He Knew He Was Right

Buckley was actually a superb seaman. He sailed his yacht, Cyrano, on long ocean voyages, accompanied by his son, Chris, and various friends, salts and landlubbers alike. "Any father you can travel across the Atlantic with twice and the Pacific once is someone you love," says Chris. The senior Buckley taught himself celestial navigation so thoroughly that he was able to write a treatise on it. Chris Buckley recalls a drunken celebration in New Guinea after the long (4,287 miles) passage from Honolulu. Chris raised a glass to his father, "who can shoot the sun, shoot the stars, and shoot the moon."

Buckley also played the harpsichord, though not well enough to suit his refined musical tastes. Buckley was hardly a dilettante; "He worked his ass off," says Chris. But he was in perpetual motion, giving 70 speeches a year, and it's difficult to tell where the work ended and the fun began. Consider the trips Buckley took to Mississippi in the late '60s and early '70s to visit his friend Clarke Reed. In a sense, the trips were serious business. A brilliant businessman and political operator, Reed was for all intents and purposes the father of the Republican Party in Mississippi, the essential man in building the GOP from minority to majority party in deep Dixie. On one trip, Reed took Buckley to see the writer Walker Percy. While they were sitting on a terrace on the Louisiana bayou, a call came to Buckley from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Paris, letting his friend know that he had just signed a peace accord with the North Vietnamese. "Peace in our time," Buckley announced. On an earlier Buckley foray to Greenville, Miss., the Reeds asked a neighbor, a cotton farmer originally from Britain, to come over and bring his xylophone.

"Everyone was a little intimidated because Buckley was at the height of his fame," recalls Julia Reed, a Vogue writer and NEWSWEEK contributing editor who was 8 or 9 years old at the time. "But he was so warm and gracious to everyone. When it was time for me to go to bed, I remember I couldn't get to sleep because Buckley was playing the piano and singing what I thought was the Frito Bandito song—you know, Ai-yi-yi-yi-yi, the "Cielito Lindo"—and someone's daughter was dancing on the table, and the British neighbor was playing his xylophone. Buckley was singing in Spanish, which was his first language, at the top of his voice. He could mingle anywhere."

Buckley was perhaps too frenetic. A 1988 Washington Monthly piece by Nicholas Lemann, now dean of Columbia Journalism School, noted that Buckley "could be a great thinker, but he's too busy running to the airport." Buckley bragged that he could write a column in 20 minutes, and many of his thrice-weekly columns read like it. But his total volume of work is staggering: his columns, The New York Times estimated, would fill 45 volumes, and his papers, donated to Yale, weigh seven tons. He wrote about 50 books (the number varies, depending on whether you count anthologies), and his TV show, "Firing Line," ran for 33 years.

"Firing Line" was a perfect vehicle for Buckley. With a worthy foe, like Germaine Greer on feminism, or race relations with James Baldwin, Buckley was all wicked cleverness. Seeing an opening, his heavy-lidded eyes would flash and his slightly reptilian tongue would dart. "He has the eyes of a child who has just displayed a horrid use for the microwave oven and the family cat," wrote David Remnick, now The New Yorker editor, in The Washington Post in 1985. Buckley loved to skewer with outlandish metaphors. A large target like Harvard was almost too easy. During the late '60s, when the Harvard campus was roiling, Buckley joked that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty.

Buckley bridled at bullies. One of the rare times he lost his temper was debating Gore Vidal, who "got under his skin," says son Chris. When Vidal called Buckley a "crypto-Nazi," Buckley responded: "Now listen, you queer, you stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in your goddam face and you'll stay plastered." But usually his public manners were genteel. With "Firing Line" guests who seemed nervous or over their heads, Buckley was gentle. Behind the scenes, he could show remarkable kindness. In 1980, a rising conservative star, Congressman Bob Bauman, was soliciting a 16-year-old for oral sex. Bauman had been a gay-basher, and he instantly became a pariah. The next day, knowing what lay ahead for the disgraced congressman, Buckley quietly gave him an envelope containing $10,000. "He was a knightly man," says Chris.