William F. Buckley Dead at 82

NEW YORK - William F. Buckley Jr., the erudite Ivy Leaguer and conservative herald who showered huge and scornful words on liberalism as he observed, abetted and cheered on the right's post-World War II rise from the fringes to the White House, died Wednesday. He was 82.

His assistant Linda Bridges said Buckley was found dead by his cook at his home in Stamford, Conn. The cause of death was unknown, but he had been ill with emphysema, she said.

Editor, columnist, novelist, debater, TV talk show star of "Firing Line," harpsichordist, trans-oceanic sailor and even a good-natured loser in a New York mayor's race, Buckley worked at a daunting pace, taking as little as 20 minutes to write a column for his magazine, the National Review.

Yet on the platform he was all handsome, reptilian languor, flexing his imposing vocabulary ever so slowly, accenting each point with an arched brow or rolling tongue and savoring an opponent's discomfort with wide-eyed glee.

"I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition," he wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1986. "I asked myself the other day, `Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?' I couldn't think of anyone."

Buckley had for years been withdrawing from public life, starting in 1990 when he stepped down as top editor of the National Review. In December 1999, he closed down "Firing Line" after a 23-year run, when guests ranged from Richard Nixon to Allen Ginsberg. "You've got to end sometime and I'd just as soon not die onstage," he told the audience.

"For people of my generation, Bill Buckley was pretty much the first intelligent, witty, well-educated conservative one saw on television," fellow conservative William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, said at the time the show ended. "He legitimized conservatism as an intellectual movement and therefore as a political movement."

thefreak said:
Judging from his views listed in that article, one has to wonder how having him and Ginsburg in the same room went.

-TM

PointBlank said:
AWKward.

thefreak said:

You know, I just watched that after a quick search before I saw you posted it.

[/Twilight Zone theme]

-TM

Subrosa said:

Nessuno said:
I just made the connection to the famous debate between him and Gore Vidal.:

"Vidal called Buckley a "cypto-Nazi" (which Vidal later, accurately, corrected to "crypto-fascist"), and Buckley responded with, "listen you queer ['quee-ah'], stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll pop you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered.""

And European criticizms of the Viet Nam War are particularly hollow, since the French made it a point to involve themselves and lose huge there, first.

Nessuno said:

You mean when the French Colonialists tried to protect their investment? I don't think you can equate US involvement in Vietnam with the French who were there before the conflict began.

You mean when the French Colonialists tried to protect their investment? I don't think you can equate US involvement in Vietnam with the French who were there before the conflict began.

Volkov70 said:
except that the French were there specifically to exploit the populace and the resources. They WERE the conflict. We went in, originally, at thier behest.

Why not? What we were ATTEMPTING to do was prevent another budding nation from becoming a totalitarian regime.

Nessuno said:

Agreed, the French were the cause for the conflict. I'm just saying that we, the US. shouldn't be compared to the French. Their reason for being there was a bad one, colonialism in general is a bad thing, but he said the French "made it a point to involve themselves." They didn't make a point of it, that's my point.

You said the French made a point of entering that conflict, I was correcting that.

I'm not even going to get into the fact that we have no right to meddle in the affairs of another country. Regardless of whether the French asked for aid or not.

oyaji said:
Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Cassiel said:

martinj_b52 said:
European achievements of the last 100 years have been few and far between.

oyaji said:

Roy Cohn was also scum. It's a pity he was ever born.

attn_ho said:
Buckley: "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."
link

Buckley recanted after hearing that a friend of his, Roy Cohn, had contracted AIDS.