As soon as the news of William F. Buckley Jr.’s passing came this morning, my thoughts went back to my undergraduate days at Oklahoma State University in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I had been an energetic conservative activist with Young Americans for Freedom and Teen Age Republicans since high school and among the very first serious books I read as an adolescent was his “God and Man at Yale.” That was followed by “Did you ever see a dream walking,” which was Buckley’s compilation of and commentary upon scholarly essays by other conservatives on a variety of the major issues of the day.
To say Buckley had a profound effect upon me and millions of my contemporaries does not begin to do the man justice. I thought of my days at OSU because there was only one newsstand in town that stocked National Review and I couldn’t wait for each new issue to arrive. Even at a land grant state school like OSU, the liberal orthodoxy in the classroom was suffocating, so every NR issue was like a gulp of fresh air. Buckley was a lifeline to a world of ideas and thought whose depth and richness scaled the heart of the Western intellectual tradition.
I loved the magazine’s rebellious, irreverent attitude, the wit and grace of its composition and the wonderfully expansive learning and wisdom epitomized by so many of the bylines it offered, particularly those of Frank Meyer and James Burnham. Meyer’s fusionist conservatism melded perfectly with my admiration of Ronald Reagan, born of watching The Speech in 1964. And Burnham’s “Suicide of the West” remains to this day for me the authoritative dissection of the fatal flaws of contemporary liberalism. All of this was the essential preface to the Reagan years. Without Buckley, it is unlikely anybody would ever have uttered the words “President Ronald Reagan,” except perhaps as a lost possibility.
But Buckley’s influence went far beyond his books and magazine. There was, for example, “Firing Line” on PBS, which was a continuing feast of Buckley’s rhetorical and logical demolition of whatever hapless liberal was brave enough to come on the show. What a delight it was that Buckley’s victims couldn’t seem to help themselves, attracted as they were by his rapier wit and generous spirit while knowing they had little hope of prevailing in any contest requiring intellectual logic and vigor or knowledge of history. It was as if the liberal Goliath was re-slain with every show, the spectacle of which instilled inspiration and optimism to those of us who saw ourselves as the campus Davids of the Right.
I could go on, but suffice it to say WFB was a man who epitomized the axiom that the pen is, finally, mightier than the sword, at least so long as it is wielded on behalf of enduring truth. His public appearances in recent years have become steadily less frequent and new generations have come of age without knowing, much less appreciating, the power of his wit and intellect. Even so, Buckley was one of a very few men from the 20th Century of whom it must be said he shaped his day and those of all who followed him.
Requiescat In Pace, indeed.
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