WFB Jr., Nearer Still
Though he had retired and his voice has been heard less in the mainstream media in recent years, he was still writing and striking with acute journalistic brilliance. It’s hard to imagine that William F. Buckley Jr. is gone.
He was a giant of intellectual honesty, one of the greatest minds to communicate thought in what was true eloquence. The publication he founded, the National Review, that embodies his critical thinking skills and civil discourse, has quickly assembled an array of tributes. All of them sweet in their own way of capturing one of the….last?….gentle giants of journalistic integrity and personal honor.
He was a great man and a figure of great historical significance. He founded the American conservative movement that, among many other achievements, won the Cold War. But he wanted to slip quietly away to avoid the presidents and prime ministers rushing up to ask for his autograph.
We at National Review were far luckier than they.
To the very last article for NR, I always enjoyed seeing Buckley’s byline come up in my news sweep, and always stopped to read what he had to say. He was incisive, charitable and illuminating.
He was a ready source of advice, argument, vocabulary, and wit. All the novel and insoluble problems an editor faces he had faced and solved 30 years before. Above all, he was fun — right to the end….He was as mentally sharp and as good company as he had ever been — I saw him for dinner last month in Palm Beach where he thoroughly enjoyed himself — but he was tired. He had enjoyed his vacation in this vale of tears but he wanted to go home.
We should be sorry for ourselves and his family over his death. We can be glad for him.
I read his book Nearer My God cover to cover, made notes all over some of the margins, tried to get him on my radio show as a guest to ask those questions I penned in the book, and quoted him in this article for Voices. He saw things as they are and named them clearly. He was the boy who declared the emperor had no clothes when everyone else was skating around political correctness.
He speaks of an encounter with the current headmaster of Millbrook School, his boyhood private preparatory school where “religious observance was routine”. Buckley inquired about what sorts of religious services are scheduled these days at Millbrook, and was told that there were none; that “students were ‘encouraged’ to engage in spiritual activity according to their own lights”.
Buckley learned of a Candlelight Service held before Christmas, directed by the school’s Spiritual Life Committee. The program for this service was, he says, “eclectic”, and widely varied to include every conceivable sensibility.
Commenting on the mission and goals of the Spiritual Life Committee to foster individual spiritual expression of students, Buckley writes, “[E]xplain why the Bible, which in the Christian world has more or less officially served that purpose since Constantine (d. A.D. 337), is no longer adequate to serve such purposes”?
Noting that the report avoids mentioning Christmas in referring to its “Candlelight Services”, he observes:
“The Spiritual Life Committee treats the word “Christmas” as Victorians treated the word “syphilis”, though more Victorians contracted syphilis, one supposes, than, at this rate, Millbrook students contract Christianity. The recommendations of the Spiritual Life Committee would not have needed altering by a single syllable if the Bible had never been written. The school could with perfect accuracy advertise itself as the Millbrook School for Pagan Boys and Girls.”
And there you are. A remarkable mind.
He was also infused with a deep and profound commitment to his Roman Catholic faith. I believe that was the origin of the moral order which he gave expression to in his writing for National Review, and in speaking out and conducting himself as a provocative, loving American.
He believed that ideas mattered, and they do.
