William F. Buckley, Jr.: An Appreciation

William F. Buckley, Jr. died yesterday. He had been a part of my life for so long that it hardly seems credible he's gone. I was reminded of a story about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. The story is that when Joan Crawford died, Bette Davis said, "Now that Joan is dead I can say something good about her. Joan is dead. Good."
For reasons best left unsaid, I was watching Fox News Channel when they aired a "tribute" to Buckley. The tribute consisted of a series of still images for about thirty seconds. That was it. The man who was the public face of conservatism between the Goldwater debacle of 1964 and the election of Nixon in 1968; who championed Ronald Reagan when the former governor of California was still widely regarded as an unelectable loon; who swallowed his considerable pride and publicly praised Rush Limbaugh after Limbaugh surpassed him in influence; who had stood his ground, however wrongheaded such effort may have been, as the conservative movement left him; and who was famed for his articulate defense of his beliefs, was not allowed even a few posthumous words. It was exactly what he deserved. He had become a name and nothing more, derided as senile by his own political offspring once he criticized George W. Bush.
Like George Will, only in the pompous precincts of inside-the-Beltway politics could Buckley have been considered an intellectual. On any decent campus he would have been just another blowhard of above-average IQ and above-average self-regard. But in the sixties, he was adopted by the then-dominant moderate Democratic elite as their pet conservative, since he was not the pathetic ignoramus that typified the conservative movement of the mid-sixties (e.g., Robert Welch, whom in fact Buckley condemned in 1965, and George Wallace, whom he chastised on Firing Line in 1968). "But he's so articulate," people would say, and John Kenneth Galbraith among others became his friend. Buckley parlayed this opportunity into a prominent position as a commentator on TV, then during the Reagan administration was seen as a sort of John the Baptist figure, a voice that had been crying in the wilderness, now justified by the arrival of a savior.
But those pathetic ignorami who were then and are now the true heart of the conservative movement had the last laugh, as that Fox News tribute showed. Pushed aside at the very time the conservative movement had reach its greatest power ever, aging, in poor health, Buckley was far from vital and far from the center of the movement he had devoted his professional life to promoting. What he worked for had come to him; then it pushed him away.
The writer Larry L. King spent a few days with Buckley around 1965 and then wrote about the experience. The denouement is when Buckley publicly and angrily calls King a son of a bitch when he very obviously misunderstands a joke that King has made. King concludes the piece by saying in effect that only someone who has lived a hopelessly sheltered, and rather self-centered, life could behave as Buckley does. That was always true of the man. In his private life, where for all I know he may have been a true gentleman, there may well be those who will miss him. In the public arena where he proudly made his name, on both right and left, there will be none.
After I wrote this, I came across this post by tristero at Hullabaloo. And here's Glenn Greenwald's take, a fairly comprehensive overview of Buckley's life and career, plus his relationship to the conservative movement of today.
And after first publishing this post, I came across James Wolcott's piece.