Though I was later to appear on “Firing line,” write for his magazine,and find myself embroiled in his public diplomacy, my first meeting with Bill Buckley was by far my warmest. It was the morning of the Apollo 11 moon launch, and the July temperature and humidity at Cape Canaveral were both approaching 100 as the Saturn V smoked cryogenically on … [Read More]

    Bill Buckley was many things, but centrally he was one of the great American journalists, whose historic achievement was the creation of National Review. Historians will look to his magazine when they seek to explain much that has happened to the America of our time. During the 1930s, Walter Lippman was an important journalist, and like Buckley wrote many … [Read More]

With the passing of William F. Buckley I now feel officially old. Like thousands of modern conservatives, I grew up on Buckley. Each Sunday, I would make sure to be at home for Firing Line, to watch him genially make mincemeat of the likes of Harriet Pilpel—one of the generation of nice old babuschkas who somehow (unaccountably to me) became architects … [Read More]

William F. Buckley Jr. might have allowed the neoconservative tendency in through the gates at NR, but he never quite surrendered to its charms—opposing, eventually, the war in Iraq and never evincing any kind of “democratist” sentiments. This is worth remembering while reading the gushing eulogies coming from the old and new guard of the neocon brain trust.  Norman Podhoretz, for … [Read More]

Leave it to John McCain to make Barack Obama appear to have the steady, sane foreign policy. With the Albanians’ declaration of independence in Kosovo, the retirement of Fidel Castro and the recent repudiation of Musharrraf’s PML-Q party in parliamentary elections in Pakistan, there have been a number of occasions in recent days for McCain to demonstrate the experience of … [Read More]

Rewriting History Every now and then I am forced to retch with disgust as I read some choice slander in the neoconservative press. Such a reaction occurred recently while I was looking at a picture of Tom Cruise in the New York Post. Cruise was dressed in a German Wehrmacht uniform and obviously shown in his cinematic role as the Swabian … [Read More]

Taking a break from current events (1918—), I’d like to recommend a fascinating book that re-imagines economics. Self-consciously bold, the book rejects the utilitarian view of man implicit in “neo-classical” thinking (Ricardo, Malthus, later Mises), which focuses on man as an imperfectly rational calculator of his own self-interest. Instead, it attempts to view the economic activities of men and women in … [Read More]

The death of William F. Buckley, Jr., is, for me at least, the closing of a chapter in my own history, both personal and ideological. Buckley, you see, was my childhood hero. His magazine, the National Review, was available in our Junior High School library—along with The New Republic, The Nation, and even American Opinion (!)—and I read it regularly, as … [Read More]

The Associated Press is reporting that William F. Buckley has passed away in his home. He had been suffering with emphysema for years. Taki’s Magazine has had its disagreements with the current National Review to be sure. But at this moment, we’d be remiss not to think of Buckley’s tremendous intellectual achievement in editing NR over the course of four decades. … [Read More]

When I wrote Pat Buckley’s obituary last spring, I had a pretty good idea that Bill would follow her sooner rather than later. I happened to be with him the day she died, along with his brother James and sister Priscilla, and I was taken aback by Bill’s unembarrassed weeping. At her memorial service at the Met, he was more in … [Read More]