Writer William F. Buckley dies at 82

Unlike so many of his peers and predecessors on the right, Buckley wasn’t a self-made man prescribing thrift, but a multimillionaire’s son who enjoyed wine, sailing and banter and assumed his wishes would be granted. Even historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who labeled Buckley “the scourge of American liberalism,” came to appreciate his “wit, his passion for the harpsichord, his human decency, even ... his compulsion to epater the liberals.”

Buckley once teased Schlesinger after the historian praised the rise of computers for helping him work more quickly. “Suddenly I was face to face with the flip side of Paradise,” Buckley wrote. “That means, doesn’t it, that Professor Schlesinger will write more than he would do otherwise?”

Buckley founded the biweekly magazine National Review in 1955, declaring that he proposed 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.”

Conservatives had been outsiders in both mind and spirit, marginalized by a generation of discredited stands — from opposing Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to the isolationism that preceded the U.S. entry into World War II. Before Buckley, liberals so dominated intellectual thought that critic Lionel Trilling claimed there were “no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”

“Bill could go to the campus with that arch manner of his. And he was exciting and young and conservative,” conservative author and columnist George Will told the AP in 2004. “And all of a sudden, conservatism was sexy.”

In the 1950s, “conservatism was barely a presence at all,” Will said. “To the extent that it was a political presence, it was a blocking faction in Congress.”

NBC News video From the archive: 'Miles Gone By' July 13, 2004: William F. Buckley Jr. talks about his book, "Miles Gone By," with Hardball host Chris Matthews. MSNBC

The National Review was initially behind history, opposing civil rights legislation and once declaring that “the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail.”

Buckley also had little use for the music of the counterculture, once calling the Beatles “so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of antimusic.”

The magazine could do little to prevent Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat in 1964, but as conservatives gained influence, so did Buckley and his magazine. The long rise would peak in 1980, when Buckley’s good friend Ronald Reagan was elected president.

“Ronnie valued Bill’s counsel throughout his political life, and after Ronnie died, Bill and Pat were there for me in so many ways,” Reagan’s widow, Nancy Reagan, said Wednesday in a statement.

Buckley’s wife, the former Patricia Alden Austin Taylor, died in 2007 at age 80. Christopher is their only child. Buckley is also survived by two brothers and three sisters.

Christopher Buckley remembers his father’s one losing adventure, albeit one happily lost. William F. Buckley was the Conservative Party’s candidate for mayor of New York in 1965, waging a campaign that was in part a lark — he proposed an elevated bikeway on Second Avenue — but that also reflected a deep distaste for the liberal Republicanism of Mayor John V. Lindsay.

“By this time I realized he wasn’t just any other dad,” Christopher Buckley told the AP. “I was 13 at the time, and there were mock debates in my fifth grade home room class. And there were people playing him, so that was kind of strange.

“And that’s when you get the sense that your dad is not just Ozzie and your parents are not Ozzie and Harriet. But he was a great dad, and he was a great man, and that’s not a bad epitaph.”

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