A REAL MAN

Bill Buckley was not only one of the most brilliant and prolific thinkers and writers of our age, a consummate gentleman, icon of conservative ideas, wonderful debater, orator, founder and editor of National Review magazine that changed the landscape of American ideas and politics under his leadership. But William F. Buckley Jr. also constantly sewed fresh and vibrant thoughts and new cultural awareness into the American landscape and world of reason and ideas through his writings and television programs. He also learned how to play the harpsichord and marvelously played compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach, memorably rode a motorbike to work in Manhattan during the gasoline crunch of the 1970s, and was at heart a generous and kind man, intelligent and well-informed beyond words, who stayed true to his ideals, beliefs, and friends all his life. I was privileged to have Buckley as a friend and mentor for more than four decades. We became good friends in the early 1990s during my assignment by The Washington Times to cover a libel case against him by a horrible right-wing hatemonger, Willis Carto of Liberty Lobby had turned that previously respected political organization in the 1950s into a vile racist, anti-semitic cesspool, mainly through its horrible tabloid publication called Spotlight. Carto fanned the flames of far-right racist fever swamps, and Buckley, to his credit, flushed him out and took him on in one of a series of great pieces in National Review by writer C.H. Simonds. The result was a humongous lawsuit brought by Carto against Buckley, with Carto attorney Mark Lane of civil rights fame bringing lots of fury. It was one of my best reporting assignments covering the libel trial between Buckley and Carto in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., which Buckley ultimately won. Simonds’ piece in National Review tore Carto’s pants off, showed him and Spotlight to be racist anti-semitic monsters and authors of fever-swamp ultra-right hatred against Jews and non-white minorities. Buckley countersued. It was quite an event in the U.S. District court in Washington. I never will forget the moment when attorney Lane pulled out a copy of a National Review magazine, with Buckley on the stand – it featured a piece about then-Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, a flamboyant black Democrat, who used to call everyone “baby.” National Review’s cover headline blazed out: “The jig is up, baby.” Mark Lane wanted Buckley to tell the jury what he meant by the word “jig,” Buckley responded: “A dance, a gavotte.” But Lane had made his point to the all-black jury, except one, that the subliminal message was a mischievous racial slur. Lane held up the magazine before the jury, handed to mim from a stack of NR magazines by a lovely black female associate handing him the magazines. Lane held up the magazinespat out the word – “Jig.” You could have heard a pin drop. It was devastating. Although Buckley did not have an untoward racially biased bone in his body. This was just a mischievous cover headline about a flamboyant corrupt black New York City politician who was drummed out of Congress for being a thief and embarrassment to the U.S. House of Representatives. Buckley during court breaks hammered out newspaper columns on his laptop computer in about 20 or 30 minutes. The man was a genius and had a mind that never stopped searing the opposition. I watched Buckley type a column one day during a courtroom break, hammering away for twenty or thirty minutes without a stop, and it was done, then sent to hundreds of newspapers for publication. Buckley’s syndicated column, “On the Right,” was carried nationally for four decades. A clever man indeed, collected, knew every day what he needed to achieve, and did so cheerfully. Newsweek magazine, owned by The Washington Post Corporation, devoted its March 10, 2008, issue with tributes to Buckley after his death. He died at his home desk in Sharon, Connecticut, writing a book about late Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. The Newsweek tribute to “Mr. Right,” with a marvelous picture of rumpled Buckley in a nice linen suit on the cover, clutching papers that he always had with a clipboard, and editor Jon Meacham’s marvelous tribute to “Architect of the Right,” and another by Evan Thomas, “He Knew He Was Right,” and a wonderful tribute by Katrina vanden Heuvel, liberal-left editor of The Nation magazine, and co-author Michael J. Gerson, right-wing former chief speechwriter for President Bush. The Newsweek issue had brilliant pictures of Buckley riding his motorbike through downtown Manhattan in the 1960s, and organizing his yaght sails on Cyrano that he navigated across both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans with son Christopher Buckley, an acclaimed author in his own right. As my parents would say, “Chip off the old bloc.” There were many things about the Newsweek issue that struck me. First , the terrific piece by Evan Thomas, “He Knew He Was Right,” which told that Buckley united the conservatives and crafted a winning alternative to New Deal liberalism. “Now the right is adrift and needs another William F. Buckley,” Thomas wrote. “Buckley was a bon vivant with luxurious tastes, a prolific author of best-selling novels as well as serious nonfiction, a sportsman most gleeful on icy slopes and navigating through a gale, a world-class name-dropper, a refined musicologist (and self-taught harpsichord player) and a lover of big words (a sesquipedalian, as he might say). “His aristocratic airs were a bit over the top: the parlor-snake languor; the plummy accent; the lank, slightly too-long hair. “He played the ‘Masterpiece Theatre’ host of ‘Brideshead Revisited’ to perfection. But he was not a snob. ‘He was quite the opposite,’ says his son, Christopher, a well-known satirist and writer. The caricatures of Buckley masked interesting complexities. “In the 1955 manifesto for the National Review, his new magazine that would set the course for late-20th-century conservatism, Buckley vowed to ‘stand athwart history, yelling “Stop.” But he was by no means a stick-in-the-mud. He was always on the go, looking for new adventures and ideas.” One thing about Buckley that many people missed who did not know him well was his huge tolerance and dedication to opposite ideas. Bruce Levington, a classical pianist, poker partner, and close friend of Buckley’s for many years, put it this way: “He never, never folded .” “He was a great deal more accepting of difference than many people might have thought,” Levington said. “His tone and level of civilized discourse also set him in great relief to the shrill type of commentary we often hear today. He didn’t want to be unduly harsh or unfair, and he felt deeply hurt or disturbed if something he wrote or said hurt someone personally. There was a fundamental kindness about him, which, for all his seemingly intimidating persona, was quite touching.” Buckley wrote about 50 books in addition to his twice-weekly column that was carried by more than a hundred newspapers. He will be missed indeed. But what a mark he made, and his compendium of work remains for young high school and college students to read and study – a marvelous collection of history and commentary.