Wikipedia Search William F. Buckley Jr. Article Talk Language Download PDF Watch Edit "William F. Buckley" redirects here. For his father, see William F. Buckley Sr. For other persons of like name, see William Buckley (disambiguation). William Frank Buckley Jr. (born William Francis Buckley;[a] November 24, 1925 – February 27, 2008) was an American conservative writer, public intellectual, political commentator and novelist.[1] William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley in 1985 Buckley in 1985 Born William Francis Buckley November 24, 1925 New York City, U.S. Died February 27, 2008 (aged 82) Stamford, Connecticut, U.S. Occupation Editorauthorpolitical commentator Education Yale University (BA) Subject American conservatismpoliticsanti-communism Spouse Patricia Taylor Buckley ​ ​(m. 1950; died 2007)​ Children Christopher Buckley Parent William F. Buckley Sr. Relatives James L. Buckley (brother) Priscilla Buckley (sister) Patricia Buckley Bozell (sister) Reid Buckley (brother) L. Brent Bozell III (nephew) William F. B. O'Reilly (nephew) Military career Service / branch United States Army Years of service 1944–1946 Rank First lieutenant Battles / wars World War II Born in New York City, Buckley spoke Spanish as his first language before learning French and then English as a child.[2] He served stateside in the United States Army during World War II. Following the war, he attended Yale University, where he engaged in debate and conservative political commentary; he graduated from Yale with honors in 1950. Afterward, he worked at the Central Intelligence Agency for two years. In 1955, Buckley founded National Review, a magazine that stimulated the growth and development of the conservative movement in the United States. In addition to editorials in National Review, Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale (1951) and more than 50 other books on diverse topics, including writing, speaking, history, politics, and sailing. His works include a series of novels featuring fictitious CIA officer Blackford Oakes and a nationally syndicated newspaper column.[3][4] In 1965, Buckley ran for mayor of New York City on the Conservative Party line, finishing third. From 1966 to 1999, he hosted 1,429 episodes of the public affairs television show Firing Line, the longest-running public affairs show with a single host in U.S. television history; through his work on the show, he became known for his Northeastern elite accent and wide vocabulary.[5] Buckley is widely considered to have been one of the most influential figures in the conservative movement in the United States.[6][7][8] Early life edit Childhood edit William Frank Buckley Jr. was born William Francis Buckley in New York City on November 24, 1925, to Aloise Josephine Antonia (née Steiner) and lawyer and oil developer William Frank Buckley Sr. (1881–1958).[9] His mother hailed from New Orleans and was of German, Irish, and Swiss-German descent, while his father had Irish ancestry and was born in Texas to Canadian parents from Hamilton, Ontario.[10] He had five older siblings and four younger siblings. As a boy, Buckley moved with his family to Mexico[11] before moving to Sharon, Connecticut. He began his formal schooling in France, attending first grade in Paris. By the time Buckley was seven, the family had moved to England, where he received his first formal English-language training at a day school in London. Due to the family's varied places of residence, his first and second languages were Spanish and French.[12] As a boy, he developed a love for horses, hunting, music, sailing, and skiing, all of which were reflected in his later writings. He was homeschooled through the eighth grade using the Homeschool Curriculum developed by the Calvert School in Baltimore.[13] Just before World War II, around the ages of 12 and 13, he attended the Jesuit preparatory school St John's Beaumont in the English village of Old Windsor. Buckley's father was an oil developer whose wealth was based in Mexico and became influential in Mexican politics during the military dictatorship of Victoriano Huerta, but was expelled when leftist general Álvaro Obregón became president in 1920. Buckley's nine siblings included eldest sister Aloise Buckley Heath, a writer and conservative activist;[14] sister Maureen Buckley-O'Reilly (1933–1964), who married Richardson-Vicks Drugs CEO Gerald A. O'Reilly; sister Priscilla Buckley, author of Living It Up with National Review: A Memoir, for which Buckley wrote the foreword; sister Patricia Buckley Bozell, who was also an author; brother Reid Buckley, an author and founder of the Buckley School of Public Speaking; and brother James L. Buckley, who became a U.S. senator from New York and a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.[15] During the war, Buckley's family took in the English historian-to-be Alistair Horne as a child war evacuee. He and Buckley remained lifelong friends. They both attended the Millbrook School in Millbrook, New York, graduating in 1943. Buckley was a member of the American Boys' Club for the Defense of Errol Flynn (ABCDEF) during Flynn's trial for statutory rape in 1943. At Millbrook, Buckley founded and edited the school's yearbook, The Tamarack; this was his first experience in publishing. When Buckley was a young man, libertarian author Albert Jay Nock was a frequent guest at the Buckley family house in Sharon, Connecticut.[16] William F. Buckley Sr. urged his son to read Nock's works,[17] the best-known of which was Our Enemy, the State, in which Nock maintained that the founding fathers of the United States, at their Constitutional Convention in 1787, had executed a coup d'état of the system of government established under the Articles of Confederation.[18] Music edit In his youth, Buckley developed many musical talents. He played the harpsichord very well,[19] later calling it "the instrument I love beyond all others",[20] although he admitted he was not "proficient enough to develop [his] own style".[21] He was a close friend of harpsichordist Fernando Valenti, who offered to sell Buckley his sixteen-foot pitch harpsichord.[21] Buckley was also an accomplished pianist and appeared once on Marian McPartland's National Public Radio show Piano Jazz.[22] A great admirer of Johann Sebastian Bach,[20] Buckley wanted Bach's music played at his funeral.[23] Religion edit Buckley was raised a Catholic and was a member of the Knights of Malta.[24][25] The release of his first book, God and Man at Yale, in 1951 was met with some specific criticism pertaining to his Catholicism. McGeorge Bundy, dean of Harvard at the time, wrote in The Atlantic that "it seems strange for any Roman Catholic to undertake to speak for the Yale religious tradition". Henry Sloane Coffin, a Yale trustee, accused Buckley's book of "being distorted by his Roman Catholic point of view" and stated that Buckley "should have attended Fordham or some similar institution".[26] In his 1997 book Nearer, My God, Buckley condemned what he viewed as "the Supreme Court's war against religion in the public school" and argued that Christian faith was being replaced by "another God [...] multiculturalism".[27] He disapproved of the liturgical reforms following the Second Vatican Council, writing of the loss of the Latin Mass: "I pray the sacrifice will yield a rich harvest of informed Christians. But to suppose that it will is the most difficult act of faith I have ever been called upon to make, because it tears against the perceptions of all my senses."[28] Buckley was also interested in the writings of the 20th-century Italian writer Maria Valtorta.[29] Education and military service edit Buckley attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico (or UNAM) until 1943. The next year, upon his graduation from the U.S. Army Officer Candidate School (OCS), he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army. In his book Miles Gone By, he briefly recounts being a member of Franklin Roosevelt's honor guard upon Roosevelt's death. He served stateside throughout the war at Fort Benning, Georgia; Fort Gordon, Georgia; and Fort Sam Houston, Texas.[30] After the war ended in 1945, Buckley enrolled at Yale University, where he became a member of the secret Skull and Bones society[31][32] and was a masterful debater.[32][33] He was an active member of the Conservative Party of the Yale Political Union,[34] and served as chairman of the Yale Daily News and as an informer for the FBI.[35] At Yale, Buckley studied political science, history, and economics and graduated with honors in 1950.[32] He excelled in the Yale Debate Association; under the tutelage of Yale professor Rollin G. Osterweis, Buckley honed his acerbic style.[36] Early career edit Buckley remained at Yale working as a Spanish instructor from 1947 to 1951.[37] Central Intelligence Agency edit Buckley served in the CIA for two years, including one year in Mexico City working on political action for E. Howard Hunt,[38] who was later imprisoned for his part in the Watergate scandal. The two officers remained lifelong friends.[39] Buckley said that while he worked for the CIA, Hunt, his immediate boss, was the only other CIA employee he knew and that William Sloane Coffin exposed Buckley's CIA employment.[40] While stationed in Mexico, Buckley edited The Road to Yenan, a book by Peruvian author Eudocio Ravines.[41] After leaving the CIA, Buckley worked as an editor at The American Mercury in 1952, but left after perceiving newly emerging antisemitic tendencies in the magazine.[42] First books edit God and Man at Yale edit Buckley (right) and L. Brent Bozell Jr. promote their book McCarthy and His Enemies, 1954. Buckley's first book, God and Man at Yale, was published in 1951. Offering a critique of Yale University, Buckley argued in the book that the school had strayed from its original mission. One critic viewed the work as miscasting the role of academic freedom.[43] The American academic and commentator McGeorge Bundy, a Yale graduate himself, wrote in The Atlantic: "God and Man at Yale, written by William F. Buckley, Jr., is a savage attack on that institution as a hotbed of 'atheism' and 'collectivism.' I find the book is dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author."[44] Buckley credited the attention the book received to its "Introduction" by John Chamberlain, saying that it "chang[ed] the course of his life" and that the famous Life magazine editorial writer had acted out of "reckless generosity".[45] Buckley was referred to in Richard Condon's 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate as "that fascinating younger fellow who had written about men and God at Yale."[46] McCarthy and His Enemies edit In 1954, Buckley and his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell Jr. co-authored a book, McCarthy and His Enemies. Bozell worked with Buckley at The American Mercury in the early 1950s when it was edited by William Bradford Huie.[47] The book defended Senator Joseph McCarthy as a patriotic crusader against communism, and asserted that "McCarthyism ... is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks."[48] Buckley and Bozell described McCarthy as responding to a communist "ambition to occupy the world". They conceded that he was often "guilty of exaggeration", but believed the cause he pursued was just.[49] National Review edit Buckley in the 1970s Buckley founded National Review in 1955 at a time when there were few publications devoted to conservative commentary. He served as the magazine's editor-in-chief until 1990.[50][51] During that time, National Review became the standard-bearer of American conservatism, promoting the fusionism of traditional conservatives and libertarians. Examining postwar conservative intellectual history, Kim Phillips-Fein writes:[52][53] The most influential synthesis of the subject remains George H. Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Tradition since 1945 .... He argued that postwar conservatism brought together three powerful and partially contradictory intellectual currents that previously had largely been independent of each other: libertarianism, traditionalism, and anticommunism. Each particular strain of thought had predecessors earlier in the twentieth (and even nineteenth) centuries, but they were joined in their distinctive postwar formulation through the leadership of William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review. The fusion of these different, competing, and not easily reconciled schools of thought led to the creation, Nash argued, of a coherent modern Right. Buckley sought out intellectuals who were ex-Communists or had once worked on the far Left, including Whittaker Chambers, Willi Schlamm, John Dos Passos, Frank Meyer, and James Burnham,[54] as editors and writers for National Review. When Burnham became a senior editor, he urged the adoption of a more pragmatic editorial position that would extend the influence of the magazine toward the political center. Smant (1991) finds that Burnham overcame sometimes heated opposition from other members of the editorial board (including Meyer, Schlamm, William Rickenbacker, and the magazine's publisher, William A. Rusher), and had a significant impact on both the magazine's editorial policy and the thinking of Buckley himself.[55][56] Upon turning 65 in 1990, Buckley retired from the day-to-day running of National Review.[50][51] He relinquished his controlling shares of National Review in June 2004 to a pre-selected board of trustees. The next month, he published the memoir Miles Gone By. Buckley continued to write his syndicated newspaper column, as well as opinion pieces for National Review magazine and National Review Online. He remained the ultimate source of authority at the magazine and also conducted lectures and gave interviews.[57] Defining the boundaries of conservatism edit See also: Conservatism in the United States Buckley and his editors used National Review to define the boundaries of conservatism and to exclude people, ideas, or groups they considered unworthy of the conservative title.[58] For example, Buckley denounced Ayn Rand, the John Birch Society, George Wallace, racists, white supremacists, and antisemites. When he first met Ayn Rand, according to Buckley, she greeted him with the following: "You are much too intelligent to believe in God."[59] In turn, Buckley felt that "Rand's style, as well as her message, clashed with the conservative ethos".[60] He decided that Rand's hostility to religion made her philosophy unacceptable to his understanding of conservatism. After 1957, he attempted to weed her out of the conservative movement by publishing Whittaker Chambers's highly unfavorable review of Rand's Atlas Shrugged.[61][62] In 1964, he wrote of "her desiccated philosophy's conclusive incompatibility with the conservative's emphasis on transcendence, intellectual and moral", as well as "the incongruity of tone, that hard, schematic, implacable, unyielding, dogmatism that is in itself intrinsically objectionable, whether it comes from the mouth of Ehrenburg, Savonarola—or Ayn Rand."[63] Other attacks on Rand were penned by Garry Wills and M. Stanton Evans. Nevertheless, historian Jennifer Burns argues, Rand's popularity and influence on the right forced Buckley and his circle into a reconsideration of how traditional notions of virtue and Christianity could be integrated with all-out support for capitalism.[64] In 1962, Buckley denounced Robert W. Welch Jr. and the John Birch Society in National Review as "far removed from common sense" and urged the Republican Party to purge itself of Welch's influence.[65] He hedged the statement by insisting that among them were "some of the most morally energetic, self-sacrificing, and dedicated anti-Communists in America."[66] On Robert Welch and the John Birch Society edit In 1952, their mutual publisher Henry Regnery introduced Buckley to Welch. Both became editors of political journals, and both had a knack for communication and organization.[67] Welch launched his publication One Man's Opinion in 1956 (renamed American Opinion in 1958), one year after the founding of The National Review. Welch twice donated $1,000 to Buckley's magazine, and Buckley offered to provide Welch "a little publicity" for his publication.[67] Both believed that the United States suffered from diplomatic and military setbacks during the early years of the Cold War, and both were staunchly anti-communist.[68] But Welch expressed doubts about Eisenhower's loyalties in 1957, and the two disagreed on the reasons for the United States' perceived failure in the Cold War's early years.[69] According to Alvin S. Felzenberg, the disagreements between the two blossomed into "a major battle" in 1958.[67] That year, Boris Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novel Doctor Zhivago. Buckley was impressed by the novel's vivid and depressing depictions of life in a communist society, and believed that the CIA's smuggling of the novel into the Soviet Union was an ideological victory.[69] In September 1958, Buckley ran a review of Doctor Zhivago by John Chamberlain. In November 1958, Welch sent Buckley and other associates copies of his unpublished manuscript "The Politician", which accused Eisenhower and several of Eisenhower's appointees of involvement in a communist conspiracy.[69] When Buckley returned the manuscript to Welch, he commented that the allegations were "curiously—almost pathetically optimistic."[68] On December 9, 1958, Welch founded the John Birch Society with a group of business leaders in Indianapolis.[70] By the end of 1958, Welch had both the organizational and the editorial infrastructure to launch his subsequent far-right political advocacy campaigns. In 1961, reflecting on his correspondences with Welch and Birchers, Buckley told someone who subscribed to both the National Review and the John Birch Society: "I have had more discussions about the John Birch Society in the past year than I have about the existence of God or the financial difficulties of National Review."[68] Buckley rule edit The Buckley rule states that National Review "will support the rightwardmost viable candidate" for a given office.[71] Buckley first stated the rule during the 1964 Republican primary election featuring Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller. The rule is often misquoted and misapplied as proclaiming support for "the rightwardmost electable candidate", or simply the most electable candidate.[72] According to National Review's Neal B. Freeman, the Buckley rule meant that National Review would support "somebody who saw the world as we did. Somebody who would bring credit to our cause. Somebody who, win or lose, would conservatize the Republican party and the country. It meant somebody like Barry Goldwater."[71] Starr Broadcasting Group edit Buckley was the chairman of Starr Broadcasting Group, a company in which he owned a 20% stake. Peter Starr was the company's president, and his brother Michael Starr was executive vice president. In February 1979, the US Securities and Exchange Commission accused Buckley and 10 other defendants of defrauding shareholders in Starr Broadcasting Group. As part of a settlement, Buckley agreed to return $1.4 million in stock and cash to shareholders in the company. The other defendants were ordered to contribute $360,000.[73] In 1981, there was another agreement with the SEC.[74] Other political commentary and action Viewpoints Language and idiolect Spy novelist edit In 1975, Buckley recounted being inspired to write a spy novel by Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal: "If I were to write a book of fiction, I'd like to have a whack at something of that nature."[188] He went on to explain that he was determined to avoid the moral ambiguity of Graham Greene and John le Carré. Buckley wrote the 1976 spy novel Saving the Queen, featuring Blackford Oakes as a rule-bound CIA agent, based in part on his own CIA experiences. Over the next 30 years, he would write another ten novels featuring Oakes. New York Times critic Charlie Rubin wrote that the series "at its best, evokes John O'Hara in its precise sense of place amid simmering class hierarchies".[189] Stained Glass, second in the series, won a 1980 National Book Award in the one-year category "Mystery (paperback)".[190][b] Buckley was particularly concerned about the view that what the CIA and the KGB were doing was morally equivalent. He wrote in his memoirs, "To say that the CIA and the KGB engage in similar practices is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes an old lady into the path of a hurtling bus is not to be distinguished from the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of a hurtling bus: on the grounds that, after all, in both cases someone is pushing old ladies around."[191] Buckley began writing on computers in 1982, starting with a Zenith Z-89.[192] According to his son, Buckley developed an almost fanatical loyalty to WordStar, installing it on every new PC he got despite its growing obsolescence over the years. Buckley used it to write his last novel, and when asked why he continued using something so outdated, he answered "They say there's better software, but they also say there's better alphabets." Later career edit Buckley shaking hands with President George W. Bush on October 6, 2005 Upon turning 65 in 1990, Buckley retired from the day-to-day running of the National Review.[50][51] The next month, he published the memoir Miles Gone By. Buckley continued to write his syndicated newspaper column and opinion pieces for National Review and National Review Online.[193] In 1991, Buckley received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.[194] Views on modern-day conservatism edit Buckley criticized certain aspects of policy within the modern conservative movement. Of George W. Bush's presidency, he said, "If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we've experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign."[195] According to Jeffrey Hart, writing in The American Conservative, Buckley had a "tragic" view of the Iraq war: he "saw it as a disaster and thought that the conservative movement he had created had in effect committed intellectual suicide by failing to maintain critical distance from the Bush administration .... At the end of his life, Buckley believed the movement he made had destroyed itself by supporting the war in Iraq."[196] Regarding the Iraq War troop surge of 2007, however, it was noted by the editors of National Review that: "Buckley initially opposed the surge, but after seeing its early success believed it deserved more time to work."[197] In his December 3, 2007, column, shortly after his wife's death, which he attributed, at least in part, to her smoking, Buckley seemed to advocate banning tobacco use in America.[198] Buckley wrote articles for Playboy, despite criticizing the magazine and its philosophy.[199] About neoconservatives, he said in 2004: "I think those I know, which is most of them, are bright, informed and idealistic, but that they simply overrate the reach of U.S. power and influence."[140][200][201][202][203] Personal life edit In 1950, Buckley married Patricia Buckley, née Taylor, daughter of Canadian industrialist Austin C. Taylor. He met Taylor, a Protestant from Vancouver, British Columbia, while she was a student at Vassar College. She later became a prominent fundraiser for such charitable organizations as the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Institute of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery at New York University Medical Center, and the Hospital for Special Surgery. She also raised money for Vietnam War veterans. On April 15, 2007, Pat Buckley died at age 80 of an infection after a long illness.[204] After her death, Buckley seemed "dejected and rudderless", according to friend Christopher Little.[205] William and Patricia Buckley had one son, author Christopher Buckley.[206] They lived at Wallack's Point in Stamford, Connecticut, as well as a duplex apartment at 73 East 73rd Street, a private entrance to 778 Park Avenue in Manhattan, New York City.[207] Beginning in 1970, Buckley and his wife lived and worked in Rougemont, Switzerland, for six to seven weeks per year.[208] Death and legacy edit Buckley suffered from emphysema and diabetes in his later years. In a December 2007 column, he commented on the cause of his emphysema, citing his lifelong habit of smoking tobacco despite endorsing a legal ban of it.[198] On February 27, 2008, he died from a heart attack at his home in Stamford, Connecticut, at the age of 82. Initially it was reported that he was found dead at his desk in his study, a converted garage, and his son, Christopher Buckley, said, "He died with his boots on after a lifetime of riding pretty tall in the saddle."[205] But in his 2009 book Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir, he admitted this account was a slight embellishment on his part; while his father did die in his study, he was found lying on the floor.[4] Buckley was buried at the Saint Bernard Cemetery in Sharon, Connecticut, next to his wife, Patricia. Notable members of the Republican political establishment paying tribute to Buckley included President George W. Bush,[209] former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, and former First Lady Nancy Reagan.[210] Bush said of Buckley, "He influenced a lot of people, including me. He captured the imagination of a lot of people."[211] Gingrich added, "Bill Buckley became the indispensable intellectual advocate from whose energy, intelligence, wit, and enthusiasm the best of modern conservatism drew its inspiration and encouragement ... Buckley began what led to Senator Barry Goldwater and his Conscience of a Conservative that led to the seizing of power by the conservatives from the moderate establishment within the Republican Party. From that emerged Ronald Reagan."[212] Reagan's widow, Nancy, said, "Ronnie valued Bill's counsel throughout his political life, and after Ronnie died, Bill and Pat were there for me in so many ways."[211] House Minority Whip Roy Blunt stated that "William F. Buckley was more than a journalist or commentator. He was the indisputable leader of the conservative movement that laid the groundwork for the Reagan Revolution. Every Republican owes him a debt of gratitude for his tireless efforts on behalf of our party and nation."[213] Various organizations have awards and honors named after Buckley.[214][215] The Intercollegiate Studies Institute awards the William F. Buckley Award for Outstanding Campus Journalism.[216] In popular culture edit In the 1991 film Hook, Dustin Hoffman based his vocal mannerisms as Captain Hook on Buckley.[217] In the 1992 film Aladdin, the Genie (voiced by Robin Williams) impersonated Buckley.[218][219] The 2016 film X-Men: Apocalypse briefly shows footage of Buckley on a TV news clip.[220][221] Buckley appears in James Graham's 2021 play Best of Enemies. The play is a fictionalized retelling of the 1968 Buckley–Vidal debates. In the 2023 Max miniseries White House Plumbers, Buckley is portrayed by Peter Serafinowicz, as a friend of the family of E. Howard Hunt. In 2025, the U.S. Postal Service released a stamp honoring Buckley.[222] Works edit Main article: William F. Buckley Jr. bibliography See also: List of Blackford Oakes novels Explanatory notes References Further reading External links Last edited 1 day ago by Wabbuh Related articles L. Brent Bozell Jr. American activist and writer (1926–1997) Movement conservatism Inside term for the American New Right M. Stanton Evans