[Rhodes22-list] Great Sailor 'Gone West'

[Robert Skinner]

Thank you for the heads-up, Brad.

I respected his penetrating wit and intelligence, 
but often disagreed with Bucley.  Nevetheless, he
contributed to our culture in a very positive way.
And he was a sailor.

/Robert
-------------------------------------------------
Brad Haslett wrote:
> 
> You owe it to yourself to read his books on sailing.  Brad
> 
> February 27, 2008
>  William F. Buckley Jr. Is Dead at 82 By DOUGLAS
> MARTIN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/douglas_martin/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
> 
> William F. Buckley
> Jr.<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/william_f_jr_buckley/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
> who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a
> refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of
> American political discourse, died Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn.
> 
> Mr Buckley, 82, suffered from diabetes and emphysema, his son Christopher
> said, although the exact cause of death was not immediately known. He was
> found at his desk in the study of his home, his son said. "He might have
> been working on a column," Mr. Buckley said.
> 
> Mr. Buckley's winningly capricious personality, replete with ten-dollar
> words and a darting tongue writers loved to compare with an anteater's,
> hosted one of television's longest-running programs, "Firing Line," and
> founded and shepherded the influential conservative magazine, National
> Review.
> 
> He also found time to write more than 45 books, ranging from sailing
> odysseys to spy novels to celebrations of his own dashing daily life, and
> edit five more.
> 
> The more than 4.5 million words of his 5,600 biweekly newspaper columns, "On
> the Right," would fill 45 more medium-sized books.
> 
> Mr. Buckley's greatest achievement was making conservatism — not just
> electoral Republicanism, but conservatism as a system of ideas — respectable
> in liberal post-World War II America. He mobilized the young enthusiasts who
> helped nominate Barry Goldwater in 1964, and saw his dreams fulfilled when
> Reagan and the Bushes captured the Oval Office.
> 
> To Mr. Buckley's enormous delight, Arthur M.
> Schlesinger<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/arthur_m_jr_schlesinger/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
> Jr., the historian, termed him "the scourge of liberalism."
> 
> In remarks at National Review's 30th anniversary in 1985, President
> Reagan<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/ronald_wilson_reagan/index.html?inline=nyt-per>joked
> that he picked up his first issue of the magazine in a plain brown
> wrapper and still anxiously awaited his biweekly edition — "without the
> wrapper."
> 
> "You didn't just part the Red Sea — you rolled it back, dried it up and left
> exposed, for all the world to see, the naked desert that is statism," Mr.
> Reagan said.
> 
> "And then, as if that weren't enough," the president continued, "you gave
> the world something different, something in its weariness it desperately
> needed, the sound of laughter and the sight of the rich, green uplands of
> freedom."
> 
> The liberal advance had begun with the New Deal, and so accelerated in the
> next generation that Lionel Trilling, one of America's leading
> intellectuals, wrote in 1950: "In the United States at this time liberalism
> is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is
> the plain fact that there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in
> general circulation."
> 
> Mr. Buckley declared war on this liberal order, beginning with his
> blistering assault on
> Yale<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/y/yale_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>as
> a traitorous den of atheistic collectivism immediately after his
> graduation (with honors) from the university.
> 
> "All great biblical stories begin with Genesis," George Will wrote in the
> National Review in 1980. "And before there was Ronald Reagan, there was
> Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater there was National
> Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a
> spark in his mind, and the spark in 1980 has become a conflagration."
> 
> Mr. Buckley weaved the tapestry of what became the new American conservatism
> from libertarian writers like Max Eastman, free market economists like Milton
> Friedman<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/milton_friedman/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
> traditionalist scholars like Russell Kirk and anti-Communist writers like
> Whittaker Chambers. But the persuasiveness of his argument hinged not on
> these perhaps arcane sources, but on his own tightly argued case for a
> conservatism based on the national interest and a higher morality.
> 
> His most receptive audience became young conservatives first energized by
> Barry Goldwater's emergence at the Republican convention in 1960 as the
> right-wing alternative to Nixon. Some met in Sept., 1960, at Mr. Buckley's
> Connecticut estate to form Young Americans for Freedom. Their numbers — and
> influence — grew.
> 
> Nicholas Lemann<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/nicholas_lemann/index.html?inline=nyt-per>observed
> in Washington Monthly in 1988 that during the Reagan administration
> "the 5,000 middle-level officials, journalists and policy intellectuals that
> it takes to run a government" were "deeply influenced by Buckley's example."
> He suggested that neither moderate Washington insiders nor "Ed Meese-style
> provincial conservatives" could have pulled off the Reagan tax cut and other
> reforms.
> 
> Speaking of the true believers, Mr. Lemann continued, "Some of these people
> had been personally groomed by Buckley, and most of the rest saw him as a
> role model."
> 
> Mr. Buckley rose to prominence with a generation of talented writers
> fascinated by political themes, names like Mailer, Capote, Vidal, Styron and
> Baldwin. Like the others, he attracted controversy like a magnet. Even
> conservatives — from members of the John Birch Society to disciples of
> conservative author Ayn
> Rand<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/ayn_rand/index.html?inline=nyt-per>to
> George Wallace to moderate Republicans — frequently pounced on him.
> 
> Many of varied political stripes came to see his life as something of an art
> form — from racing through city streets on a motorcycle to a quixotic
> campaign for mayor of New York in 1965 to startling opinions like favoring
> the decriminalization of marijuana. He was often described as liberals'
> favorite conservative, particularly after suavely hosting an
> adaptation of Evelyn
> Waugh<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/evelyn_waugh/index.html?inline=nyt-per>'s
> "Brideshead Revisited" on public television in 1982.
> 
> Norman Mailer<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/norman_mailer/index.html?inline=nyt-per>may
> indeed have dismissed Mr. Buckley as a "second-rate intellect
> incapable
> of entertaining two serious thoughts in a row," but he could not help
> admiring his stage presence.
> 
> "No other act can project simultaneous hints that he is in the act of
> playing Commodore of the Yacht Club, Joseph Goebbels, Robert Mitchum,
> Maverick, Savonarola, the nice prep school kid next door, and the snows of
> yesteryear," Mr. Mailer said in an interview with Harpers in 1967.
> 
> Mr. Buckley's vocabulary, sparkling with phrases from distant eras and
> described in newspaper and magazine profiles as sesquipedalian
> (characterized by the use of long words) became the stuff of legend. Less
> kind commentators called him "pleonastic" (use of more words than
> necessary).
> 
> And, inescapably, there was that aurora of pure mischief. In 1985, David
> Remnick<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/david_remnick/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
> writing in The Washington
> Post<http://www.nytimes.com/mem/MWredirect.html?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/custom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=WPO>,
> said, "He has the eyes of a child who has just displayed a horrid use for
> the microwave oven and the family cat."
> 
> William Francis Buckley Jr., was born in Manhattan on Nov. 24, 1925, the
> sixth of the 10 children of Aloise Steiner Buckley and William Frank Buckley
> Jr. (According to "William F. Buckley, Jr., Patron Saint of the
> Conservatives," a biography written by John B. Judis, Mr. Buckley's sister
> Patricia said he was christened Francis instead of Frank because there was
> no saint named Frank. Later, in "Who's Who" entries and elsewhere, he used
> Frank.)
> 
> The elder Mr. Buckley made a fortune in the oil fields of Mexico, and
> educated his children with personal tutors at Great Elm, the family estate
> in Sharon, Conn. They also attended exclusive Roman Catholic schools in
> England and France.
> 
> Young William absorbed his family's conservatism along with its deep
> Catholicism. At 6, he wrote the King of England demanding he repay his
> country's war debt. At 14, he followed his brothers to the Millbrook School,
> a preparatory school 15 miles across the New York state line from Sharon.
> 
> In his spare time at Millbrook, young Bill typed schoolmates' papers for
> them, charging $1 a paper, with a 25-cent surcharge for correcting the
> grammar.
> 
> He did not neglect politics, showing up uninvited to a faculty meeting to
> complain about a teacher abridging his right to free speech and ardently
> opposing United States' involvement in World War II. His father wrote him to
> suggest he "learn to be more moderate in the expression of your views."
> 
> He graduated from Millbrook in 1943, then spent a half a year at the
> University of Mexico studying Spanish, which had been his first language. He
> served in the Army from 1944 to 1946, and managed to make second lieutenant
> after first putting colleagues off with his mannerisms.
> 
> "I think the army experience did something to Bill," his sister, Patricia,
> told Mr. Judis. "He got to understand people more."
> 
> Mr. Buckley then entered Yale where he studied political science, economics
> and history; established himself as a fearsome debater; was elected chairman
> of the Yale Daily News, and joined Skull and Bones, the most prestigious
> secret society.
> 
> As a senior, he was given the honor of delivering the speech for Yale's
> Alumni Day celebration, but was replaced after the university's
> administration objected to his strong attacks on the university. He
> responded by writing his critique in the book that brought him to national
> attention, in part because he gave the publisher, Regnery, $10,000 to
> advertise it.
> 
> Published in 1951, "God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic
> Freedom,'" charged the powers at Yale with having an atheistic and
> collectivist bent and called for the firing of faculty members who advocated
> values not in accord with those that the institution should be upholding —
> which was to say, his own.
> 
> Among the avalanche of negative reviews, the one in Atlantic by McGeorge
> Bundy, a Yale graduate, was conspicuous. He found the book "dishonest in its
> use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author."
> 
> But Peter Viereck, writing in The New York Times Sunday Book Review viewed
> the book as "a necessary counterbalance."
> 
> After a year in the Central Intelligence
> Agency<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/central_intelligence_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org>in
> Mexico City (his case officer was E. Howard Hunt, who went on to win
> celebrity for his part in the Watergate break-in), Mr. Buckley went to work
> for the American Mercury magazine, but resigned after spotting anti-Semitic
> tendencies in the magazine.
> 
> Over the next few years, Mr. Buckley worked as a freelance writer and
> lecturer, and wrote a second book with L. Brent Bozell, his brother-in-law.
> Published in 1954, "McCarthy and His Enemies" was a sturdy defense of the
> senator from Wisconsin who was then in the throes of his campaign against
> communists, liberals and the Democratic
> Party<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/d/democratic_party/index.html?inline=nyt-org>
> .
> 
> In 1955, Mr. Buckley started National Review as voice for "the disciples of
> truth, who defend the organic moral order" with a $100,000 gift from his
> father. The first issue, which came out in November, claimed the publication
> "stands athwart history yelling Stop."
> 
> It proved it by lining up squarely behind Southern segregationists, saying
> blacks should be denied the vote. After some conservatives objected, Mr.
> Buckley suggested instead that both uneducated whites and blacks should not
> be allowed to vote.
> 
> Mr. Buckley did not accord automatic support to Republicans, starting with
> Eisenhower's campaign for re-election in 1956. National Review's tepid
> endorsement: "We prefer Ike."
> 
> Circulation increased from 16,000 in 1957 to 125,000 at the time of
> Goldwater's candidacy in 1964, and leveled off to around 100,000 in 1980. It
> is now 155,000. The magazine has always had to be subsidized by readers'
> donations.
> 
> Along with offering a forum to big-gun conservatives like Russell Kirk,
> James Burnham and Robert Nisbet, National Review cultivated the career of
> several younger writers, including Garry
> Wills<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/garry_wills/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
> Joan Didion<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/joan_didion/index.html?inline=nyt-per>and
> John Leonard, who would shake off the conservative attachment and go
> their leftward ways.
> 
> National Review also helped define the conservative movement by isolating
> cranks from Mr. Buckley's chosen mainstream.
> 
> "Bill was responsible or rejecting the John Birch Society and the other
> kooks who passed off anti-Semitism or some such as conservatism," Hugh
> Kenner, a biographer of Ezra
> Pound<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/ezra_pound/index.html?inline=nyt-per>and
> a frequent contributor to National Review told The Washington Post.
> "Without Bill — if he had decided to become an academic or a businessman or
> something else — without him, there probably would be no respectable
> conservative movement in this country."
> 
> Mr. Buckley's personal visibility was magnified by his "Firing Line" program
> which ran from 1966 to 1999. First carried on WOR-TV and then on the Public
> Broadcasting Service<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/p/public_broadcasting_service/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
> it became the longest running show hosted by a single host — beating out Johnny
> Carson<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/johnny_carson/index.html?inline=nyt-per>by
> three years. He led the conservative team in 1,504 debates on topics
> like
> "Resolved: The women's movement has been disastrous."
> 
> There were exchanges on foreign policy with the likes of Norman Thomas;
> feminism with Germaine Greer and race relations with James Baldwin. Not a
> few viewers thought Mr. Buckley's toothy grin before he scored a point
> resembled nothing so much as a switchblade.
> 
> To New York City politician Mark
> Green<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/mark_green/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
> he purred, "You've been on the show close to 100 times over the years. Tell
> me, Mark, have you learned anything yet."
> 
> But Harold Macmillan, former prime minister of Britain, flummoxed the
> master. "Isn't this show over yet?" he asked.
> 
> At age 50, Mr. Buckley added two pursuits to his repertoire — he took up the
> harpsichord and became novelist. Some 10 of the novels are spy tales
> starring Blackford Oakes, who fights for the American way and bedded the
> Queen of England in the first book.
> 
> Others of his books included a historical novel with Elvis
> Presley<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/elvis_presley/index.html?inline=nyt-per>as
> a significant character, another starring Fidel
> Castro<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/fidel_castro/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
> a reasoned critique of anti-Semitism, and journals that more than succeeded
> dramatizing a life of taste and wealth — his own. For example, in "Cruising
> Speed: A Documentary," published in 1971, he discussed the kind of meals he
> liked to eat.
> 
> "Rawle could give us anything, beginning with lobster Newburgh and ending
> with Baked Alaska," he wrote. "We settle on a fish chowder, of which he is
> surely the supreme practitioner, and cheese and bacon sandwiches, grilled,
> with a most prickly Riesling picked up at St. Barts for peanuts," he wrote.
> 
> Mr. Buckley's spirit of fun was apparent in his 1965 campaign for mayor of
> New York on the ticket of the Conservative Party. When asked what he would
> do if he won, he answered, "Demand a recount." He got 13.4 percent of the
> vote.
> 
> For Murray Kempton<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/murray_kempton/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
> one of his many friends on the left, the Buckley press conference style
> called up "an Edwardian resident commissioner reading aloud the 39 articles
> of the Anglican establishment to a conscript of assembled Zulus."
> 
> Unlike his brother James who served as a United States senator from New
> York, Mr. Buckley generally avoided official government posts. He did serve
> from 1969 to 1972 as a presidential appointee to the National Advisory
> Commission on Information, and as a member of the United States delegation
> to the United Nations<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_nations/index.html?inline=nyt-org>in
> 1973.
> 
> The merits of the argument aside, Mr. Buckley irrevocably proved that his
> brand of candor did not lend itself to public life when an Op-Ed article he
> wrote for The New York Times offered a partial cure for the AIDS epidemic:
> "Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm to
> prevent common needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the
> victimization of homosexuals," he wrote.
> 
> In his last years, as honors like the Presidential Medal of Freedom came his
> way, Mr. Buckley gradually loosened his grip on his intellectual empire. In
> 1998, he ended his frenetic schedule of public speeches (some 70 a year over
> 40 years, he once estimated). In 1999, he stopped "Firing Line," and in
> 2004, he relinquished his voting stock in National Review. He wrote his last
> spy novel the 11th in his series), sold his sailboat and stopped playing the
> harpsichord publicly.
> 
> But he began a new historical novel and kept up his columns, including one
> on the "bewitching power" of "The Sopranos" television series. He commanded
> wide attention by criticizing the Iraq war as a failure.
> 
> On April 15, 2007, his wife, the former Patricia Alden Austin Taylor, who
> had carved out a formidable reputation as a socialite and philanthropist but
> considered her role as a homemaker, mother and wife most important, died.
> Mr. and Mrs. Buckley called each other "Ducky."
> 
> He is survived by his son, Christopher, of Washington, D.C.; his sisters
> Priscilla L. Buckley, of Sharon, Conn., Patricia Buckley Bozell, of
> Washington, D.C., and Carol Buckley, of Columbia, S.C.; his brothers James
> L., of Sharon, and F. Reid, of Camden, S.C., a granddaughter and a grandson
> 
> In the end it was Mr. Buckley's graceful, often self-deprecating wit that
> endeared him to others. In his spy novel "Who's on First," he described the
> possible impact of his National Review through his character Boris Bolgin.
> 
> " 'Do you ever read the National Review, Jozsef?' asks Boris Bolgin, the
> chief of KGB<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/k/kgb/index.html?inline=nyt-org>counter
> intelligence for Western Europe, 'it is edited by this young
> bourgeois fanatic.' "