William F. Buckley Jr. Socialites Information

William Frank Buckley Jr. (born William Francis Buckley; November 24, 1925 – February 27, 2008) was an American public intellectual and conservative author and commentator. In 1955 Buckley founded National Review, a magazine that stimulated the conservative movement in the late-20th century United States. Buckley hosted 1,429 episodes of the public affairs television show Firing Line (1966–1999), the longest-running public affairs show in US television history with a single host, where he became known for his distinctive idiolect and wide vocabulary.

Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale (1951) and more than fifty other books on diverse topics, including writing, speaking, history, politics, and sailing. His works include a series of novels featuring fictitious CIA agent Blackford Oakes. He also penned a nationally syndicated newspaper column.

Buckley called himself either a libertarian or a conservative.George H. Nash, a historian of the modern American conservative movement, said in 2008 that Buckley was "arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century. For an entire generation, he was the preeminent voice of American conservatism and its first great ecumenical figure." Buckley's primary contribution to politics was a fusion of traditionalist conservatism and classical liberalism; it laid the groundwork for the rightward shift in the Republican Party exemplified by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

Buckley was born November 24, 1925, in New York City, the son of Aloise Josephine Antonia (Steiner) and William Frank Buckley, a Texas-born lawyer and oil developer. His mother, from New Orleans, was of Swiss-German, German, and Irish descent, while his paternal grandparents, from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, were of Irish ancestry. The sixth of ten children, Buckley moved as a boy with his family to Mexico, and then to Sharon, Connecticut, before beginning his formal schooling in Paris, where he attended first grade. By age seven, he received his first formal training in English at a day school in London; his first and second languages were Spanish and French. As a boy, Buckley developed a love for music, sailing, horses, hunting, and skiing, all interests reflected in his later writings. He was homeschooled through the eighth grade using the Calvert School of Baltimore's Homeschool Curriculum. Just before World War II, at age 12–13, he attended the Jesuit preparatory school St John's Beaumont in England.

Buckley had nine siblings, including eldest sister Aloise Buckley Heath, a writer and conservative activist; sister Maureen Buckley-O'Reilly (1933–1964), who married Gerald A. O'Reilly (the CEO of Richardson-Vicks Drugs); sister Priscilla L. Buckley (author of Living It Up With National Review: A Memoir, for which William wrote the foreword); sister Patricia Buckley Bozell, who was Patricia Taylor's roommate at Vassar before each married; brother Reid Buckley, an author, debate-master, and founder of the Buckley School of Public Speaking; and brother James L. Buckley, who became a U.S. Senator from New York and was later a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

During the war, Buckley's family took in the future British historian Alistair Horne (son of Sir Allan Horne) as a child war evacuee. He and Buckley remained lifelong friends. They both attended the Millbrook School in Millbrook, New York, graduating in 1943. Buckley was a member of the American Boys' Club for the Defense of Errol Flynn (ABCDEF) during Flynn's trial for statutory rape in 1943. At Millbrook, Buckley founded and edited the school's yearbook, The Tamarack; this was his first experience in publishing. When Buckley was a young man, his father was an acquaintance of libertarian author Albert Jay Nock. William F. Buckley Sr., encouraged his son to read Nock's works.

As a youth Buckley developed many musical talents. He played the harpsichord very well, later calling it "the instrument I love beyond all others". He was an accomplished pianist and appeared once on Marian McPartland's National Public Radio show Piano Jazz. A great admirer of Johann Sebastian Bach, Buckley wanted Bach's music played at his funeral.

Buckley attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico (or UNAM) in 1943. The following year, upon his graduation from the US Army Officer Candidate School (OCS), he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army. In his book Miles Gone By, he briefly recounts being a member of Franklin Roosevelt's honor guard upon Roosevelt's death. He served stateside throughout the war at Fort Benning, Georgia; Fort Gordon, Georgia; and Fort Sam Houston, Texas.

At the end of World War II in 1945, Buckley enrolled at Yale University, where he became a member of the secret Skull and Bones society and was a masterful debater. He was an active member of the Conservative Party of the Yale Political Union, and served as Chairman of the Yale Daily News and as an informer for the FBI. Buckley studied political science, history, and economics at Yale, graduating with honors in 1950. He excelled on the Yale Debate Team; under the tutelage of Yale professor Rollin G. Osterweis, Buckley honed his acerbic style.

In 1951, along with many other Ivy League alumni, Buckley was recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); he served for two years, including one year in Mexico City working on political action for E. Howard Hunt, who was later jailed for his part in the Watergate affair. The two officers remained lifelong friends. In a November 1, 2005, column for National Review, Buckley recounted that while he worked for the CIA, the only CIA employee he knew was Hunt, his immediate boss. While in Mexico, Buckley edited The Road to Yenan, a book by Peruvian author Eudocio Ravines.

In 1950, Buckley married Patricia Aldyen Austin "Pat" Taylor (1926–2007), daughter of Canadian industrialist Austin C. Taylor. He met Taylor, a Protestant from Vancouver, British Columbia, while she was a student at Vassar College. She later became a prominent fundraiser for such charitable organizations as the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Institute of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery at New York University Medical Center and the Hospital for Special Surgery. She also raised money for Vietnam War veterans and AIDS patients. On April 15, 2007, Pat Buckley died at age 80 of an infection after a long illness. After her death, Buckley seemed "dejected and rudderless", according to friend Christopher Little.

William and Patricia Buckley had one son, author Christopher Buckley. They lived at 778 Park Avenue in Manhattan.

Buckley was raised a Catholic and was a member of the Knights of Malta. He described his faith by saying, "I grew up, as reported, in a large family of Catholics without even a decent ration of tentativeness among the lot of us about our religious faith." When he attended Millbrook School, Buckley was permitted to attend Catholic Mass at a nearby church despite the school's Protestant affiliation. As a youth, he became aware of anti-Catholic bias in the United States through reading American Freedom and Catholic Power, a Paul Blanshard book that accused American Catholics of having "divided loyalties".

The release of his first book, God and Man at Yale, in 1951 was met with some specific criticism pertaining to his Catholicism. McGeorge Bundy, dean of Harvard at the time, wrote in The Atlantic that "it seems strange for any Roman Catholic to undertake to speak for the Yale religious tradition". Henry Sloane Coffin, a Yale trustee, accused Buckley's book of "being distorted by his Roman Catholic point of view" and stated that Buckley "should have attended Fordham or some similar institution".

In his 1997 book Nearer, My God, Buckley condemned what he viewed as "the Supreme Court's war against religion in the public school" and argued that Christian faith was being replaced by "another God ... multiculturalism". As an adult, Buckley regularly attended the Tridentine Mass in Connecticut. He disapproved of the liturgical reforms following the Second Vatican Council. Buckley also revealed an interest in the writings and revelations of the 20th Century Italian writer Maria Valtorta. In his spiritual memoir, Buckley reproduced Valtorta's detailed accounts of Jesus Christ's crucifixion; these accounts were based on Valtorta's visionary experiences of Christ and the mystical revelations she recorded in her book The Poem of the Man-God.

Buckley's first book, God and Man at Yale, was published in 1951. A critique of Yale University, Buckley argued that the school had strayed from its original mission. Critics viewed the work as miscasting the role of academic freedom. Buckley himself credited the attention the book received in the media to the "Introduction" written by John Chamberlain, saying that it "chang[ed] the course of his life" and that the famous Life magazine editorial writer had acted out of "reckless generosity." William F. Buckley Jr. was referred to in the novel The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon in 1959 as "that fascinating young man who wrote about man and God at Yale."

In 1954, Buckley and his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell Jr. co-authored a book, McCarthy and His Enemies. Bozell worked with Buckley at The American Mercury in the early 1950s when it was edited by William Bradford Huie. The book strongly defended Senator Joseph McCarthy as a patriotic crusader against communism. The book asserted that "McCarthyism ... is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks." Buckley edited The American Mercury in 1951 and 1952, but left after perceiving newly emerging anti-Semitic tendencies in the magazine.

Buckley founded National Review in 1955 at a time when there were few publications devoted to conservative commentary. He served as the magazine's editor-in-chief until 1990. During that time, National Review became the standard-bearer of American conservatism, promoting the fusion of traditional conservatives and libertarians. Examining postwar conservative intellectual history, Kim Phillips-Fein writes:

Buckley sought out intellectuals who were ex-Communists or had once worked on the far Left, including Whittaker Chambers, William Schlamm, John Dos Passos, Frank Meyer and James Burnham, as editors and writers for National Review. When Burnham became a senior editor, he urged the adoption of a more pragmatic editorial position that would extend the influence of the magazine toward the political center. Smant (1991) finds that Burnham overcame sometimes heated opposition from other members of the editorial board (including Meyer, Schlamm, William Rickenbacker, and the magazine's publisher, William A. Rusher), and had a significant impact on both the editorial policy of the magazine and on the thinking of Buckley himself.

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