Bill’s first book, God and Man at Yale, was published in 1951. His TV show Firing Line wrapped in 1999. Those are the brackets of a career. 1951–65, his run for mayor of New York City, was the ascent. 1965–89, the end of the Reagan era, was the peak. From then until 1999 he was a Grand Old Man. Last century, last millennium. He performed in and against a world that was different from ours. How?

The great political difference, abroad but at home too, was the ever-presence of communism commanded by the Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin looks bad now, and is, but comparing him with his predecessors, I cannot forget the judgment of the émigré cabbie who, after telling me how much he admired Stalin — “He killed Germany” — slapped his dashboard and snorted, “Putin is little officer.” The Soviet Union had troops in the Fulda Gap and missiles pointed everywhere. In the Seventies, its proxies swallowed Southeast Asia and patrolled Africa. Respectable pro-Sovietism had died in this country with the Henry Wallace campaign of 1948, before Bill got going. But anti-communist liberals were ever subject to bouts of wishful thinking or fear, while the student radicals of the late Sixties and on did the Soviets’ bidding willy-nilly.

Opposing communism was the supreme worldly cause of Bill and the Right he sought to shape. This shaped his judgments of hosts of figures. Bad guys or loose cannons who were acceptable, or at least tolerable, because they were anti-communist included Franco and Somoza, apartheid South Africa and Joe McCarthy. It could work for liberals too. Bill spent years wooing the old LBJ hand John Roche to write for National Review, in the end simply buying his column from his syndicate. When the Soviet Union finally fell, Bill wrote of it in religious terms. “On bended knee we give thanks to Providence for the transfiguration of Russia, thanks from those of us who lived to see it, and thanks to those, departed, who helped us to understand why it was right to struggle to sustain the cause of Western civilization.”

With the Soviet Union gone, the foreign policy stance that Bill represented went too. Conservatives’ mixed responses to the Falklands War, which was outside the Cold War, were the first signs of what was to come. With the breakup of Yugoslavia it came. Which wars to fight? All? None? Ask the Republican president-elect, who wants to appoint a Putin cheerleader as the director of national intelligence.

Bill was a celebrity. His medium was the media — books, columns, speaking, television, this magazine. He never tried radio — who cared, until the Nineties? — and never cracked Hollywood: No Blackford Oakes movie got made. But he was everywhere else.

Now, that everywhere is as remote as Samuel Johnson writing for Grub Street. Through most of Bill’s career there were three television networks, plus public television. Newspapers began folding after World War II, but the survivors were still numerous and potent. Ditto print magazines. When Henry and Clare Boothe Luce edited some ad copy that Bill had written for NR as a friendly stunt, it was help from the gods. When you brought out a book — and America’s publishers had not yet congealed into a few megacorporations — you publicized it by going on The Today Show or The Tonight Show. Sales followed.

Bill navigated this world by being its Conservative. There seemed to be room for only one. (George Will, sometime employee, would become Two.) Bill intuited that even media figures and outlets that disagreed with him might be willing to go rounds with him or give him a slot. That was the attitude of Firing Line’s longtime liberal producer Warren Steibel. Bill was a combination counsel for the perps in the dock — all other conservatives — and licensed fool. Norman Mailer described his media persona thus: “No other actor on earth can project simultaneous hints that he is in the act of playing Commodore of the Yacht Club, Joseph Goebbels, Robert Mitchum, Maverick, Savonarola, the nice prep school kid next door, and the snows of yesteryear.” (Goebbels was a low blow to aim at a World War II vet, one that Gore Vidal would repeat seriously, but the rest was pretty shrewd.)

It helped that Bill’s talents suited the media of his day. A fast writer with a voice both ornate and demotic, he was an ideal columnist. With a mischievous face, an easeful affect, and an unplaceable accent, he shone against television’s simpler production values (two cameras, lean sets, little music). The family dinner table and college debating had prepared him to be an effective lectern jockey. The books marched in a steady stream, anthologies of columns, genre fiction, sailing books, and more. Cruising Speed, his book about a week in his life in November 1970, has permanent value as a time capsule, and, as it develops, an analysis of the costs of living at such a tempo.

No need to describe the media world now. You carry it in your pocket. Rush Limbaugh, a longtime Bill admirer, took advantage of the end of the fairness doctrine to reinvent talk radio. He succeeded as no one else has because he began as a DJ. He did not want, he told us in 2019 when National Review Institute awarded him a Buckley Prize for Leadership in Political Thought, to do the best conservative show on radio; he wanted to do the best show on radio. He loved his medium along with his message. For a while Ann Coulter was the It Girl, banging out books and online chats with Milo Yiannopoulos about Daddy. Now we have Joe Rogan, inquiring bro. Like Limbaugh, he came to his format, the podcast, with previous performing experience, as a comedian and an actor.

Then there is all the rest of it — as Joyce said, Here Comes Everybody. The internet is one immense Letters to the Editor section, unedited. Bill 2.0 could make it in this world, but he would occupy a smaller niche.

The media world of Bill’s career, especially of its launch phase, reflected a larger reality: the existence of a common national culture, presided over by an establishment. “Establishment” was a term borrowed, half humorously, from the Church of England’s role in British life, as depicted in Trollope novels. Politically the American establishment was liberal — mildly, it seems now, but decidedly nonetheless. Culturally it purveyed a mix that Dwight Macdonald, a contentious critic who was briefly Bill’s friend, called midcult — poised between lowbrow popular fare and the mandarins. Macdonald despised midcult, writing that Life magazine, Luce’s picture weekly, would showcase both Picasso and horses on roller skates, but the horses on roller skates always seemed to win. Terry Teachout, one of Bill’s many discoveries, took the opposite view. Midcult organs brought the finer things to Americans like Terry growing up in Sikeston, Mo., which they could have encountered no other way. Even people who preferred the horses on roller skates knew, because they were told, that Picasso was “better.”

The academy in this period was already toying with existentialism and nihilism. Bill sensed some of this in God and Man at Yale, though he was more worried about socialism in Econ 1. But ordinary people thought of the Ivy League as old gray stones, with “The Whiffenpoof Song” on soundtrack, and their credulity exerted a restraining effect on the profs.

Bill began as a rebel against this establishment. His first book attacked his alma mater. His second, McCarthy and His Enemies, was too mired in its subject; Macdonald said it read like a brief for a pickpocket by Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. In Up from Liberalism, Bill’s third book, he pivoted from McCarthy to showing how extreme and silly his critics had been. (Bill was always a good counterpuncher.)

But when the establishment buckled in the Sixties under the weight of the Vietnam War, Bill attacked its attackers. He did so because lefty radicals were obviously worse. In any case Bill’s goal, all along, had been not to destroy the establishment but to change it — and open it to conservatives. He wanted in, for himself and us. Terry’s career — biographer, playwright, librettist, critic for everybody, landing finally at the theater desk of the Wall Street Journal — was what Bill had in mind. Larry Perelman, Bill’s late-life pianist friend, has titled his new study of him American Impresario. Le mot juste.

Now the Right couldn’t care less. It bellows on X that there is no more establishment, or that somehow X is. Its thought leaders, to the extent it has any, are autodidact nitwits with a sprinkling of professors from winger academic shtetls. The president-elect is Mr. Horses on Roller Skates himself. From Dwight Macdonald to McDonald’s.

Bill did his best in the world as he knew it, and he did it all his life. That is all that anyone but the very greatest can do.