by Mary Wakefield Buxton
 

Almighty Bill Buckley
 

Urbanna, Va.— The loss of conservative intellectual giant last month, William F. Buckley, has not gone unobserved here at the Pineapple Palace. He was one of the men in my life that I hold as great.

At one time, during my younger years, in order to be happy, I had to be either reading Bill Buckley in his brilliant magazine, “The National Review,” or watching him slice through the brains of lesser thinkers on his stimulating PBS television program, “Firing Line.”

I loved his sharp wit, sparkling repartee, superior command of the English language, beautiful diction, eloquent manners, and his ability to so fully express the written word. His vocabulary was stupendous. It was not unusual for me to read Bill Buckley during those years with a dictionary in my lap.

Not to mention his unending passion for such dreary little symbols as the semicolon. For Buckley believed that not only words in society mattered, but punctuation too; indeed, according to his school of thought, it mattered a great deal.

I needed Buckley to counteract the tremendous wave of secular liberalism that had taken over the nation when I was in college and afterwards. The ideas on the left attacked every small-town Ohio principle that I had been raised to believe: conservative philosophy that encompassed a belief in small government, individual freedom, self responsibility, low taxes, strong defense of America, diligence in the pursuit of work, and allegiance to the great books of western civilization.

Success for Buckley was not the usual rags-to-riches journey, however. He came from all the advantages that life born on the right side of the street could offer: culture, education and language skills that children inherit beyond what they learn in school; if only as being exposed to all the finer things in life at the breakfast table each morning (and not having to read an etiquette book later in life after one had made his first million to know anything about manners.) A background that included afternoon teas and conversations “with grandmother” served from sterling silver and porcelain cups inherited from earlier generations, fine prep schools, exclusive clubs and Ivy League colleges.

Yet Bill Buckley was born into a new and secular world that challenged his Catholic belief in God, pooh-poohed the principles and work ethics of yesteryear that once guaranteed a man his place in heaven, a society that was moving toward socialism; and an all-knowing and all-powerful benevolent government that stripped the individual from his own responsibility for care and fulfillment in life with every new piece of legislation. He was not a man to sit by while the whole of American society fell asunder.

Within 6 years of graduation from Yale, Buckley blasted the left with his first book, “God and Man at Yale.” He went on to write 40 books in his lifetime, along with editing his own magazine, writing a syndicated newspaper column, and hosting his own TV program.

He inspired countless other writers along the way, including me. Young, 21 and enthusiastic in 1963 about Senator Barry Goldwater, I wrote my first political article. It was titled “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” to parody the novel at the time, and I sent it to Bill Buckley at the “National Review.”

One might have thought the editor was too busy to respond, but he did. “Good writing,” he wrote me in a personal letter. Words that have stayed with me for a lifetime, but more than that, they were words that left a suggestion that writers ought to encourage others to write well, for after all, it is not a bad way to spend one’s life. A free society depends on the constant production of writers.

There was something terribly sweet about the man, too, even when he was tearing apart a liberal from limb to limb, as he was so prone to do. How fun it was to watch Buckley in action. How he would lead the unwary souls in debate down that briery lane, stop to admire an occasional bloom, note the blush of an early rose, inhale the sweet drought of honeysuckle spread across the gate . . . before arriving to end of the path. And the inevitable beheading.

One always knew when Buckley was ready to drop the sword. His eyes would suddenly bulge, as if aware of his own lust, his brows would shoot upwards, and a tiny smile would break upon his pursed lips. It was almost as if he felt some sympathy for his opponent as he delivered the final stroke.

The day came in my life, however, when conservatives were not quite so wonderful. It was the controversy over Roe vs. Wade that left me understanding we needed liberals as much as conservatives. So that no man, church or government could ever deny birth control to women, or usurp her right to control her own reproductive organs.

I came to see both liberal and conservative thought as necessary components to continuing progress and individual freedom, and that a world that contained only one school of thought would eventually kill off both. And that free and open debate between both forces was absolutely imperative to maintain democracy.

People generally come with a little of both conservatism and liberalism in them. Few are totally one-way thinkers.

I suspect that in his last years, Bill Buckley discovered the same thing. Thus, most people, as they age and experience more of life, find earlier dogmatic and extreme views evolve into tolerance and understanding of other thought.

And I suspect Bill Buckley loved reading liberal writers of our time, such as are published weekly in the “New Yorker,” and admire them just as much as I do.

If only there weren’t so many of them in this world. Liberals. In state and federal courts and legislatures, on college campuses teaching students one-way thinking, and controlling so much of the world news in the media.

And a lot more Bill Buckleys.