If, as Carlyle believed, “The history of the world is but the biography of great men,” then William F Buckley—80 in November—rates a place in the history of our time. Fifty years ago, Buckley, the New York city-born heir to a Texas oil fortune, started a magazine with the express purpose of making his historical mark. In the first issue of National Review, dated 19th November 1955, he declared that his new publication “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” Today, at a time when the left extols the virtues of competition and even privatisation, it’s a challenge to think back to a different era, when a genuine left believed, with good reason, that it was driving an unstoppable locomotive destined for the Finland station.
In 1955, Buckley was already famous in the US. Four years earlier, at age 25, he had published God and Man at Yale, an account of his undergraduate years, in which he cited in detail the secularist and Fabian tendencies of his professors. The book provoked a storm, which propelled it to bestsellerdom, as well as Buckley to enfant terrible-dom—it’s still in print today.
As John Judis, a man of the left, observed in his admiring 1988 biography, “During the 1950s and 1960s, Bill Buckley was American conservatism… He created the style and the politics that have come to be identified as conservatism.” Noting Buckley’s 80th birthday, columnist George F Will cited his 4,000 columns, 47 books and 34-year stint as host of the public broadcasting show Firing Line and concluded, “Buckley’s country is significantly different, and better, because of him. Of how many journalists, ever, can that be said? One.”
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