I can’t add much to the wonderful tributes to Bill that have appeared here and on the home page. Needless to say I agree with what has been said here so eloquently about Bill’s enduring importance. Let me focus for the moment on two smaller things I had a special vantage point on: Bill’s patience and his commitment to problem-solving.

When you are a young editor who basically knows nothing about how to edit a magazine, as I was when I was hired, patience in the proprietor is very important. Although patience is probably the wrong word. Bill wasn’t really the patient sort–you don’t write 50 books and thousands of columns and do everything else Bill did unless you are always anxious to get on to the next thing. I remember his long-time assistant Frances Bronson telling the story of how once over the phone he gave her a long list of things to do and by the end of it was asking whether she’d been able to do the first thing he had mentioned to her–even though she’d been on the phone with him the entire time!

So maybe it wasn’t patience, but a generosity of spirit. All I know is that he reacted to the various snafus, miscommunications, and scrapes that inevitably attended my early (and late?) editorship of his dear magazine with remarkable equanimity. He always wanted to put the past aside (even if it happened just two hours ago), and focus on the future–how to fix it, how to keep it from happening again, how to learn from it.

I can’t tell you how much I treasured this quality in him. Early on, I would take problems to him with trepidation, and always come away with a feeling of relief. No one was so adept at “moving on” as Bill. Occasionally, he might send a withering memo or place a sharp phone call to me or someone else here–usually because something wasn’t happening quickly enough–and you’d be shattered. Then, you’d see him soon thereafter and that smile and twinkle in the eye would be there, and you were back in the sunny uplands of Buckleyville. He had moved on.

Which is not to say that he didn’t want whatever he had been writing or calling about to happen. A friend, and keen observer, of Bill once told me that he was a supremely talented executive, or he never would have been able to live his packed life as he did. I had never thought of it that way, but he was right. Bill was insistent on follow-through and accountability and timeliness. And once he fastened on a problem, he focused on it like a laser, as a certain president once said.

When I had a very minor, nagging health issue, Bill referred me to one of his doctors and wrote him a letter about me, bought and sent me things out of the blue he thought might help, and inquired about it over and over again. He wanted it solved.

As I think I saw someone write in the last day or so, his attitude to life was, “always forward.” One of the reasons he was so captivating to his friends is that he always gave them the sense that if they would lash themselves to him, they’d be in for the ride of a lifetime. Anyway, these aren’t the most important things to say about Bill, but I have been thinking about them since yesterday as I’ve reflected on the extraordinary privilege I had to work with him so closely. I have a hard time imagining editing National Review without Bill Buckley to read it, and send us memos about what he liked and what he didn’t. Now I’ll always wonder.

When writing a column about him today, I came across this passage in a speech about gratitude that seems very appropriate:

To fail to experience gratitude when walking through the corridors of the Metropolitan Museum, when listening to the music of Bach or Beethoven, when exercising our freedom to speak or, as happened to us three weeks ago, to give, or withhold, our assent, is to fail to recognize how much we have received from the great wellsprings of human talent and concern that gave us Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, our parents, our friends…We need a rebirth of gratitude for those who have cared for us, living and, mostly, dead. The high moments of our way of life are their gifts to us. We must remember them in our thoughts and in our prayers; and in our deeds.