Buckley, William F., Jr.

Buckley, William F., Jr. (1925–), conservative journalist and intellectual.Buckley grew up in Sharon, Connecticut, one of ten children of William Frank Buckley and Aloise Steiner Buckley. The father had grown wealthy in the oil business, and both parents had strong Roman Catholic loyalties. After service in World War II and graduation from Yale University, Buckley won notoriety with his book God and Man at Yale (1951), an attack on his alma mater's liberal economic thinking and religious agnosticism. Buckley inherited much of his conservatism from his father, particularly the anticommunism. He befriended Whittaker Chambers, a protagonist in the Alger Hiss case, and published their letters in Odyssey of a Friend (1964). With L. Brent Bozell, Buckley wrote McCarthy and His Enemies (1954), a defense of Joseph McCarthy's anti‐Communist investigations.

Founding the National Review magazine in 1955, Buckley brought together the disparate strands of American conservatism—free‐market and libertarian, religious and traditionalist, elitist and populist. It became America's leading conservative journal. Buckley also became known through his long‐running National Public Television program Firing Line. There and in his writings, Buckley displayed his wit and sarcasm, his ample lexicon, and his erudition. Buckley himself did not develop a consistent intellectual conservatism; his opinions could reflect any of the varieties he welcomed in his magazine. Usually, however, he saw American conservatives as a beleaguered minority standing against a dominant and privileged liberal establishment. Against this ascendancy, Buckley defended a conservative counterculture and its tribal loyalists. Through his longevity, sustained productivity, and public visibility, Buckley served the conservative intellectual movement as a paterfamilias.
See also Cold War; Fifties, The; Liberalism; Roman Catholicism.

Bibliography

Mark Royden Winchell , William F. Buckley, Jr., 1984.
John B. Judis , William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives, 1988.

J. David Hoeveler