BILL BUCKLEY'S SAD FAREWELL
June 29, 2004

by Joe Sobran

     Over more than half a century, William F. Buckley 
Jr. has gone from enfant terrible to eminence grise of 
the American conservative movement. He first made his 
mark with GOD AND MAN AT YALE (1951), a small book 
arguing that his alma mater was promoting left-wing views 
that would disturb most of its alumni; at the time, in 
the heat of the McCarthy era, that seemed controversial. 
It was only natural that his second book should be a 
defense of Joe McCarthy himself.

     In 1955, before he was 30, he founded NATIONAL 
REVIEW, which soon became the country's foremost 
conservative magazine. Now 78, he has finally 
relinquished control of the magazine, which is barely 
recognizable as the one he launched those many moons ago.

     NATIONAL REVIEW was chronically short on money, but, 
at the beginning, long on writing talent. Its 
contributors included such brainy and stylish 
intellectuals as James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, 
Russell Kirk, Willmoore Kendall, and Richard Weaver. They 
were not only anti-Communist; they were anti-liberal and, 
more specifically, anti-Eisenhower, believing that the 
Republican Party had abandoned the solid principles of 
Robert Taft.

     The star of the show was Buckley himself, who had 
earned a reputation as a brilliantly witty debater at 
Yale. One liberal called him "the most dangerous 
undergraduate Yale has seen in years." Dangerous! 
Tweaking liberal noses in those days could get you called 
a fascist and Nazi by the folks who accused McCarthy of 
hysterical smears.

     Buckley and his magazine made the most of such 
ironies. They pretty much invented fun-loving 
conservatism, ploddingly imitated today by Rush Limbaugh. 
As the country moved leftward in the Sixties, Buckley 
became the first conservative celebrity, so familiar that 
comedians got big laughs imitating his haughty demeanor. 
Nobody else was on hand to nail liberals at every turn.

     Today it's hard to remember how controversial, and 
exciting, Buckley was in those days. His assimilation to 
the ranks of the respectable was completed in 1980, when 
a NATIONAL REVIEW subscriber, recently deceased, was 
elected president of the United States. I was on the 
magazine's staff at the time, and I remember Bill's 
delight in sharing jokes with his pal Ron.

     Everyone at the magazine loved Bill. His charm was 
real. Despite his lofty public persona, he was warm, 
hilarious, and infinitely considerate and generous. A fat 
book could be written about his quiet good deeds, if 
anyone could trace them all; he performed them 
unostentatiously, with tact and delicacy.

     Unfortunately, Bill tended to mistake his personal 
success and Reagan's political victories for the final 
triumph of conservatism. He forgave Reagan's compromises 
and made some of his own. He didn't seem to notice that 
during the Reagan years, the Federal Government continued 
to grow at a rate that would have horrified Robert Taft. 
He was nearly as indulgent to the first President Bush, 
another Yale man, as he had been to Reagan.

     In recent years, NATIONAL REVIEW has become remote 
from the thing it was in 1955. Buckley has turned it over 
to young neoconservatives with little conception of its 
original standards, who have supported the new Bush 
administration, and especially the Iraq war, with 
fanatical zeal, without regard to any philosophy that can 
be called conservative.

     Buckley seems to realize this. In announcing his 
retirement to the NEW YORK TIMES, he admitted that the 
growth of the Federal Government under the current 
President Bush "bothers me enormously." As for the war 
itself, he added, "With the benefit of minute hindsight, 
Saddam Hussein wasn't the kind of extra-territorial 
menace that was assumed by the administration one year 
ago. If I knew then what I know now about what kind of 
situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war."

     So there spake the founder of NATIONAL REVIEW. I've 
often wondered if he had qualms about his callow, 
warmongering successors; I guess I have the answer now.

     Sad to reflect that the magazine has forsaken not 
only its founding purpose -- to "stand athwart history 
yelling 'Stop'" -- but its founding philosophy of 
severely limited government. That philosophy was hard 
enough to reconcile with the Cold War; it's impossible to 
square with endless imperialist wars.

     It's some meager consolation that Bill Buckley 
acknowledges, however implicitly, the distance between 
the magazine he created and the one from which he has now 
taken his leave.

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