Bill Buckley is dead. A world ends.

Bummer. I always thought it was kind of sad that he lived to see the descent of his magazine into another belligerent mouthpiece of the modern Republican Party. Seriously: K. Lo? Jonah Goldberg? Mark Levine? These are the intellectual beacons of Conservatism now?

Fair enough. I'll understand if Rod wants to delete that post.

I remember as a kid watching Firing Line and marveling at the civility and good humor Buckley always treated those he disagreed with. Firing Line was always my idea of how intelligent adults should discuss issues. Although I agreed with him mightily, he's impact on America's intellectual community and political discourse was profound.

Lord have mercy.

Memory eternal.

Like many here, I cut my political teeth on Bill Buckley and the National Review. So much so that I have often said that politics was my first religion.

Later in life, I came to be converted to Catholicism (Buckley's own religion, for those not in the know) and in some respects, left behind the Republican Party and, to a lesser extent, National Review and Buckley.

But despite my many and sometimes acrid disputes with the Republican Party, I have never been estranged from its grand gentleman, Bill Buckley. He was indeed a giant and though I never met him, he was a seminal influence on my life.

Mary Most Holy, pray for thy son WFB. God bless Bill Buckley. Requiescat in pacem.

Whether you consider American conservatism a good thing or a bad one, you have to recognize one thing: without this man, it wouldn't exist in any form we would recognize. How, over a period of decades, could an such an agglomeration of wildly disparate, jarring, logically incompatible and often bitterly opposed people and ideas be kept more or less together in public discourse? When such a thing happens in history, it often has one overwhelming explanation--the power of an incandescent, utterly dominating personality. There has never been a better example of this than Buckley. He found conservatism an array of eccentrics on the fringes of society. He leaves it an integral and formidable component of the intellectual life of his country. His undeniable intellectual powers--and,even more, his wit and personal charm, by which millions of opponents were reluctantly delighted--were the sine qua non of that development. He--not Goldwater, not Reagan--was the founder of the feast. For without him, there would have been no Goldwater, no Reagan, no nothing. Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and may the Perpetual Light shine upon him.

Well put, Erin. I agree- it seems like we are waiting for the new voices of conservatism to arise.
How I dearly loved Firing Line, and the civil exchange of ideas. It was so different from today's coarsenss, in everything from the behavior of the guests to the theme music.

Rod,

I hope this doesn't sound impossibly pedantic, but I believe what you want is requiescat in pace, not pacem. You aren't the only one I've seen doing this recently. Perhaps it's a contamination with dona nobis pacem or some such. As you say, though, may he rest in peace, in any case.

Not to be insensitive (and I'm no liberal), but Buckley was hardly the hero he's being made out to be here. He was a xenophobic fascist.

He once told Gore Vidal, "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I will sock you in your goddamn face, and you will stay plastered.”

National Review will sing his praises, but they totally ignored Dorothy Day, a true hero, when she died.

As Bill Kauffman writes, "Despite its pro-Catholic tendency, and despite its commendable custom of commemorating the passing of worthy people even when some of these did not belong to the conservatives, National Review paid neither respect nor attention to the passing of Dorothy Day, while around the same time it published a respectful R.I.P. column in honor of Oswald Mosley, the onetime leader of the British Fascist Party."

Read more about it here: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0GER/is_2000_Summer/ai_63500751

I was in junior high school when I stumbled on to Bill Buckley one Saturday morning while channel surfing. He was hosting "Firing Line" on the local public television station in my home state. He made nerdiness seem cool. Being a nerd mysef and an instinctive contrarian at that impressionable age, Bill Buckley became my intelletual mentor and his "little magazine" my political Bible.

Greater than the power of his own writings was his influence as an organizer of other conservative intellectuals. "National Review" was a mail-order version of a traditional European salon. "Firing Line" brought that salon into living rooms every week. The most influential book he wrote (aside from "God and Man at Yale") was an anthology he edited in the 1970s entitled "American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century" and subtitled "Did You Ever See A Dream Walking?" (which also doubled as the title of his introductory essay). That volume introduced a host of conservative writers (some already dead by then) and illuminated the various strains in American conservatism that continue to be debated today and which are often a fruitful focus of this blog (traditional vs libertarian; Burkean/organic conservativism vs free-market economics; internationalism vs. "America First").

Bill Buckley was a great gift to this country!! I will miss him :-(

I'm glad you corrected the Latin, Rod. Otherwise it wouldn't have surprised me if you'd gotten an e-mail from the Beyond gently admonishing you about it.(BTW, reddopto, he might have told you that the Irish are Gaelic, not Gallic.)

My parents were charter NR subscribers, so from my early childhood, I learned that there was this man “Buckley” who was a source of wisdom, insight, and wit. He offered his country his love and his ardent effort, he offered his colleagues in the conservative movement vision and encouragement, he treated his adversaries with respect, he provided his friends loyalty and great company and conversation. To all whom he encountered – as is so evident from the tributes of so many who knew him at NR – including those of us who “knew” him only through his writings, through Firing Line, or through (in my case) one on-campus talk, he offered the example of a life lived fully, and with grace.

He is with his Lord, and with his love, and – if God is as joyous as I believe him to be – close to some good sailing as well. He left all who knew him enriched, and he left his nation a decidedly better place.

Requiescat in pace, indeed.

Richard

As a high school student in the early to mid 1980s, I became a Firing Line fanatic, read as many of his books as I could, and even penned an essay about WFB for a college scholarship competition - and was awarded the scholarship!

Magnanimous, erudite, endearingly prickly - he will be missed.

Memory Eternal!

I am sad. He was one of my first experiences of what being a good Conservative Christian can be. Someone who is passionate about what he thinks, but is respectful to those he disagrees with.

If only more followed this example. Having said that, godspeed, sir.

I used to just love watching WFB on Firing Line. I enjoyed his sparkling repartee and rapier wit and I kept thinking that this show would be the one in which he would part his hair with his tongue!!!

My sister, who is more liberal than me, just loved his sailing books. She got me Nearer My God for Christmas one year.

So many conservatives nowadays seem so angry. Like Reagan, Buckley never seemed angry. He always seemed to be enjoying some sort of private joke. I thought it was interesting how one of his good friends was the almost stereotypically liberal J.K. Galbraith.

I am glad he is with Pat now but I am sure it's hard for their son Chris.

Eternal rest grant him O Lord, and let light perpetual shine up him.

Heard him speak; both of epic proportions and down to earth at the same time (how is that possible?) My heart is sad to know he's passed. May he rest in peace.

Yeah, Vidal had just called him a Nazi and it was perhaps one of the most stressful nights in the most stressful year in American politics and American civility was pushed to the breaking point.

I was 12 years old that year, with a budding interest in politics. Like my parents, my sympathies were, and are still not where Buckley's were. We were liberal Gene McCarthy supporters. But Buckley was the star of ABC's limited convention coverage, which I think started at 9:30 or 10:00 whereas the other two wealthier networks, in those days were doing near gavel to gavel coverage. We would turn to ABC as soon as their broadcast started. He was a charismatic presence to a 12 year old political junkie. I got my first library fine that fall for not returning a National Review I had checked out on time. He never really converted me though.