Tomorrow is the 100th birthday of William F. Buckley, Jr. Bill Buckley was a prolific writer, a deep thinker, a Renaissance man, who played the harpsichord, wrote spy novels, ran for Mayor of New York City, and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, all while presiding over National Review magazine, the [then] voice of the American conservative movement.
It is hard to imagine the United States today without Bill Buckley’s intellectual influence. He was a deep and profound thinker, who advised many, from Senator Barry Goldwater (R. Az.) to President Richard Nixon (R. Ca.) to Governor and President Ronald Reagan (R. Ca.). He engaged in civil debate with many, particularly those with whom he disagreed, in his Firing Line debates, which were aired by PBS. He encouraged and aided young people to learn, think, and become engaged in the political processes of our country. Bill Buckley was Charlie Kirk before Charlie Kirk was born.
I offer below a tribute to William F. Buckley, Jr. It is a speech by Clark Judge, originally given at The Catholic Bill Buckley Conference, held at Portsmith Abbey School on June 6, 2009. The speech was reprinted in The American Spectator on November 21, 2025. Below that is an article on the rise and fall of his magazine, National Review, which was written by Francis Sempa, and published in The American Spectator on November 17, 2025. And below that is a speech by Neal Freeman, a former National Review writer and associate of Bill Buckley, which was given earlier this month at The Buckley Prize Dinner in Palm Beach, Florida, and which was reprinted in The American Spectator on November 20, 2025. I hope you enjoy all.
Buckley at 100: Catholicism, Communism, and Conservatism
A warrior for morality, democracy, and freedom.
At this conference, we have talked about Bill Buckley as a man of faith, a man of letters, a man of creativity. That creativity included founding National Review magazine, becoming the central figure in a new kind of debate television with Firing Line, authoring thousands of columns and articles, dozens of books, founding the New York Conservative Party and the American conservative movement.
But let me suggest that his greatest creative act — at least his greatest act of creative intellect — was the introduction of a Catholic sensibility into the main currents of American political thought.
Yes, Catholics had been major players in American politics since the 1840s, as the Irish and later the Italians, still later other Catholic ethnic groups, transformed the new nation’s urban governance. But these Catholics acted as what academics like to call practitioners.
Catholic political thinking was largely on the left and not at all consequential, even in the development of America’s major left-leaning political movements. The Progressives of the early 20th Century were mainly Protestants and of the managerial mindset that gripped so many Protestant reformers of the time. The authors of the New Deal were also primarily Protestant — heirs of the Progressives, with large measures of British and German socialism thrown in. Left-oriented Catholics were tagalongs.
Bill introduced a Catholic perspective into the American discourse at the same moment that the old Protestant establishment’s confidence in the American experiment and America’s place in the world was wavering. And through that Catholic sensibility, he brought clarity to the great issues of his time.
Clarity about the moral nature of the struggle with communism.
Clarity about the moral superiority of free markets to collectivism.
Clarity about the essential link between a traditional moral order and the long-term prospects for democracy and freedom.
Clarity about communism was a central theme of God and Man at Yale. The Cold War was not just about strategic tensions, a standoff with another nuclear power. Though much of the Yale faculty had forgotten it, Bill argued, the Cold War was at its root a moral struggle — about the nature of man and society, of freedom, and of free will.
We have heard at this conference McGeorge Bundy’s odious putdown of the book — a not-so-veiled anti-Catholic sneer. But one thing Bundy got right was that Bill’s understanding of the communist challenge was informed by his Catholicism, reflecting a quality of moral insight almost entirely lost on the Protestant establishment of the day.
Similarly, in Up from Liberalism, the contempt Bill displayed for Eleanor Roosevelt and William Sloane Coffin derived not just from their New Deal collectivism but also from their lack of clarity about communism.
And years later in Let Us Speak of Many Things, a compilation of his speeches, Bill included the text of debate remarks in which he takes apart an earlier Norman Mailer speech — one that reflected too much of the literary and political establishment’s thinking of the 1960s and 70s — noting with disdain Mailer’s callousness towards communist butchery and his utter lack of a moral sense about communism.
Bill had that sense — and restored it to American thought just as others were losing it.
Bill brought similar clarity to the role of the market in our national life.
He showed the acuity of his technical understanding of finance in The Unmaking of a Mayor. The appendix collects the position papers he wrote for his candidacy, including one on New York’s fiscal situation. In 1975, when New York went bankrupt, politicians and journalists alike — including, for example, the much-celebrated Ken Aulleta, chronicler of the bankruptcy — insisted that no one could have predicted the crisis. They conveniently forgot — if they had ever bothered to know — that Bill Buckley had diagnosed its causes and forecast its coming a decade earlier.
Bill had read Hayek, von Mises, and Friedman. Their writings influenced his commentaries long before they were widely known within the American intelligentsia.
To them, Bill added a moral understanding of markets.
He argued that the free market was best for achieving social justice. He challenged the notion — popular again today — that government provides a wider and fairer distribution of wealth and a more humane material standard of living. He noted that market-oriented countries did much better on all these scales than socialist ones and that the freer a country’s markets, the more socially just its economy.
He elucidated numerous, often surprising, examples of the market’s morality.
Sometime in the 1970s, for example, in New York City, local liberals got themselves into a rage about the financial distress of a certain classical music radio station. It was a sign of the market’s callousness, they fumed. These liberal champions of the people argued, in essence, that market responses to the people’s tastes demonstrated the market’s ethical inadequacy. Bill replied that, in fact, the marketplace of New York radio advertising was not neglecting but favoring the city’s classical music stations. It was allocating a larger share of revenues to those stations than their share of the radio listening audience alone would have justified. Instead of ignoring classical music, he said, the market was delivering it a subsidy.
This was an economic and moral sophistication far beyond the capacity of the liberal elites of the era.
You may recall the story of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev during Khrushchev’s visit to New York.
Rockefeller told Khrushchev that immigrants had come to America for freedom. Khrushchev snorted, No, they didn’t. They came for jobs. I was almost one of them, he added. Rockefeller had no response.
Bill Buckley knew that all those jobs and the better lives and social justice they enabled were the fruits of freedom. After Khrushchev’s shoe-pounding performance at the United Nations, he rented Carnegie Hall for a rally and a reply, finishing his speech calling out a vow directed to the Soviet leader: “We will bury YOU.”
For me, one photo captured the gulf in acuity between Bill and the American Establishment of the mid-1960s. It appears in The Unmaking of a Mayor. It was taken during one of the televised debates pitting Bill against Republican nominee John Lindsay and Democratic candidate Abraham Beame. Beame is making what looks in the photo to be — and knowing Beame, almost certainly was — an earnest but utterly banal point. Lindsay’s furrowed brow bespeaks his struggle to comprehend. Next to him, chin on one hand, fingers of the other tapping in boredom the turned-off microphone, Bill stares out with heavy eyelids that announce just how far ahead of the rest of the class his now wandering mind is.
Bill’s clarity about the essential link of morality and democracy, and freedom, was told in the pages of National Review innumerable times throughout the decades.
Here I want to take issue with something E. J. Dionne said last night. E.J. is a fine man and a graceful writer, but perhaps he has become too caught up in the early Bradford Oakes novels. He referred to Bill as a kind of monarchist, or at least one whose thought betrayed monarchical tendencies.
It is a strange conclusion to draw about the founder of one of the few enduringly successful third parties in the nation’s history, a party created to challenge all the political aristocracies of the day… one who ran for political office to begin the unseating of those aristocracies… who helped his brother become a U.S. senator on a platform of challenging those aristocracies… who was instrumental in the election of the 20th Century president least linked to any of the then reigning American political establishments of either political party: Ronald Reagan.
Bill was as determined and shrewd a practitioner of American politics as any of the Irish or Italian pols of the great urban machines of yesteryear. But unlike them and so many others, he used politics as a platform for clarifying the moral underpinnings of popular government and markets and the great global struggle, in sum, of an enduringly free society.
Where would we be today without his clarity?
Where would America be?
Where would the world be?
Unlike many who have spoken here, Bill was not a large factor in my career. I’ve written in recent years for National Review Online, but not for National Review magazine. He never edited my copy. He didn’t help me get a job.
As a high school student, I watched him debate during his run for mayor, and those televised debates began my turn to conservatism. A year later, friends and I drove to New Haven to see him face off against Tom Hayden in an auditorium at Yale. But I did not truly come to know him until after my years as a White House speechwriter.
Bill influenced me mostly through his writing, editing, and public speaking. And in that I am like those who have come to this conference through a Portsmouth Abbey School connection rather than the Bill Buckley connection… and like most of the millions of young people he reached throughout his career.
We know him not as an intimate, not as a colleague, but as a teacher — a teacher for us all.
Through the application of Catholic moral sensibility and Catholic styles of discourse, his teaching clarified during pivotal decades the political thought of the United States — and, I believe, will continue to clarify that thought for as long as there is a United States.
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National Review Turns 70
A look back on a conservative institution.
Seventy years ago, on Nov. 19, 1955, a new conservative journal of opinion announced that it stood athwart history yelling “Stop.” National Review soon became the flagship journal of the modern conservative movement. The masthead of that first issue included Editor and Publisher William F. Buckley Jr., senior editors James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, Suzanne La Follette, Jonathan Mitchell, and William Schlamm, associates and contributors L. Brent Bozell, John Chamberlain, Frank Chodorov, Max Eastman, Medford Evans, Eugene Lyons, Karl Hess, Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, Gerhart Niemeyer, Freda Utley and Richard Weaver. It was the beginning of an intellectual and political journey that 25 years later led to the election of Ronald Reagan as president of the United States.
Buckley even made being a conservative “cool.”
In retrospect, the Reagan presidency was the high point of National Review’s political and social influence. It’s been downhill ever since. But more about that later. The journey from fledgling conservative magazine to the Reagan White House was fascinating. And the key to the magazine’s political success was William F. Buckley Jr., who became a public intellectual and well-known celebrity — writing syndicated columns that appeared in hundreds of newspapers, writing non-fiction books and spy thrillers, hosting Firing Line on PBS where conservative ideas were otherwise absent, running for mayor of New York, and becoming the voice of “respectable” conservatism. Buckley even made being a conservative “cool.”
Buckley had help, of course. James Burnham was the dominant intellectual voice of National Review and conservatism’s leading anti-communist strategist. Frank Meyer, as Daniel Flynn notes in The Man Who Invented Conservatism, attracted great writers to the Books, Arts and Manners section and promoted fusionism to encourage conservative political coherence. Russell Kirk brought Burkean tradition and order to the movement. Whittaker Chambers, for a brief time period, outlined for readers what was at stake in the Cold War. Will Herberg and, later, Michael Novak melded God and conservatism. Richard Weaver brought the South’s voice and its conservative traditions into the fold.
Buckley kicked out the kooks from the movement and forced them to the fringe where they belonged. He appealed to the nation’s youth by birthing the Young Americans for Freedom at his home in Sharon, Conn., where the group issued the Sharon Statement in September 1960, as a declaration of conservative principles.
National Review entered the national political arena in 1964 with its support for the Goldwater campaign, which lost big at the polls but introduced to the nation the conservative political voice of Ronald Reagan. Two years later, Reagan was governor of California, two years after that, he became presidential timber. And by 1976, Reagan and the conservative movement had effectively captured the national Republican Party. In 1980 and 1984, National Review’s candidate won two landslide presidential elections.
There was, to be sure, internal divisions among NR’s writers and staff. Burnham, the political realist, was often opposed by Meyer, the counterrevolutionary ideologue. Bill Rusher wanted to form a third party when Nixon founded the EPA, left the gold standard, pursued détente with the Soviet Union, and launched the opening to Mao’s China. There were clashes between traditional conservatives, libertarians, and the growing neoconservative movement. It took the disaster of the Carter presidency to bring them all together for Reagan.
By that time, there were other conservative journals contributing to the movement: Human Events, The American Spectator, Commentary, and others. Conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation formed policymakers who filled the ranks of the Reagan presidency. National Review, however, was the heart and soul and mind of the movement.
When Reagan’s policies helped bring down the Soviet empire and end the Cold War, it was a victory for National Review, too. Since November 1955, Burnham and others had promoted an offensive strategy of victory — a strategy that Reagan implemented to defeat the “evil empire.”
They forgot — or never understood — James Burnham’s political advice that NR should support the most right-leaning electable candidate.
Victory can lead to magnanimity (as Churchill counseled) or hubris. In National Review’s case, it led to hubris. The neoconservatives who joined National Review to help Reagan win the Cold War soon looked for other enemies to slay. First came the Gulf War in 1991. Then humanitarian intervention in the Balkans. Then NATO enlargement. Then the Afghan and Iraqi wars and the Global War on Terror. NR mostly cheered on Bush 43 as he sought to remake the Middle East in America’s image. By that time, Burnham was gone, and Buckley had moved away from daily supervision of the magazine.
As John Judis, a Buckley biographer, noted, NR’s founder opposed the growing neoconservative influence of the magazine. The neocons were busy fighting World War IV, while Buckley sided with Jeane Kirkpatrick in wanting the U.S. to return to being a “normal country.”
Under Rich Lowry’s editorial guidance, NR joined with neoconservatives to support extending America’s “unipolar moment.” But as so often happens, hubris led to nemesis. Afghanistan and Iraq became foreign policy debacles. NATO enlargement helped fuel Russian geopolitical aggressiveness.
The failed Bush 43 presidency resulted in Obama’s presidency, which combined foreign policy amateurism with domestic policy radicalism. And after eight painful years of Obama, National Review began its final descent to irrelevance.
During the 2016 election season, NR effectively became a never-Trumper journalistic organ. Its editors devoted an entire issue to “Against Trump.” It was the result of a snobbish, insular political deafness to the rising populist movement in the GOP and the country at large. Trump just wasn’t their kind of conservative. He was “anti-intellectual” and crude. The policy-wonkish Rich Lowry and Jonah Goldberg, and others at the magazine, gradually slipped into Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS).
They forgot — or never understood — James Burnham’s political advice that NR should support the most right-leaning electable candidate. That candidate in 2016, 2020, and 2024 was Trump. But issue after issue of NR included anti-Trump screeds. And it hasn’t changed even after Trump’s remarkable victory in 2024.
So, here’s wishing National Review a happy 70th birthday. I was a subscriber for 40 years until the current editors squandered the great legacy of William F. Buckley Jr. Perhaps 70 is a good age at which to retire.
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NR Turns 70: A Different Perspective
Thanks to all of you for supporting our sometimes lonely cause.
Thanks to my editors for inviting me to write for National Review — Bill Buckley for 25 years, John O’Sullivan for another nine, and Rich Lowry these past 28 years.
You all know Rich, and most of you remember Bill. Let me say just a word about John. John O’Sullivan had one hellaciously tough act to follow. Following Bill Buckley at National Review was, in the British context, the equivalent of following Addison at the Spectator or Chesterton at the Weekly. Yet, John managed to carry it all off with his customary aplomb. Thank you, John.
As some of you may know, John is the only Commander of the British Empire — so designated by Queen Elizabeth herself — to have served as editor of an American political magazine. Some of my colleagues at NR worried about John’s divided loyalties. I never did. From day one, it seemed clear that John‘s stewardship of the magazine was far superior to his stewardship of the empire. Sorry, John.
As you know better than most, no Buckley event could be considered complete without at least one mildly Anglophobic jape.
Thanks also to the governor and the first lady of my home state of Florida. I met them when they were dating. You could warm your hands by their love for each other — and by their love for our country.
Your name came up in a conversation last week, Ron, with one of the Buckley Fellows at Yale. He’s doing a book on conservatives at Yale. When I asked him how his research was going, he said that he had identified three students who were more conservative the day they graduated than they had been the day they arrived — Brent Bozell in the ‘40s, me in the ‘60s, and you in the ‘90s. I wished my young friend well, but I fear that his book will soon take its place on that shelf reserved for the World’s Thinnest Books. Great British Chefs. Hilarious Mormon Gags. Famous Italian War Heroes. And the like.
It is my privilege tonight to offer a personal tribute to our man Buckley, born 100 years ago this month. I will speak, as Bill would have described it, synecdochically. I will speak of two days in his long and astonishingly productive life — the day I met him, and the day, 44 years later, when I said goodbye.
I met him in 1963.
I was sitting at my desk at Doubleday and Company, one of the junior-most executives at what was then the largest book publisher in the country. The phone rang, and the caller identified himself as Bill Buckley. I drew a blank. Bill Buckley had not yet become Bill Buckley. He said, “I’ve just finished reading your piece on Governor Rockefeller and found it to be, ughhhhh, arresting. I wonder if you could join me for dinner to discuss it.”
Sure.
I showed up at the appointed hour to find that there would be four of us for dinner. Bill and I, Bill’s wife Patsy, and the young publisher of National Review magazine, William A. Rusher.
Patsy made a strong first impression. She was six feet tall. Supermodel photogenic. Vassar-educated with a wit that carried the sting of an angry hornet. An improbably good cook. A chauvinistic Canadian girl from the real Canada, where they drill for oil and dig for coal. Patsy migrated across our northern border and became the doyenne of New York society.
Bill Rusher had worked a stakhanovite schedule through high school, which got him into Princeton, where he excelled, which got him into Harvard Law School, where he excelled again. When he landed a partner-track job at a big New York firm, his single mom, possibly for the first time in 25 years, was able to exhale. Her only child, Billy, was going to be all right. Which he was. Until the day he quit the white-shoe law firm to join Buckley’s ragtag band at National Review. Rusher moved to the 35th Street office and seized control of the provisional wing of National Review.
As I was soon to learn, William A. Rusher signed incendiary interoffice memoranda with his initials, leaving recipients with the impression that they had been issued by the War Department.
How did that evening go? We spoke of books and boats and ballistic missiles. We took on the Oxford trilogy of PP and E — philosophy, politics, and economics. We spoke without pause. We became four peas, one pod.
At ten o’clock sharp, Bill Rusher, a man of iron habit, excused himself and went home. Along about one o’clock, Patsy, a young mother with things to do in the morning, excused herself and went upstairs to bed. I don’t know how long I stayed, but I do remember this. When I left Bill’s place, I walked down Fifth Avenue to the Doubleday Building, I went to the men’s room and shaved. And I marched into Nelson Doubleday’s office and resigned. I was going to work for National Review.
Why did I leave a promising career? Why did Bill Rusher? Why did the rest of the NR Irregulars?
Because Bill Buckley proposed to change the world. Some of us thought he might just do it. And we wanted to help.
The shocking twist to this tale of impetuous youth is that — in the event — it happened in exactly that way. Bill changed the world, and some of us like to think we helped.
Bill changed our politics. When he entered the public arena in 1951, America’s two great political parties were competing feverishly to give their presidential nominations to the same man. The ideologically androgynous Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bill got to work. From 1964, when he was still in his 30s, until 2012, four years after his death at the age of 82, every Republican nominee for president was either a Buckley conservative or somebody who pretended to be one. My lingering image of the 2012 primary was that iconic photo of Mitt Romney lugging around his go-to campaign prop — a three-legged stool.
Bill changed our economics. With Bill in his protégé’s ear at every step along the way, Ronald Reagan cut the personal tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent. That was a victory for the enterprising individual, long overdue. That was a victory for the economically marginalized, for whom growth is the only way up and out. That was a victory for the cause of freedom, which never has enough friends.
And Bill changed our place in the world. There has been lively debate as to who was most responsible for America’s victory in the Cold War — that by-now almost forgotten, century-long, close-run, blood-soaked struggle for the world. Some said that it had been George Kennan, the architect of the West’s containment policy. I believe it was George Kennan who said that. Some said that it had been John Paul II. But we have the testimony of Frank Shakespeare, my longtime colleague on the National Review board, that the great Giovanni Paulo had dismissed that notion with a wave of the papal hand.
Some said that it had been Ronald Reagan. But not Ronald Reagan. Twice in my presence, Reagan deflected credit to his own mentor, to a man 14 years younger than himself. In Reagan’s judgment, it had been Bill Buckley who, decade after decade, had reified the hard spiritual case against communism.
Let me add a personal note. It was my good fortune to be the guy standing next to Bill Buckley when he became Bill Buckley. He changed my place in the world. Early on, he introduced me to the girl who would become my bride, the irresistible Jane Freeman. (That news prompted one of my leftwing cousins to call ours an arranged Taliban marriage. As we approach our 60th anniversary, Jane and I have come to regard the Taliban marriage as an underrated social institution.) Over the course of many years, it was Bill’s generosity of spirit that allowed me to prosper in his friendship. He was, at first, my intimidating boss, and then my professional colleague, and then my valued partner and, soon enough, my close friend. Ask yourself. Were you ever lucky enough to have a boss with that kind of emotional range?
Bill Buckley was a good man, a godly man. But of course, he was not a perfect man. One example — and I mention it only because it has grated on me for years. I have now read in nine books — most recently in the deeply researched volume from Sam Tanenhaus — that Bill Buckley was a great sailor.
It would not have required deep research to learn two things about Bill Buckley the sailor. First, that his skills were of a surprisingly low order, and second, that he was utterly fearless. That was not always a happy combination for ocean racing. Bill was not a great sailor. He was to the ketch and the sloop as he was to the piano and the harpsichord. An aspirant. Bill was a great writer about sailing.
There. We have concluded the fair-and-balanced section of my remarks.
In late 2007, Bill missed our regular catch-up session. I called to check on him, inviting him to visit us in Maine. After what seemed like a very long pause, he said, “Mon vieux, I have terminal emphysema.” Bill Buckley did not use words imprecisely. I thought a bit and said, “Okay, we’ll bring Maine to you. Hold lunch for us Thursday.” Jane and I pulled some lobsters, scavenged a few bottles of his favorite Alsatian white, and barreled down the road to Stamford, Connecticut. It was a chilly day, but sunny, and we sat out on his lanai overlooking Long Island Sound. We drank some wine and laughed and talked about the good days, of which there had been a great many.
Toward mid-afternoon, he tired. He said he needed a “snort of oxygen.” He started to rise from his chair, but then slumped back down, a look of distress crossing his face. He was mortified, as he put it, to learn that a book he had given me actually belonged to a British friend. Could I be sure to get it to him? He mentioned a woman with whom we both had worked for many years. He regretted that cross words had passed between them. Would I please remember to tell her he loved her? He had promised a mutual friend that he would write a letter for a grandson seeking admission to Yale. Bill, mortified again, had forgotten the boy’s name. Might I be willing to fill in?
One by one, this man who had known popes and presidents, this man who had bent the arc of so much history, worked his way through a list of slights unattended and courtesies unreturned, not one of them rising to the level of a social misdemeanor. These were the most important people in the world. These were his friends.
He died a few weeks later. His caretaker told me that Bill had been out in the drafty old garage he used as a makeshift office. Preparing, no doubt, to meet one last, unreasonably self-imposed deadline.
Two days later, I received a letter from National Review’s office in New York. It was Bill, thanking me for some forgettable favor and, more generally, for a lifetime of friendship. It was apposite, perfectly so, that Bill Buckley should have expended some of his last breaths dictating expressions of gratitude. His life with words had been long and promiscuous, but he remained steadfast in his attachment to the word “gratitude.” It became the title of his favorite book, which took the form of a love letter to the land of his birth. He was grateful to his friends, to his family, to his church, to the United States of America.
My suggestion tonight is that we — all of us — should return that gratitude in equal measure.
Thank you.
GFK
Observations From The Fifth Estate 