He Knew He Was Right

Buckley himself had no political ambition. As a joke, the National Review ran a BUCKLEY FOR MAYOR headline at the time of the 1965 New York City mayoral race. Liberal Republican John Lindsay was running against the old Democratic machine, leaving conservatives nowhere to go. When New York's fringey Conservative Party asked Buckley to run for mayor for real, he accepted—as a lark. At his announcement, asked what he would do if he won, Buckley answered, "Demand a recount." (He got 13 percent of the vote.) In 1970, the conservatives asked Buckley to run for the Senate, but the editor passed the baton to his brother James—who actually won New York's junior Senate seat when the majority liberal vote split between the Democrat and the Republican candidates. Jim Buckley served a term until 1977, and was beaten by Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan—who, in the small world of the New York intelligentsia, was one of Bill Buckley's closest friends and a regular at the Buckley dinner table on 73rd Street.

Buckley did not distinguish between political persuasions in his friendships. For Buckley, "Politics wasn't the ultimate thing," says Rich Lowry, Buckley's disciple and successor as editor of National Review. "That's why he could have all these friendships across party and ideology, because he never believed that political views defined the essential person. He had a deep belief in the preciousness of individuals." Lowry says that was the root of Buckley's deep anti-communism: "There was no way someone like that could survive five minutes in a communist state. He'd be bored to death, and then he'd be executed because he would deliberately do something provocative."

By the late '60s, Buckley was the grandee of resurgent conservatism. President Richard Nixon made him a delegate to the United Nations. Sitting in the General Assembly, Buckley entertained himself listening to the United States being denounced by Third World countries. "He got a good, fun book out of the experience," says son Chris. Buckley's vindication awaited: the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. "All great Biblical stories begin with Genesis," George Will wrote in National Review in 1980. "And before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater, there was the National Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind, and in 1980 the spark became a conflagration." (Will was one of several now celebrated pundits or writers who worked for or contributed to National Review; others include Joan Didion and Garry Wills.) In gratitude, Reagan offered to make Buckley ambassador to the Court of St. James's. Sensing that he would be bored hosting diplomatic receptions in London when he could be entertaining far more interesting guests at his New York maisonette, Buckley politely declined, though he asked dryly to be made ambassador to Kabul instead. At the time, Kabul was under Soviet occupation. In his frequent letters to Reagan, Buckley would write under his signature, "United States Ambassador to Afghanistan."

Buckley was having too much fun to be ambassador to anything. In 1976, he wrote his first of 11 novels about the smooth and daring Blackford Oakes—Yale man, CIA spook and Buckley fantasy. (Buckley would whip novels off while on his annual ski vacation at his chalet in Gstaad.) In the first spy novel, a No. 1 best seller, Oakes beds the Queen of England while saving her from communist evil. Buckley actually knew a little about the CIA, having served as a junior agency case officer for a year in Mexico City after graduating from Yale in 1950. Buckley's CIA boss in Mexico, E. Howard Hunt, was no Blackford Oakes: the bumbling Hunt was later busted as one of the Watergate burglars. Buckley's nonfiction feel for the CIA was realistic. After a coup plot against Indonesian strongman Sukarno failed in 1957, Buckley wrote in the National Review, "The attempted assassination of Sukarno last week had all the earmarks of a CIA operation. Everyone in the room was killed except Sukarno."

Buckley was a great talent scout, but his protégés needed to have a hollow leg and a robust disposition. NEWSWEEK International Editor Fareed Zakaria was a Yale student in 1983 when he invited Buckley to speak to the Yale Political Union. Buckley invited Zakaria and another budding young intellectual, Michael Lind, to spend the day at the Buckley weekend house, a 13-room stucco mansion overlooking Long Island Sound in Stamford, Conn. Arriving at 11 a.m. on a bright May day, the young men were served bullshots (vodka and bouillon). Before lunch there were gin and tonics, and with lunch came red and white wine, followed by … a brisk swim! Buckley led the young men to a chilly-looking swimming pool, where he disrobed and plunged in. The young men looked at each other—was this some sort of Greek or late-Victorian ritual?—and stripped off their clothes and jumped in, too. All the men vigorously splashed about for a bit and it was … time for a sail! As the paid hands rigged Buckley's yacht and loaded aboard the steaks, there were more gin and tonics, more wine. Somehow, the yachting party staggered back in time to catch the evening news, followed by … more drinks, laughs and high-minded debate.

Lucky guests got to spend the night on the Buckley yacht. Lowry recalls a memorable, if uncomfortable, Friday-night sailing trip. After dinner there were drinks and hands of poker. Meanwhile, the anchor was slipping and the boat was drifting to shore. No one noticed, Lowry recalled, until the boat was aground. The tide went out … and the yachting party called it a day. "We slept all night on the boat, at a 45-degree angle," Lowry says. Buckley didn't seem particularly bothered. His reaction, says Lowry, was a mixture of "vexation and amusement."