William F. Buckley Jr. has died

[one...two...tree 2,762]

William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review and dominant post-war conservative intellectual, died overnight. He was 82.

Kathryn Jean Lopez, editor of National Review Online, posted the news on the magazine's blog at 11:13.

"After [a] year of illness, he died while at work; if he had been given a choice on how to depart this world, I suspect that would have been exactly it," Lopez wrote. "At home, still devoted to the war of ideas."

After founding National Review in 1955 at age 30, Buckley established the magazine as the flagship journal of the conservative movement. Starting in 1966, he also used his perch as host of PBS's "Firing Line," one of the orginial political talk shows, to advocate for ideas that were seen as radical in some quarters.

With the election of his friend Ronald Reagan in 1980, though, Buckley's years of laboring in the intellectual vineyards were rewarded. His ideas not only entered the mainstream but accounted for both the push of the Republican Party righward and the Democrats toward the middle.

Aside from his body of work -- which included numerous non-fiction books and novels -- Buckley as a legendary bon vivant and mentor, up close and from a distance, to generations of conservative thinkers and politicians.

I'm going to be on a plane for a few hours, so please feel free to use the comments section to discuss Buckley, the future of conservatism and whatever else is on your mind.

STATEMENT BY MRS. RONALD REAGAN ON THE DEATH OF WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY

Los Angeles, California – I was deeply saddened this morning when I learned of Bill Buckley’s death. He and his wife Pat were dear friends of ours for a long long time. Ronnie valued Bill’s counsel throughout his political life and after Ronnie died, Bill and Pat were there for me in so many ways.

Bill Buckley’s devotion to this country was evident in everything he wrote. My love and deepest sympathy go out to his son, Chris, and the entire Buckley family.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/jonathanmart...r_has_died.html

[Nagishkaw 510]

Oh wow. I didn't know he passed away. How sad.

[Jasman0717 9]

RIP

[Scott & Lai 12]

http://www.visajourney.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=112889

[one...two...tree 2,762]

http://www.visajourney.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=112889

I saw that later, Scott. Sorry.

I always liked watching Firing Line. Although I didn't eye to eye with much of Buckley's views, he was a true intellect.

[almaty 19]

buckley was a 1st class chopf##k..wanted to tattoo on the arm of those with AIDS, so they could be identified..

[one...two...tree 2,762]

buckley was a 1st class chopf##k..wanted to tattoo on the arm of those with AIDS, so they could be identified..

Holy cow! I didn't know that. I know he had some strange notions, just like Pat Buchanan...but they both were capable of saying some well thought out things.

[almaty 19]

Everyone detected with AIDS should be tatooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals."

Hell of a guy.

[GaryC 7]

Everyone detected with AIDS should be tatooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals."

Hell of a guy.

Context, as has been pointed out, is everything. Here is the story you are referring to in it's entirety.

February 19, 2005, 11:55 a.m.

Killers at Large

AIDS carriers and their victims.

Tony Venenum (we’ll call him), 26, reasons that he has always taken risks in life. He was raised by a single parent and made his way in a neighborhood where toughness was a requirement for survival. He discovered, in his teens, that he had solace in male companionship, and before he was 20, had been seduced, and had lived then with Guido, an older man. Both had jobs in establishments that required conformist behavior — Tony even wore a jacket and tie to work, but then Guido took sick and the diagnosis was AIDS. But the retrovirus inhibitor kept him alive and active, but after two years the poison prevailed, leaving Tony both bereft and desperate for relief, which he found in crystal meth. This cheered him greatly but also increased his craving for sex, which he engaged in diligently, finding on the Internet’s manhunt.net an abundant supply of gay men seeking the same relief and the same sensations that Tony had become accustomed to. But then early in June he recognized symptoms like those that had gradually disabled Guido. He didn’t consult a doctor — he had no trouble in getting access to the inhibitor drug, and the crystal meth, for a sometime street kid, was easy to find. So were more partners, to whom he didn’t confide his illness. So that when the public health official came by and told him he wanted information, and if necessary could get a warrant, Tony decided fatalistically to cooperate.

The health office wanted the names and addresses of everyone Tony had had sex with, a question that made Tony laugh through his hoarse coughing. How could he possibly reconstruct such a list? A few guys, sure, but all of them? Could the enquirer reconstruct the name of every girl he had winked at in the last three years? The New York Times reports, in two stories on the new and virulent strain of AIDS, that those who seek to do something to arrest the virus are driven to “more aggressive” measures than in the past. Charles Kaiser, the historian and author of The Gay Metropolis, makes the basic point in words of one syllable. “Gay men should not have the right to spread a debilitating and often fatal disease. A person who is HIV-positive has no more right to unprotected intercourse than he has the right to put a bullet through another person’s head.”

Public heath officials are considering measures which, 20 years ago, would have been though fascistic interventions in human rights. There is thought of infiltrating gay sites, particularly those on the Internet. What, having identified such sites, will they then do? Interpose a message about the danger of unprotected sex? Collect names and email addresses, and send individual warnings to prospective victims? Such measures are not easily composed: “Dear Sir: You have recently kept company with Tony Venenum. Tony has a new and dangerous strain of AIDS and you may have contracted it. You should report to a doctor and you must not engage in unprotected sex because in doing so you may be committing murder.” The boundaries of the new campaign, let alone the niceties, haven’t been resolved upon, but not much thought is being given to concerns of privacy. Murderers need to be stopped, and if this means opening their mail, well — such things happen and you can take comfort that you may be saving a life.

The objective is to identify the carrier, and to warn his victim. Someone, 20 years ago, suggested a discreet tattoo the site of which would alert the prospective partner to the danger of proceeding as had been planned. But the author of the idea was treated as though he had been schooled in Buchenwald, and the idea was not widely considered, but maybe it is up now for reconsideration.

http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/wfb200502191155.asp

[Don_Joy's Prince 0]

He was a major force in the creation of the conservative movement. I had a lot of respect for him and he will be missed.

R.I.P Mr. Buckley

[Don_Joy's Prince 0]

Almaty! The real story does not match your version. I think you were stretching the facts.

[one...two...tree 2,762]

(Good article)

William F. Buckley, R.I.P.

Why we should be (mostly) glad that he outlived his brand of conservatism.

William F. Buckley, who died today, outlived a conservative movement that was largely his creation.Buckley established himself as intellectual father to conservatism in 1955, when he founded National Review. Contrary to Lionel Trilling's famous declaration in 1950 that liberalism was "the sole intellectual tradition" in the United States, conservatism did exist before Buckley. But it was diffuse, encompassing WASP aristocrats (the people Franklin Roosevelt denounced as "economic royalists"); an assortment of cultural conservatives motivated largely by anti-Semitism, racism, nativism, and anti-Catholicism; and a small circle of intellectuals, of whom the best-remembered are the Burkean Russell Kirk and libertarians Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand. Buckley gathered and sifted through these disparate groups, spurning the anti-Semites and anti-Catholics (prompting the John Birch Society to tag him the "pied piper for the establishment"); tolerating but not joining the racists and the nativists; and embracing the libertarians so long as they didn't disparage religious belief. This last caveat excluded the cultish Rand, whose Atlas Shrugged Whittaker Chambers panned in National Review, taking exception to its atheism and its materialism, which in Chambers' view made it a conservative mirror-image of Marxism. Christian piety and anti-communism were Buckley's twin pillars, the former to such an extent that Buckley ruled out David Brooks, his onetime protégé, as a possible editor of National Review on the grounds that Brooks was Jewish. Buckley wasn't willing to sacrifice National Review's identity as a publication whose mission was at least partly theological.

More prosaically, National Review defined itself in opposition to the "modern Republicanism" of Dwight D. Eisenhower. In a publisher's statement accompanying the first issue—the one famous for pledging to stand "athwart history, yelling Stop"—Buckley denounced conservatives who "made their peace with the New Deal," as the sitting president did, as "the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality [have] never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity." It was this mission, more than the others, that defined Buckley's influence on conservatism. Within 10 years, the Republicans would nominate for president Barry Goldwater, a candidate who represented the antithesis of modern Republicanism. After Goldwater's landslide defeat, Buckley's movement pressed on, and in 1980 it installed Ronald Reagan, one of its own, as president.

It's rare that a writer as influential as Buckley leaves behind so little in the way of lasting works. Buckley published many books in his lifetime, but only his first, God and Man at Yale, will likely stand the test of time. Buckley extended his influence mainly through National Review, through a syndicated newspaper column, and through Firing Line, the lively debate program on public television that elevated him to national celebrity. His public persona drew admiration from ideological friend and foe alike because of Buckley's obvious charm, his playful wit, his generosity, and his insistence that political differences be expressed in a civil tone.

But sorry as we may be to mark Buckley's passing, we should be very glad that the country ignored much of what he had to say. Consider, for example, this editorial from 1957 (cited in Paul Krugman's recent book The Conscience of a Liberal):

The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. …

National Review

believes that the South's premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way; and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.

This equanimity in that last clause is particularly chilling when you consider that it was published only two years after Emmett Till's murder. Buckley was not himself a bigot, but he was at best blind and at worst indifferent to the bigotry all around him, and there can be no question that he stood in the way of racial progress. In a 1963 column taking exception to the imminent march on Washington, where Martin Luther King would deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech, Buckley described himself as someone who believed that

a federal law, artificially deduced from the Commerce Clause of the Constitution or from the 14

th

Amendment, whose marginal effect will be to instruct small merchants in the Deep South on how they may conduct their business, is no way at all of promoting the kind of understanding which is the basis of progressive and charitable relationships between the races.

Buckley was similarly oblivious to the danger posed by Sen. Joe McCarthy, about whom he co-authored a sympathetic book in 1953. As late as December 2005, Buckley was still hedging carefully any criticism of McCarthy's irresponsible witch hunt:

[M]y own study of McCarthy ended with his activity in September 1953 … his fight with the Army, which was what the fracas [depicted in George Clooney's film

Good Night and Good Luck

] was about in 1954 — which got him censured, and which loosed Edward R. Murrow — was something else. … McCarthy had thrown restraint to one side, that he was deep in booze in those days and did some flatly inexcusable things, for instance his attack on General Ralph Zwicker.

Although he was tough on communism, Buckley was soft on fascism. In a "Letter From Spain" for National Review (also unearthed by Krugman), he wrote:

General Franco is an authentic national hero. It is generally conceded that he above others had the combination of talents, the perseverance, and the sense of righteousness of his cause, that were required to wrest Spain from the hands of the visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihlistis that were imposing on her, in the thirties, a regime so grotesque as to do violence to the Spanish soul, to deny, even Spain's historical identity.

Fortunately for all of us, by the time Buckley's man Ronald Reagan entered the White House, various civil rights laws were already on the books, communism was dying of natural causes, and Gen. Franco (to quote Saturday Night Live) was still dead. As for dismantling the New Deal, Reagan rallied the nation against big government but did little to shrink it, instead ballooning the budget deficit from $74 billion to $155 billion. About this, Buckley said at the close of Reagan's presidency, "most cool observers now realize that the deficit is a problem not curable by any means as easy as voting for one or another presidential candidate." Meanwhile, Buckley praised the tax cuts that helped create those deficits as "a revolution not merely in economic thought but in ethical thought as well."

Reagan was clearly a Buckleyite, but the presidency of his ideological successor, George W. Bush, led the conservative movement away from Buckley-style conservatism. Partly, Bush did this by making his peace with the New Deal. Reagan had railed against big government while doing little to reduce it; Bush dispensed with the rhetoric and used the federal agencies as a patronage machine for disastrously incompetent cronies. Bush also turned his foreign policy over to the neoconservative movement to a much greater extent than Reagan had, with the disastrous Iraq war the result. Buckley had never cottoned to the neoconservative movement, probably because it was too tolerant of the New Deal. Eventually Buckley would declare the Iraq war a mistake, putting himself at odds with his own magazine, which under the editorship of Rich Lowry had become emphatically neoconservative. Shortly before he died, David Frum, a National Review writer, published a book that called for a carbon tax and promoted government action to combat obesity. As I write this, the Republican Party is preparing to nominate a candidate—John McCain—who, if elected, seems likely to revive Eisenhower-style modern Republicanism.

History did not stop. It never does. That's the good news, and also the bad.

Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.

http://www.slate.com/id/2185301/

[GaryC 7]

Not slanted much, hum?

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Everyone detected with AIDS should be tatooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals."

Hell of a guy.

He also opposed de-segregation of the schools in the 50's (see the below quote).

"The central question that emerges…is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”

Most of that was due to his upbringing in the South, and the sorts of views that were popular in the South during the 1930's. Like several writers I quite like - he's not untypical of people from that place in time - simply a compendium of the popular views that he grew up with. To be fair though - the guy did change his opinions on a lot of that stuff in subsequent years - and from what I understand he didn't really have any enemies, even among the people who disagreed with him.

Buckley founded the "modern" conservative movement. As opposed to "Neoconservatism" - Leo Strauss can be thanked for that.

[Empress of Groovy 373]

I thought he seemed like kind of a nut. An eloquent nut, but still a nut.