Who else has been so right on so many issues so much of the time? I couldn't think of anyone
February 28, 2008 -- If Bill Buckley wasn't the father of mod ern American conservatism, he cer tainly gave the movement intelligence, eloquence, charm and wit.
Buckley died yesterday at 82, steadfast in what he once described as his life's work: To "stand athwart history yelling 'Stop' at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who urge it."
For more than half a century, as a columnist, magazine editor, TV host and public speaker, he convincingly resisted the notion that change simply for the sake of change is always to the good.
Some knew Buckley from his thrice-weekly column (which ran on these pages for decades) or his TV show, "Firing Line," America's longest-running TV program with the same host.
In 1955, he founded National Review; it almost instantly became one of the nation's most influential journals of ideas.
Through it, he expelled extremist elements - like the conspiracy-obsessed, but influential, John Birch Society - from mainstream conservatism.
Always a fervent anti-communist, he also broadened conservatism's focus to economic, social and cultural issues - laying an intellectual groundwork for what became the Reagan Revolution.
To be sure, not all of Buckley's positions stood the test of time. National Review early on defended southern segationists and opposed civil-rights reform.
Yet he also wrote a lengthy indictment of anti-Semitism, regretfully citing examples of it from some of his own writers.
In 1965, he ran for mayor of New York - an unsuccessful attempt to keep Republican John Lindsay out of City Hall.
Yet he and National Review, he declared, were not in the business of "making practical politics. Our job is to think and to write, and occasionally to mediate. We are tablet-keepers."
Indeed.
Buckley, of course, was known more for his sly wit than for his modesty - noting in The New York Times Book Review in 1986: "I asked myself the other day, 'Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?' I couldn't think of anyone."
Neither can we.
He didn't have all of the answers, but he asked many of the right questions - and America is much the better for it.
As Ronald Reagan once put it, "He gave the world . . . the sound of laughter and the sight of the rich, green uplands of freedom."
William F. Buckley, R.I.P.
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