William F. Buckley Jr.

LITTLE ROCK — IT WAS typical, the way we heard of William F. Buckley's death Wednesday over NPR, the quasi-educated's guide to how to think about everything. The anchorwoman-news reader is a more accurate title-described Mr. Buckley as er-i-u-dite, her game way of saying erudite, and as the author of thousands of editorials in newspapers across the country, by which she must have meant syndicated columns. It was one more sad yet amusing piece of evidence that the linguistic, cultural and political wasteland that William Frank Buckley inherited, and which he'd done so much to explore and deplore over his 82 fun-filled years,was still out there. Though it does seem to have grown even more pretentious.

We missed the man immediately. Pity he couldn't have heard that brief but illiterate obituary notice; think of the nice light brite he could have composed for the National Review about it. It would have been charming but incisive, noting not just the still prevailing illiteracy of our more high-minded media but what it says about the American condition. With a pang not for him but for ourselves, we knew at once that this would not be the last time we would miss William F. Buckley Jr.

TODAY'S is quite a different intellectual and political world from the one into which Bill Buckley was born November 24, 1925, mainly because he made the difference. It was a world in which the conservative philosophy could scarcely be called a philosophy; it was more like a relic under glass, its skeletal remains rolled out now and then for an occasional autopsy by Walter Lippmann or a funeral mass under the direction of George Santayana. Any distinction between conservative thought and right-wing nuttism, the holy and profane, had long ago blurred into inconsequentiality. These bones had about as much chance of living again as Robert A. Taft had of being elected president of the United States.

By 1950, the cultivated Lionel Trilling, one of the few members of the professoriate who had some reverence for the old ways, could observe: "In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation." Professor Trilling's diagnosis was all too accurate. Oh, there was still a conservative impulse in American politics after the second Great War-"perhaps even stronger than some of us know," the professor admitted. But there was no extant conservative thought, he opined, only "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." That comment was more than a diagnosis; it could have been an epitaph.

This was the valley of dry bones into which strode a young student at Yale-Buckley, Wm, F. of the Connecticut Buckleys, the oil Buckleys-and which he proceeded to bring to life despite the best efforts of academe to discourage him. It's not that he was present at the creation of the conservative revival; he pretty much created it, beginning at Yale. The young man arrived there well-armed, for from youth he had received a thorough grounding in the permanent things under the Jesuits, an education which he employed to devastating effect. Pitted against even a young Buckley, the university's whole oh-so-liberal power structure found itself completely outmatched and, even worse, had not the vaguest idea it was. Such was Yale's hermetically sealed, long unchallenged, collective mind, or what was left of it.

This dapper young Edwardian, complete with the manners and accent of his rarefied class, outpointed Yale's stultified bureaucracy at every opportunity. A veritable caricature of all that Yale was solemnly dedicated to extirpating, he reacted to its solemn efforts by compiling a best-selling catalogue of its dull gray sins. Instead of being cowed like a proper undergraduate eager for the system's approval, young Buckley fought back with zest. The result was his God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom." What fun.

The title of his book said it all, but Buckley being Buckley even then, he expounded on his theme at sesquipedalian length. Yale's McGeorge Bundy, who would go on to become the architect of the Vietnam War and other disasters, was reduced to the sputtering rage of all capital-L Liberals when they're pinned like butterflies to a board, or rather like drab moths. It was just the sort of reaction Buckley thrived on even then. (Years later he would orchestrate the excommunication of the John Birch Society from the respectable right with the same deft touch and holy glee.)

Our Hero would go on to many another triumph, from his founding of National Review to innumerable columns, essays, novels, books, travels, grand adventures and grander spoofs. Our favorite among his book titles was the one he gave his highly personal history of the National Review. It's enough to warm the heart of any editor: Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription. In one of his potboilers, a spy novel entitled Who's on First, Buckley had the KGB's counter-intelligence chief for Western Europe ask a colleague, "Do you ever read the National Review, Jozsef?" The comrade would go on to note that it was edited "by this young bourgeois fanatic." Nice self-spoof. Mr. Buckley, a conservative for all seasons, was many things but never bourgeois, and certainly not a fanatic. His sense of humor disqualified him. As one of his critics noted, he had a talent unusual in someone of deep political convictions; he was unlikely to ever "ruin a dinner party." Quite the contrary. Where Buckley was, there was festivity.

IF YOU SEEK his monument today, just look around. Conservatism is now the dominant American political philosophy, and liberalism the series of irritable mental gestures. But nothing disorganizes an army or cause like victory. Conservatism's intellectual dominance now shows in its smug self-satisfaction, its various cracks and fault lines, its slow subsidence from rebirth to mere reflex, its progression from courage to hubris.

And there is no new Buckley in sight, someone who could both mobilize and rejuvenate the old truths, even while entertaining us all. For bitterness was alien to his character. His good will was inexhaustible-well, almost inexhaustible. There was the small matter of Gore Vidal, whom he could not bear. (Who could? Mr. Vidal is the Aaron Burr of American letters.) But in general, even Mr. Buckley's foes, especially his foes, were charmed by his manners and mannerisms, and, despite their worst instincts, were even persuaded to change their minds on rare occasion-just as Buckley himself did as he came to tower over the conservative scene.

Between them, William F. Buckley in God and Man at Yale, and his friend, mentor and conscience, Whittaker Chambers in Witness, made a revolution in American political thought and action even if few could see it coming. It was Editor Buckley's National Review that midwifed the intellectual revolution that preceded the popular one, as intellectual revolutions will do. Just as Milton Friedman came to dominate economic thought, going from right-wing crank to the man who overthrew a brittle Keynesianism, so William F. Buckley set the scene for the whole Reagan Revolution and its afterglow. At the end, he had gone from brilliant prodigy to accomplished elder statesman of the conservative movement.

But now what? This verbally inexhaustible wizard leaves behind innumerable epigones but no worthy successor. His inferior imitators are everywhere-the little magazines and Fox News are full of them-but where is the next Buckley? Instead, the time is ripe for a Buckley of the left to challenge a decaying intellectual establishment-if only such a whiz could be found, a writer and thinker and persona with Buckley's wit, promise and general lilt, all of which overlay a mind and will that was Roman in the sense of both the Republic and the Church. What a rarity he was, unfortunately. Something tells us we have only begun to miss William F. Buckley Jr.