Since the early 1950s, William F. Buckley, Jr., has been one of the most visible and outspoken conservative intellectuals in the United States. By founding National Review magazine in the mid-1950s and thus providing conservative writers with a common organ of opinion, he brought a measure of cohesiveness to a disparate group of dissenters from the liberalism that dominated the American intellectual community. Buckley also hosted Firing Line, the Public Broadcasting System’s longest-running program, where he engaged individuals of all political persuasions on a variety of issues and presented his conservative perspective to a large audience.

Buckley was born to staunchly Catholic parents, William Frank Buckley and Aloise Steiner Buckley. His father was a millionaire Texas oilman often embroiled in Mexican politics, frank in his racial prejudices, and politically allied with Southern Democrats. His mother was a pious and gentle southerner.

Even in the years when he attended Millbrook Academy in upstate New York and Yale University, Buckley was known for his spunk and often exhibited an outlaw independence when it came to rules and conventions. At Yale, he bristled under what he saw as the reigning liberal ideology of the institution. His defiance emerged forcefully in his book God and Man at Yale (1951), which won him national attention. In it, Buckley marshaled evidence to show that Yale had abandoned its allegiance to Christianity and free-market economics. Typical of his style, Buckley named names and described a conspiracy against these threatened American orthodoxies.

Buckley’s early conservatism derived from several sources, including his father and one of his father’s close friends, the aristocratically oriented libertarian Albert Jay Nock. At Yale, his irrepressible teacher, Willmoore Kendall, a noted constitutional theorist, influenced Buckley with his portrayal of America as a political battleground that pitted partisans of the “open society”—liberals with a program of relativism and individualism—against partisans of democratic majoritarianism, who defended the right of the community to preserve its traditional values. But Whittaker Chambers was probably the most important influence on Buckley. Chambers’s autobiography, Witness (1952), dramatized for Buckley the great spiritual conflict that Chambers believed defined the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Chambers’s spirited writing outlined a great contest between the religious and intellectual values of the West and the promise of a new global, secular society offered by communism. Chambers helped Buckley see the Cold War as a transcendent struggle, a view that Buckley would never wholly abandon.

By the time Buckley launched National Review in 1955, his particular style of conservatism had become evident. His was a conservatism of loyalties to the provincial and familial ways of the group and the nation at large. Thus, his book McCarthy and His Enemies (1954), coauthored by his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell, heavily emphasized the right of society to defend its folkways, and he gave priority to these interests over the civil liberties claimed by dissenters from majority opinion. Buckley viewed such dissenters as alien and subversive, enemies of traditional mores. Likewise, in Up from Liberalism (1959) Buckley spoke for the interests of the dominant white South as the civil rights movement intensified in that part of the country.

Depending on the issue in question, Buckley has expressed both libertarian and traditionalist views, and sometimes rather extreme ones. It is fair to say, then, that there has been an ad hoc quality to Buckley’s conservatism.

National Review itself was representative of Buckley’s perspective. It saw the conservative movement, and especially its leading intellectual voices, as an embattled clan fighting to reclaim for the country a heritage of freedom and morality weakened and corroded by liberalism. A wide range of conservatives were given voice in National Review—anticommunists, libertarians, traditionalists, religious conservatives. The prominence of many also reflected an important component of the conservative community. Buckley’s own Roman Catholicism was also reflected in the journal, but that fact often caused problems. Max Eastman and Ayn Rand parted company with Buckley largely because he took his religion seriously.

From the 1960s on, Buckley was one of the most widely syndicated columnists in the country. The versatile essayist wrote on subjects ranging from American foreign policy to peanut butter. His pieces were reprinted in National Review and from time to time anthologized into various collections. The Jeweler’s Eye (1968) contains Buckley’s essay on Playboy magazine, revealing how, on questions of sexual mores and some other issues, he moderated his libertarian ethos. At one point, Buckley endorsed the legalization of marijuana, but this essay shows that he was not at all inclined to accept Hugh Hefner’s call for a new morality. The Governor Listeth (1970) contains Buckley’s writings on the Vietnam War. Inveighing We Will Go (1972) has a lengthy interview with Playboy that is one of the most succinct summaries of Buckley’s general outlook. Asked at the beginning of the interview what he thought was the most important development in the 1960s, Buckley replied: the philosophical acceptance of coexistence with the Soviet Union by the West. Asked at another point what he thought could be done to stop sexual promiscuity, he replied: get people to stop reading Playboy.

In A Hymnal (1978), Buckley offered an essay on Soviet writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of his most powerful pieces. The essay revealed how Buckley, in the era of détente and accommodation with the Soviet Union, still saw the Cold War in spiritual terms and how he used Solzhenitsyn’s graphic writings to help keep alive the recognition of communism’s evils. Right Reason (1985) gathers Buckley’s reflections on such events as the revolution in Iran, the downing of a Korean airplane by the Soviets, and the American intervention in Granada.

Buckley also wrote personal memoirs. In 1965, he ran for mayor of New York against a prominent Republican liberal, John Lindsay. He chronicled the issues and anecdotes of that campaign in The Unmaking of a Mayor (1966). A very personal account of his spiritual life appeared in Nearer, My God (1997); his autobiography, Miles Gone By (2004), recounts more particulars of his life and career.

In 1976, Buckley launched a new series of books that captivated his large audience. An avid sailor, Buckley began to recount his adventure on the brine with the publication of Airborne (1976). Atlantic High (1982) and Racing Through Paradise (1987) followed. The latter describes Buckley’s enrapture with the Trimble Loran-C, a high-tech navigation calculator. Indeed, Buckley’s enthusiasms for such gadgetry and personal computers have revealed him to be a conservative quite at home in the modern world. That temperament has led at least one critic to question whether Buckley has a truly conservative mind, one enamored of antiquity and place, permanence and continuity. Buckley seemed too much a jet-age conservative, a contradiction. Indeed, Buckley is at home with cultural modernism, however much he prefers Bach to modern composers. A bathtub in one of the Buckley residences was painted in modernist style by the artist Robert Goodnough.

In 1976, Buckley ventured into fiction writing, specializing in the genre of Cold War political intrigue. His series introduced the hero Blackford Oakes—Ivy Leaguer, adventurer, romantic. In such books as Saving the Queen (1976), Stained Glass (1978), Who’s On First (1980), and High Jinx (1986), Buckley, as he once said, vicariously relived the Cold War. He believed its existence needed to be restored to public memory. Buckley continued to set his novels during that period even after the fall of the Soviet Union, publishing his eleventh Blackford Oakes novel in 2005.

Buckley retired as editor of National Review in 1990, still maintaining a strong presence at the magazine even after he relinquished his controlling shares in 2004. In 2000, he aired his last Firing Line. As befitted a prominent and highly literate conservative, he continued to write prolifically for National Review and other periodicals even as he scaled back his public speaking and some of his more taxing hobbies. His outstanding achievements in a plethora of fields were rewarded in 1991 with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and again in 2003 with the Charles H. Hoeflich Lifetime Achievement Award.

Buckley’s immense oeuvre has not amounted to a coherent and consistent conservative philosophy: to be fair, he never intended it to. Depending on the issue in question, Buckley has expressed both libertarian and traditionalist views, and sometimes rather extreme ones. It is fair to say, then, that there has been an ad hoc quality to Buckley’s conservatism. Nonetheless, his writings constitute an immense, important, and highly influential catalogue of more than fifty years of conservative opinion.

Further Reading

J. David Hoeveler, Jr., Watch on the Right: Conservative Intellectuals in the Reagan Era

John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives

William F. Meehan, III, William F. Buckley Jr.: A Bibliography

George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945

Mark Royden Winchell, William F. Buckley Jr.

This entry was originally published in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, p. 97.