I was upset to hear that William F. Buckley Jr. died yesterday at the age of 82. He'd been suffering with diabetes and emphysema, but we don't really know what happened yet. His son said that Buckley was found at his desk and may have been working on his column--which for any writer--is the perfect way to go out.
Ironically, a while back, I picked up two books by Buckley: Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith and Let Us Talk of Many Things: The Collected Speeches. I haven't read either book, but I plan to soon. Buckley has always intrigued me. His political views were somewhere between libertarianism and old right conservatism (which pretty much describes my own political views). He couldn't identify with the neoconservatism of today, and neither can I.
But he seemed bigger than politics. By late yesterday afternoon, I found 59 articles on the web that had already been written about his death. Certainly his death was newsworthy. He started National Review magazine, which was said to have influenced Ronald Reagan's politics. But more than that, he was a man who wasn't beholden to a particular political party. And he had a personality that most people loved. He could be feisty and he wasn't afraid to punch back at times, but by and large, he respected people and I love that. Here's how he was portrayed yesterday in a Bloomberg article:
Known for nurturing writing talent regardless of political leaning, Buckley counted among his proteges conservative columnists David Brooks and George Will, liberal writer Garry Wills and early contributors to the magazine Joan Didion and Arlene Croce.
While his detractors came largely from the left, and included author Gore Vidal, Buckley was also criticized by supporters of "Objectivist'' conservative Ayn Rand and the ultra-right John Birch Society.
I love what the New York Times said about him yesterday:
Mr. Buckley’s winningly capricious personality, replete with ten-dollar words and a darting tongue writers loved to compare with an anteater’s, hosted one of television’s longest-running programs, "Firing Line," and founded and shepherded the influential conservative magazine National Review.
Buckley's wife, Patricia Alden Austin Taylor, died in April of 2007. They called each other "Ducky," for who knows what reason. Life couldn't have been the same for him without her these past ten months. But like others who loose their spouse, he found the will to go and with his work.
I know I've said this many times before, but I am always grateful for the writing legacy a person can leave behind. As my own political views have been shaped over the past couple of decades and as I've found myself closer to Buckley's views than the vast majority of what passes today for conservatism, I always knew in the back of my mind that I would feast on his writings one day.
Buckley wrote more than 55 books, some of which were novels, and approximately 4.5 million words in his 5,600 newspaper columns which, according to the New York Times would fill 45 more medium-sized books. I'm looking forward to diving in reading many of those words.
