Man of thought, man of action.

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.--"Bill" to that half of the world he knew personally--was the star of many odd and significant stories. In two of the oddest and most significant stories involving him, however, Bill was not the central figure at all but one of history's "extras."

The better known story concerns his presence at Heston Aerodrome when Neville Chamberlain returned from his famous meeting with Hitler. Bill's father made a detour while driving his son to boarding school in England to witness Chamberlain's arrival. So WFB was on hand to hear Chamberlain announce that it was his and Hitler's joint intention never to go to war again in their lifetimes.

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Bill made less of this story than most of us would have done. In Miles Gone By, he tells us merely that, beset by homesickness, he spent his first ten days at the school praying for war so that his parents would have to bring him home. In later conversation he doubted this brush with history had particularly influenced his views on foreign policy.

Maybe. But it is hard to believe that a precocious (everyone agrees on that) twelve-year-old would not have drawn some conclusions from his small connection with such momentous events. After all, so many of Bill's subsequent opinions--from the wickedness of appeasing the unappeasable to the general vanity of human wishes--are illustrated in advance by this tableau of Chamberlain's earnest delusion. It suggests God tapping Bill on the shoulder and telling him to pay attention.

The second story I had entirely forgotten until I read Bill's obituary in the Financial Times. This revealed that during his two years of military service, from 1944 to 1946, Bill had served as part of an honor guard at the funeral service of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Few dramatists but God would attempt such heavy symbolism--maybe Shakespeare. For Bill had come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. He was to spend the next sixty years seeking to deconstruct two of FDR's main achievements: the New Deal welfare state and the Yalta settlement of Europe. Even as he accompanied FDR's physical corpse, did Bill sense that his soldierly duty also indicated his ideological mission?

If so, he was taking on a vast, complacent, and apparently immovable status quo. The post-war period from 1945 until 1968 was very far from being a conservative one. Culturally, it was a liberal period with growing radical influences, combining Freudian psychoanalysis, Norman Vincent Peale's decaffeinated Christianity, the birth of rock 'n' roll, the "Beat" poets in America and "Angry Young Men" in Britain, fashions in rebellion from Camus to James Dean, and--as the Fifties turned into the Sixties--the start of the satire boom. Politically, it was the time when Eisenhower in America and Churchill in Britain both accepted that their respective versions of the welfare state were there to stay. Likewise the Cold War division of Europe: "Rollback" was out, with a decided bang over Hungary, and anti-colonialism was in, with another bang over Suez. Liberal intellectuals, still anti-Communist, were happily convinced that America would gradually adopt welfare-state arrangements similar to those in Europe and Britain--to which, indeed, Communist economic structures were also converging. "New Republicans" did not contradict them very strongly. And this mild unresisted spreading consensus was given (by Daniel Bell) a name: "the End of Ideology."

Bill Buckley saw this consensus as a kind of amnesiac ideology. It didn't know it was an ideology and had forgotten its own name (which, for the curious, is "socialism"). But even in its most deluded moments, in which it imagined itself to be the central tradition of Western thought, this ideology threatened the individualism and Judeo-Christianity (to use a term not then in vogue) that were the main glories of that tradition. He accordingly set out to challenge and unmask it at every level. And he did so, in four distinct phases between 1951 and his death on February 27 of this year. In these four phases he played, successively, the picador (1951-1958), the theoretician (1958-1965), the organizer (1965-1981), and the guardian angel (1981-2008).

THE PICADOR: 1951-1958

A picador is the horseman at a Spanish bullfight who goads the bull with the pricks of his lance until the animal is angry enough to fight the matador and confused enough to lose to him. Bill played the picador to an increasingly angry and confused bull of American liberalism from the day that God and Man at Yale was published in 1951. This book grew out of the alumni-day address that Bill was not allowed to give on his departure from his alma mater. Its argument, grotesquely summarized, was that Yale was not impartial in its undergraduate teaching on the key questions of Christianity and capitalism but was in effect hostile to both--and that something should be done about it.

Therein lay a real problem. Universities exist in a liberal society to provide independent islands of thought and argument. Tenure and academic freedom safeguard that independence. Was Bill prepared to sacrifice academic freedom on the altar of his political opinions? Liberal academics nationwide asserted with one voice that he was. McGeorge Bundy, in a pugnacious review of the book for The Atlantic, declared roundly: "I can imagine no more certain way of discrediting both religion and individualism than the acceptance of Mr. Buckley's guidance."

Bundy's tough review was persuasive in 1951 because the political corruption of the universities was then a cloud no bigger than a man's hand. It is far larger and more threatening today. But since Bill was not about to recommend state control of Yale, what could be done about it? He suggested that Yale might be held accountable by its alumni, who could withhold their financial aid. To which Bundy asserted that no large group of alumni would act in this way and that, if they did, Yale would ignore them. He proved right in the first case--and though the second is moot, he was probably right there too.

In short the picador's lance broke on the bull's tough hide--but it didn't matter since the creature's anguished and indignant howls attracted a large crowd of admiring onlookers. Bill was a national figure at 26, starting a career of debating and controversy that lasted half a century.

His next controversy chose itself. If wounding liberalism was your aim, then defending Sen. Joe McCarthy was an obvious tactic. McCarthy had enraged the liberal establishment even more than Bill had, with his charges that successive Democratic administrations had failed to remove obvious security risks from government. As we now know from the Venona transcripts and from recent works by Arthur Herman, M. Stanton Evans, and others, McCarthy's charges were in part true, in part exaggerated, and in part false. But because the false charges were egregiously false, Senate liberals assisted by a compliant media were able to paint the senator as wholly mendacious and a danger to the Republic.

Bill and his brother-in-law, Brent Bozell, sought to remedy this with a 1954 book, McCarthy and His Enemies, that examined case by case the charges made by and against McCarthy and found him largely justified. It is a fascinating book full of careful research and fine distinctions. It also spoke for a larger segment of American opinion, including some liberal intellectuals, than the myth of McCarthyism now allows. As Irving Kristol wrote at the time in Commentary: "There is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: He, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing. And with some justification." Bill's book was a series of variations on that theme.

But it was championing a lost cause. McCarthy's public image was so blackened, not without his own assistance, that Dwight Macdonald's description of the book as giving "the general effect of a brief by Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft on behalf of a pickpocket" had force. On this occasion liberalism received only a flesh wound from the picador, in part because it was so well-armored. As Elliott Abrams, reviewing the 1995 re-publication of McCarthy and His Enemies in these pages, pointed out, "It was in the McCarthy era that the iron triangle of liberal bureaucrats, a liberal press, and liberal Democrats in control of Congress was first evident." It was thus ensured that McCarthy's sins were punished while those of his enemies were thrust down the memory hole.

Bill drew the obvious conclusion. He could hardly found a rival Yale after God and Man, but he could found a magazine to disrupt the operations of liberalism's iron triangle. NATIONAL REVIEW was established in 1955 and was from the first a picador in itself. It was, Bill said toward the end of his life, his greatest achievement.

Reflecting Bill's public personality, NATIONAL REVIEW was sharp, witty, combative, crisp, unafraid, word-intoxicated, cultivated, and above all highly readable. It managed to combine elevated religious and philosophical themes with what Frank Loesser called "that slam-bang tang reminiscent of gin and vermouth." And it was no respecter of stout parties, including the GOP, that were too lazy or uninformed intellectually to realize the high civilizational stakes in both domestic politics and the Cold War.

Bill's philippics against the "New Republicanism" of Eisenhower and Nixon in the first decade of the magazine set a high standard in invective. In 1958 he gave a speech that was reprinted in NR under the title "The Tranquil World of Dwight D. Eisenhower," in which he sought to explain why the Republican party had chosen a non-ideological (and therefore liberal-bydefault) leader:

   What the New Republicans needed was a great political shapelessness,
   an infinite ideological plasticity which, on approaching the
   great unresolved political problems that have arisen out of the
   growth of Communism and the omnipotent State, could be relied
   upon to ooze its way over those problems, without grind, or tear, or
   rasp or friction. The Eisenhower approach was designed not to
   solve problems, but to refuse, essentially, to recognize that
   problems exist; and so, to ignore them.

If this sounds overdrawn today, it performed an important task in the late Fifties. Bill realized that the statist and secularist liberalism that was always his target could never be defeated or even seriously checked as long as it had friends in both parties. So the picador began to stick his barbs in the New Republicans too because of their unwillingness (in their doomed search for a quiet life) to fight the necessary cultural wars of conservatism.

THE THEORETICIAN (1958-1965)

Even so, the new conservative movement that Bill was now erecting on the foundation of NATIONAL REVIEW needed more substantial armor than flouts and jeers or even serious negative criticism. It needed strong philosophical grounding, practical policy proposals, a rhetoric and platform appealing to substantial numbers of Americans, and a central overriding Idea that would unite the disparate groups opposing liberalism.

Bill provided some of these essentials from his own personality. The picador radical was only part of him--that part which admitted, in his 1963 essay "Notes Toward an Empirical Definition of Conservatism," that though he was a conservative spiritually and philosophically, "temperamentally I am not of the breed." A second element was his strong Catholic faith, intellectually entrenched by the priests of the English school to which his father was driving in 1938, which sustained his clear and principled opposition to Communism. Athird was his adamantine individualism, philosophical in form to be sure and logically resulting in policies to cut taxes and reform welfare, but arising ultimately from his own "damn your eyes" sense of independence. Like Frank Johnson, an English conservative writer whom Bill admired, he took individualism to the extreme length of being an individual. This did not always please the dogmatists of individualism.

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Nor did it please those on the Catholic Left who wanted to protect Catholicism from any libertarian virus. In 1961 Pope John XXIII issued an encyclical of mildly liberal tone on social questions, Mater et Magistra, that prompted Bill in his picador mode to include in NR's "For the Record" a quip "going the rounds in Catholic conservative circles: 'Mater si, Magistra no!'" Left Catholics, notably the Jesuit magazine America, promptly accused NR and Bill of rejecting the teaching authority of the Church on social questions.

Bill replied at length in NATIONAL REVIEW (since America would not publish his letter) that he regretted what was at worst a venial flippancy but that NR had made no substantive criticism of the encyclical, suggesting rather that it was concerned with what were trivialities by comparison with the geopolitical dangers of the time. He also pointed out (rightly) that the encyclical laid down relevant moral principles for general guidance, leaving the faithful to judge how best to blend these with prudential judgments in shaping policy. Accusations of "infidelity" to Church teaching, he concluded, were "uncharitable ... irrational, and in the true sense, scandalous."

This little storm soon passed, but it was a harbinger of major disputes to come. As liberal Catholics sought to push the Church leftward, Bill hired a succession of distinguished religious conservatives to defend orthodoxy and liberty simultaneously.

Bill recruited the best minds to NATIONAL REVIEW--James Burnham (geopolitics), Russell Kirk (culture), Will Herberg (religion), Whittaker Chambers (Communism), Frank Meyer (political theory), Henry Hazlitt (economics), Ernest van den Haag (crime and society), and many more. Myth and legend now embroider the rows that Bill (and Priscilla) adjudicated between some of these older and then more celebrated figures. What is more impressive, however, is how Bill in his dealings and correspondence with them was constantly learning from their work in a dozen different disciplines.

The Economist's Lexington described Bill recently as "the Grand Old Man of American conservatism." To Bill in the Fifties and Sixties, however, these were the grand old men of conservatism. And the pietas that was one of Bill's most attractive features led him to beg, borrow, and steal their wisdom for recycling to his readers who were fast becoming the followers of his new conservatism.

In particular, as Bill later said, James Burnham was "the dominant intellectual influence in the development of this journal.... His commentary, during such crises as are merely suggested by mentioning Budapest, Suez, Berlin, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, was sustained by the workings of a great mind." But Burnham's influence went beyond geopolitics. As Linda Bridges (who is NR's institutional memory in person) recalls, Burnham was also a force keeping Bill and NR from advocating either abstention or third-party votes in the Fifties and Sixties. Bill had clearly been tempted toward such a course in his Eisenhower article. But Burnham directed him toward a form of politics that would build a movement within the regular party structure--which, inevitably, meant within the Republican party.

Famously, Bill completed this task by "purging" a variety of "wingnuts" from the new conservative movement. That has aroused as much hostility from paleoconservatives then and now as it has elicited praise from most other people. Bill's actions are condemned by them as being somehow inconsistent with the spirit of liberty and the free play of debate. But Bill had no power to shoot dissenters or exile them to Siberian lumber camps. His "purges" consisted entirely of arguing against their beliefs and prohibiting them from appearing in NATIONAL REVIEW. These activities are generally known as "debating" and "editing." If he had not persuaded others of the soundness of his position, he would have lost both debates and readers.

What then was the crux of his argument? In his essay on empirically defining conservatism, Bill discussed his differences with Ayn Rand and the Objectivists, and Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. The essence of Bill's criticism is that they were intellectual extremists, often stimulating in their single-minded logical progressions, but likely to reach eccentric conclusions and so to discredit conservatism with regular folks. This criticism is certainly reasonable and probably right. At the time it persuaded most conservative-minded people.

But it has one drawback: It could well be applied to the young author of God and Man at Yale. He certainly would not have backed away from logical but extreme positions merely because they struck the masses as unreasonable. He would have gloried in annoying them further provided that he also confounded and dazzled them. This attachment to reasonableness was a new and significant development.

The picador phase of WFB had been in many respects the most important phase of his career. The theoretician had then built a magazine and an ideological movement. But that phase too was now drawing to a close. It was to be followed by something less poetic.

THE ORGANIZER: 1965-1981

It is one of Jane Austen's universally acknowledged truths that Bill Buckley developed a fusionist conservatism by uniting libertarians, traditionalists, and foreign-policy hawks around the common standard of anti-Communism. There is truth in that, but it is not the whole truth. And it is certainly not how people saw it at the time. The new conservatism of WFB, Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, et al. was thought by many to be an exotic European import, Burkean in a Lockean liberal society, and romantically opposed to the kind of historical change that Americans naturally embraced.

In 1957 Samuel Huntington, provoked by this new conservatism, wrote an important article in the American Political Science Review in which he defined conservatism as the system of ideas that was employed to defend established institutions whenever they came under fundamental attack. "When the foundations of society are threatened," he wrote, "the conservative ideology reminds men of the necessity of some institutions and the desirability of the existing ones."

How did Buckley's new conservatism measure up? Huntington argued in effect that it was only half a conservatism. Those new conservatives who were mainly concerned to oppose international Communism he could endorse. The threat was real and so was the conservatism. Domestically, however, he felt that America in the liberal Fifties was in a state of such contentment that there was no real challenge to existing institutions and the Buckleyites were left flailing at ideological windmills rather than at real enemies. But Huntington did not believe that this political peace would continue long. America's liberal institutions would soon come under sustained radical attack, he forecast, and when they did, liberals rather than conservatives would step forward to defend them in a conservative spirit.

This was both very shrewd and slightly unfair--shrewd because it forecast the emergence of the first generation of neoconservatives in response to Vietnam and the Sixties revolution, unfair because it ignored the extent to which Buckley was already planting conservative sentiments in a broad swathe of American opinion, so that when the crisis arrived, there would be a conservative interpretation and response ready.

Following his own prescription of reasonableness, Bill had been initially skeptical of the Goldwater campaign. At NATIONAL REVIEW it had been William Rusher who foresaw and promoted the Goldwater insurgency. Bill had supported it manfully once it seemed a viable campaign, but he had not been able to persuade the candidate to pursue his own strategy of distancing himself from the Birchers. Bill's old mentor Willmoore Kendall--whom he brought to NR--said of Goldwater's famous line, "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice," that there was nothing wrong with it that couldn't be put right by 100,000 well-chosen words; Kendall was probably reflecting Bill's views. Goldwater's landslide defeat, though seen differently in retrospect, confirmed this caution the day after. It would have been readily understandable if Bill and NR had retreated into cultural politics thereafter. Instead they launched into a bold electoral venture.

Bill knew that if conservatism had any future, it had to be a hard political movement as well as a soft intellectual one. It also had to have appeal to people other than NR subscribers. And it had to succeed--or at least be protected from failure. So WFB launched a serious bid for the New York mayoralty disguised as a lark.

His serious aim was to win a respectable share of the vote. He won 13.4 percent. As the political insiders knew, he could have scored considerably higher if he had not agreed to shrug off attacks from the conservative Democrat in order to keep out the liberal Republican. He protected the conservative movement from the taint of failure by treating the campaign as a personal prank--that was the intent of his remark that if elected he would "demand a recount." Above all he got the votes of New York cops, Irish and Italian communities, the hard-working middle class, and other groups that had not until then been thought of as natural conservative voters. These voters would later be known as "Reagan Democrats." They would decisively tilt American politics to the right. But their fight was only one skirmish in a revolution.

The Sixties revolution, as Huntington had foreseen, produced a radical attack on liberal institutions. Most liberals appeased and surrendered to the radical attack, but some rebelled and became what we now know as neoconservatives. They were few in number but intellectually distinguished. And they found that they had quite a lot in common with the author of God and Man at Yale and with the conservative movement that had been growing unnoticed in the background. One pundit noticed in particular the suggestive coincidence that Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell had founded The Public Interest magazine in the same summer that Buckley had fought the New York mayoral election. Though there were differences, Buckley's campaign proposals on reforming welfare embodied the same kind of skeptical criticism of idealistic liberalism that The Public Interest would later specialize in. And this convergence in domestic policy was replicated by the almost identical positions that conservatives and neoconservatives took on Communism and the Cold War.

Marriage was an ideological possibility but not necessarily a political advantage. Some conservatives were suspicious of former liberals (some of whom were still actual Democrats). But Bill had always believed in welcoming converts. As the Sixties turned into the Seventies, NR increasingly showcased writers such as Michael Novak, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Bill could welcome them without fearing a takeover because he knew that movement conservatism had three great advantages on its side. It had a well-worked-out philosophy that, in its practical applications, was fairly close to neoconservative ideas. It had, in himself, a strong and popular ideological leader who could advance and defend those ideas effectively in public--through his lectures and Firing Line programs--against both enemies and allies. And, in his friend Ronald Reagan, it had a national leader and potential president who was firmly in Bill's ideological camp. In order for the neoconservatives to get anything like an upper hand within the broad conservative movement, they would need a candidate of similar strength. If Daniel Patrick Moynihan had been prepared to run against President Carter in 1980, they might have become the dominant faction. But Moynihan would not run and all sides now rallied in support of Reagan's presidency.

The fully rounded conservatism that Huntington could not find in 1957 now not only existed but even dominated the political system following the suicide of liberalism. It was strong enough to withstand the cold winter of Watergate and the drenching shower of Carterism. Its main architect was Bill Buckley. And it won the White House in 1980.

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THE GUARDIAN ANGEL: 1981-2008

Reagan's victory was the triumph of Bill Buckley's philosophy and a catastrophic defeat for the suffocating liberalism that had dominated America in 1951. The rest was details. Both Bill and NR were the establishment for the first time. Bill took to this role more comfortably than most other conservatives because he had been a member of New York's social establishment for three decades, a national celebrity since God and Man at Yale, a serious political leader since the New York mayoral election, a presidential appointee under Nixon, and a television personality since the success of Firing Line. But he was now enthusiastic about helping and assisting the establishment he had previously scorned and mocked, on the largely correct grounds that it was a different establishment.

There were disappointments: Reagan never abolished the Education Department. And disagreements: He signed an arms-control treaty that Bill and most other conservatives thought smelled of appeasement (wrongly, as it turned out; or so I believe). And Reagan's successor was not as ideologically inspiring as the Gipper.

Still, with the Cold War victory and the entrenchment of Reagan's domestic legacy under President Clinton--whose presidency effected welfare reform, the expansion of NATO, NAFTA, budgetary surpluses, and other moderate elements in the GOP's agenda--Bill had in effect achieved his political ambitions (astonishingly ambitious ones in 1951) more completely than any other major figure of his time. He still had work and fun ahead as he cruised along. But he began to withdraw progressively from his political and "movement" responsibilities, beginning with his full handover of the NATIONAL REVIEW editorship (to me, as it happens) at the 1990 Anniversary dinner. Over the next decade he handed the TV work over to the capable Peter Robinson, and cut down and eventually halted his hectic speaking schedule.

His interests moved away from politics--which began to bore him--toward fiction and religion. Blackford Oakes made way for conventionally serious novels about the historical figures he had known. At long last he wrote the "Catholic" book he had long been pressed to produce by friends. He even wrote a sort of autobiography--the wonderful Miles Gone By. (He had superstitiously avoided autobiography until then.) He continued playing serious games, founding BuckPac to defeat Lowell Weicker in Connecticut. And he revisited the controversies of his youth with the republication of the Yale and McCarthy books.

Much has been made of Bill's occasional second thoughts during this late period on segregation and the civil-rights revolution. He had undoubtedly said some wrong and foolish things at the time and he was right to retract them. It is less clear either that he was "wrong" in opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act--since legal anti-discrimination, if unchecked, is ultimately incompatible with liberty--or that he "apologized" for doing so. His vague words seem to suggest he accepted a good end had been achieved but by unconstitutional means he distrusted. That leaves open the possibility of achieving the same good end by better means.

But Bill was not the kind of logical extremist who insists on fighting hypothetical battles at a cost in real reputation. The Act had passed and achieved some good; he was happy to accept the fact and to modify his opposition accordingly. As Burnham might have told him, it would have been unreasonable to do otherwise.

Whatever the precise rights or wrongs of the matter, however, this much is clear: There had been two great moral choices facing America in the 1950s--segregation and Communism, oppressed black Americans and captive nations. Bill had initially stumbled, like half the nation, on the first, but he recovered himself and sought thereafter to reconcile civil equality with constitutional form. Many of Bill's enemies (and his most bitter ones) remained wrong or indifferent on the second until the Berlin Wall fell. Bill was asked to apologize--and he did express regrets. No such demand has been made of those who ignored the slavery imposed on half of Europe. When Bill visited that half of Europe in 1990, he was greeted by the dissidents recently promoted to ministerial office as someone who had kept their hope of freedom alive through the long twilight years.

At the end of his life Bill was weary--and justifiably so. Like Saint Paul he could say: "I have run the race, I have fought the good fight, I have kept the faith." And he died still running.

Death may have been the only way of persuading Bill Buckley to slow down.