William F. Buckley Jr. (1925–2008), R.I.P.

William F. Buckley passed away on Wednesday, February 27, 2008. He was eighty-two. For half a century, he was the most widely recognized and respected conservative public intellectual in America. He had also served in 1953–54 as ISI’s first president. The institute’s current president, T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr., said on his passing, “It was William F. Buckley who crafted the intellectual consensus that accommodated conservatism’s warring proponents of freedom on the one hand and of moral order on the other. Freedom, he showed, was the indispensable means for achieving moral order. The success of the modern conservative political coalition would not have been possible except for the antecedent intellectual consensus forged by Buckley in the pages of National Review.”

In 1953, the young Buckley was tapped by his friend, ISI founder Frank Chodorov, to serve as the first president of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (as ISI was known until a name-change in 1966). Buckley’s first book, God and Man at Yale (1951), had demonstrated the pressing need for an organization such as ISI, and so his leadership of the fledgling group was a natural fit. While his tenure was brief, Buckley remained close to ISI throughout his life. For many years he lectured for ISI on campuses across the country, and he was a regular speaker at other ISI events as well. Late in his life, he took a special interest in the ISI Books imprint, commenting that it was “one of the blessings of this century . . . beautifully producing important works rather studiously neglected by contemporary publishing.”

In 1955 Buckley founded National Review with the aim of standing “athwart history yelling Stop.” The magazine provided conservative writers with a common forum, bringing a measure of cohesiveness to a disparate band of dissenters from the regnant liberalism of mid-century America. Buckley later hosted Firing Line (1966–99), the Public Broadcasting System’s longest-running program, where he engaged individuals of all political persuasions on a variety of issues and presented a conservative perspective to a large audience.

From the 1960s on, Buckley was one of the most widely syndicated newspaper columnists in the country. He wrote on subjects ranging from American foreign policy to peanut butter. Beginning in the mid-1970s, Buckley also ventured into fiction-writing, particularly the genre of Cold War political intrigue. His novels introduced the hero Blackford Oakes—Ivy Leaguer, adventurer, romantic. In such books as Saving the Queen (1976), Stained Glass (1978), Who’s on First (1980), and High Jinx (1986), Buckley, as he once said, vicariously relived the Cold War. He believed that the “long twilight struggle” needed to be restored to public memory.

The intellectual influences on Buckley’s conservatism were varied, including his father and one of his father’s close friends, the aristocratic libertarian Albert Jay Nock. At Yale, the legendary teacher Willmoore Kendall left his mark. The influence of Jose Ortega y Gasset is evident in the proposed title for a theoretical magnum opus that Buckley never finally undertook: The Revolt Against the Masses. Perhaps the deepest influence was that of Whittaker Chambers, the great “witness” against the Soviet spy Alger Hiss—and against the crimes of communist totalitarianism. Chambers’s moving letters to Buckley were collected in Odyssey of a Friend (1969).

Chambers’s influence can be seen in a key passage in God and Man at Yale, where Buckley wrote, “The duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world . . . and the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.” That understanding was the taproot of Buckley’s conservatism, and broadly construed it was that perspective that informed the work of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists from its founding in 1953. It is an insight that continues to inspire the work of ISI today.

Buckley is survived by his son Christopher and two grandchildren.

• View a gallery of images from William F. Buckley's ISI legacy.
• Read the introduction (in PDF) to ISI Books' William F. Buckley Jr.: A Bibliography by William F. Meehan III.
• Read the entry on William F. Buckley from American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia (ISI Books).
• At ISI's October 2003 50th Anniversary Gala, former ISI Honors Fellow & Yale alumnus Austin Bramwell presented William F. Buckley Jr. with the Institute's Charles H. Hoeflich Lifetime Achievement Award.
  
  Watch, hear, or read the introduction to Mr. Buckley by Austin Bramwell.
  Watch, hear, or read Mr. Buckley's remarks.
• Read the following articles written in ISI publications related to William F. Buckley.
  • "Valedictory Voyage, a review of William F. Buckley's Miles Gone By"
    by William F. Meehan III from Intercollegiate Review — Fall/Winter 2004
  • "The Revolt against the Establishment: God and Man at Yale at 50"
    by Austin Bramwell from Intercollegiate Review — Fall 2001
  • "A Plea for Procedures: William F. Buckley, Jr., Four Reforms, A Guide to the Seventies"
    by C. P. Ives from Modern Age — Summer 1974
  • "Log of a Man in Motion: William F. Buckley, Jr., Cruising Speed"
    by Henry Regnery from Modern Age — Winter 1972
  • "Somnium Ambulatum: William F. Buckley, Jr., Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? American Conservative Thought ...
    by Haben Gow from Modern Age — Summer 1971
  • "A Witness to Himself: William F. Buckley, Jr., Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers' Letters to William F. B...
    by Henry Regnery from Modern Age — Spring 1970
  • "A Clear Voice in Babylon: William F. Buckley, Jr., The Unmaking of a Mayor"
    by George N. Crocker from Modern Age — Summer 1967
  • "The Committee Appraised: William F. Buckley and others, The Committee and its Critics"
    by Francis G. Wilson from Modern Age — Summer 1962