Maestro of American Conservatism: The Enduring Relevance of William F. Buckley Jr.

He not only came to personify conservatism; he also explained it and articulately defended it, elevating our public discourse along the way.

Today marks 100 years since the birth of William F. Buckley Jr. To note the occasion, we are publishing the following, which is adapted from a talk presented at Hillsdale College on April 8, 2025.

M y subject tonight is a man who is considered by many to have been the most important public intellectual in the United States in the second half of the 20th century. For an entire generation, he was the preeminent champion of conservatism in the public arena and its first great ecumenical figure. He changed minds, he changed lives, and he labored successfully to change the direction of American politics.

In his later years, and following his death in 2008 at the age of 82, William F. Buckley Jr. received an avalanche of accolades from friends and political foes alike. He was called “the most formidable debater of his era” and “the most eloquent conservative of the 20th century.” He was hailed as “the godfather of the conservative movement,” the “patron saint” of American conservatism, “the pope of the conservative movement,” and even “the St. Paul of the modern American conservative movement.”

If such plaudits may seem a bit lavish, they were not insincere. Indeed, one might say of Buckley that he gained his stature the old-fashioned way: He earned it.

Consider the statistics. During his nearly 60 years in the public eye, Buckley published 55 books (both fiction and nonfiction). He also published dozens of book reviews; at least 56 introductions, prefaces, and forewords to other peoples’ books; more than 225 obituary essays; more than 800 editorials, articles, and remarks in the magazine he founded, National Review; and approximately 5,600 newspaper columns, totaling more than 4.5 million words. In addition, he gave hundreds of lectures around the world, at a rate of 70 per year for many years. An inveterate and conscientious correspondent, he may well have composed more letters than any American who ever lived.

He seemed to be the poster boy for the aphorism of the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope: “There is no greater human bliss than twelve hours of work, and only six hours in which to do it.”

How was Buckley able to accomplish so much, and so consequentially? And what might we learn from him as we navigate the treacherous rapids of the 21st century?

* * *

Let us start at the beginning. William F. Buckley Jr. was born in 1925, the sixth of ten children in a rambunctious Roman Catholic family presided over by his wealthy, very conservative father, an oilman from Texas. From an early date, it was evident that young William was going to make his mark upon the world. Upon entering Yale University in 1946 (after military service in World War II), he quickly became a Big Man on Campus, an outstanding member of the debating team, and, from early 1949 to 1950, the chairman of the Yale Daily News (the undergraduate newspaper), from which perch he fired editorial fusillades at liberal targets — much to the discomfiture of the faculty and administration.

By his senior year, Buckley — although personally popular — was greatly distressed by the drift of things at Yale. Brought up to be a devout Christian, an anticommunist, and an “individualist” (in today’s parlance, a libertarian or free-market conservative), he was appalled by the rampant secularism and collectivist economic teachings that he discerned inside and outside the classroom. He was also offended by the Yale administration’s apparent indifference to these trends in the hallowed name of “academic freedom.” Eventually, he resolved to write an exposé entitled God and Man at Yale, which he published in 1951, a little over a year after his graduation. He was not quite 26 years old.

Buckley did not content himself in his book with documenting what he called “Yale’s intellectual drive toward agnosticism and collectivism.” In an audacious display of counterrevolutionary fervor, he urged Yale’s alumni to rise up and impose a new “value orthodoxy” at Yale, affirming Christianity and free-market economics. He argued that the university’s alumni, as Yale’s “consumers,” should be the ultimate “governing body” and “ultimate overseers” of Yale’s product. It was a proposal that evoked apoplexy among liberals at Yale and elsewhere.

Instead of loftily ignoring Buckley’s polemic, Yale officialdom reacted to it (in one journalist’s words) “with all the agility of an elephant cornered by a mouse.” The Yale administration facilitated a blistering attack on Buckley and his book by McGeorge Bundy in the Atlantic Monthly. Various liberal professors and commentators at Yale and elsewhere chimed in. For several months, a torrent of vituperation rained down upon him. He was pilloried as a “violent,” “unbalanced,” and “twisted” ignoramus, a dangerous, authoritarian Catholic, and an advocate of “pure fascism.”

Buckley’s broadside quickly attracted national attention. Time magazine dubbed him a “rebel in reverse”: “a fire-eating youthful conservative.” By the time the commotion subsided some months later, not much had changed at Yale. But God and Man at Yale had become a cause célèbre and bestseller. For most of the nearly three-quarters of a century since its publication, it has been in print. It remains a locus classicus for conservative criticism of liberal bias and hypocrisy in American higher education.

Most important, with an unintended assist from what Buckley called Yale’s “Apparatus,” a star was born: a conservative star who was both young and debonair. The searing controversy catapulted him to the forefront of the slowly emerging conservative intellectual and journalistic community in the United States. It also gave him a lifelong distrust of liberal, intellectual arrogance: “these haughty totalitarians” — as he called them in 1951 — “who refuse to permit the American people to supervise their own destiny.” A little over a decade later, he would declare, in one of his most famous utterances, that “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.”

I think it is fair to say that, without the sensational controversy surrounding God and Man at Yale, and, to a lesser extent, his next book, McCarthy and His Enemies (which he co-authored and published in 1954), Buckley might not have successfully taken the most consequential step in his career: the launch, in 1955 — a few days before his 30th birthday — of the outspokenly conservative journal of opinion, National Review.

As we think about Buckley’s legacy and its continuing relevance, it is important to recognize the context in which he made his intrepid move. In the early 1950s, the American right was a hodgepodge of uncoordinated intellectual and journalistic figures who fell into three categories that did not often overlap: “traditionalist” conservatives like Russell Kirk, author in 1953 of The Conservative Mind; classical liberals and zealous free marketeers; and determined, anticommunist Cold Warriors. Moreover, in 1955, there was no weekly conservative journal of opinion in the United States. There were a few right-wing publications, to be sure, like the newsletter Human Events, but nothing comparable in prestige or influence to such left-of-center magazines as the New Republic. It became Buckley’s daunting challenge to forge a movement out of the discordant elements on the right and (as he put it) to “revitalize the conservative position.”

Buckley’s success at this was substantial, although the waters through which he sailed were often choppy. First, and crucially, as a conservative Christian, an ardent “individualist,” and an unwavering anticommunist, he shared common ground with each component in the nascent coalition. Like the conductor of a choir, he worked to blend the different voices together. He did so, in part, by encouraging a modus vivendi and philosophical framework that became known as fusionism — that is, a fusing or reconciliation of the competing paradigms of the libertarians and the traditionalists. He also learned from his friend and hero, the ex-communist Whittaker Chambers, that (in Chambers’s words) “to live is to maneuver” — which to Buckley meant steering prudently between the demands of ideological purity and the perceived constraints of political reality.

Another factor that enabled Buckley to pilot his magazine successfully was that National Review had some of the earmarks of a family business. As founder and editor in chief, he owned the entire voting stock: a barrier to factional intrigue. Early on, he hired his sister Priscilla, an accomplished journalist, for ballast. She eventually became managing editor for more than a quarter of century.

Now successful families, it is said, require hands-on fathers, and National Review was no exception. Initially, Buckley must have seemed miscast for this role. But precisely because he was younger than most of his more academic colleagues (and controlled the voting stock), he was able to prevent National Review’s house from collapsing. The youthful debater discovered that he possessed the “fatherly” diplomatic skills (and charm) that fostered movement consciousness and kept his sometimes cantankerous colleagues from upending their common endeavor.

Buckley, then, brought an ecumenical sensibility to his enterprise. But there were limits. In its first decade, National Review began to function as the general staff of the conservative movement and as its arbiter of respectability. In this capacity, Buckley sternly made the magazine off-limits to antisemites, conspiracy theorists, and what he called the “irresponsible right.” He publicly denounced the secretive John Birch Society and its founder Robert Welch, who believed that President Eisenhower was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” Before Welch’s views became well known, a number of prominent conservatives, including some of Buckley’s associates and sponsors, joined the Society, which grew to more than 60,000 members. When Buckley denounced its leader and ultimately the society itself, he ignited a tremendous uproar on the right, and his magazine initially lost a considerable number of subscribers. But with conspicuous support from rising conservative luminaries like the Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan, Buckley and his journal survived the storm and emerged as the principal gatekeeper of the conservative movement. Years later he declared that “the absolute exclusion of anything antisemitic or kooky” from mainstream conservative ranks had been National Review’s greatest accomplishment.

The bigots and other extremists did not disappear from the face of the earth, of course. But from the mid-1960s on, the once-upstart National Review was increasingly recognized as, in Buckley’s later words, “a central journalistic document” and “crucible through which conservative thought” was refined and transmitted.

Meanwhile, Buckley himself was becoming much more than a conventional journalist. In the 1960s, he deliberately took on a new and far-sighted role: builder of conservative institutions. In the summer of 1960, for example, he arranged for about 100 conservative student activists from around the country to convene at his family home in Sharon, Conn., where, with his patronage and encouragement, they established Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), soon to be the leading conservative youth organization of the 1960s. These “cadres for conservatism” (as they have been called) became a powerful presence in the Goldwater for President campaign in 1964, and became a source of talent for future conservative leadership. In 1962, he helped to create the Conservative Party of New York state, in the very belly of the liberal beast. Eight years later, the party elected his brother James to the United States Senate. In 1964, Buckley made the very first financial contribution that launched the Philadelphia Society, which became — and remains today — the nation’s premier organization of conservative intellectuals. “I never got a bigger bang for a buck,” he remarked with satisfaction some years later.

During the Sixties and Seventies, Buckley himself became an institution of a sort, whose growing fame extended beyond the ranks of his magazine’s readership. In 1962, he inaugurated a syndicated column which eventually appeared, three times a week, in more than 300 newspapers. In 1965, he was persuaded to run for mayor of New York City on the Conservative Party ticket. He hoped that the new Conservative Party would outpoll the state’s entrenched Liberal Party, which exerted a powerful leftward pull in New York politics. Above all, he hoped to win enough votes, in a three-way race, to defeat the very liberal, nominally Republican candidate John Lindsay, whom he despised. Buckley did not win the race, nor did he really want to. When a reporter asked him what he would do if he won, he shot back: “Demand a recount!”

But the irrepressible gadfly was amply compensated for his toil. His ensuing book about the election, The Unmaking of a Mayor, became a national bestseller, introducing still more Americans to his conservative political philosophy. Even better, his stellar performances in the televised mayoral debates in New York City led to the creation in 1966 of his very own public television show, Firing Line. For the next 33 years, in more than 1,500 episodes, he interviewed and jousted (verbally) with an astonishing variety of guests from across the ideological and cultural spectrum. It became the longest-running public affairs show with a single host in the history of television. I cannot begin to count the number of young people for whom watching Firing Line was a transformative intellectual experience. With his wit, urbanity, panache, debating skills, and erudite vocabulary, Buckley breached the wall of liberal condescension and shattered the stereotype that conservatives are ignorant and humorless. As David Brooks succinctly observed in 2008, Buckley “changed the personality of modern conservatism.”

In short, in the 1960s Buckley became a celebrity. In 1967, he made the cover of Time magazine above the caption: “Conservatism Can Be Fun.” Three years later, he appeared as a celebrity guest on the very popular television comedy show, Laugh-in. It was one of his most dazzling performances. At one point an interviewer said to him:

Mr. Buckley, I have noticed that whenever you appear on television, you’re always seated. Does this mean you can’t think on your feet?

Buckley paused for a moment and then answered:

It’s very, very hard to stand up carrying the weight of what I know.

Attaining the status of pop culture icon did not seem to diminish Buckley’s proselytizing impulses. From the 1950s until nearly the end of his life, one of the constants of his career was the frequency with which he lectured on the nation’s college and university campuses. He hoped to influence not only American public opinion but also what Russell Kirk called “the rising generation.” One of the educational institutions he especially liked to visit, as many of you know, was Hillsdale College. As a token of his esteem for it, in 2004 he gave the college a comprehensive set of the speeches, articles, and newspaper columns that he had published up to that date. This enormous treasure trove is now available for research in the Hillsdale College Archives.

In 1971, Buckley published a rousing journal of one week in his frenetic life; he called the book Cruising Speed. Twelve years later, he published another one-week account and titled this one Overdrive. In the midst of all this activity came yet another milestone in the Buckley saga: the election of an unabashed conservative, Ronald Reagan, to the presidency of the United States.

Reagan had been a faithful reader of National Review since its debut in 1955. In 1961, the two men became acquainted, and their friendship deepened over time. On more than one occasion, Reagan acknowledged his intellectual debt to the man he called the conservative movement’s “Galahad: ready to take on any challenges in the critical battle of point and counterpoint.” During Reagan’s eight years in the White House, Buckley frequently advised him on personnel selections and other matters, and became, in the judgment of one of Reagan’s biographers, the president’s “most trusted adviser outside his official family.”

The advent of Reagan marked a turning point for American conservatism. In the 1970s and 1980s, the center of gravity for the American right shifted toward Washington, D. C., — the world of public policy and politics — and away from the movement’s flagship journal in New York. In the earliest years of National Review, the number of publicly active conservative intellectuals in the United States had been minuscule, and the media world in which they operated was small: just three national television networks, no public television, no cable news channels, and, of course, no internet, Facebook, or Twitter. With the coming of the Reagan Revolution, this landscape spectacularly changed. New journals, think tanks, talk radio shows, and other vehicles of conservative advocacy sprang up from shore to shore. A veritable conservative counterculture was formed. In this new era, National Review and its Galahad, while still influential, no longer seemed quite so dominant.

Prosperity had come to the conservative cause. In part, perhaps, for that very reason, from the mid-1970s onward, Buckley seemed to become more inclined, at least publicly, to pursue interests that took him outside the conservative orbit and even outside the realm of politics altogether. At least once he remarked that he was not a conservative by temperament. He often confessed that he was “easily bored.” The most dramatic expressions of this temperamental restlessness and aversion to boredom came at sea. He was an experienced and enthusiastic sailor since boyhood. In 1975, he and a few friends sailed across the Atlantic Ocean from Miami to Spain in a yacht just 71 feet long. Five years later, he and a few amigos crossed the Atlantic in a small craft again. In 1985, along with a few friends, he piloted a vessel only 36 feet long across 4,400 miles of the Pacific Ocean from Hawaii to New Guinea. In 1990, he celebrated his 65th birthday while traversing the Atlantic yet again, in another small vessel, following the route Christopher Columbus took from Portugal to Barbados. From each of these unforgettable and risky adventures came another beautifully written Buckley book.

Another lifelong passion that he now appeared to cultivate more intensely than ever was his love of classical music — above all, that of Johann Sebastian Bach. In his later years, Buckley played the harpsichord at a near-professional level of competence and performed Bach concertos with several orchestras. Famous musicians were frequent guests — and sometimes performers — at his home in New York City. Music was a large — increasingly large — part of his life. On at least one of his ocean voyages, he brought along a piano on which, while at sea, he sometimes played Bach’s music.

Buckley once described himself as a “performing writer.” In 1975, after some hesitation, he applied his gifts to a new genre. In that year, he wrote a Cold War spy novel, Saving the Queen, in which the American hero was a dashing Yale graduate and CIA agent named Blackford Oakes, clearly modeled to some extent on Buckley himself (who had worked for the CIA for a few months after leaving Yale). This foray into fiction-writing was a success, which Buckley followed by writing ten more best-selling Blackford Oakes novels, and a couple of other Cold War novels, before his death. Mindful always of the journal of opinion that had made him a conservative leader, he donated his royalties from these books to National Review.

At this point some of you must be wondering: How on earth was this man able to accomplish so much? First, Buckley was a very rapid writer, capable of turning out a newspaper column in 20 minutes or less. He was also an exceptional typist who could type more than 100 words per minute. When computers and word processors came along, Buckley turned to them with gusto, a fact to which I can attest. During a telephone conversation with him back in the 1980s, he suddenly asked me whether I was using a personal computer for my own writing. No, I admitted. He was amazed. “George!” he exclaimed. “The computer is the greatest invention since the pencil!”

Closer to the crux of the matter, I think, was another factor that helps to account for his astonishingly productive career. Despite the endless attractions — and distractions — of his lifestyle, he was a writer of extraordinary discipline. His bibliographer, William Meehan, has noted that during Buckley’s first 39 years of writing newspaper columns, he missed his filing deadline exactly four times — in each instance, because of illness. It was a feat fit for inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Another reason for Buckley’s hyperactivity was simply this: As the undisputed maestro of the conservative movement, he felt an obligation, I believe, to live up to his responsibilities in that role. There was a practical dimension to his commitment also: the royalties that he received from his writings and public speaking helped him to keep his greatest creation — his magazine — afloat.

In addition, as I said earlier, Buckley hated boredom. And one thing that especially bored him was nonstop talk about politics, particularly in private conversation. His curiosity about nonpolitical things was insatiable. So I suspect that consciously or unconsciously, Buckley, in his joyous pursuit of sailing, music, travel, and other avocations, was trying to teach an enduringly valuable lesson that conservative activists might well ponder today: that the good life must always include room for a private sphere, beyond the reach of governmental intrusion and political contention.

Still, it was Buckley’s fate to live in an era marked by two of the most fateful, concurrent dramas of modern times: the struggles against totalitarianism abroad and against threats to ordered liberty at home. To both of these efforts — which still continue — he contributed both unstintingly and consequentially.

How consequentially? Fewer than three years before Buckley died, George Will put it to him this way:

The argument goes like this. Without Bill Buckley, no National Review. Without National Review, no Goldwater nomination. Without the Goldwater nomination, no conservative takeover of the Republican Party. Without that, no Reagan. Without Reagan, no victory in the Cold War. Therefore, Bill Buckley won the Cold War.

To which Buckley replied: That’s a very nice abbreviation, and I hope you will remind historians of it.

No doubt there are historians who would complain that this is an oversimplification, and they would have a point. Nevertheless, ask yourselves this question: If Buckley had never founded his magazine, or if President Reagan had not survived the assassination attempt on him in March 1981, would the Cold War have ended when it did, and as it did?  I wonder. Conservatives like to say that ideas have consequences. Leadership has consequences, too.

* * *

In the course of this lecture, I have alluded to some of the qualities of leadership that enabled Buckley to become the maestro of modern American conservatism. Here let me be more explicit. It has been said of Buckley that he possessed “a remarkable capacity to energize everyone around him.” His talent for inspirational leadership and institution-building, and his generally ecumenical disposition, were essential in keeping a sometimes fractious coalition reasonably united (except for a few on the fringe). Like Reagan, he knew that successful politics is about addition, not subtraction. It is a lesson that conservatives may need to ponder in the years ahead.

Related to this was Buckley’s phenomenal gift for friendship that enabled him to cross and often transcend political battle lines. He was, by and large, a cheerful controversialist, and, in the process, a collector of an incredible gallery of friends. Even most of his political antagonists were his friends. It helped him to win a hearing for conservatism in parts of America far beyond what we today would call his “base.”

Secondly, as we have seen, Buckley possessed a superb wit and sense of humor. Reagan also had this gift, and that is one reason why these two individuals became the most admired conservative leaders of the past half century. It was Mary Poppins who said that “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” The deft use of wit and humor can have a similar effect in our politics. Buckley demonstrated, as Time magazine recognized, that “conservatism can be fun.” It is another lesson for today’s conservatives to remember when they engage in political argument.

Finally, early in his career on the public stage, Buckley lamented what he called “the failure of the conservative demonstration.” For the rest of his life, he strove to make that demonstration, elegantly and persuasively, through the power of his words. Although he frequently felt obliged to maneuver as political conditions varied, he never lost his fundamental, conservative philosophy, anchored in his religious faith, his love of freedom, his distrust of overweening government, and his opposition to tyrannies abroad.

He not only came to personify conservatism; he also explained it and articulately defended it, elevating our public discourse along the way. Although capable of clever one-liners, he never reduced his work of proselytizing to the level of sloganeering and sound-bite certitudes. His life was a reminder, to his generation and now to ours, that the conservative cause, to be successful, requires minds as well as voices.

To his enduring credit, William F. Buckley Jr. had both. And I suspect that for those conservatives who now discover or rediscover him, he will prove to be a maestro for years to come.