We Are All in His Debt
KRISTOL, WILLIAM
William F. Buckley Jr. 1925-2008 We Are All in His Debt BY WILLIAM KRISTOL Here’s one measure of the man and the scope of his achievement: No serious historian will be able to write about...
...More broadly, Buckley was notable for a generosity of spirit and an intellectual ecumenism...
...He preferred to use his rapier-like wit, but he could pull out the heavy artillery when he needed to...
...After Buckley, there was Ronald Reagan...
...It’s true that he saw in conservatism a set of doctrines that transcended any one nation, or any one time, and that approached the status of political, even metaphysical, truths...
...And after he had established enough of a beachhead that frontal assaults against conservatism couldn’t succeed, he parried subsequent efforts to weaken his forces or blunt their effect...
...As a conservative, Buckley had a proper reverence for the greats of old...
...But Buckley wasn’t embarrassed to view his conservatism as being in the service of his patriotism, and to see in the conservative movement a means of defending our country and of defending freedom...
...And so Buckley himself fought...
...It was not just a happy coincidence that Buckley, in the course of promoting conservatism, also helped his country...
...Early on, he beat back crude attempts to delegitimize his efforts...
...He welcomed many kinds of conservatives, old and new, into the fold at National Review, and he welcomed the emergence of other conservative organs and institutions (including this magazine...
...1925-2008 We Are All in His Debt BY WILLIAM KRISTOL Here’s one measure of the man and the scope of his achievement: No serious historian will be able to write about 20th-century America without discussing Bill Buckley...
...Buckley, in one column, could combine captivating charm with ferocious polemic—and this combination was a source of his lasting appeal to the young...
...In watching over Buckley’s 82 years on this terrestrial orb, surely the morning stars sang together for joy...
...and that this hangs on our willingness to defend this extraordinary country of ours, so awfully mixed up, so much of the time...
...Buckley fought through to victor y—to as great a victory as was possible...
...Many of the tributes have emphasized his charm and civility, his generosity and decency—all qualities he had in spades...
...But Buckley was also a fi ghter...
...He knew that different kinds of conservatism could possess different elements of truth—and he would even acknowledge that liberalism might occasionally glimpse certain aspects of the just or the good...
...And he was extraordinarily kind and helpful to the young—including to those who were by no means his followers or even reliable allies...
...so crazily indulgent of its legion of wildly ungovernable miscreants— to defend it at all costs...
...Before Buckley, there was no conservative movement...
...This combination of principle and ecumenism was key to his own intellectual vitality, and to the health of the conservatism he fathered...
...From the beginning, he wasn’t deterred by the extraordinary odds against him...
...He didn’t ever relax his standards of critical judgment, but he recognized the limits of any one person’s or group’s judgment...
...His obituaries and eulogies are among his best writings—able at once to convey grief and gratitude...
...A few years ago, Charles Kesler called attention in these pages to Buckley’s explanation of the “basic assumption” behind his bestselling Blackford Oakes spy novels: that the survival of everything we cherish depends on the survival of the culture of liberty...
...so schizophrenic in its understanding of itself and its purposes...
...Indeed, because of the debilities of postwar liberalism, conservatism had to take as its task the defense of Western civilization itself.And so it did...
...In a letter to Willmoore Kendall, the philosopher Leo Strauss once referred admiringly to Buckley’s “great power of invective...
...Reagan was the most important American political fi gure of the latter half of the 20th century...
...But Buckley’s was a world for young men and women, a world of challenge and daring and excitement...
...With it all, this idealistic republic is the fi nest bloom of nationhood in all recorded time, and save only that God may decide that the land of the free and the home of the brave has outrun its license on history, we Americans must contend, struggle, and if necessary fi ght for America’s survival...
...As for Buckley the man: He lived life more fully than anyone I have known, with more joy, verve, and spirit...
...No one was more central to his emergence and success than Bill Buckley...
Vol. 13 • March 2008 • No. 25
