From a News Feed:

CONSERVATIVE WRITER, COMMENTATOR WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. DEAD AT 82

Bill

Farewell to one of the wittiest of men. Fortunately his son, Christopher, is keeping up the good work.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Well said.

A man of clarity who increased our knowledge whether you agreed with him or not. An achiever. An intellect with a brilliant wit who made my mind smile on many a day.

He will be missed.

Adam

He was a man Ayn Rand disliked even hated. She has been quoted as telling Buckley "You are too intelligent to believe in God".

He also published the Whitaker Chamber's review of Atlas Shrugged.

I must admit that before I read Atlas I read and liked National Review. I continued to read him after I read Atlas. He will be missed.

Also in Getting it Right Buckley talked down Objectivism. (Qualification: I have not read the book just the reviews.)

On Reason's blog Hit & Run Jacob Sullum noted that Buckley was opponent of the "war on drugs". There are very few among conservatives so this is another reason he will be missed.

I can remember an appearance of Mr. Buckley on the Johnny Carson Tonight Show wherein the question of smoking ganja came up. Buckley smiled his Cheshire cat smile and answered that why yes he had inhaled, but always outside the three mile limit of United States territorial waters.

If anyone appreciates the art of sailing, I would reccommend his book Airborne: A Sentimental Journey which is about his month long sail to the Europe on his boat - Cyrano. His writing skills are so powerful that you actually feel the motion of his description of struggling through gale forced seas.

Yes. I was assuming folks on Objectivist Living knew the history involving Rand and Buckley - so I posted the news item thinking it would be of interest.

Buckley was something of an enigma to me - I have always liked Rand's succinct summary which you quote above. The Chambers review of AS was just plain hateful. I imagine Buckley reading AS and getting increasingly excited about the emphasis on achievement, on freedom, on capitalism, but also disquieted at the absence of God - and then, coming to the final passage of making of the sign of the dollar (echoes of the Roman Catholic sign of the cross) and throwing the book across the room in disgust.

Bill (smiling)

I trust everyone knows what Buckley wrote in his syndicated newspaper column when Ayn Rand died. More than any single individual on the planet, William F. Buckley Jr moved heaven and earth to ridicule and defeat Rand.

W.

Alfonso, you wrote: "I imagine Buckley reading AS and getting increasingly excited about the emphasis on achievement, on freedom, on capitalism, but also disquieted at the absence of God - and then, coming to the final passage of making of the sign of the dollar (echoes of the Roman Catholic sign of the cross) and throwing the book across the room in disgust."

In 1983,I interviewed William Buckley as research for The Passion of Ayn Rand. When I asked him if the Chambers review represented his own opinion, he answered: "I never read the book [italics mine]. When I read the review of it, and saw the length of the book, I never picked it up. I think I read all her other novels. I didn't read her philosophy books. . . . One of these days, I'll probably get around to reading Atlas Shrugged."

Barbara

Barbara -

Thanks for the clarification. I'm amazed that he never read it. I remember him somewhere predicting that Rand would be remembered in the future just for the "fornicating bits in her novels.

But note that I said "I imagine. I didn't and don't think he necessarily did throw the book. But its an amusing image. I'm surprised to hear that he reported never having read it - though I'm not that certain I'd trust him on such a thing.

Bill

The "fornicating bits" was not Buckley but Russell Kirk.

Radley Balko of Reason had a very good post about Buckley making the point about Buckley being a small government conservative.

One of the thing Buckley did in National Review was to get the Right out of the fever swamps(Anti-Semiticism) in which he considered Ayn Rand.

Chris -

Thanks for the correction - Kirk, not Buckley.

Bill

Outstanding anecdote, Barbara! Thanks for sharing it. Even people who've never decently read Rand often have volumes to say about her. I'll bet Buckley -- with his quietly seething antipathy -- was no exception. I'd love to hear anything else he had to say. Even very uniformed and malicious views can often be insightful and worth hearing...

Here's a mind-boggling quote from William Buckley's Up From Liberalism:

"Conservatism is the tacit acknowledgment that all that is finally important in human experience is behind us…. Whatever is to come cannot outweigh the importance to man of what has gone before."

Barbara

Which, if he were right, would demolish all respect for human achievement - unless it was someone else's, in the past. All notions of pride - swept away.

This is Buckley's Roman Catholicism speaking clearly.

The crime of Buckley, IMHO, was to attempt to wed (relatively) free market thinking with Roman Catholicism (and, more broadly speaking, religion). He preceded Falwell by decades in this endeavor.

Bill

I just enjoyed him on Firing Line . His wit was sharp, his sarcasms sly, his English impeccable, and his vocabulary brilliant. And there was, of course , his characteristic Buckley mannerisms and inflections.

He gave me the term “apposite”, from which I tried to create the term “apposite ego” to denote that well balanced, all rounded ego, a Galt-like flavour, productive and full of a self-esteem that is not derived at the expense of others; someone, most likely, from a almost non-dysfunctional family system.