William F. Buckley, Jr. Biography Quotes 28 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
William Francis Buckley Jr. was born on November 24, 1925, in New York City, into a large, devoutly Catholic family headed by William F. Buckley Sr., a Texas-born lawyer and oil developer, and Aloise Josephine Antonia Steiner Buckley. The family's frequent moves between the United States and Latin America, and time spent in Europe, exposed him early to multiple languages and cultures. He grew up speaking English and Spanish, learned French, and developed the cosmopolitan manner that would later make his public voice instantly recognizable. The Buckleys eventually centered their lives in Sharon, Connecticut, which became a family redoubt and later a focal point of William Jr.'s political activity.

Buckley attended schools in the United States and abroad before serving during World War II as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army. After the war he entered Yale University, where he quickly distinguished himself as a campus presence: he edited the Yale Daily News, became a celebrated debater, and took a leading role in the Yale Political Union's Party of the Right. He graduated in 1950, studying political science, history, and economics. His Yale experience, and his dismay at what he saw as the dominance of secular liberalism among faculty, became the impetus for his first and formative book.

Early Career and First Books
Buckley worked briefly for the Central Intelligence Agency in Mexico City, where he served under E. Howard Hunt. In 1951 he published God and Man at Yale, a pugnacious polemic arguing that Yale had turned away from religious and free-market principles. The book made him a national figure at just twenty-five and announced a style that combined fearless criticism with wit and erudition. In 1954, with his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell Jr., he coauthored McCarthy and His Enemies, a controversial defense of Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist investigations, while also laying down standards by which conservatism, in his view, should discipline itself.

National Review and the Making of Modern Conservatism
In 1955 Buckley founded National Review, aiming to give American conservatism intellectual rigor and a coherent voice. He recruited a remarkable editorial circle, including James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, Frank S. Meyer, Russell Kirk, and his sister Priscilla Buckley, who later served as managing editor. The magazine fused traditionalist, libertarian, and anti-Communist currents into a persuasive movement and became a rallying point for readers across the country.

At National Review, Buckley asserted editorial leadership with both hospitality and boundary-setting. He criticized the conspiracy-laden claims of Robert Welch and the John Birch Society, working to marginalize them from mainstream conservatism. He opposed the segregationist politics of the era and, while his magazine took positions in the 1950s that he later reassessed and regretted, he moved over time toward a more inclusive vision of American civic life. The magazine's support for Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964 and its advocacy for Ronald Reagan's candidacy in the 1970s and 1980s helped to redefine the Republican Party. Reagan himself would later salute Buckley for having provided the "ideas, arguments, and inspiration" that powered the conservative ascendancy.

Buckley's home in Sharon became a meeting ground for young activists, and the 1960 Sharon Statement of Young Americans for Freedom, drafted at a gathering he hosted, succinctly articulated the principles that National Review championed: limited government, free markets, and a strong stand against Soviet Communism.

Public Debates and Media Career
Beginning in 1966, Buckley hosted the television program Firing Line, which ran for over three decades and became one of the longest-running public-affairs shows in American history. The set was spare, the format unscripted, and the conversations probing. Guests ranged from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to Norman Mailer, Muhammad Ali, and Jesse Jackson. Buckley's patrician cadence, quick humor, and willingness to engage ideological opponents made the program a model of civil yet spirited discourse.

Beyond his own program, Buckley relished debate on the widest stage. At Cambridge University in 1965 he debated James Baldwin in a searing exchange on race and the American dream; Baldwin's eloquence carried the day with the student audience, but the event underscored Buckley's belief that arguments deserved to be tested in public. In 1968, during ABC's coverage of the party conventions, his televised clashes with Gore Vidal drew enormous attention and controversy. Although the exchange turned heated, it helped confirm Buckley's position as the country's most recognizable conservative intellectual and underscored his capacity to make abstract ideas feel urgent and contested.

Political Campaign and Advocacy
In 1965 Buckley ran for mayor of New York City on the Conservative Party line against John Lindsay and Abraham Beame. With mordant humor and substantive proposals on crime, education, and fiscal order, he used the campaign to argue that conservatism could speak to urban governance. He won a significant share of the vote for a third-party candidate and influenced the city's political conversation even in defeat.

Throughout the Cold War, Buckley was an unflinching anti-Communist, supporting a robust foreign policy and the containment of Soviet power. On domestic issues he defended limited government and free enterprise while showing an independent streak that surprised some allies. In his later years he advocated a rethinking of drug policy, criticizing the failures of the war on drugs, and he sometimes took heterodox positions on immigration and criminal justice. He supported civil order but came to distance himself from earlier National Review positions that had resisted aspects of civil-rights reform, reflecting his own capacity for self-critique.

Literary Output and Style
Buckley's bibliography is vast. In addition to God and Man at Yale and Up from Liberalism (1959), he produced collections of essays and speeches that chronicled decades of argument. He wrote a bestselling series of spy novels featuring Blackford Oakes, beginning with Saving the Queen (1976), which married his Cold War preoccupations to a flair for storytelling. He published travelogues from his transoceanic voyages, including Atlantic High and Airborne, and memoirs such as Nearer, My God, a meditation on faith that revealed the centrality of Catholicism to his life. The pages of National Review regularly featured his "Notes & Asides", and his syndicated column "On the Right" reached newspapers nationwide.

His prose was precise yet playful, with a grand vocabulary that never quite overshadowed its argumentative purpose. Admirers praised his geniality and charm; detractors conceded his formidable intellect. Friends and colleagues such as James L. Buckley, his brother who served as a U.S. senator from New York, and editors like Priscilla Buckley and the philosopher Frank Meyer helped shape and refine the magazine voice. Writers including Garry Wills began their careers at National Review before moving in different directions, a testament to Buckley's role as a mentor who welcomed lively minds even when paths diverged.

Personal Life
In 1950 Buckley married Patricia Aldyen Austin Taylor, known to all as Pat, a Canadian-born figure of great style and hospitality. Their marriage formed a social and intellectual partnership that anchored Buckley's public life; their home was famous for lively salons where politicians, writers, and artists mixed. They had one child, Christopher Buckley, who became a novelist and satirist in his own right. William's siblings were themselves accomplished: James L. Buckley in politics and the judiciary; Priscilla Buckley as a respected editor and author; Reid Buckley as a writer and teacher of rhetoric; and Patricia Buckley Bozell, who, with her husband L. Brent Bozell Jr., helped shape currents in postwar conservative thought.

Beyond politics, Buckley cultivated demanding hobbies. He was an accomplished sailor who crossed oceans, and a dedicated amateur musician who loved the harpsichord and the music of Bach. These pursuits humanized the public fighter: the same intensity he brought to argument he invested in mastering the winds and the keyboard.

Later Years, Honors, and Legacy
Buckley received numerous honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991 and the National Humanities Medal in 2005. Even as the conservative movement he helped build achieved political power, he retained a critic's distance, occasionally rebuking its excesses. He stepped back from National Review's day-to-day operations but continued writing, lecturing, and sailing. The death of his wife in 2007 was a personal blow. On February 27, 2008, he died at his desk in his home in Stamford, Connecticut, at age eighty-two.

William F. Buckley Jr. left behind a reconfigured American conservatism and a model of how ideas can be advanced in public, combining principle with panache, engagement with opponents, and a willingness, at times, to revise earlier conclusions in light of experience. His magazine served as a school for writers and thinkers; his television work demonstrated that serious debate could captivate a broad audience; and his books revealed both a polemicist's edge and a lover of language and life. Figures as different as Whittaker Chambers, James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Ronald Reagan, and L. Brent Bozell Jr. trace the arc of a career that thrived on contention yet aspired to persuasion. In the intellectual and political history of the United States, he remains a defining presence.

Our collection contains 28 quotes who is written by William, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Leadership.

• 1976 Saving the Queen (Novel)
• 1959 Up from Liberalism (Book)
• 1954 McCarthy and His Enemies (Book)
• 1951 God and Man at Yale (Book)