BUCKLEY, William F(rank), Jr.

(b. 24 November 1925 in New York City), journalist and author whose writings in the 1950s and 1960s are credited with giving the American conservative movement its intellectual inspiration as well as helping political conservatives move into the mainstream of late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century American politics.

Buckley was born into a wealthy family, the sixth of ten children of William Frank Buckley, Sr., a lawyer who had led an adventurous life building an oil empire in seven countries, especially Mexico, and New Orleans–born Aloise (Steiner) Buckley. Buckley's father was a tough man who was determined that his children not grow up spoiled and elitist. Buckley attended schools in France and England and graduated from Millbrook School in Millbrook, New York, in 1943. In 1944 he attended the University of Mexico for a semester and then joined the U.S. Army, serving in the infantry and leaving as a second lieutenant in 1946. He then entered Yale University. Buckley had been raised to be self-confident and to trust his own judgment, which created conflict. He discussed this in his first book, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom (1951); he readily debated Marxists and atheists, proving to have a deadly wit and a devastating delivery while advocating his conservative Roman Catholic principles. In 1950 he graduated with a B.A. While he was an undergraduate, in 1947, he was appointed to teach beginning Spanish, and he remained in that post for a year after graduation.

God and Man at Yale elicited bitter, hateful reviews from left-wing writers. Meanwhile, Buckley joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and was assigned to Mexico; his supervisor was the novelist and eventual Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt. (During the 1972 presidential campaign burglars broke into the Watergate offices of the Democratic Party; their connections were traced back to the White House and the committee to reelect Richard Nixon.) In 1952 Buckley left the CIA to pursue journalism, joining the staff of the American Mercury only to leave it because of its anti-Semitic editorial stance. He was a supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy's well-publicized, often cruel effort to reveal the Communist threat to America.

Buckley's declaration that he wanted to "revitalize the conservative position" in the United States seemed outrageous in 1955. With McCarthy's eventual disgrace, political conservatism seemed almost dead and was held in disrepute. But Buckley founded the National Review in 1955 with every intention of making his moralistic brand of conservatism a force in American politics; this was brash and suggested an overweening self-importance, but it also happened, and Buckley had much to do with how it happened.

The National Review featured essays, sometimes polemics, and straightforward journalism. By 1964, when the conservative senator Barry Goldwater was nominated for president, the magazine had a paid circulation of more than 125,000. (The number of subscribers drifted down to about 100,000 in 1980 but received a boost when President Ronald Reagan declared in 1983 that he read it and awaited each issue eagerly.) In 1960 Buckley helped found the Young Americans for Freedom; to the puzzlement of leftist writers, the organization attracted thousands of poor and lower-middle-class young people who found Buckley's moralistic view of politics appealing. The organization, which worked as a lobbying group and as support for conservative causes, had a membership near fifty-five thousand by 1969. In 1961 Buckley helped form the Conservative Party in New York, perhaps hoping to inspire a mass movement. Although Buckley lost his bid for mayor of New York in 1965 on the Conservative ticket, finishing third behind the Republican John Lindsay and the Democrat Abraham Beame with 13.4 percent of the vote, the Conservative Party did not prove irrelevant. Buckley's brother James was elected U.S. senator for New York as a Conservative Party candidate in 1970.

In 1962 Buckley began his newspaper column "On the Right," which was syndicated to more than three hundred newspapers in the 1980s. This column and Buckley's National Review helped give his conservatism legitimacy in the eyes of mainstream voters during the 1960s. Buckley's opposition to bigotry, especially anti-Semitism, and the National Review's exposure of antidemocratic rightist movements encouraged people to see conservatism as rational and honest. When the National Review exposed the right-wing John Birch Society as anti–civil rights, the journal and its editor, Buckley, showed principle. Indeed, Buckley insisted all his career that conservatism means conserving civil rights—or, more plainly, protecting civil rights.

In 1966 Buckley began hosting a weekly interview show, Firing Line, ona local television station. The show's producer did a good job of finding such provocative guests as the atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the Black Panther activist Huey Newton, the boxer Muhammad Ali, the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and the British journalist Malcom Muggeridge. Buckley, already notorious but a vague figure for many people outside New York, became a superstar. His odd habit of leaning his head back to stare down his nose at his guests, his lapboard covered with papers, his slow speech, and his biting humor as well as his sudden smiles combined to make him endearing as a personality, whatever his views. Firing Line won an Emmy in 1969. In 1971 the Public Broadcasting Service picked up the show, giving it exposure on more than 170 television stations. It remained popular until Buckley retired from it in 1999.

In 1969 President Richard Nixon appointed Buckley one of five members of the Advisory Commission of the U.S. Information Agency. Buckley resigned from the position in 1972 to protest what he viewed as Nixon's betrayal of conservatism by instituting wage and price controls to combat inflation. Even so, he accepted an appointment to the American delegation to the United Nations for 1973; he made his presence known, denouncing the anti-Americanism of many delegates. His book United Nations Journal: A Delegate's Odyssey (1974) made plain his objections to what he observed, even while asserting that America's participation in the United Nations was worthwhile.

Buckley married Patricia Austin Taylor in 1950. They had one son. After the 1960s Buckley wrote a series of bestselling novels about the secret agent Blackford Oakes and devoted much of his time to writing nonfiction about sailing as well as social commentaries that emphasized a need for Americans and all people to lead moral lives. It was the explosion of activity in the 1960s that set most of the pattern for his later life and fixed in the minds of most observers an image of Buckley as honest, friendly, and brilliant, even among those who disagreed with his political views.

Buckley's nonfiction is rife with anecdotes about himself, but Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith (1997) stands out because it gives a good explanation of the beliefs that form the foundation of his political and social views. Other significant autobiographical works include The Unmaking of a Mayor (1966), about running for mayor of New York, and Overdrive: A Personal Documentary (1983), about a day in his frenetic life; both offer insights into the gusto with which he lives. Charles Lam Markmann, The Buckleys: A Family Examined (1973), portrays the Buckleys as analogous to the Kennedys, with William F. Buckley the counterpart of John Fitzgerald Kennedy; the analogy does not hold up. He depicts Buckley as crude, vitriolic, and half-witted. John Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (1988), is the only full-length biography.

Kirk H. Beetz