A Look Back At The Late, Great William F. Buckley

As a teenager in the 1960s, I was influenced greatly by conservative author, editor, TV host and newspaper columnist William F. Buckley.

I read his newspaper columns, his magazine National Review and his many books, including his sailing books and his fine series of spy thrillers. I was also a faithful viewer of his TV show, Firing Line.

I’m thankful that I was able to review two of his books for the Philadelphia Inquirer. One was on President Ronald Reagan and the other was his last thriller. He was still alive when my review of Last Call for Blackford Oates appeared, and I hope he read it.

Ed Feuler offers a look back at the late, great William F. Buckley in the Washington Times.

Last week was a homecoming for me. But it was something more. On Oct. 18, I was in Chicago to receive the annual William F. Buckley Prize for Leadership in Political Thought. On the occasion of this great honor, I couldn’t help reflecting on the fact that we stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us.

Conservatives owe a huge debt to Bill Buckley. He didn’t just start a magazine when he founded National Review in 1955. He planted a flag for many of us who bristled at the liberal orthodoxy then prevalent in American society.

The books that followed, along with his hosting television’s “Firing Line” for 33 years, showed how the tenets of conservative weren’t something that had to be consigned to history books and musty tomes. They were eternally true. They could — and should — be applied to the issues of the day.

For so many of us, the philosophy of freedom found its voice in Bill Buckley and its platform in National Review.

It soon became clear that Bill was developing not just a readership, but a national movement. NR was not simply another journal, but a political act.

We intend, wrote Bill to a prospective supporter, “to revitalize the conservative position” and “influence the opinion-makers” of the nation.

… But Bill’s influence went beyond his landmark magazine. His biography itself is conservatism’s history.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/22/remembering-william-f-buckleys-pivotal-role-in-the/ 

You can also read my Philadelphia Inquirer reviews of Mr. Buckley’s books below:

The Legacy Of William F. Buckley

As Ed Feulner notes in his piece in the Washington Times, it has been ten years since author, columnist, editor and TV host William F. Buckley died.

I began reading Mr. Buckley and watching his TV show Firing Line when I was 12-years-old. 

Like so many, many others, Mr. Buckley was a huge influence in my life. 

I’m thankful that I was able to review favorably two of his books for the Philadelphia Inquirer – one was a political book on President Reagan and the other was his last spy thriller. 

He died before my review of his The Reagan I Knew appeared in the Inquirer, but as he was alive and still an avid reader when my review of Last Call for Blackford Oakes appeared in the Inquirer, I hope he read my review.

William F. Buckley may have passed, but his influence lives on. 

Ed Feulner looks back at the life and work of  Mr. Buckley in the Washington Times.

It’s been exactly a decade since William F. Buckley Jr. died. Yet, surveying the ideological landscape, it feels more like a century.

Watch an episode of his program “Firing Line,” and you’ll see what I mean. There, Mr. Buckley — in his uniquely aristocratic way — would debate guests on the issues of the day. Not try to shout each other down, or trot out a quick sound bite before three or four different people cross-talked over you, but actually debate.

That may sound like a recipe for boredom, and perhaps by the cage-match mentality prevailing today, it was. But we’re talking about a program that racked up more than 1,500 episodes over nearly 35 years. People were watching, listening and engaging in debates of their own across the country.

Mr. Buckley, of course, was no mere host, but an intellect of the first order who preached undiluted conservatism. Author, publisher, commentator, he bucked the liberal order by revealing the emptiness of its utopian promises.

… “Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view,” he wrote in “Up From Liberalism.” Another classic zinger: “Liberals, it has been said, are generous with other people’s money, except when it comes to questions of national survival, when they prefer to be generous with other people’s freedom and security.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/26/william-f-buckleys-legacy/ 

And you can read my Philadelphia Inquirer reviews of Mr. Buckley’s books below:

And you can watch an episode of Firing Line in which Groucho Marx appears with William F. Buckley via the below link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXlIZBZpkoA  

The Intellectual And The Talk Show Host: Buckley’s Regular Presence On Carson’s ‘Tonight’

James Rosen, editor of A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century, a book of William F. Buckley's pieces on notable people during the conservative writer's lifetime, offers a piece in the Los Angeles Times on Buckley's many appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

"Johnny Carson was amused by everything,” William F. Buckley Jr., the godfather of modern American conservatism, once observed about the King of Late Night. Buckley’s exposure to the dominant TV entertainer of the 20th century was, literally, episodic: the product of appearances on “The Tonight Show” so frequent that Buckley lost count of them. “I was his guest a half-dozen times,” he estimated after Carson’s death – by which time the figure was actually twice as high.

Today, the regular presence on the leading late night TV shows of someone like Buckley, an aristocratic intellectual given to speaking in whole paragraphs, even other languages – he began one “Tonight” appearance with several sentences in Spanish – would seem, in a lineup dominated by actors and pop stars, glaringly out of place. Back then, however, Buckley fit right in and we were, as a nation, richer for it.

It was in the 1960s and ’70s that Buckley and Carson reached the apex of their influence in their overlapping fields. As a magazine editor, syndicated newspaper columnist, college lecturer, spy novelist, talk show guest and host of “Firing Line,” the longest-running TV show with a single host, Buckley was even more of a multimedia phenomenon than Carson.

What brought them together was an admirable appetite for eclecticism less discernible in our niche-targeted era: a Warholian conflation of High and Low that placed entertainers, athletes, politicians, novelists, intellectuals, psychics and oddballs on the same TV couch.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-rosen-buckley-carson-20161120-story.html

P.J. O'Rourke Rips 'Buckley And Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped The Sixties'

I was a teenager and a political conservative in the 1960s (although in other aspects I was far from conservative) and I read William F. Buckley's newspaper column and his political books. I also watched him on his PBS TV show, Firing Line. In later years I read and enjoyed his spy thrillers. He was a huge influence.

In the 1960s I also read Norman Mailer's novels and nonfiction work. I didn't agree with his worldview, but I thought he was an interesting writer. I also thought Mailer's The Executioner's Song  was an outstanding true crime book.

Having read both authors and having watched the two brilliant men debate on Firing Line, I was initially very interested in reading Kevin M. Schultz's Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties.

But having now read P.J. O'Rourke's book review in the Washington Post, I'm not so sure.

Kevin M. Schultz’s “Buckley and Mailer” would be fun without Kevin M. Schultz. He’s a third wheel. What he contributes to the chronicle of friendship between William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer is what an oversize carry-on bag contributes to an airplane flight. If “Buckley and Mailer” were a Bing Crosby and Bob Hope road movie, Kevin M. Schultz would be along instead of Dorothy Lamour. Athos, Porthos and . . . Schultz.

In fairness, telling the story of two men who liked each other is difficult if you don’t like one of them. Schultz detests Buckley.

“ . . . a salesman’s eyes, as though Buckley were trying to sell something he knew you didn’t really want to buy.”  

... Schultz’s subtitle says it all — wrong. “The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties.” The adjective, the verb and the nouns are incorrect.

Schultz is a historian of the ’60s. I was there. William F. Buckley did not shape the ’60s and would have been appalled to be accused of it. Buckley, who led conservatism’s long march from cocktail-hour mixed nuts to political main course, shaped the ’80s and, to an extent, the ever-since.

Norman Mailer did not shape the ’60s. Prosperity, pot, the pill and the draft did. Mailer was an artist; he shaped all of creation. But he had little direct influence on we who fancied ourselves members of the Armies of the Night. And Mailer considered us to be lost in the dark, anyway. Buckley and Mailer together can hardly be said to have done what Buckley and Mailer separately did not do.

... I met Buckley a number of times and owe him a boatload of praise. He was a mainmast of courtesy, an anchor of encouragement and a spinnaker of enthusiasm for whatever one had written. And he knew what it was. The man must have read everything, including National Lampoon. My first contact with Bill was in the mid-’70s, a personal note lauding something I’d done, maybe “Why Fluoride in Water Turns Kids Into Commies.” (Infrequent need to go to the dentist means fewer salutary waiting-room exposures to hard-line Cold War articles in Reader’s Digest.)

Only once did I get a chance to talk to Mailer at length. We were seated near each other at a dinner party. “The Executioner’s Song” had just been published. I asked Mailer if Gary Gilmore’s inamorata, Nicole Baker, had as much je ne sais quoi and you-know-what as it seemed. The answer was: did she ever.

You can read the rest of the review via the below link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/intellectual-frenemies-of-the-1960s/2015/05/29/bf7c5dd0-f285-11e4-bcc4-e8141e5eb0c9_story.html?postshare=5721433079430125