Buckley, William F., Jr. (1925—)

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Buckley, William F., Jr. (1925—)

William F. Buckley Jr. found fame as the voice of conservatism. Founder of the National Review, the conservative journal of opinion of which he was editor-in-chief until 1990, Buckley also worked as an influential political advisor and popular novelist. Buckley aptly described the effect of his National Review through his character Boris Bolgin in his spy novel Who's on First. "'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. Oh, how they cried about the repression of the counter-revolutionaries in Budapest! But the National Review it is also angry with the CIA for—I don't know; not starting up a Third World War, maybe? Last week—I always read the National Review, it makes me so funny mad—last week an editorial said'—he raised his head and appeared to quote from memory—'The attempted assassination of Sukarno last week had all the earmarks of a CIA operation. Everybody in the room was killed except Sukarno."'

William Frank Buckley, Jr. was born in New York City in 1925 into a wealthy Connecticut family of Irish decent. He grew up in a devout Christian Catholic atmosphere surrounded by nine brothers and sisters. He attended Millbrook Academy in New York and then served as a second lieutenant in World War II. After his discharge in 1946 he went to Yale bringing with him, as he wrote, "a firm belief in Christianity and a profound respect for American institutions and traditions, including free enterprise and limited government." He found out that Yale believed otherwise. After graduating with honors in 1950, he published the public challenge to his alma mater God and Man at Yale in 1951. It brought him instant fame. He claimed that Yale's "thoroughly collectivist" economics and condescending views towards religion could only lead towards a dangerous relativism, a pragmatic liberalism without a moral heart. What America required and conservatism must supply was a fighting faith, noted David Hoeveler in Watch on the Right, and William 'Bill' Buckley, Jr. was just the man for the job.

In 1955 he founded the National Review, creating one of the most influential political journals in the country. His syndicated column, On the Right, which he started to write in 1962, has made its weekly appearance in more than 300 newspapers. Not only in print has he been America's prime conservative voice, Buckley also hosts the Emmy award-winning show Firing Line —Public Broadcasting Service's longest-running show—which he started in 1966. The Young Americans for Freedom Movement (1960) which aimed at conservative control of the Republican Party was Buckley's brainchild. He has written and edited over 40 books which include political analyses, sailing books and the Blackford Oakes spy novels and has been awarded more than 35 honorary degrees. In 1991 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. As a member of the secretive Bilderberg Group and the Council on Foreign Relations—founded in 1921 as an advisory group to the President—he also plays an important political advisory role. His spy novels, however, show most clearly how much he perceived the Cold War to be essentially a spiritual struggle.

Remarking to his editor at Doubleday, Samuel Vaughan, that he wanted to write something like 'Forsyth,' Vaughan expected a Buckley family saga in Galsworthy's Forsythe Saga tradition. But Buckley was referring to Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal and produced Saving the Queen, which made the best-seller lists a week before its official publication date. After watching the anti-CIA movie Three Days of the Condor, Buckley—who himself worked briefly (nine months) as a CIA covert agent—set out to write a book in which "the good guys and the bad guys were actually distinguishable." That history is the "final" fiction is one of the themes of his Blackford Oakes novels that always take as their starting point an historical "fact." But his main interest lay in countering the charges that there was no moral difference between Western intelligence and its Soviet counterpart. In his Craft of Intelligence, former CIA Director Allen Dulles, who figures frequently in Buckley's novels, claimed that "Our intelligence has a major share of the task of neutralizing hostile activities. Our side chooses the objective. The opponent has set up the obstacles." Buckley frames it differently in his novel Stained Glass : "Our organization is defensive in nature. Its aim is to defeat your aggressive intentions. You begin by the dissimilarities between Churchill and Hitler. That factor wrecks all derivative analogies."

Buckley's conservatism is deeply spiritual but never orthodox. In a direct contradiction of conservative and Republican politics, he claimed in a 1996 cover story of the National Review "The War on Drugs Is Lost," that "the cost of the drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs combined with an intensive education of non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment with drugs." In his syndicated column he wrote of his sister's cancer chemotherapy and her need for medical marijuana. Buckley's public stand and personal drama are closely related. In Watch on the Right, David Hoeveler sees this communal and familial conservative pathos as a defining quality of Buckley's character: "The conservative movement for Buckley was a family affair, it flourished with friendships within and struck forcefully at the enemy without." Nine of the ten Buckley children at one time contributed to the National Review.

Being Catholic always mattered more to him than being conservative, Gary Willis noted in his Confessions of a Conservative. When asked in an Online Newshour interview about his book Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith, how his Christian belief influenced his views on conservatism, he laughed his reply: "Well, it's made me right all the time."

—Rob van Kranenburg