William F. Buckley Tribute

William F. Buckley Jr., who as author, journalist, and polysyllabic television personality did more to popularize conservatism in post-New Deal America than anyone other than Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan, died early today at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 82 and had been ill with emphysema, said his assistant, Linda Bridges.

    Mr. Buckley’s political importance has long been acknowledged across the political spectrum. Pat Buchanan, the three-time presidential candidate, once called him “the spiritual father of the movement,” while the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called Mr. Buckley “the scourge of American liberalism.” Although Schlesinger, very much a man of the left, did not mean it as a compliment, Mr. Buckley cheerily took it as such.

    Good cheer was a key element in Mr. Buckley’s success. Not only did it sustain him during the ’50s and ’60s, when his brand of conservatism claimed few adherents. It also helped earn him an audience — and grudging acceptance — among the liberal elite. Indeed, Schlesinger became a friend of Mr. Buckley’s, as did such other eminent liberals as the activist Allard Lowenstein, the columnist Murray Kempton, and the Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith.
    Mr. Buckley’s personal charm was one of several sources from which he derived so large an influence. He was also the author of more than 40 books. Although many were not about politics, all his early ones were, and they tended to attract wide attention.

    In 1955, Mr. Buckley founded National Review, which he edited for the next 35 years. “It was a pretty sclerotic situation [on the right] when National Review started out,” he recalled in a 2001 Globe interview. “Our launch reflected a pent-up appetite.”

    The columnist George F. Will (the magazine’s onetime Washington editor) said at a 25th anniversary celebration, “Before Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater, and before Barry Goldwater there was National Review, and before there was National Review, there was Bill Buckley, with a spark in his mind.” That spark, Will noted, eventually became “a conflagration.” One sign of that conflagration was circulation: The magazine is America’s most widely read political journal.