He was the maker of the American conservative movement—a master fusionist.
Until Bill Buckley came along, says William A. Rusher, who worked beside him for thirty years as publisher of National Review, “there was a congeries of ill assorted half-enemies. He brought them together into a unified movement by pointing out they all had the same enemy—the liberals.”1
“He did it all,” says NR editor Rich Lowry. “He combined George Will, the columnist; Rush Limbaugh, the voice; Tim Russert, the interviewer; Ann Coulter, the liberals’ bête noir; and Tom Clancy, the novelist.”2
Because of his life and work, says National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez, “conservatives will never be seriously lost in the wilderness.”3
He was philosophically conservative but temperamentally free-spirited. He was fearless, says Thomas (Dusty) Rhodes, chairman of National Review. “Nothing got to him, sailing, skiing, nothing.” His courage derived from his religion—he believed “he was going to Heaven.” Frances Bronson, his personal assistant for four decades, agrees: “His faith was his grounding.”4
He never pandered in his writing. Says NR senior editor Jay Nordlinger, he sought “the right word, not just big words.”5
He could not bear to be idle or without a book. “His nightmare,” says Kate O’Beirne, president of the National Review Institute, “was to be stuck somewhere where he had nothing to read—not even at a street corner.”6
Among the books that made a difference in his life—Albert Jay Nock’s Memoirs of a Superfluous Man and Bruce Marshall’s Father Malachy’s Miracle.
He revered his father, he loved Our Lady, and he was bereft when his wife, Pat, died before he did.
He viewed Communism as the great enemy of America and the West, an enemy to be defeated, not accommodated.
He saw his goals achieved, says longtime friend and colleague Daniel Oliver: “Communism defeated, free market economics widely understood if not widely enough practiced, and some sense that government could be, not the solution, but the problem.”7
He will live on in the sturdy journal of conservative opinion he founded; in his books, columns, speeches, and debates; in television interviews by him and of him; in the editorials, reviews, forewords, and letters he composed; in a mighty stream of words unequalled—according to the historian George Nash—by any writer of the last century.
Bill Buckley could have been the playboy of the Western world but chose instead to be the St. Paul of the modern American conservative movement. His vision of ordered liberty shaped and molded and guided American conservatism from its infancy to its maturity, from a cramped suite of offices on Manhattan’s East Side to the Oval Office of the White House, from a set of “irritable mental gestures” to a political force that transformed American politics.