On an airplane all day today, I just now exchanged emails with Jeffrey Hart, who, three decades ago in Hanover, introduced me to WFB. When we heard the news, I discovered, Jeff and I had had the same thought, recalling the speech by William Gerard Hamilton at the end of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Replace “Johnson” with “Buckley,” and you have what we’re feeling, Jeff and I–and every friend of the American conservative movement, and even, for that matter, two-thirds of its enemies.

He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. – Buckley is dead. – Let us go to the next best: There is nobody; – no man can be said to put you in mind of Buckley.