WFB RETIRES FROM NATIONAL REVIEW

An icon of the American Right for a half century, William F. Buckley, Jr. is retiring from National Review:

In an interview, he said he planned to relinquish his shares [of National Review] today to a board of trustees he had selected. Among them are his son, the humorist Christopher Buckley; the magazine's president, Thomas L. Rhodes; and Austin Bramwell, a 2000 graduate of Yale and one of the magazine's youngest current contributors.

Mr. Buckley's exit from the stage of political journalism is sad to see. Granted, I've had mixed feelings about NR and WFB for some years as I believe both capitulated to a neoconservative element as National Review was purged of its Old Right sympathizers in favor of approved New York neocons.

But what Buckley accomplished with National Review was an amazing thing. Sometime take a few hours, find your local university library and turn through the pages of NR from the 1950s and 1960s. You'll be shocked by the audacity of the positions and the vibrancy of the prose. Indeed, in those early decades, National Review stood "athwart history, yelling 'Stop,'" with men such as Russell Kirk, James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall and Frank Meyer. None of them would have been allowed to darken the door of NR in the past decade.

A young Russell Kirk told the even younger William F. Buckley, Jr. not to locate the NR offices in New York City. The danger was too great for assimilation into the very establishment mentality that NR and its fellow travelers were fighting. Dr. Kirk suggested somewhere such as Chicago instead. Buckley went to NYC anyway and in the end proved Kirk right.

I had the good pleasure to meet Buckley in the National Review offices. I interviewed him in the magazine's library room for my undergraduate thesis, which looked at Buckley's and Kirk's role in the post-war Conservative movement. It was an exciting opportunity for a 21 year old. When I wrote to request the interview Mr. Buckley responded with a conditional "yes". Enclosed with the letter was a reading list to complete before the interview so I would ask sensible questions. It showed wisdom on his part, and likely reflected hard learned experience with past undergraduates!

I continued a correspondence with him for a time, and he was always gracious to answer my letters. His book God & Man at Yale, although written almost 40 years before my reading of it, was like a bolt out of the blue for me. Firing Line on PBS was unique among political television shows. There is much for which we can thank William F. Buckley, Jr. And it is no shock that he--like the rest of us--was not perfect. Still, as we often must do, we wonder what might have been.