|
|
|
|
The Real Bill Buckley
 In
1993 I pretty much defied William F.
Buckley Jr., my boss at National Review for 21 years, to fire
me, and he
did.  I
was sorry it had to end that way, but things had become
very strained between us. I’ve told my side of that story before.
What
I’ve never told is what Bill was really like. And now that I want to, I
hardly know where to start.
I just got
the news that Bill has emphysema and has checked into the Mayo Clinic. At
80, he hasn’t looked well lately in his television appearances, so this
shouldn’t have been a shock. But it’s a shock, all right —
such a shock that I’m not really writing, I’m babbling.
Like
millions of young conservatives in the 1960s, I adored Bill Buckley. I met him
at my Michigan university in 1971, and a few months later he invited me to
come to New York to write for him. I was thrilled, and on September 11,
1972, I went to work at National Review’s Manhattan
office, a starstruck kid of 26. The biggest news story was still being called
“the Watergate caper.”
What fun it
was! In private Bill was every bit as witty as his public reputation, but warmer
and funnier. He kept the office as happy as a nest of singing birds, with
affectionate and gracious gestures for all of us. It pains me to recall how
callow I was in those days, but he was always too encouraging to let me feel
like anything but a prodigy.
He had
help. Two of his sisters worked in the office too, Priscilla, his managing
editor, and his kid sister Carole, whose desk was next to mine. They shared
that Buckley radiance and humor. So, I learned, did all his siblings. Magic
seemed to run in the family.
![[Breaker quote for The Real Bill Buckley: Happy memories]](2006breakers/060530.gif) Bill
had founded the magazine in 1955, and
had gathered and fostered remarkable young writing talents: Garry Wills,
John Leonard, Joan Didion, Arlene Croce, George Will, Richard Brookhiser, Paul
Gigot, and many others were among his discoveries. He’d also
attracted such notable older conservative intellectuals as James Burnham,
Willmoore Kendall, Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, and Richard Weaver. These
brilliant, headstrong people sometimes had sharp differences among
themselves, but Bill’s genially magnetic personality usually kept the
peace.
Over the
years I came to know another side of Bill. When I had serious troubles, he was
a generous friend who did everything he could to help me without being
asked. And I wasn’t the only one. I gradually learned of many others
he’d quietly rescued from adversity. He’d supported a
once-noted libertarian in his destitute old age, when others had forgotten
him. He’d helped two pals of mine out of financial difficulties. And on
and on. Everyone seemed to have a story of Bill’s solicitude. When you
told your own story to a friend, you’d hear one from him. It was as if
we were all Bill Buckley’s children.
It went far
beyond sharing his money. One of Bill’s best friends was Hugh Kenner,
the great critic who died two years ago. Hugh was hard of hearing, and once,
after a 1964 dinner with Hugh and Charlie Chaplin, Bill scolded Hugh for being
too stubborn to use a hearing aid. Here were the greatest comedian of the
age and the greatest student of comedy, and Hugh had missed much of the
conversation! Later Hugh’s wife told me how grateful Hugh had been
for that scolding. Nobody else would have dared speak to her husband that
way. Only a true friend would. If Bill saw you needed a little hard truth,
he’d tell you, even if it pained him to say it.
I once
spent a long evening with one of Bill’s old friends from Yale, whose
name I won’t mention. He told me movingly how Bill stayed with him to
comfort him when his little girl died of brain cancer. If Bill was your friend,
he’d share your suffering when others just couldn’t bear to.
What a great heart — eager to spread joy, and ready to share grief!
Compared
with all this, the political differences that finally drove us apart seem trivial
now. I saw the same graciousness in his relations with everyone from
presidents to menials. I learned a lot of things from Bill Buckley, but the best
thing he taught me was how to be a Christian. May Jesus comfort him now.
Joseph Sobran |
||
| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
|
||
|
||
|
Archive Table of Contents
Current Column Return to the SOBRAN’S home page. |
||
|
|
| FGF E-Package columns by Joe Sobran, Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried, and others are available in a special e-mail subscription provided by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation. Click here for more information. |