This year is the centennial of the birth of William F. Buckley, Jr., the best-known American conservative intellectual of the second half of the 20th century, and February 27 is the anniversary of his death in 2008 at the age of 82. To most Americans, he was a media celebrity, the erudite and witty host of the PBS program “Firing Line,” while to so-called movement conservatives, he was the leader of a faction that crystallized around his magazine National Review, founded in 1955. Having met him when I was at graduate school at Yale, for a decade, from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, I was privileged to know Bill Buckley as a mentor and friend. He has been the subject of a number of biographies, including John Judis’s William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (1988) and the definitive forthcoming biography by Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and Revolution That Changed America (June 2025).
Read Full Article »
