
When William F. Buckley Jr. died last year, most obituaries mentioned National Review’s dubious record on civil rights. Some of the magazine’s statements from that era are indeed difficult to read today, but however incautiously they may have been expressed, it’s important to remember that they were motivated partly, perhaps mostly, by small-government principles. In discussing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for instance, NR cited with approval Barry Goldwater’s view “that the bill’s famous Title VII, creating the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, would unwisely extend a federal bureaucracy into areas of personal relationship and property management that should better …