William Buckley passed away last night. Rick Perlstein has a kind epitaph up about him. I wouldn’t have been so forgiving. But I try not to speak ill of the dead for a day or two.
About The Author

BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
“But I try not to speak ill of the dead for a day or two.”
Not me! I’ve already danced the horah around the room, and will soon be doing the hokey pokey.
Ding dong, the witch is dead!
On the birmingham church bombings (published just days afterwards):
“Let us gently say the fiend who set off the bomb does not have the sympathy of the white population in the South; in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur — of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro.
And let it be said that the convulsions that go on, and are bound to continue, have resulted from revolutionary assaults on the status quo, and a contempt for the law, which are traceable to the Supreme Court’s manifest contempt for the settled traditions of Constitutional
practice. Certainly it now appears that Birmingham’s Negroes will never be content so long as the white population is free to be free.”
My only reservation about remembering Buckley the racist is that I cannot remember ever hearing such things from him in my post-1965 lifetime. Did he ever disavow his old racism? I don’t know and I’m curious.
Likewise. I don’t recall anything of that sort from him during my lifetime, either. He seems to have moderated a lot of his views over time, coming out in favor of drug legalization and often opposing many of the more ridiculous extremes of the modern conservative movement he helped found.
Buckley, at the end of the day, was a reasonable man. Wrong, in my opinion, about many things, but his mind was open to being changed, and he reached his conclusions through careful reasoning. In any case, he was a far better man than most of his ideological successors, and we’d probably be better off today if people like Buckley were still driving right-wing ideology than people like Karl Rove.
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Despite this dismal stance, Buckley did in fact change and renounce racism by the mid-1960s, in part because his horror at the terrorist tactics used by white supremacists to fight the civil rights movement, in part because of the moral witness of friends like Garry Wills who confronted Buckley with the immorality of his politics. Buckley’s change was by no means pre-ordained. Some of his friends from the 1950s, notably Revilo Oliver remained adamant racialists (Oliver moved from National Review to the John Birch Society to the fringes of neo-Nazism).
There are a host of other issues on which Buckley moderated his politics. In the 1980s, he said that if he were a black South African he would probably support the ANC, a statement that shocked fellow conservatives. This independence of mind continued to the end of his life. Not too long ago, he admitted that the Iraq war was a ghastly mistake, again annoying his intellectual fellow travelers. He was learning until his last days.
‘I Don’t Stoop. I Merely Conquer’
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
We’re almost grateful for an intellectual opponent that understands the rules of debate.
“Not too long ago, he admitted that the Iraq war was a ghastly mistake, again annoying his intellectual fellow travelers.”
And no matter what, that right there puts him ahead of 95% of the guys on the other side…and more than a damn few of our “own side.”
I grew up in a conservative household and for most of my childhood, I thought Buckley was incredibly cool. I loved his use of arcane words that sent me running to the dictionary. I loved that he was so arch and snobby. I thought it took some nerve to completely act like an elitist asshole with no shame about it.
Of course, by age eleven, I parted ways with Buckley and my father over the Civil Rights Movement. I now pass judgement on his life by saying he was wicked and vain. But, he sure did have a great vocabulary and he was always out-front about representing upper class conservatives.
It is poetic, isn’t it, that Buckley and movement conservatism should die in the same year?
Only one of them will be missed at all, but still…
Once a spook, always a spook.
Wikipedia
Riiiight…
Don’tcha just LOVE those little coincidences?
And who published the book?
Regnery Publishing.
Nice.
He was being set up to be a spokesman for the right wing of the CIA even then.
Once a right wing spook always a right wing spook.
Good riddance to bad, BAD garbage.
Plus…the arrogant, idiot motherfucker couldn’t even write an intelligible English sentence.
from Last Call for Blackford Oakes
Jesus LORD!!!
Good Old Ronnie, a serial maturbator. I canb see it now. Right up there in the Ovaltine Office.
But he WAS at ease with himself.
Has any Irishman ever written such a load of bollocks and bullshit?
How many commas does it take to screw in a broken lightbulb?
No RIP from me.
RAFAAP
Rest As Far Away As Possible.
If there is a hell it just got even duller.
AG
I didn’t even realize that he was still alive, having been superceded by the rabid “conservatives” of today.
There have been worse , there will be worse
oops and that was supposed to have gone under DaveW’s comment!
Buckley drove the Birchers out of the conservative movement, agonizingly applied his libertarian principles to advocate an end to drug prohibition, and opposed rightwing antisemitism. He was as close to an intellectual as the American Right has had, and by contrast shows the mental midget status of the current crop of wannabes like Kristol. He was wrong about most things, IMO, but did have some honor, again something entirely absent from today’s Right.
He wrote some mildly amusing spy novels and, for me, passes the “have a beer with” test — though in his case it would probably have to be 40-year-old single malt or something.
He is also credited with enabling Ronald Reagan to become president, which is absolutely unforgivable. If not for that, his legacy would hover around Not So Bad territory.
One thing I appreciate about William Buckley is how he took up the fight against antisemitism, particularly antisemitism within right-wing circles. People often don’t realize how antisemitic the country was in 1950s. It is at least partly Buckley’s doing that it is far less so today.
I can’t think of a talk or interview program that was as thought-provoking as Buckley’s Firing Line. It was a place where ideas were discussed in an intelligent manner, and it was not all politics. One show that stands out in my memory was Groucho Marx talking with Buckley about the nature of humor. They sort of talked past each other, but still, it was better than your usual television fare. From better than your usual conservative rhetorician.
National Review Takes A Trip Down Memory Lane
Posted by Clif on 01/3/05 at 10:11 am
Category: America’s Shittiest Website
National Review RestroomsThose crazy kids over at The Corner at National Review are all giddy and bubbly because this is the 50th Anniversary Year for National Review. They promise to print some of the greatest hits from their archives. Says K-Lo herself: “I love the archive stuff myself.” Do you think this is some of the archive stuff that K-Lo loves and that we can expect to see reprinted?
From unsigned National Review editorial printed August 24, 1957, titled “Why the South Must Prevail” (probably by William F. Buckley Jr.):
The central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists
From Richard Weaver, “Integration is Communization,” published by NR on July 13, 1957:
`Integration’ and `Communization’ are, after all, pretty closely synonymous. In light of what is happening today, the first may be little more than a euphemism for the second. It does not take many steps to get from the `integrating’ of facilities to the `communizing’ of facilities, if the impulse is there.
From an interview of Senator Richard Russell published in NR, also in 1957:
As you know, Mr. Jones, there are some communities and some states where the Negro’s voting potential is very great. We wish at all costs to avoid a repetition of the Reconstruction period when newly freed slaves made the laws and undertook their enforcement. We feel even more strongly about miscegenation or racial amalgamation.
The experience of other countries and civilizations has demonstrated that the separation of the races biologically is highly preferable to amalgamation.
I know of nothing in human history that would lead us to conclude that miscegenation is desirable.
From James J. Kilpatrick, “Right and Power in Arkansas,” publised August 28, 1957:
The State of Arkansas and Orval Faubus are wholly in the right; they have acted lawfully; they are entitled to those great presumptions of the law which underlie the whole of our judicial tradition . . . Conceding, for the sake of discussion, that the Negro pupil has these new rights, what of the white community? Has it none?
From an unsigned NR editorial published on June 2, 1964:
But whatever the exact net result in the restricted field of school desegregation, what a price we are paying for Brown! It would be ridiculous to hold the Supreme Court solely to blame for the ludicrously named `civil rights movement’ — that is, the Negro revolt.
From an unsigned NR editorial published on July 2, 1963:
The Negro people have been encouraged to ask for, and to believe they can get, nothing less than the evanescence of color, and they are doomed to founder on the shoals of existing human attitudes — their own included.
In fact, I’m going to send an email to K-Lo, who breathlessly announced the proposed trip down memory lane, and ask her if any stops are planned at these destinations.
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“For though the world stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”
Oh wait, that was someone else.
I struggle to recall anything I agreed with WFB, but I will always respect him as someone who challenged my thinking and the thinking of others.
He was a hugely important man dedicated to keeping all of us honest and we all benefit from that.
What I was surprised by reading his obit was that he spent a lot of WWII in Mexico, arguably dodging the War