Death did not sneak up on NR’s founder, William F. Buckley Jr., who passed away 15 years ago today, concluding a long, rear-guard action against diabetes, emphysema, and other afflictions. He was 82. In his last years, the response to the question posed upon the rare sighting — How are you Bill? — was typically met with decomposing, a mix of humor, honesty, and melancholy. The crammed life — the stuff of his best-selling week-in-the-life-of memoirs Overdrive and Cruising Speed — that defined the never-stop conservative gave way, as all do, to nature, time, and their ravages. To decomposition.
Death was not an eventuality that had avoided Bill’s consideration. A remarkable example of this comes from 1962, from a letter Bill had written to the editors of The Individualist, the newsletter of Young Conservative Club of Walt Whitman High School (in the Bronx), responding to their inquiry about something he had written in Up from Liberalism concerning “final truths.” Bill’s comments were and remain powerful and instructive:
In the passage you quote from Up From Liberalism I intended, indeed, to refer to the religious truth that is our central heritage and to the moral philosophy and human insight that derive from it. Sometimes this position is referred to (in a phrase going back, I believe, to the days of the Roman Empire) as “the morality of the last days”—by which is meant the world-view of men who know that death is close. But, in the long view, we all stand sentenced to death, and whether it comes in 1995 or tomorrow makes no difference. That is why the morality of the last days always applies to what is “finally important in human experience.” All our techniques of social welfare, all our science, all our comfort, all our liberty, all our democracy and foreign aid and grandiloquent orations—all that means nothing to me and nothing to you in the moment when we go. At that moment we must put our souls in order, and the way to do that was lighted for us by Jesus, and since then we have had need of no other light. That is what is finally important; it has not changed; and it will not change. It is truth, which shall ever abide in the future. And if it is “reactionary” to hold a truth that will be valid for all future time, then words have lost their meaning, and men their reason.
One final and associated thought here: Among the many things for which Bill was famous, the obituaries and remembrances he penned — typically work of beautiful prose and penetrating insight — rank high. Several years back James Rosen, a WFB fan if ever there was one, had the terrific idea to see the best of these collected and published. It proved a best seller. If you own a copy of A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century, maybe flip through its pages today — doing so might be a fitting way to remember a great man who, himself, provided us with great remembrances. And this final final thought: If you’ve yet to read Neal B. Freeman’s recent, wonderful declaration of Bill’s legacy, do so, here.