Remembering Buckley

The following excerpts are from editorials Wednesday.

Philadelphia Inquirer: The passing of William F. Buckley Jr., 82, Wednesday leaves the world of ideas a little less gracious, not as much fun, and woefully lacking in vocabulary skills.

Buckley went from being almost a lone conservative voice in the post-World War II liberal wilderness, to the intellectual heart and soul of a movement that brought to power Reagan, Gingrich and Bush.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: His was a conservatism founded in the classics and the Roman Catholic faith, expressed in a limitless vocabulary and a matchless ability to summon up historical and literary parallels. Who would believe that for 33 years, the nation would watch a TV show, “Firing Line,” featuring a slouching, stammering host debating ideas with other (usually overmatched) intellectuals? Who would believe that the author of “God and Man at Yale” would go on to write spy thrillers featuring a CIA agent who beds the Queen of England? Who would believe an epicure who found as much to like in peanut butter as in Beluga caviar, a conservative who decried as mistakes both the war in Iraq and the war on drugs?

Chicago Tribune: Like any long-lived commentator, Buckley took positions that today are hard to excuse, such as his indulgence of Southern segregation in the 1950s, his defense of Joseph McCarthy and his proposal, during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, that the infected be required to get tattooed to alert potential sexual partners.

But he also strove to exile anti-Semites and other crackpots from the movement. He was willing to break with conservative orthodoxy by advocating the legalization of marijuana and, in 2006, pronouncing the Iraq war a failure. Through friendships with liberals such as economist John Kenneth Galbraith and journalist Murray Kempton, he exemplified the notion – forgotten by many modern pundits – that political disagreements don’t mandate mutual hatred.

Dallas Morning News: No one could have imagined in 1955, when he launched National Review, that Bill Buckley was midwifing a movement that would become the dominant force in U.S. politics. Conservatism was dead in those days. National Review gave the disparate voices of the American right a platform from which to criticize liberalism, marginalized the kooks and united social and economic conservatives. Buckley and his circle made conservatism coherent and mainstream and in the watershed 1980 election, they triumphed.

Yes, Ronald Reagan was the most important conservative of our time. But: no Buckley, no Reagan.