peer of Mr Buckley’s, Buckley loved to tell stories for the sheer pleasure of the story telling.Â
So I’ll share my only humorous Buckley story. On most occasions, when Buckley was on campus to speak, he stayed overnight at my folk’s home. On one visit, when I was 12 or 13, my Mom asked me to show Mr Buckley to his room and carry his bag up. The adults had dinner elsewhere that night and he & my folks had arrived home kind of late. We went upstairs and I dutifully pointed out the bathroom and the study and set his bag on the bed. I told him it was a famous bed because Bishop Sheen, Mike Wallace, Nelson Rockefeller, Alan Greenspan, Russell Kirk, Bill Simon, Elliot Richardson, Tad Szulc, Bill Fulbright, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Pat Moynihan and others had slept in the bed.
He looked at me, looked at the bed, looked back at me and said "I hope you changed the sheets". He explained that words mattered and what I should have said was noted people had been guests in my parents home and retired in the room.
Then he asked me if my Mom had any ice cream in the icebox and would I like to join him in a bowl after the adults "retired". I said my Dad never would never retire because he liked his job too much. Words mattered.
We never got to share that bowl of ice cream because he fell asleep at the desk in the study reading, of all things, a copy of Sandburg’s Lincoln. He was still there early the next morning when I was heading off to swim practice.
Like you Dan, I used to love watching him on Firing Line and reading his fictional novels with Blackford Oakes long before Jason Bourne was imagined.
What a terrific man. What an great instrument for the conservative movement. He was 1 in a billion -never to be matched. Never to be repeated. A man with a true gentle soul and a piercing intellect informed, as history will note, for the Right Reasons.
I wonder if there aren’t quite a few more intelligent thoughtful educated people on the right and left who are up to the kind of debate that Buckley did if only the media would focus on them and not the shouters.
I was always a fan of WFB during his erudite span as talk show host and guest, and loved his sailing adventure stories of crossing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans under sail. BUT, I’ve also never forgiven him for his ill-chosen words when the AIDS epidemic was still much misunderstood about forcible testing and tattooing and possible compulsury sequestation. As much as any other source, I place much of the Right’s animous against the gay community and HIV as springing from this root-stock. He provided the intellectual-legitimacy and political-cover for their fears and phobia; "…well, Buckely said…" Coversely, if someone of WFB’s intellectual and political stature from the Right had comeout for compassion and acceptance I think it would have had a huge impact.
The problem is, Ted, what do we accept?
Two new U.S. studies of gay and bisexual men who know they are infected with HIV show that more than one-third have recently had unprotected intercourse. In many cases, these men are engaging in unprotected sex with other HIV-infected men — a practice called "serosorting," where partners with a similar, HIV-positive blood test status decide to forego condoms.However, "we also found that almost a third of the men — 31.4 percent — said that they had had unprotected anal intercourse with at least one partner of unknown serostatus, and almost a quarter had unprotected intercourse with a partner who they knew was HIV uninfected," said the lead author of one of the studies, Dr. Kenneth Mayer, medical research director at Fenway Community Health, in Boston.
Or:
HIV testing rates have remained low in the United States this decade, with only about one-fifth of people at high risk for infection getting a test in any given year, according to a study published on Monday. The study also found that many more people at high risk of HIV infection — men who have sex with men, injection drug users and others — say they plan to get tested than actually do get tested."We know that there are about 1.1 million Americans infected with HIV. And we know that about 25 percent of them don’t know that they’re infected," Brian Pence, an epidemiologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview.
And what this adds up to is that the rate of HIV among younger gay people is skyrocketing, thus ensuring that the disease is perpetuated at least another generation.
Was that worth it, Ted?
TedB, to be fair… folks like Buckley who made a living writing and publishing a huge volume of material must make lots of mistakes in their life. True with the political arena, too… like with McCain, for instance, only that’s not on writing -that’s on positions taken.
The better wisdom is to take their career in total and dismiss the hopefully rare instances of nuttiness… I know I’ve had to do that with RonnieR and BarryG and W and even the fast-forgotten RudyGiuliani.
It’d be a shame to have expected Buckley at first to shed his orthodox Catholic-based moral values to embrace a position that took years for most leaders to finally embrace -and even some of those haven’t gotten on board as of yet.
I thought I had a pretty good vocabulary level until I read some WFB columns. Comparatively, I’m vocabularily challenged.
One a similar note,
I had a subscription to NR about a year ago. I don’t recall any articles on the subject, but there were many ads for the legalisation of marijuana. Was this a position held by NR?
Oh, forgot to ask:
I never heard of Firing Line until a few years ago. I don’t suppose there’s any "Best of" DVDs out there?
Everything else is on DVD. There ought to be some of Firing Line and Rush Limbaugh.
but there were many ads for the legalisation of marijuana. Was this a position held by NR?
Buckley was in favor of legalisation of most drugs.
#11
Can you sum up why?
I didn’t always agree with him but I did always respect him. The Firing Line was one of the finest shows ever on television. Now all they have is reality crap.
Btw, here’s something from the National Review from Buckley just prior to the 2003 Lawrence decision by SCOTUS:
The Texas law says that gays cannot do what non-gays can do, and the facts of the matter weigh against Texas. Even if the prosecution was brought on by agents provocateurs furtively setting out to add one more right to the Bill of Rights, it’s hard to defend what the Texans did. The only way to do it, of course, is to say that what Texas did/does is not the Supreme Court’s business. But this will prove hard, because in the Bowers case in 1986, the Court acknowledged that it was the Court’s business, and now it will need to ask again whether due process, or equal protection, is involved. Justice Scalia will say it is not, and his opinion will be interesting, as his opinions are always interesting. It would be nice if Texas simply repealed the law, and let Lambda’s clients go back to their practices undisturbed.
#6: The whole message of safe sex has missed the point: It is the means to an end, the end being not getting a virus that will shave decades off your life, not to mention other STDs. The ads have depicted it as an end in itself. It’s like a brand that’s using outdated advertising. I love old commercials as much as anyone, but it’s time for the ads to view safe sex for what it is. The gay community also needs to encourage monogamy and sexual exclusivity. This is especially important with young people coming out at early ages.