When news of Bill's death reached me, I was in Prague. It was suitable and perhaps comforting place to hear such sad news since Prague is one of the great European cities Bill helped to liberate from communism. Eighteen years ago he and I were here on a National Review Institute political tour of Eastern Europe. This was only a year after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the "velvet revolutions." Because of Bill's leadership in the anti-Communist and conservative movements, everyone wanted to meet him. New ministers, heads of new political parties, and editors of old national newspapers (with new editorial lines) told him of how they had read smuggled copies of NR during the years that the Communist regime condemned them to work as stokers and quarry-men.Meanwhile, Ann Coulter says the young William F. Buckley was a lot like...Ann Coulter:
He took it all very humbly and even a little quizzically. It was as if he didn't quite believe that he had blown a trumpet and, lo, the walls of Communism had tumbled down — "literally," to use a word whose misuse he occasionally denounced. He was a great man and a figure of great historical significance. He founded the American conservative movement that, among many other achievements, won the Cold War. But he wanted to slip quietly away to avoid the presidents and prime ministers rushing up to ask for his autograph.
William F. Buckley was the original enfant terrible.
As with Ronald Reagan, everyone prefers to remember great men when they weren't being great, but later, when they were being admired. Having changed the world, there came a point when Buckley no longer needed to shock it.
But to call Buckley an "enfant terrible" and then to recall only his days as a grandee is like calling a liberal actress "courageous." Back in the day, Buckley truly was courageous. I prefer to remember the Buckley who scandalized to the bien-pensant.
Other tributes will contain the obvious quotes about demanding a recount if he won the New York mayoral election and trusting the first 2000 names in the Boston telephone book more than the Harvard faculty. I shall revel in the "terrible" aspects of the enfant terrible.
BTW, I published a chapter on the life and career of William F. Buckley in my book, PBS : Behind the Screen
which you can buy from Amazon.com, here:
