He Knew He Was Right

The Buckley dinner salons were held at Bill and Patricia's Park Avenue apartment, a ground-floor maisonette at 73rd Street in Manhattan. Literary sportsman George Plimpton might be there, chatting with statesman Henry Kissinger or novelist Dominick Dunne. At the same time, standing in the corner might be a lumpy, Trotskyite-turned-Catholic intellectual talking to a nervous Yale undergraduate. There were rarely politicians to be seen at the Buckleys' elegant home, but, standing by the Bösendorfer piano in the living room, guests often heard world-class pianist Bruce Levingston playing the same Bach concerto he would be performing the next week at Carnegie Hall. (Buckley had heard Levingston play Bach as a 23-year-old prodigy and asked him to come sailing; the two men became lifelong poker buddies. "He never, never folded," Levingston recalls.)

The dining room was grand, two tables for 10 set with silver flatware and fine china, with the Buckleys' Cavalier King Charles spaniels swirling about. "The first time I had dinner, they put a finger bowl in front of me and I wasn't sure if I should drink it," says David Brooks, now a New York Times columnist, then an editorial assistant at Buckley's National Review. Buckley had offered Brooks a job after Brooks, a University of Chicago student, wrote a funny, if smart-alecky, parody of Buckley's name-dropping memoir, "Overdrive," for the school newspaper. Guests were sometimes daunted: after dinner, Buckley might call on one or two to stand and speak on whatever they felt strongly about. But there was a "charming and childlike side to Buckley," Levingston says. Buckley treated his guests equally, expressing as much interest in the Yale undergrad on his right as in the former secretary of State on his left—or more if the student had something refreshing to say (it didn't hurt if she was pretty, either). Buckley may have been an haut gourmand, but he kept a jar of peanut butter—high-quality peanut butter, to be sure—in his suitcase. "He was a great deal more accepting of difference than many people might have thought," says Levingston. "His tone and level of civilized discourse also set him in great relief to the shrill type of commentary we often hear today. He didn't want to be unduly harsh or unfair, and he felt deeply hurt or disturbed if something he wrote or said hurt someone personally. There was a fundamental kindness about him, which, for all his seemingly intimidating persona, was quite touching."

For more than a half century, William F. Buckley Jr., who died last week at 82, largely inspired and held together the conservative movement that is collapsing today. The Wall Street Journal editorialized: "Several generations of conservatives grew up (in more than one sense) with Bill Buckley. Now they have—well, there is no one like him." "He changed the personality of conservatism," Brooks says. "It had been sort of negative, and he made it smart and sophisticated and pushed out all these oddballs and created a movement." More recently, says Brooks, conservatism has "lost something." In the conservatism spawned by talk radio and TV, the haters and know-nothings are back, ranting about immigrants and liberals. "It was a lot more philosophical under him," he says. At those nightly salons, Buckley liked to talk and argue about ideas and literature and the nature of man; politics was rarely mentioned. "The new conservatives are not as intellectually creative as those dealing with communism and socialism," says Brooks. Buckley tolerated some disreputable ideas, including segregation; but he had the capacity to change.

Buckley was a bon vivant with luxurious tastes, a prolific author of best-selling novels as well as serious nonfiction, a sportsman most gleeful on icy slopes and navigating through a gale, a world-class namedropper, a refined musicologist (and self-taught harpsichord player) and a lover of big words (a sesquipedalian, as he might say). His aristocratic airs were a bit over the top: the parlor-snake languor; the plummy accent; the lank, slightly too-long hair. He played the "Masterpiece Theatre" host of "Brideshead Revisited" to perfection. But he was not a snob. "He was quite the opposite," says his son, Christopher, a well-known satirist and writer. The caricatures of Buckley masked interesting complexities. In the 1955 manifesto for the National Review, his new magazine that would set the course for late-20th-century conservatism, Buckley vowed to "stand athwart history, yelling 'Stop'." But he was by no means a stick-in-the-mud. He was always on the go, looking for new adventures and ideas. In the '60s, he took to driving a motorcycle through the streets of Manhattan and later sailed his yacht into international waters to experiment with marijuana.

Social conservatives tend to be a gloomy lot because they have a dark view of human nature. Every disturbance, they fear, could lead to the French Revolution. But Buckley was as sunny and hopeful as the hero he helped create, Ronald Reagan. He believed that if government would just leave man alone, the human spirit would triumph. Certainly, his did. When he died last week as he was sitting down in his study to write (he was working on a memoir of Reagan), he was one of the world's last great public intellectuals, a man who could spar intensely with the late liberal icons Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and John Kenneth Galbraith about the true meaning of life—and then have a laugh over a martini.

Buckley owed his success to genius, but just as much to the peculiar nature of his upbringing. He was blessed to grow up in a style and manner that were almost uniquely inside-out, that endowed him at once with critical detachment and a warm faith that he belonged. Buckley's first language was Spanish—from a nanny who worked for the Buckleys while they lived in Mexico for a time. His father was a Texas oil wildcatter who struck it rich and moved his large (10 children) family to Connecticut. They lived on an idyllic estate called Great Elm in the bucolic town of Sharon. But the local WASP gentry looked down on them, at first, as Roman Catholic parvenus—"one step up from mackerelsnappers," says Chris Buckley, invoking an old anti-Catholic slur. Cosseted by nannies and tutors, with his siblings as playmates, Bill grew up in isolated splendor, "as if in a Catholic duchy of Liechtenstein," says the younger Buckley. He was, as a child and all through his life, "deeply, profoundly and sometimes exasperatingly Catholic," says his son. Buckley was, as well, a precocious patriot. At the age of 8, he wrote a stern letter to the King of England, demanding that Britain pay off its World War I debt to the United States.