William F. Buckley, RIP

ElJeffe · February 2008

1925 - 2008

Bill Buckley was a gentleman and a scholar. He was a conservative before there was really such a thing as conservatism, and he spent his life pushing forth the ideals he believed in so strongly. While many modern conservatives engage in cheap point-scoring and petty demonization of the "enemy", Buckley was invariably civil and courteous, even as he stood athwart history yelling "Stop!". He was thoughtful and eloquent, and he was a constant point of stability and sanity amidst an increasingly schizophrenic political movement.

I feel bad that he died when he did, with his party torn by stupid squabbles and hijacked by polemicists and charlatans. The man was ever an optimist, though, and I have no doubt that he would've kept his head high, secure in the knowledge that the party would return to sanity and unity in pursuit of making the world a better place.

Rest in peace, Mr. Buckley.

Dracomicron · February 2008

He had a highly entertaining antagonism towards Gore Vidal. That kind of thing reaches across political party and touches everyone's heart.

Mithrandir86 · February 2008

Dracomicron wrote: »

He had a highly entertaining antagonism towards Gore Vidal. That kind of thing reaches across political party and touches everyone's heart.

"Now listen, you queer, you stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered."

His work was always a pleasant read or listen, even if you vehemently disagreed with it.

JohnOrangePeel · February 2008

I enjoyed his cheesy smooth speech patterns, as well as listening to him getting completely owned by a young(ish) Chomsky in a debate in the late 60's.

nexuscrawler · February 2008

I never read any of his recent stuff. did he ever comment directly on the Neo-con movement? seems very at odds with his political thinking.

ElJeffe · February 2008

nexuscrawler wrote: »

I never read any of his recent stuff. did he ever comment directly on the Neo-con movement? seems very at odds with his political thinking.

He supported the Iraq war, but his support was consistent with his general belief that the US should be a force for democracy. I never saw any comments of his regarding the Bush administration's excesses and general asshattery, though I like to think he would've noted there was nothing "conservative" about them.

Bloods End · February 2008

Oh Thank god this isn't what I thought it was. I thought this said Wilford Brimley died and got all in a panic. Good to know the diabeetas king is still kicking.

SteevL · February 2008

William Buckley and Gore Vidal commentary on the ideal presidency and what a Nixon presidency would be like.

The two of them have a little debate: "I'll sock you in the goddamn face"

Buckley apparently had a debate with Reagan in 1978. This was his closing speech.

The man had style.

Mithrandir86 · February 2008

JohnOrangePeel wrote: »

I enjoyed his cheesy smooth speech patterns, as well as listening to him getting completely owned by a young(ish) Chomsky in a debate in the late 60's.

I have seen the video, and I would not go so far as to say that Chomsky owned Buckley in that debate. Or even won it.

Chomsky certainly held his own, but so did Buckley. In all fairness, Chomsky refused to discuss the Roman Empire in his discussion of the motivations and moral implications of Imperialism.

Bad Kitty · February 2008

My God. His voice is hypnotic.

ElJeffe · February 2008

SteevL wrote: »

The two of them have a little debate: "I'll sock you in the goddamn face"

That was beautiful.

ElJeffe · February 2008

Bad Kitty wrote: »

My God. His voice is hypnotic.

He really was an awesome speaker with a wonderful voice. It's like if Dickens were a political commentator.

Matt_S · February 2008

Though I admittedly don't know much about Mr. Buckley, I've seen his debate against Noam Chomsky on YouTube and he seemed to be an intelligent, reasonable, and eloquent individual.

I mourn his loss today. The Bill O'Reilly's, Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys of the world can learn more than a few lessons from him. Though I disagree with many things that he said - sometimes even vehemently - he seemed to be one of the last of his kind, as one of those who prefer polite discourse and civility to the "debates" that we see today that is often fueled by bickering and partisan politics.

RIP Bill Buckley.

Dracomicron · February 2008

Olbermann is doing a segment on him. #2 on Countdown.

TheLawinator · February 2008

I'm honestly truly saddened that I only learned of this man with his death. I've never seen anything like his debates, and he's a true pleasure to listen to.

SteevL · February 2008

One thing I've wanted to see was Buckley's debate with Carl Sagan which was apparently broadcast after ABC' s airing of the movie The Day After.

Loren Michael · February 2008

I liked that guy a lot.

Zimmydoom · February 2008

Dracomicron wrote: »

Olbermann is doing a segment on him. #2 on Countdown.

A rather sobering segment at that. Tattoos for people with AIDS and stripping the uneducated of their voting rights does not a libertarian make.

Irond Will · February 2008

I saw him speak when I was in college. He was pretty old by that point and leaned on his podium and mumbled into the mike about "gratitude". I guess kids those days probably didn't have enough of it.

I disagreed with most of his fundamental values. He was an arrogant snob and a hypocrite and a self-described elitist. He was an atrocious novelist. His magazine is now loaded with fools and ignorance and irony and hatred. The movement that he created has become an abomination.

The world is a smaller place without him, though, and his erudition and civility and grace will continue to provide a model for us.

skyybahamut · February 2008

Bad Kitty wrote: »

My God. His voice is hypnotic.

That's theMid-Atlantic English for you. Just like FDR

Something Witty · February 2008

I had never truly heard of him up until now but the moment I watched the video where he threatened to sock a mans goddamned face in I thought "America has lost one of it's few truly great politicians."

Derrick · February 2008

While I won't say I actually liked the man, I did like that he was around. He added spice to the political world.

His tone makes the "sock" comment totally unbelievable to me.

Eat it You Nasty Pig. · February 2008

NPR replayed an interview with him earlier today in which he basically rejected the concept of universal sufferage.

Buckley was in many ways the archetype of a particular school of American thought: specifically, people who find a way to use the Constitution as a bar against moving to address basically any collective action problem. He is well known because he is particularly well spoken, but it doesn't make his beliefs any more objectionable.

He was a brilliant writer, speaker and thinker, and to the extent you can respect such a person irrespective of his use of his gifts, I can respect Buckley.

widowson · February 2008

ElJeffe wrote: »

nexuscrawler wrote: »

I never read any of his recent stuff. did he ever comment directly on the Neo-con movement? seems very at odds with his political thinking.

He supported the Iraq war, but his support was consistent with his general belief that the US should be a force for democracy. I never saw any comments of his regarding the Bush administration's excesses and general asshattery, though I like to think he would've noted there was nothing "conservative" about them.

I think he was one of the first conservatives to turn against Bush and wasn't happy about the Iraq war:

Buckley: Bush Not A True Conservative

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/07/22/eveningnews/main1826838.shtml

I think Mr. Bush faces a singular problem best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology â€” with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending, extremely tolerant of excesses by Congress, and in respect of foreign policy, incapable of bringing together such forces as apparently were necessary to conclude the Iraq challenge.

There will be no legacy for Mr. Bush. I don't believe his successor would re-enunciate the words he used in his second inaugural address because they were too ambitious. So therefore I think his legacy is indecipherable.

Iraq: It didn't work:

http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley200602241451.asp

One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. ... Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols.

The Iraqis we hear about are first indignant, and then infuriated, that Americans aren't on the scene to protect them and to punish the aggressors. And so they join the clothing merchant who says that everything is the fault of the Americans.

Now granted, I wasn't able to find anything he said about the subsequent firing of Rumsfeld and the surge (two things that the Shrub actually got right about the war)....wait hang on:

John Miller: I believe it's fair to say that WFB supported the invasion of Iraq and began to have misgivings about the result that led him to reconsider the whole enterprise -- but that he also supported the troops surge. Last year, he made a personal contribution to the presidential campaign of John McCain.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2008/02/27/DI2008022701866.html

What I liked about this guy was that he believed the words that came out of his own mouth. A conservative, a real conservative who believes that they're saying, has to have misgivings about Bush II because:

-Extravegent domestic spending, starting with surplus and leaving behind a deficit.

-Making social security worse by adding another benefit that's so confusing it didn't win him any points anyways.

-Cronyism: Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzales, Dick Chaney, Donald Rumsfeld, ect. Hiring people totally based on loyalty and not competence and holding on to them (Rumsfeld) when it's clear they're doing a bad job and, furthermore, being a dick about it.

-Lack of eloquence. It's embarrising to hear Bush II speak.

-The Iraq war, poor planning, poor execution, sticking with a loosing strategy until the people (2006 elections) basically force you to fire the jackass who's loosing you the war (Rumsfeld again).

I could go on, but the point's been made, I think.

Elki · February 2008

The Economist wrote:

FEW intellectuals change the political weather. Even the most successfulâ€”an Arthur Schlesinger, say, or a J.K. Galbraithâ€”usually tilt into the prevailing wind and enjoy the sail. William F. Buckley, who died in his study this week, aged 82, was a weather-changer.

When Mr Buckley decided to make his name as a conservative intellectual the phrase was an oxymoron. Dwight Eisenhower's Republican Party was as adamantly middle-of-the-road as it was middle-brow. Ike did not take it as an insult when people said of him that â€œhis smile was his philosophyâ€.

At that time, America's tiny band of right-wing activists included a remarkable number of crackpots. Kent Courtney, the founder of the Conservative Society of America, accused Barry Goldwater of being â€œtainted by socialismâ€. The John Birch Society worried that Eisenhower was an agent of international communism. Lionel Trilling was right when he pronounced, in 1950, that â€œliberalism is not only the dominant, but even the sole, intellectual traditionâ€ in the United States.

Mr Buckley devoted his life to changing this. He founded the National Review for the conservative intelligentsia at the tender age of 29. And he turned himself into a one-man opinion machineâ€”tossing off articles and books with ease. All in all he wrote about 55. They included sailing memoirs and spy novels.

Mr Buckley famously said that the purpose of the National Review was to stand â€œathwart history, yelling â€˜Stopâ€™â€. But in fact he did more than just stand athwart. He helped to drive the crazies out of the movement. He persuaded a disparate band of enthusiastsâ€”free-marketers and social conservatives, anti-communists and American traditionalistsâ€”to band together against the liberal-collectivist foe. And he attracted a brilliant group of intellectuals to the conservative cause, including, for a while, such unlikely people as Garry Wills and Joan Didion, both (now) liberal writers.

What made Mr Buckley such a weather-changer? Money helped: his father was a multimillionaire and the young Buckley tapped both his personal wealth and his family's connections to finance his new magazine. But the young man also brought a rare collection of qualities to his self-appointed task.

The first was an appetite for bomb throwing. Just as radical artists like nothing better than baiting the bourgeoisie, Mr Buckley was at his happiest baiting the liberal establishment. His first book, â€œGod and Man at Yaleâ€, which he published shortly after graduating, took aim not just at his alma mater but at the academic elite in general.

The book turned him into a national sensation, with students queuing around the block to buy it and grandees such as McGeorge Bundy denouncing its author as a â€œtwisted and ignorant young manâ€. It also linked two of the themes that were to drive forward the rise of the conservative movementâ€”opposition to Keynesian economics (the man part of the book's title) and dislike of secular intellectuals (the God part).

Mr Buckley's second quality was his patrician style. He was a leading adornment of the establishment he liked to excoriate. He sailed his own boat and holidayed in St Tropez and St Moritz. He liked to hang out with such liberal luminaries as J.K. Galbraith (in the local book store in Gstaad, where they both went skiing, they would battle to get their books the best spot in the window). His wife, Patricia, was one of New York's leading socialites. Mr Buckley managed to be every liberal's favourite conservative as well as every conservative's favourite conservative.

Mr Buckley put both qualities on display in his television appearances. As the host of â€œFiring Lineâ€ from 1966 to 1999 he pioneered a type of televised political mud-wrestling that has since become tedious but was once regarded as ground-breaking. His style was all his ownâ€”he spoke in languid sentences, adorned with erudite allusions and polysyllabic flourishes, in an accent that had a touch of English-aristo. But he was not above raw populism. He was infamous for using the word â€œqueerâ€ on television (during a debate with Gore Vidal).

This belies the third thing that made him importantâ€”an inner core of seriousness. Mr Buckley was in it for more than the champagne. He was a committed Catholic, as were many of those around him at the Review. He felt that modern liberalism was corroding the foundation of Western civilisation, no less. For him, first things always came first.

Bill's children

Mr Buckley lived long enough to see the movement that he founded not just flourishing but ascendant. He saw two avowedly conservative presidents in the White House: Ronald Reagan, who was a close friend, and George W. Bush, who describes today's conservatives as â€œBill's childrenâ€. He saw his fellow conservatives create a network of institutions from think-tanks to rival conservative magazines such as the Weekly Standard. The lone prophet became the father of a new establishment.

But it was not clear that he was entirely happy with the direction of the movement. He grew disillusioned with the Bush administration and even said publicly that, if America were a parliamentary system, Mr Bush would have resigned. He was uncomfortable with the Iraq war. He engaged in a fierce public debate with Norman Podhoretz over whether Iraq is, as Mr Podhoretz claims, â€œan amazing successâ€.

Indeed, Mr Buckley's death comes at a time when the movement he created is at one of its lowest points in decades. Conservatives are uncertain where to go after the Bush-Cheney years. They are showing signs of intellectual exhaustion. And the crackpots, once exiled, are beginning to define conservatism once again. The movement has never needed a new William F. Buckley more than it does today.

Elki · February 2008

I trashed a lot of crap from this thread. You people have to learn how to comment on something without taking the thread completely off-topic and into some wide philosophical debate.

moniker · February 2008

The man was an oxymoron made manifest in a glorious, and verbose, level of open minded wrongness. Which is far more than can be said for any of the political commentators of today. The world certainly is a lesser place with his passing.

Eat it You Nasty Pig. · February 2008

Elki wrote: »

I trashed a lot of crap from this thread. You people have to learn how to comment on something without taking the thread completely off-topic and into some wide philosophical debate.

lord forbid a discussion of a philospher stray into talk of what he believed

Dracomicron · February 2008

The Colbert Report had a Buckley biographer on last night. It was as entertaining as one might imagine.

Newres · February 2008

Unfortunately it is the first time I have heard about him, but he gives great speeches from the clips that I have seen. Does anybody has a link to the whole Panama debate with Reagan ?

moniker · February 2008

Newres wrote: »

Unfortunately it is the first time I have heard about him, but he gives great speeches from the clips that I have seen. Does anybody has a link to the whole Panama debate with Reagan ?

The Hoover Institute has the whole series. A lot of the good ones, apparently, stream online. It didn't look like PBS has/kept a site for his show.

Dracomicron · February 2008

You just know George F. Will is going to say something beautiful about the man.

George F. Will wrote:

Those who think Jack Nicholson's neon smile is the last word in smiles never saw William F. Buckley's. It could light up an auditorium; it did light up half a century of elegant advocacy that made him an engaging public intellectual and the 20th century's most consequential journalist.

Before there could be Ronald Reagan's presidency, there had to be Barry Goldwater's candidacy. It made conservatism confident and placed the Republican Party in the hands of its adherents.

Before there could be Goldwater's insurgency, there had to be National Review magazine. From the creative clutter of its Manhattan offices flowed the ideological electricity that powered the transformation of American conservatism from a mere sensibility into a fighting faith and a blueprint for governance.

Before there was National Review, there was Buckley, spoiling for a philosophic fight, to be followed, of course, by a flute of champagne with his adversaries. He was 29 when, in 1955, he launched National Review with the vow that it "stands athwart history, yelling Stop."

Actually, it helped Bill take history by the lapels, shake it to get its attention, and then propel it in a new direction. Bill died Wednesday in his home, in his study, at his desk, diligent at his lifelong task of putting words together well and to good use.

Before his intervention -- often laconic in manner, always passionate in purpose -- in the plodding political arguments within the flaccid liberal consensus of the post-World War II intelligentsia, conservatism's face was that of another Yale man, Robert Taft, somewhat dour, often sour, three-piece suits, wire-rim glasses. The word "fun" did not spring to mind.

The fun began when Bill picked up his clipboard, and conservatives' spirits, by bringing his distinctive brio and elan to political skirmishing.

When young Goldwater decided to give politics a fling, he wrote to his brother: "It ain't for life and it might be fun." He was half right: Politics became his life and it was fun, all the way. Politics was not Bill's life -- he had many competing and compensating enthusiasms -- but it mattered to him, and he mattered to the course of political events.

One clue to Bill's talent for friendship surely is his fondness for this thought of Harold Nicolson's: "Only one person in a thousand is a bore, and he is interesting because he is one person in a thousand." Consider this from Bill's introduction to a collection of his writings titled "The Jeweler's Eye: A Book of Irresistible Political Reflections":

"The title is, of course, a calculated effrontery, the relic of an impromptu answer I gave once to a tenacious young interviewer who, toward the end of a very long session, asked me what opinion did I have of myself. I replied that I thought of myself as a perfectly average middle-aged American, with, however, a jeweler's eye for political truths. I suppressed a smile -- and watched him carefully record my words in his notebook. Having done so, he looked up and asked, 'Who gave you your jeweler's eye?' 'God,' I said, tilting my head skyward just a little. He wrote that down -- the journalism schools warn you not to risk committing anything to memory. 'Well,' -- he rose to go, smiling at last -- 'that settles that!' We have become friends."

Pat, Bill's beloved wife of 56 years, died last April. During the memorial service for her at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, a friend read lines from "Vitae Summa Brevis" by a poet she admired, Ernest Dowson:

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:

Out of a misty dream

Our path emerges for a while, then closes

Within a dream.

Bill's final dream was to see her again, a consummation of which his faith assured him. He had an aptitude for love -- of his son, his church, his harpsichord, language, wine, skiing, sailing.

He began his 60-year voyage on the turbulent waters of American controversy by tacking into the wind with a polemical book, "God and Man at Yale" (1951), that was a lovers' quarrel with his alma mater. And so at Pat's service the achingly beautiful voices of Yale's Whiffenpoofs were raised in their signature song about the tables down at Mory's, "the place where Louis dwells":

We will serenade our Louis

While life and voice shall last

Then we'll pass and be forgotten with the rest

Bill's distinctive voice permeated, and improved, his era. It will be forgotten by no one who had the delight of hearing it.

Gim · March 2008

"The Beatles are not merely awful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of antimusic."

"I won't insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said."

"Mr. Bush is in the hands of a fortune that will be unremitting on the point of Iraq. If he'd invented the Bill of Rights, it wouldn't get him out of his jam."

Those are some solid quotes, Mr. Buckley. Have a good rest.

Edit: Whoops, the marijuana one was actually somebody else.

Ghandi 2 · March 2008

Those are awesome. Although I couldn't find that quote about Bush on the terrible and probably horribly inaccurate quote websites. I should read one of his books. I can't believe I hadn't really heard much about him until he died, but he was quieter during my lifetime.

I think we can all agree that the political scene needs more people like him. RIP.

Gim · March 2008

Yeah, it's hard to verify quotes online. It's quite possible it's not his either. But the Beatles one is (circa 1964), and that is all that really matters.

Ghandi 2 · March 2008

True. He had a few other good ones about the failure of Bush and Iraq, but those aren't as funny as the one you said.

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William F. Buckley, RIP

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