Writer and Journalist William F Buckley found dead at 82

[nobodyspecial]

I always have been, and always will be, diametrically opposed to the beliefs, SOCIAL beliefs, Buckley espoused. On other matters, well, it was a different story. The thing that strikes me is that as he allowed his views to change, via the influence of the reality of his theories put into play or a change in the outcome of any particular situation he had postulated upon, and was always more than willing to admit when he wrong and not bash you over the head when he was right - unlike almost ALL of those that have followed in his footsteps. He spoke, he did not yell. He exchanged ideas, not shoved his down your throat. He brought a civility to political discourse that has since been relegated to the scrap heap of history. I may not have agreed with him very often, but I never felt I had to - or else.

Very well written, spot on.

 

[pgoat]

I'll leave the politics to a politician; former NYC Mayor Ed Koch gives WFB a nice tribute here.

 

[Tomasso]

My favorite photo of WFB.... He'll be missed.

 

[scotrace]

Something he said which I often borrow.

"How easily these matters could be resolved were I only given plenipotentiary power."

Wonderful.

 

[Nathan Flowers]

My favorite, though he may have been quoting somebody else:

"Conservatism is a paradigm of essences toward which the phenomenology of the world is in continuous approximation."

 

[Dixon Cannon]

A great piece by a great thinker on a great thinker...

March 7, 2008, 7:51 pm
A Most Uncommon Man
-Dick Cavett, New York Times Contributor

It was my freshman year at Yale. I was fresher than most — and from Nebraska — so just about everything I saw, heard and did that year astonished me.

Mr. Cecil Lang, my English teacher, ended a class one day with the words, “You might want to drop by the Law School tonight. A man I consider one of the most dangerous men in America is lecturing there.” I went.

Onstage was a tall, interesting-looking man unlike anything in my experience. A speaker so vocally various, so facially vigorous, so versatile of eyebrow, so eccentric of movement and gesture — even rising virtually “on point” at times for emphasis. This was not just a speaker. This was a performer.

Only a handful of the best comic actors could display such an arsenal of physical and vocal variety. Afterwards, I walked to my room, my head ringing with un-cliched, half-understood phrases. Like, “…and the mental spastics who read The Nation.”

This was some kind of strange genius, alien to anything I’d ever seen and heard.

I would have had no trouble believing, as I learned years later, that at the age of 8 (sic) — when some kids still write to Santa — this guy had written to the King of England, demanding certain war debt reparations.

The politics in his speech had meant nothing to me. I discovered my first editorial page that year and had to be reminded what Right and Left meant. When I thanked my teacher for having recommended such an entertaining evening, he said something I wasn’t sure I understood: “Buckley’s amazing, isn’t he? If he had a little more of the common touch, he’d be a truly dangerous man.”

I certainly never expected to meet him.

Years pass, and I suddenly find myself in the daunting world of hosting a talk show. I had seen a lot of Buckley on his own show — a formidable presence on the screen — and there he was on my next week’s guest list.

Because it was Buckley, I was nervous in a way I don’t think I ever was before or since. If you’d asked me what exactly I was nervous about, I doubt that I could have defined it.

Then I found out.

Conversation seemed to be moving along nicely when, in reference to something he had just brought up, I said, “I’m not really familiar with that.” Back came, “You don’t seem to be familiar with anything.”

Wham!

I think I nearly lost consciousness. It was a rotten thing to say to a beginner.

If he meant it to be funny, it wasn’t. There was a kind of sympathetic “ouch” sound from the audience as I heard myself utter a feeble, “Oh, I’m…familiar with everything.” The rest is blank, except for the thought that this new job wasn’t always going to be fun. It was a moment that at a later time both of us would have been funny about. Not then. Somehow I got through the rest of the show on automatic pilot.

We now make a cinematic, fast-forward jump-cut to the future that will seem at first like a non sequitur bit from a confusingly edited film.

A tranquil, sparkling blue bay in the Caribbean. Several people are being pulled horizontally in a human chain through the water. Power is supplied by one of those expensive Hammacher Schlemmer toys. A sturdy little German-made putt-putt gas engine sold so rich folks, frolicking, can enjoy . . . um, being pulled through water.

Two men in the short line of swim-suited, giggling aquatic revelers are recognizable. A tourist bystander asks her friend, “Hey, can that be Dick Cavett?” “Where?” “There. In the water. The guy clinging to the naked lower calves of William F. Buckley Jr.” As the latter might have answered her with that famous and much imitated resonance, “Mirabile dictu, madame, you are correct.”

Obviously our relationship had taken a turn for the better.

Over the intervening years, the Cavetts and the Buckleys had become friends. Bill and his tall and striking wife, Pat — whose elegance, smarts and wit made her the perfectly suited WFB mate — were there on their beautiful sailboat/yacht. (Pat was Patricia, of course, but I never heard anyone call her that.)

They had sailed from New York, the yacht captained by Bill, the undaunted sailor. By this time he had been an eagerly welcomed guest on my show numerous times. What he might have termed “our initial contretemps” was forgotten.

But one day I remembered it.

I felt I just had to ask him about it. I recreated it exactly. He clearly didn’t recall it and seemed a bit embarrassed. I had gotten to know and to like him so much by then that I was sorry I’d brought it up. It clearly disturbed him. I quickly offered him an out.

“Is there any chance you had me confused with David Frost”? I asked.

“Precisely,” he said, taking my offer and flashing that trademark wink and grin. We laughed.

**********

It is cocktail time below deck. My wife and Bill were fond of each other and enjoyed making each other laugh. (”I do enjoy Bill,” she said once. “I just wish it didn’t make me feel unfaithful to Gore.”) In her omnivorous reading she had downed a heavy tome on Catholicism, and asked him to clarify some abstruse point about St. Paul and the founding of the church that seemed to her somehow self-contradictory.

“Well, the theological question becomes…” he began, but seemed to get stuck. He backed up and started a whole new sentence and came up short again. Before he could start a third, his amused spouse said, “Bill, you always like to try new things. Why not admit you don’t know the answer?” After a moment, he joined in the laughter.

Later that year, in view of his striking out on the religious question, he gave my wife the “Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare,” containing every single word in the plays and every line containing that word; a monument of scholarship.

It weighed a ton, and he cautioned her about reading it in the bathtub. It was inscribed, “From one who was at a temporary loss for words, to one who — now — never need be. Affectionately, Bill.”

She responded by sending him a cherished old volume given to her by the writer Jean Stafford. I hated to see it go, but had to admit it was the absolute ideal gift for William F. Buckley. Its incredible but accurate title: “The Pilgrim’s Progress — in Words of One Syllable.”

She put: “For Bill, should he ever need some. Love, Carrie Nye.”

 

[skyvue]

I hereby tip my hat to the late Mr. Buckley's penchant for recanting. He must have grown quite adept at it, with practice and frequent repitition.

 

[Dagwood]

Here is an article about Bill Buckley's fashion style. From the short article:

"Buckley was 'anti-fashion in the original sense of the term,' says designer and style expert Alan Flusser, author of 'Dressing the Man: Mastering the Art of Permanent Fashion.' 'He came from an era and background where if you looked like you spent too much time thinking about clothes, then everything else was suspect….I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those Shetland sweaters actually had holes in them.' At social functions, men of Buckley’s era and class were content to serve merely as backdrops for their wives."

Also: "'Buckley’s collar, of course, clung tightly to his neck and shoulder, turn and bow and bob as he might.' His genteel shabbiness did not extend to exhibiting 'prole gape.'"

 

[pgoat]

“…and the mental spastics who read The Nation.”

said by the founder of The National Review.

It's pretty tough to keep politics out of a thread like this. I'll agree he could be charming or eloquant but he was also inflammatory and offensive on a regular basis....tho that's par for the course in politics.

While getting some pizza yesterday I heard about the whole Gov. Spitzer ordeal on the Wall mounted TV...ugh.
Maybe the Libertarians had it right all along.....