Thursday, February 28, 2008

The Sui Generis WFB   [Cliff May]

I somehow recall – this has to be quite a few decades ago – seeing WFB interviewed on TV, on some program like the Tonight Show, by someone not too bright, I can’t remember who. He was talking about sailing – in particular about a sailboat journey across the Atlantic. 

Interviewer: Did your wife come along?

Buckley: No, I’m afraid my wife prefers more pacific vacations. 

Interviewer: I thought you sailed across the Atlantic?

Buckley: I meant in the sense of irenic.  

Interviewer: We’ll be right back after this important message. 

But my real introduction to WFB was through Christopher. This was about 30 years ago. I was not yet a conservative. I was a young foreign correspondent living in Mexico City when I somehow met Christopher. We became friends and bummed around together, drinking and in general looking for trouble as young men in exotic climes tend to do.

Chris was smart, and funny, and fun – and I was frankly embarrassed that I hadn’t been reading National Review. So I started – and over the next few years, the combination of the ideas I was exposed to in print, and the things I saw reporting from such garden spots as Northern Ireland, Iran, the Soviet Union and Africa, turned me – gradually but ineluctably — into a conservative.  

And eventually I had to stop being a New York Times reporter because I became opinionated and my opinions were the wrong opinions, at least in the eyes of my editors and most of my colleagues at the Times. 

I’ve already sent condolences to Chris (AKA, in Mexico at least, Cristobal) but  let me also express the same to the very extended Buckley family that reads NR and NRO. What a great and consequential man was William F. Buckley.

02/28 09:46 AMShare