Author and political commentator William F. Buckley, Jr. was found dead in the study of his Stamford, Connecticut home yesterday, apparently of natural causes. The sixth of ten children of Irish-Catholic lawyer and oil baron William F. Buckley, Sr. the 82-year-old Buckley served as a second lietenant during World War II. At war's end, he studied political science, history and economics at Yale where he was a star debater, joined the secret Skull and Bones society, and served as the chairman of the Yale Daily News.
After graduating with honors in 1950, Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale, the first of what would be over fifty books on a variety of subjects, and served briefly in the C.I.A. and as an editor of The American Mercury in 1951 & 1952. After leaving The Mercury over its percieved anti-semitic tendencies, Buckley founded conservative magazine The National Review in 1955. While at the helm of The Review, Buckley became known for his fusion of American conservative politics with libertarian economics, and had an acknowledged influence on such conservative icons as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.
In 1965, Buckley began a syndicated column, "On the Right", which at its height ran in 320 newspapers. To those outside the conservative movement, Buckley is best known as the host of 1504 installments of the PBS series Firing Line. Unlike the current crop of "conservative" pundits -- the Bill O'Reillys, Rush Limbaughs, and Ann Coulters of the world -- Buckley generally eschewed ad hominem attacks (except for his uncharacteristic feud with Gore Vidal) relying instead on a journalist's regard for facts and a debater's skill in logic. Nor was he a lock-step Republican -- deviating from the party line on such subjects as drug legalization, smoking bans, and the Iraq War. Although one might not always have agreed with Buckley (he was after all more conservative than most) one had to respect his erudite, principled, and internally consistent positions which contributed greatly to the nation's political dialogue and will be sorely missed.
