“I got to tell him once what I thought of him, almost, to his face,” Rick writes below. Me too.

Like Rick’s, my comments took the form of a toast–in this case, in April 2006, at the Union League Club, during the 25th anniversary dinner of the Dartmouth Review, to which he had given constant encouragement–and, from time to time, I later learned, financial contributions. (During the reception beforehand, Pat Buckley, who never altogether approved of Yale events, let alone of devoting her time to Dartmouth, demonstrated the extent of his support. “Peter,” she said, “can you possibly explain why my husband has insisted on bringing me here?”)

As prepared for publication:

“The great man or woman in history,” writes the philosopher Sidney Hook in his book, The Hero in History, “is someone of whom we can say on the basis of the available evidence that if they had not lived when they did, or acted as they did, the history of their countries and of the world…would have been profoundly different.”
Think back to the late nineteen-seventies, when this publication was founded. Inflation and unemployment in double digits. The United States on the strategic defensive, as the Soviet Union advanced. Yet by the late nineteen-eighties, just a decade later, inflation and unemployment stood in single digits, and the American economy had grown by an amount equal to the entire output of goods and services of West Germany. Or rather of what used to be called West Germany. Because on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down….Now ask this question: In this rebirth of the United States, in this American renaissance, who proved truly indispensable? Who passed Sidney Hook’s test? My own list includes just three names:
For giving conservative principles unassailable academic rigor, Milton Friedman. For deploying these principles in the realm of practical politics, Ronald Reagan.And for introducing conservatism into public discourse—insistently, unapologetically, and with utterly irresistible bravura—William F. Buckley, Jr.
(Applause. Cheers. Standing ovation. Buckley rises to acknowledge.) He is indeed a hero in history. He is also–our hero.

I wish I had said more, and said it better. But I said it.

When he sat down, he gave me a wink.