Remembering William F. Buckley Jr., Who Promulgated a Sophisticated Conservatism

On Buckley’s centenary, his perspicacious public persona stands as a relic of a less vacuous age.

Photo: USPS

Running as a third-party candidate in the 1965 New York City mayoral race, William F. Buckley Jr., when asked by a reporter for his first action if elected, famously replied, “Demand a recount.” The 39-year-old Conservative Party hopeful with no prior political experience faced likely defeat to his Republican and Democratic opponents, who were both politically liberal, but his wit and charisma made the election especially captivating. By campaigning, Buckley—who was born 100 years ago and died in 2008—further raised the cresting profile of conservative Republicans: the year prior, conservative Barry Goldwater had defeated the liberal Nelson Rockefeller in the 1964 Republican presidential primary, ultimately losing to Lyndon Johnson.

Educated at Millbrook and Yale, Buckley’s 1951 treatise God and Man at Yale, published a year after graduating, catapulted him to fame. Buckley criticized the pervasive influence of atheistic, collectivist, and anti-Western thought at Yale, advocating instead for a renewed emphasis on religion and capitalist individualism. The book attracted greater attention when McGeorge Bundy, paragon of the liberal establishment and then-dean of Harvard Law School, excoriated Buckley ad hominem in The Atlantic. In 1955 at age 29, Bill Buckley founded the National Review, a conservative opinion magazine. As editor-in-chief until 1990, he burnished his celebrity with pugnacious critiques of a New-Deal-influenced liberalism in establishment politics and culture.

While Buckley’s mayoral campaign ended in defeat, he managed to win 13% of the vote. But the exposure he got made his exhibitionist campaign worth it. With the Johnson Administration’s expensive, inefficient, and often corrupt “great society” programs, Buckley feared a prolonging of the New Deal-ism that had plagued his childhood. Should liberal Republicans trump the Party’s fledgling conservative wing, and accept the economic and social overreaches of Washington Democrats, then America would lack a voice balancing out liberals.

In 1966, Buckley started Firing Line, a weekly, nationally syndicated television show that would air over 1,400 episodes over 33 years. The structure of the show was simple: illuminating discourse between intelligent people holding not necessarily identical viewpoints. Buckley platformed conservative politicians like Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, but also brought on important figures in the Democratic Party and political left. He hosted public figures like Muhammad Ali; academics, like Noam Chomsky and Christopher Hitchens; and literary figures, like Norman Mailer, Louis Auchincloss, and Tom Wolfe. The underlying principle of Buckley’s Firing Line was not to antagonize the guest, but to respectfully debate pressing topics in an entertaining and intellectually stimulating arena.

In addition to Firing Line, Buckley wrote a nationally syndicated, semi-weekly column called “On The Right,” totalling over 5,500 columns by his death. He authored 57 books, sailed the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean, mastered the cello and the harpsichord, and possessed a thesaurus-obviating vocabulary despite English being his third language (after Spanish and French). The election of Ronald Reagan, the first true conservative president, was the apotheosis of his career. In honor of his centenary (he was born in 1925), the U.S. Postal Service this month launched in New Haven a commemorative stamp bearing his likeness.

Buckley was not always “On The Right” side of history, unfortunately. He co-wrote in 1954 McCarthy and His Enemies, a book which defended Senator Joseph McCarthy for his anti-communism; McCarthy’s baseless insinuations of communism within the government would lead to his not-soon-enough denunciation. In 1957, he wrote the racist “How The South Must Prevail” in the National Review, arguing that the Black population in the South was “backward” and that therefore whites were “entitled to rule,” as if whites were not responsible for Southern socioeconomic inequality. He would later disavow this insupportable claim and advocated for affirmative action, drug law-enforcement reform, and eliminating discrimination in his 1965 mayoral bid. As his personal letters show, his about-face came as a result of conferring with his own Catholic faith and as a reaction to further horrific violence by whites toward peaceful civil rights demonstrators in the South.

In light of today’s increasingly vulgar and vacuous political climate, Bill Buckley should be remembered for the grace he showed those with whom he disagreed—see for yourself and watch an episode of Firing Line on YouTube. In his central role in leading the modern American conservative movement, he worked to exclude far-right organizations like the John Birch Society from the mainstream G.O.P., and shut out isolationism and anti-Semitism where he could. Like his politics or not, the style with which he promulgated his message is worthy of praise. America today sorely lacks his brand of highbrow, substantive discourse across ideological differences, underscored by this decade’s hike in political violence.

George Thornton '26