Chris Matthews had some kind words for WFB on “Hardball” today:
MATTHEWS: It was in high school that I came under the charm and the influence of William F. Buckley Jr., the dashing, charismatic young conservative who wrote God and Man at Yale, McCarthy and his Enemies, and founded the wistful, precocious, companionable monthly, National Review. […]
It was from National Review that I gained my early affection and appetite for political philosophy and argument. To start out as a young conservative is not — let’s look at the facts — to end up there. But you have to start somewhere. You have to care before you can think, think before you can change your mind and, in my case, not stop changing your mind. I owe that start to the man who died today, at his desk: the great author, writer, sailor of the ocean sea, alpine skier, renaissance man, and in mine, as in so many millions of cases, teacher and political guidance counselor.
Peggy Noonan also shared her thoughts on Bill’s legacy:
NOONAN: I gotta tell you, Chris, what you just said about Bill Buckley was beautiful from beginning to end, and I shared very much your recounting of what it was like to discover National Review when we were kids. For you, it was one point of view that you were discovering. For me, as a young, unformed-politically person, it was a magazine that told me things I had never heard before: There was a conservative movement, there was something called conservatism, there was a way of thinking or approaching the world that I had never heard of before. […]
He was really a great man with a consequential life, one of the great lives of the 20th century, I think.