William F. Buckley Jnr was born 100 years ago this week. The renaissance man of American conservatism. Editor, broadcaster, novelist, wit, polemicist, bon viveur, one-time CIA agent, New York mayoral candidate, accomplished harpsichordist – and a devout Catholic. To Margaret Thatcher, “He shaped a generation not only in America, but wherever the defence of liberty was required.” Ronald Reagan praised him, writing, “you rolled back the Red Sea and made it dry land for the march of freedom.”
This milestone was marked in June by Sam Tanenhaus’s magisterial, authorised biography, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America – 1,000 pages and 27 years in the making. Tanenhaus cites two foundational ideas in the life of WFB: “One was Catholicism, which was the most important thing in his life. The second was a kind of evangelical capitalism.” As another distinguished conservative voice, Dr Lee Edwards, said, “Buckley could have been the playboy of the Western world, but he chose instead to be the St Paul of the conservative movement.”
