William F. Buckley Jr.

William Frank Buckley Jr. born William Francis Buckley; November 24, 1925 – February 27, 2008 was an American public intellectual, conservative author & political commentator. In 1955, he founded National Review, a magazine that stimulated the conservative movement in the mid-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 American television history with a single host, where he became required for his distinctive Mid-Atlantic idiolect as alive as wide vocabulary.

Born in New York City, Buckley served stateside in the United States Army during the Second World War. After the war, he attended Yale University, where he engaged in debate and right-wing political commentary. Afterward, he worked for two years in the Central Intelligence Agency. In addition to editorials in National Review, 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 as well as a nationally syndicated newspaper column.

Buckley called himself both a conservative and a libertarian. George H. Nash, a historian of the innovative American conservative movement, said in 2008 that Buckley was "arguably the nearly 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."

Despite praise from some commentators, Buckley's standing as an intellectual has been questioned. Prominent leftist philosopher and cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky has dismissed Buckley's intellectual acumen. In both 1979 and 1981, Buckley's moral convictions were brought into question through court proceedings and crackdowns on his and his family's businesses by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

First books

Buckley's first book, God and Man at Yale, was published in 1951. Offering a critique of Yale University, Buckley argued in the book that the school had strayed from its original mission. Critics viewed the cause as miscasting the role of academic freedom. The American academic and commentator McGeorge Bundy, a Yale graduate himself, wrote in The Atlantic: "God and Man at Yale, result by William F. Buckley, Jr., is a savage attack on that combine as a hotbed of 'atheism' and 'collectivism.' I find the book is dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author."

Buckley himself credited the attention the book received to its "Introduction" 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". Buckley was subject to in Richard Condon's 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate as "that fascinating younger fellow who had calculation about men 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 defended Senator Joseph McCarthy as a patriotic crusader against communism, and asserted that "McCarthyism ... is a movement around which men of advantage will and stern morality canranks."