Buckley, William F., Jr. 1925-2008 (William Buckley, William Frank Buckley, William Frank Buckley, Jr.)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born November 24, 1925, in New York, NY; died February 27, 2008, in Stamford, CT. Magazine editor, television personality, educator, columnist, novelist, memoirist, and author. Buckley found his voice in 1951, when he published God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom." This blistering attack against what he saw as the prejudicial liberal bias of his alma mater came at a time when American conservatism seemed to be fading into silence. Buckley revived the movement and became a spokesperson for right-wing values for the rest of his life. In 1955 he founded the National Review and served as the editor in chief until 1990 and editor at large until his death. He wrote a column, "On the Right," that was syndicated to more then 200 newspapers from 1962 to 2008, and he hosted the weekly television program Firing Line for nearly as long. Buckley carried his conservative message to dozens of college campuses from coast to coast and picked up dozens of honorary degrees along the way; it was a long way from Yale, where he had been denied the podium as a student speaker in 1950 because of his conservative views. He wrote more than fifty books, from essay collections to novels to an unusual number of autobiographies, leading some critics to suggest that he was at least as interested in promoting himself as he was in spreading his conservative agenda. Most of Buckley's novels, on the other hand, served more clearly as vehicles for his right-wing platform, and they attracted many eager readers. At least a dozen novels were espionage thrillers featuring American intelligence agent Blackford Oakes, whose fictional adventures are set in the midst of historical events such as the Cold War, the perceived threat of a united Germany, and the Kennedy presidency. The backgrounds not only added an air of authenticity to the plots (Buckley had also gathered personal experience from his one year as an operative of the Central Intelligence Agency), but also enabled the author to add his own interpretations to the unfolding of events. One novel, however, seems more autobiographical than the others. Getting It Right (2003) is the fictionalized story of the founding of the National Review. For more than fifty years Buckley was an unusually public and vocal leader of a movement that many observers, including conservatives themselves, had feared was on its deathbed. His platform, expressed with erudition, urbanity, and generally good manners, united a scattered population of right-wing supporters into a cohesive foe of liberalism that seems capable of lasting well into the twenty-first century. Buckley was honored by dozens of awards from conservative organizations and mainstream bodies as well. He won an Emmy Award for Firing Line and an American Book Award for his second Blackford Oakes novel, Stained Glass. He was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991 and the lifetime achievement award of the American Society of Magazine Editors in 2006. Buckley's views have been published in many collections, from Up from Liberalism (1959) to Let Us Talk ofMany Things: The Collected Speeches of William F. Buckley, Jr. (2000), and several works were reportedly in press at the time of his death.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Buckley, William F., Jr., Cruising Speed: A Documentary, Putnam (New York, NY), 1971.

Buckley, William F., Jr., United Nations Journal: A Delegate's Odyssey, Putnam (New York, NY), 1974.

Buckley, William F., Jr., Overdrive: A Personal Documentary, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1983.

Buckley, William F., Jr., Nearer My God: An Autobiography of Faith, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1997.

Buckley, William F., Jr., Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography, Regnery (Washington, DC), 2004.

St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2000.

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, February 28, 2008, sec. 1, pp. 1, 8.

Los Angeles Times, February 28, 2008, pp. A1, A18.

New York Times, February 28, 2008, pp. A1, A24.

Times (London, England), February 28, 2008, p. 69.