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These were the men with the ideas; Buckley provided the packaging, and a singular talent for holding together groups with potential disparate motivations under the banner of a revived conservative movement. I too keep meaning to produce a work of heft and genius. William F.

Buckley writes about same-sex marriage, the Full Faith and Credit Clause, and judicial activism—and why he argued a constitutional amendment might be necessary. At Yale he is triumphant, his legend building around him as he stalks across campus, lanky and self-assured. One evening, the four eldest children drove to a neighboring Jewish resort and left a burning cross on the lawn.

(In a heated debate with Gore Vidal, he responded to the vile. To consider effects is also to search for causes, so we begin with the family. After leveraging his elite credentials to launch an attack on the Ivy League, Buckley proceeds along with Bozell to craft a forceful defense of a brutish, slovenly, vengeful Republican leader on the grounds that, whatever his sins, his attackers are worse.

It is, in many ways, a remarkable accomplishment: exhaustive but not tiring, serious yet lively, both affectionate and suspicious. He also produced three columns a week for decades, generated prodigious written correspondence, and appeared in 1, episodes of Firing Line, all while editing the magazine and accepting regular speaking gigs.

For years, Buckley promised to write a serious work of political theory—he managed to produce thousands of words railing against his liberal enemies, but was ultimately thwarted by his inability to offer a coherent elaboration of what conservatives were really about.

Buckley spends much of his public life riding into battle on behalf of a League of Extraordinary Assholes: Roy Cohn, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Strom Thurmond, Howard Hunt, and, in a frankly bizarre turn, Edgar Smith, the convicted murderer of a teenage girl with whom Buckley has become pen pals and for whom he launches a media crusade.

Stop me if any of this sounds familiar. Or, anyway, this is the received wisdom: Buckley the gatekeeper, yoking these headstrong types together in common cause while expelling more distasteful elements like the Birchers, in service to lacquering the American right-wing with a sheen of respectability.

But Buckley never challenged what he believed was a necessary moral and social injunction against gay love, marriage and sex. Over and over we watch Buckley slander, deceive, withhold information, and defend the falsity of others. He stands athwart history, yelling the wildest possible bullshit.

It is a strong brand, but it has some visible wear and age on it by now. The father, William F. Buckley Sr. William Sr. They are rendered bright, energetic, and beloved. Though Vidal never “identified” as gay—he never “came out”—it was hardly a secret that the author of “The City and the Pillar” was, to use his own favored term, a homosexualist.

He lies with glee and without compunction; he lies willfully and by omission. Most of all, Buckley is very clearly the result of slow thinking and methodical research, which makes it precisely the sort of work that its subject could never produce. In it, he rails against the administration for abandoning the true purpose of higher education and allowing professors to corrupt American youth with Godless communism.

He writes his first book, God and Man at Yale , shortly after graduating, and it cements him as a rising star. All of the Buckley children yearn for the approval of their father, whose weakness for risky financial schemes is rivaled only by his strength of convictions: He is rabidly isolationist, anticommunist, and antisemitic.

The man who gave us Reagan, as Buckley is often known, is a thorny enough historical consequence; Tanenhaus largely leaves alone the question of whether he paved the way for something worse. At school he is recognized for great intellectual gifts, if not always the inclination to use them well.

For all the minute attention paid to how Buckley did it, we are still left wondering what exactly he did. I too am constantly on the verge of financial ruin because I find sums tedious and want to buy something nice for myself dresses in my case, ever larger boats for Bill.

Andrew Sullivan appreciated the late William F. Buckley, Jr.'s civil tone on matters of homosexuality, especially as contrasted with other conservatives of his era, but laments that "Buckley. Insofar as I am able to relate to the man at all, it is in details like these.

William F. Buckley Jr. He wrote dozens of books, including non-fiction and a bestselling series of spy novels, both of which were mainly dashed off while on skiing vacations in Gstaad. Again and again, while reading Buckley , one is struck by this sense of queasy recognition.