William Frank Buckley Jr. (born William Francis Buckley; November 24, 1925 – February 27, 2008) was an American conservative writer, public intellectual, political commentator, and novelist. Born in New York City, Buckley spoke Spanish as his first language before learning French and then English as a child. He served stateside in the United States Army during World War II. After the war, he attended Yale University, where he engaged in debate and conservative political commentary; he graduated from Yale with honors in 1950. He then worked at the Central Intelligence Agency for two years. In 1955, Buckley founded National Review, a magazine that stimulated the growth and development of the conservative movement in the United States. In addition to editorials in National Review, Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale (1951) and more than 50 other books on diverse topics including writing, speaking, history, politics, and sailing. His works include a series of novels featuring fictitious CIA officer Blackford Oakes and a nationally syndicated newspaper column. In 1965, Buckley ran for mayor of New York City on the Conservative Party line, finishing third. From 1966 to 1999, he hosted 1,429 episodes of the public affairs television show Firing Line, the longest-running public affairs show with a single host in U.S. television history; through his work on the show, he became known for his Northeastern elite accent, articulate discourse, and wide vocabulary. Buckley is widely considered one of the most influential figures in the conservative movement in the United States.
Early life
Childhood William Frank Buckley Jr. was born William Francis Buckley in New York City on November 24, 1925, to Aloise Josephine Antonia (née Steiner; 1895–1985) and lawyer and oil developer William Frank Buckley Sr. (1881–1958). His mother hailed from New Orleans and was of German, Irish, and Swiss-German descent, while his father had Irish ancestry and was born in Texas to Canadian parents from Hamilton, Ontario. He had five older siblings and four younger siblings. As a boy, Buckley moved with his family to Mexico before moving to Sharon, Connecticut. He began his formal schooling in France, attending first grade in Paris. By the time Buckley was seven, the family had moved to England, where he received his first formal English-language training at a day school in London. Due to the family's varied places of residence, his first and second languages were Spanish and French. As a boy, Buckley developed a love for horses, hunting, music, sailing, and skiing, all of which are reflected in his later writings. He was homeschooled through the eighth grade using the homeschool curriculum developed by the Calvert School in Baltimore. Just before World War II, when he was 12 and 13, he attended the Jesuit preparatory school St John's Beaumont School in the English village of Old Windsor. Buckley's father was an oil developer whose wealth was based in Mexico and became influential in Mexican politics during the military dictatorship of Victoriano Huerta, but was expelled when leftist general Álvaro Obregón became president in 1920. Buckley's nine siblings included eldest sister Aloise Buckley Heath, a writer and conservative activist; sister Maureen Buckley-O'Reilly, who married Richardson-Vicks Drugs CEO Gerald A. O'Reilly; sister Priscilla Buckley, author of Living It Up with National Review: A Memoir, for which Buckley wrote the foreword; sister Patricia Buckley Bozell, also an author; brother Reid Buckley, an author and founder of the Buckley School of Public Speaking; and brother James L. Buckley, who became a U.S. senator from New York and a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. During the war, Buckley's family took in the English historian-to-be Alistair 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, libertarian author Albert Jay Nock was a frequent guest at the Buckley family house in Sharon, Connecticut. William F. Buckley Sr. urged his son to read Nock's works, the best-known of which was Our Enemy, the State, in which Nock maintains that the founding fathers of the United States, at their Constitutional Convention in 1787, executed a coup d'état of the system of government established under the Articles of Confederation.
Music In his youth, Buckley developed many musical talents. He played the harpsichord, later calling it "the instrument I love beyond all others", but said he was not "proficient enough to develop my own style". He was a close friend of harpsichordist Fernando Valenti, who offered to sell Buckley his 16-foot pitch harpsichord. Buckley was also an accomplished pianist and appeared once on Marian McPartland's NPR show Piano Jazz. A great admirer of Johann Sebastian Bach, Buckley wanted Bach's music played at his funeral.
Religion Buckley was raised a Catholic and was a member of the Knights of Malta. He was committed to Catholic devotionals, including praying the Rosary daily. The 1951 release of his first book, God and Man at Yale, was met with some specific criticism pertaining to his Catholicism. McGeorge Bundy, dean of Harvard at the time, wrote in The Atlantic, "it seems strange for any Roman Catholic to undertake to speak for the Yale religious tradition". Henry Sloane Coffin, a Yale trustee, wrote that the book was "distorted by his Roman Catholic point of view" and 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". He disapproved of the liturgical reforms following the Second Vatican Council, writing of the loss of the Latin Mass: "I pray the sacrifice will yield a rich harvest of informed Christians. But to suppose that it will is the most difficult act of faith I have ever been called upon to make, because it tears against the perceptions of all my senses."
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