Bill Buckley detested hypocrites, zealots, liars, weaklings and fools. If the shoe fits, though.....

The first time Buckley's name registered was at a VN anti-war rally in New York at Hunter College. Congressman Ed Koch was on the stage and Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith among others.

Buckley was in the audience with a legal pad and his foot partway up on the stage. He heckled the speakers through most of the evening and made himself very annoying, but they seemed to know him--and didn't kick him out.

I later found his views reprehensible--unable to imagine they were the beginning of the end of the politics of my generation. (Boy did he teach us a lesson or ten.) He reminded me of a snake when he spoke using his tongue to lash his "guests" on his TV show. He liked the ones he could leave a little spit on more than the ones he couldn't.

The last time I saw him he was on Charley Rose saying medicare should be abolished. I played it over a few times to make sure I actually heard it. He was convinced Hillary was going to win.

I had the feeling his views had more meaning in justifying his position as an intellectual in his class than they did with anything else. I don't think any figure in his lifetime matched him for pure snob appeal. He reveled in it with each sinister-elongated dissembling vowel.

Go gently in that good night, Mr. Buckley, and may your anal retentive ideas die with you. (I know they won't but it sounds like just the right lopsided tribute.)

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

- John Kenneth Galbraith

“You cultivate the essential virtues: high purpose, intelligence, decency, humility, fear of the Lord, and the passion for freedom.” - William F. Buckley Jr

As someone who is deeply influenced by WFB and his writings I'm overcome with grief and sadness over his demise. If there is one man who always stood by his convictions without wavering, was able to tell right from wrong without any ambiguity, prodding common sense above everything else, he will be remembered as WFB.

Here is a man who was never bound to ultra conservative orthodoxy and fearlessly questioned the actions of of even avowed conservatives like Eisenhower and Bush. He is one of the few conservatives who had the certitude in acknowledging that Iraq was a failure and George W. Bush will not go fairly in history even if he invented the bill of rights.

Thanks Bill for influencing my life in a very positive way. I like to close this with another quote by WFB.

"Relate it to what should happen; fuse it into the long morality play that began, really, in the Garden of Eden.” - WFB Jr.

With eloquent erudite wit, William B called Gore Vidal a f*g and threatened to hit him. When Vidal failed to answer the challenge with action, the debate was lost. William B told Vidal where to go, and I guess it was Italy. Basta.

Thanx, Salon, and the previous posters to this thread.

Today, this Leap Year therefore not quite last day of February, is the (not Leap Year count) 58th-year anniversary of my father's death. He died on a (nominally) February 28th (longer ago than most anyone here would remember). My mother was born on March 1. But the year my father died was a Leap Year, so there was an extra day for the burial before my brother and I astonished a straitlaced relative who came to pay a condolences call by having insisted on making her a birthday cake with candles. When the straitlaced dour-faced Responsible church-going relative arrived I don't right now remember whether we were blowing out the candles or singing "Happy Birthday to Y...ou....".

Buckley was, in my opinion, everything anyone here has already said or most anyone will. Yes he was a snob and yes he was privileged and yes he was brilliant. I never knew him personally though (born into "a Yale family") I went to my then-at-Yale-brother's Yale undergraduate "commencement" and WFB (a few years older) was the featured speaker. He'd already made a bit of a stir among Yalies with "God and Man at Yale" and my, yes, partly snob and definitely privileged (whether or no brilliant) mother was SHOCKED. SHOCKED!! By those days young twerp Buckley?

My only direct encounter with him was one time he and I boarded the same Boston to NY shuttle. I recognised his face so my own lit up with the pleasure of recognition. This apparently pleased him so he responded in kind.

I will miss him -- for all that I disagreed with almost all of his ?"positions"?.

For was he not also, in his own distinctive way, a "Mensch"?

So thanks, Salon, for being the newsbreaker for me on this piece of ?"information"? and for the so-far posters for chiming in here. A ?fine? "literary"?? quote is lurking at the back of my mind but I can't quite bring it from the back to the front right now. If or when I do, I might even post a second time ... and if I do, that will be very unusual for me. I don't post here an awful lot any more ... at my ?advanced age?.

salonmarte

Whatever else may have been true about him, Buckley was a major pusher of policies that are contrary to the common good. He was a bad man who did bad things.

Buckley was wrong about McCarthyism, civil rights for blacks, the Vietnam war, equality for women, and just about every other important political topic of the last fifty years. Far from being an intellectual, he was an entertainer whose art was to make snobbery seem witty and charming. Those who are impressed by obscure words and convoluted sentences thought he had a good style. In a few years I doubt that anyone will care to read him or to watch those old TV shows. RIP.