Do It for Bill

We are celebrating William F. Buckley Jr.’s centennial this year. And it’s as good a time as ever to support his legacy, in the form of National Review, with your generous donations.

I remember when Buckley summoned me to his home in Stamford. The email seemed to have been dashed off without an attempt to spell-check or punctuate it. But the included directions — “Pursue 95 to Exit . . .” — were exquisitely written, an artifact from a much younger Mr. Buckley. I was nervous. Something about this meeting felt like a betrayal of my liberal upbringing. Something about it seemed rushed; his beloved wife had died just three weeks earlier.

On the deep-red upholstered couches, we discussed bits of his career. A perhaps tasteless obituary here. An inventive urban policy there. He was understandably glum, and I was just the latest and least impressive of the young men he had deigned to meet. But, rather suddenly, what really brought him to a sharp focus was discussing The Lives of Others, the then-new film by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. “I think it’s the greatest film I’ve ever seen,” he said to me. I agreed — and I still do. It portrays a zealous and punctilious Stasi agent who spies on one of the few loyal playwrights working in East Germany. Slowly this agent is transformed from an observer to a participant in the events on which he spies. Without spoiling it, if you haven’t seen it, I’d say that few films have dramatized the human grubbiness and corruption of communist states so powerfully. And I think the movie summoned from within Buckley all the great passions of his life. The Lives of Others memorably affirms the value of any individual life above the corruption of political systems, and it champions art’s transcendence over ideology. And so in discussing the film, I got a tiny glimpse of Buckley’s youth as well.

What he brought to the fight of his life, and what he bequeathed to National Review, are his virtues: foremost, courage. He was not afraid to make and to fight enemies, if they were enemies of what was good, true, and beautiful. This was not a mere debating society. This was not a project in civic education. There was a battle between good and evil that ran through every man’s heart but also ran through history itself. To stand with the West in the Cold War was no different than to bear the cross in pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

The next virtue he gave to this enterprise was magnanimity. He was generous with his money, and his time. He traded his talents as a novelist to buy time, not only for himself but his peers as polemicists. He curated the magazine with the best minds he could find, even when they disagreed with one another. And it was his personal graces that helped them to stick together. Lesser men — men of greater pride and worse manners — would have let the rivalries at National Review grow self-destructive. Instead, this publication has hummed with creative, ennobling intellectual tension and debate. We’re all better for it.

I ask you, in his memory, to keep this work going strong. We haven’t finished the work yet. Thank you for your support.