WFB RIP
One of the few people who has influenced me greatly died today.
William F Buckley, Jr. — 1925-2008.
More at National Review Online and The Corner.
UPDATE:
When death came for him, said Churchill of George VI, “he came as a friend.” I think the same is true for Bill. All his ambitions, public and private had been realized, more than triumphantly. He had lost the beloved wife of more than fifty years. His son Chris had long ago proved himself an independent spirit more than capable of sparring on his own two feet. He was as mentally sharp and as good company as he had ever been — I saw him for dinner last month in Palm Beach where he thoroughly enjoyed himself — but he was tired. He had enjoyed his vacation in this vale of tears but he wanted to go home.
We should be sorry for ourselves and his family over his death. We can be glad for him.
Pat, Bill’s wife, died last April. They had been the closest of companions, and no one who knew him at all well expected him to survive her for long. Nor did he: Bill outlived Pat by less than a year.
and:
I’m writing these words immediately after having returned from a private concert held in the art-laden living room of a friend of mine who owns a wonderful old Bösendorfer grand. The performer was a serious amateur pianist who played two Beethoven sonatas, Opp. 109 and 111 (frivolous amateurs don’t play late Beethoven). I sat close enough to the keyboard to read the music over his shoulder. The audience consisted of twenty people, most of whom knew one another more or less well, and after Op. 111 we retired to the host’s dining room for a sit-down meal. That’s the way to hear classical music.
Bill’s kindness and generosity of spirit really were remarkable. He was as interested in listening to the college senior to his left as to the former secretary of state to his right. I knew him in his old age, when his answer to the question, “How are you doing?” was likely to be, “Decomposing.” Even when his body was weary, though, his eyes retained a preternatural youthfulness. A treatise could probably be written about the role those eyes played in the making of modern America, but I don’t have the heart to do it. R.I.P.
No one, I added, was more respectful of saints, more mischievous towards plaster ones. How beautiful that was.
Bill had the capacity to make everyone feel that they enhanced his life. If you ran into him on the staircase, he would make you think that you had just capped his day. It need hardly be said that few men are great. But even fewer great men are so good. I weep.
“And as the last journey of this faithful pilgrim took him beyond the sunset,” Margaret Thatcher said in her eulogy for Ronald Reagan, “I like to think, in the words of Bunyan, that ‘all the trumpets sounded on the other side.’”
When the trumpets sounded once again yesterday morning, we know just what they played.
Reagan also put God above all else. Buckley and Reagan, however, were not the sort of political-religious leaders like Huckabee. Neither man would have said a word about Romney’s Mormonism. The God of Buckley and Reagan had very long arms. It was a God that Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Christians each recognized well. This God was concerned about unborn children, but just as concerned about souls trapped in the Gulag.
As a natural consequence of the importance of God in their lives, Buckley and Reagan believed in the divine purpose of marriage and family. Buckley was married once and for a very long time. Reagan did have one unhappy marriage, but that was a Hollywood marriage, and his long and loving marriage to Nancy shows just how important he considered a happy and devoted home life. Both men grounded themselves in those natural bulwarks of conservative values, faith and family, values which when working right in the lives of men make the Left less than unnecessary.
Buckley and Reagan were also men with a genuine love of life. They were not morose (although both were, at times, seriously worried about America and American values in the world.) Buckley at the sail or harpsichord, Reagan chopping wood or riding a horse — these images of happy men whose life was not just politics — are part of what a full life should be. Both men had a wonderful sense of humor to complement a life of decent fun.
The two conservative icons were, then, whole men. God, family, the brotherhood of man, the joy of living — all of these values together made Buckley and Reagan the giants that they were in American life. Because they were naturally whole men, they were also utterly sincere. Neither man was much interested in finesse. What they believed in did not require finesse.
There will be more about William F. Buckley Jr. in the forthcoming issue of First Things. I was privileged to count him as a friend for the last quarter century, and the two of us last had lunch together at his Stamford, Connecticut, home in December. He was getting ready to leave for Florida to write a book on Ronald Reagan, for which he had a January 20 deadline. He doubted he would get it done. The emphysema was the big problem and he had to keep an oxygen kit ready at hand. Norman Mailer had died a few weeks earlier and that prompted conversation about fame, life as a performance, and the fittingness of mortality. In the last two years, Bill had been preparing himself for death, and more intensely since losing Pat in April 2007. He thought he had pretty much done what he was put here to do. We talked by phone while he was in Florida. The book was not going well. In the last two days, much has been written about what he accomplished, and much more will be written. Bill Buckley was a man of almost inexhaustible curiosity, courtesy, generosity, and delight in the oddness of the human circumstance. He exulted in displaying his many talents, which was not pride so much as an invitation to others to share his amazement at the possibilities in being fully alive. He was also, in and through everything, a man of quietly solid Christian faith. I am among innumerable others whose lives are fuller by virtue of the gift of his friendship. May choirs of angels greet him on the far side of Jordan.
I allowed the thing to teach me. Malcolm Muggeridge, who’s he? I read and learned. I was enthralled.
Thank you Bill.
Peace be with you.