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.”
Bill (or WFB) was born on 24 November 1925, the sixth of ten children of devout Catholics. William F. Buckley Sr (Will), Texan son of a sheriff, was a wildcatter who made a fortune in oil, first in Mexico, then in Venezuela. A Gatsby-like figure of considerable if precarious wealth, his children idolised him. Will’s wife, Aloise Steiner, was a remote Louisiana beauty and daily communicant who prayed for everything, even good weather, saying that “nothing was too unimportant for God.” She provided religious instruction and handed on the Rosary to her son. Otherwise she left mothering to nannies. Bill’s was Mexican, and he spoke Spanish before English. “To get to the root of Bill Buckley,” a friend later said, “you’ve got to understand that he’s a Catholic aristocrat of the Spanish persuasion”; yet another observed that Bill grew up “in a family that embraced secret lawlessness.”
When Bill and his sister Patricia were about eight, they overheard their parents saying that two unbaptised sisters (and family friends) were fated to go to hell. The next time they visited the Buckleys, Bill and Patricia sneaked into a room and baptised them with holy water as they slept. For some time, whenever they stayed overnight, Bill and Patricia would silently baptise sleeping non-Catholic guests in the middle of the night – until Aloise ordered them to stop.
The children were privately tutored in everything from Latin to woodwork to ballroom dancing and piano. Home was Georgian Colonial Great Elm, set in 47 acres in Sharon, Connecticut – well-staffed and grand. Wilfrid Sheed remarked that “Bill still shows the unmistakable signs of a happy childhood.”
The family also owned a former plantation in Camden, South Carolina — Kamchatka, once the home of a Confederate general — which they visited regularly and where they felt more at ease than in Yankee New England.
Will’s business interests led to long stretches in Venezuela (after he was expelled from Mexico), France, England and Italy. Thus the much-imitated, never quite placeable accent. At school in Paris at six, Bill learned French. At thirteen, he was sent to board for a year with the Jesuits at St John’s Beaumont, Windsor, where he heard daily Mass and began all of his essays by inscribing A.M.D.G. at the top of the page. He also unfurled a five-foot-long American flag and hung it behind his bed.
He attended school with historian Alistair Horne (a wartime evacuee taken in by the Buckleys) at Millbrook, Dutchess County, New York, where the “Young Mahster” was much influenced by an inspirational teacher, Edward Pulling, who drilled into him the importance of community service. He also tutored him in public speaking – perhaps Bill’s greatest gift.
After graduating from high school, he served nearly two years in the Army (the war ended before he could be sent abroad), and entered Yale in 1946 where he thrived. He was chairman of the Yale Daily News, a member of Skull and Bones, and of course a champion debater.
Yale provoked his first book, God and Man at Yale, an attack on its liberal professoriat. Within weeks it was a New York Times best-seller and is still in print seventy-four years later. He stated his political philosophy in the preface:
“I myself believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.”
A decade later he would quip that he would “sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”
In the autumn of 1948, Bill, still a junior at Yale, met Patricia Alden Austin Taylor, daughter of Austin Cotterell Taylor, a self-made industrialist. Her mother, “Babe,” was a beauty. Pat claimed to look “exactly like my father”. Pat was a sophomore at Vassar, where she shared a dormitory suite with Bill’s sister Trish, who had arranged a blind date. Pat was not quite ready when Bill arrived. “I offered to paint her fingernails. And she immediately extended her hand.”
According to Vanity Fair’s Bob Colacello, Nancy Reagan recalls hearing the story of how Bill proposed to Pat: “She was playing bridge and Bill took her aside and asked her to marry him. And Pat said, ‘Bill, three other men have asked me the same question. I said no to them, but I’m saying yes to you. Now, may I go back to my bridge game?’” (In other versions Pat was playing canasta and had turned down as many as eight previous suitors.) While WFB was studying, Pat took lessons with James Beard, the father of American gastronomy.
They married in 1950 by the Catholic Archbishop of Vancouver. Pat’s parents insisted that the Anglican Bishop of Vancouver bless the union at the wedding reception. Significantly, Pat was – and remained – Church of England and although not demonstrably religious, she would proclaim her Anglicanism whenever Bill’s Catholicism was mentioned. It was a volatile but enduring union.
Colacello saw them as “a study in contrasts — Auntie Mame and the Absent-minded Professor, Pericles and Cleopatra — but those who knew them best understood how in tune they were mentally, morally, politically, and romantically. They called each other Ducky.”
Pat proved to be an arresting, original figure who illuminated the social and philanthropic spheres of New York for four decades. Born and wed into privilege and wealth, her life combined noblesse oblige and haute couture with a genius for raising money and a devotion to her husband.
Their only child, Christopher, was born in 1952. An accomplished writer too, his memoir of his parents, Losing Mum and Pup (2009), is an extraordinary account; in turn, affectionate, exasperated and wry.
WFB spent two years with the CIA, one of them in Mexico, reporting back on pro-communist activity. Years later, he met the former Mexican President, who asked him what he had done during his stay in the country. “I tried to undermine your regime, Mr President.”
His station chief in Mexico was E. Howard Hunt, who twenty years later helped plot the Watergate burglary. Buckley, godfather to three of Hunt’s children, bravely defended him as committing “one tragic error in judgment, unrelated to any selfish purpose; and indeed conceived by him, however wrongly, as in the interest of his country.”
In 1952 Bill and Pat bought a waterside house at Stamford on the Connecticut side of Long Island Sound – their family home for the rest of her life. She would paint it Bermuda pink “so sailors might see it and drop in” and garden there in bikinis. In Manhattan they lived in Dag Hammarskjöld’s former Upper East Side duplex.
His next, post-CIA project was a defence of Senator Joe McCarthy, co-written with L. Brent Bozell, his Yale classmate and brother-in-law. They did not defend McCarthy the man but McCarthyism as a “movement”. In foreign affairs, Buckley was essentially an isolationist – except where Communism was involved. He would oppose John XXIII’s and Paul VI’s attempts to promote détente; but rejoiced when John Paul II joined with Reagan in supporting the trade union Solidarity to undercut the communist regime in Poland.
In 1955, undaunted – and with financial support from his father – he founded the fortnightly political magazine National Review, which he would edit until 1990.
As the New Yorker’s Louis Menand observed, “Reagan [they had met in 1961] was a regular reader of National Review, and he was undoubtedly happy to have the political support of an erudite East Coast socialite who used big words and went to Yale, someone whose alliance might convince Republican blue bloods that a former sportscaster, movie actor, and television pitchman was their kind of Republican.”
In 1965, near the height of his celebrity, he ran for mayor of New York against liberal Republican John Lindsay. Asked by reporters what he would do if he won, he said, “Demand a recount.” He need not have worried.
In April 1966, WFB launched Firing Line. It would remain on the air for 1,054 episodes over 33 years, making it the longest-running such public affairs show in TV history. Like National Review, it never made a profit. But as Tanenhaus put it, “He confidently assumed — knew from experience — that audiences were alive to his particular music: the arcane vocabulary (‘I am lapidary but not eristic when I use big words’.) and ornate syntax, the fanciful imagery, the irony, the weave of logic and sophistry.”
Menand quipped, “And the rumpled, rubber-faced manner, the popping eyes, the languorous drawl, the charmingly wicked grin he flashed when he thought he had scored a kill — Buckley was a show unto himself.” Tanenhaus confirms this: “Buckley was essentially a performer, a debater, not a thinker. He never managed to produce the magisterial philosophical explication of conservatism he had planned to write… he got by on his wits, preternatural self-confidence, and considerable charm… His great skill was as a listener who actually paid close attention to what other people said.”
Among his guests, like Reagan and Thatcher, were Mother Teresa and Bishop Fulton Sheen, but also left-wing philosophers like Noam Chomsky and Germaine Greer and revolutionaries like Timothy Leary, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
It was maddening for him that his celebrity sprang from two notorious interviews. The first, with James Baldwin at Cambridge University in 1965, where he was outclassed, and the second with Gore Vidal at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, where he lost his cool.
Vidal, seeking (successfully) to needle him, called WFB a “crypto-Nazi”. Buckley shouted, “Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddam face and you’ll stay plastered.” Litigation ensued, and WFB, so cool and in control, would always regret losing it.
Self-doubt was rare. He asked in an article in 1986: “Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time? I couldn’t think of anyone.”
“He gave us Reagan” is the standard narrative and the Gipper’s two terms as President were the epitome of WFB’s career.
The Buckleys lived very well. A thirty-six-foot sloop, the Patito; a basement Jacuzzi and thirty-foot swimming pool (“the most beautiful indoor swimming pool this side of Pompeii”); annual ski vacations at Chateau de Rougemont near Gstaad, where he would somehow dash out his books and columns while he and Pat entertained David Niven, Vladimir Nabokov and Teddy Kennedy. After J.K. Galbraith brought Teddy to visit the Buckleys at Rougemont one winter, Kennedy asked if he could borrow a car to go back to Gstaad. Pat said, “Certainly not — there are three bridges between here and Gstaad.”
He had a genius for friendship. And unlikely ones — Wilfrid Sheed and Norman Mailer, Galbraith, and politicians such as Allard Lowenstein and George McGovern — liberals all; but also Jesse Jackson and Timothy Leary.
It was said that none of the causes for which he passionately stood – on race, sexuality and the role of religion in society – triumphed. Of course he deplored the quiet triumph of secularism since the sixties.
Decades later, he conceded he was wrong on race and was among the first public figures to call for the creation of a national public holiday in Martin Luther King Jr’s honour, as well as for a memorial to him on the National Mall.
Each Sunday in Stamford Bill and Christopher climbed into the car with their servants, refugees from Cuba, and drove to church. In his last years, he heard Sunday Mass in a chapel attached to a local church where Bill had contrived to have Latin Mass in the Tridentine rite said by a friendly priest who lived nearby. The arrangement was said to be officially approved, if not officially blessed.
Even in the mid-nineties, after he had retired as editor, the young men and women working on the eighth floor of National Review’s building in Manhattan said the Angelus every day.
He rarely questioned doctrine. John XXIII’s 1961 encyclical Mater et Magister (Mother and Teacher) on the Church’s social teaching led to a National Review headline, “Mater Si! Magister No!” As it happens this was not WFB’s work but he accepted responsibility for it as the editor, adding that the paper did not disagree with what the encyclical said but was disappointed by its silence about other problems, notably the threat of communism.
He was also equivocal about Humanae Vitae, pointing out it was not ex cathedra and believing, like Clare Boothe Luce, that there should be some sense of moral distinction between abortion and contraception. “My own incomplete understanding of the natural law balks at the central affirmation of Humanae Vitae, even as I’d of course counsel dutiful compliance with it.” Of that compliance: “Which side to observe? But the answer, for a Catholic, has got to be: the position taken by the Pope, as spokesman for the Magisterium.”
Politically, his influence proved greater and Republican White Houses from 1974 to 2008 were evidence of that.
But in 2025? The writer John Banville says, “They would have deplored Donald Trump as a vulgar arriviste, but by jingo they would have voted for him.”
Pat’s death in April 2007 devastated him. The columnist Taki remembered, “I’ve never seen a man cry so much.” He didn’t last a year.
Tanenhaus’s final judgment was: “… if only we can discover in ourselves the imagination and generosity, the kindness and warmth, that Bill Buckley demonstrated time and again in his long and singular life.”
On Bill’s death, on 27 February 2008 at 82, Newsweek declared simply, “Mr Right. RIP.” When asked if he thought he would go to Heaven, he beamed, “I want very much to” – adding, “anybody who is searching for God will find Him.”
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