My Aunt writes about a hero of mine, and a good friend of my father’s

My aunt, Katherine Haimbaugh (who I call “Taffy” since my father couldn’t pronounce her name as a baby — and it stuck) sent this from her archives — she is 97. The essay is a particularly good depiction of William F. Buckley, who I had the pleasure of meeting on several occasions. I once asked him about political correctness, and he responded, “Tim, I have always been politically… correct!”

Enjoy the article. There are some parallels with current times, in that the conservative voice is being drowned out today as it was in the 60’s.

By Katherine Haimbaugh 1997

The name of William F. Buckley, Jr. may not be a household name but I expect all of us have heard of him either as the editor of the magazine National Review or as the host for the television program, Firing Line. We are all certainly aware of his proclivity for esoteric language which President Reagan once referred to in a speech, 11 You know, I always appreciate the phone calls I get from Bill. I remember one just before Reykjavik. “Mr. President, He said, “would you indulge me a timorous moment of matitudianl disquietude?” and I said “Hold the line, Bill, I think my scrambler is still on.”

Putting to use his extraordinary vocabulary and his unabashed love of the English language, Mr. Buckley has written over 20 books of nonfiction in addition to almost as many novels, drawing material for both from a lifetime of unique experience and adventure. Many of his books have headed the best seller list and have had critical acclaim. He is an accomplished seaman, having written four delightful books on transatlantic cruises on a sailboat, which offer a rare insight into his personal relationship with family & friends as well as his love for the sea. He is a former

agent for the c. I.A, drawing from his knowledge of The

Agency to write 8 successful spy novels, the most popular of which was Saving The Queen.

He served as the Public Delegate to the United States Delegation of the United Nations which provided the material for his book, United Nation’s Journal, A Delegate Odyssey. He ran unsuccessfully as a candidate for Mayor of N.Y.C.,

resulting in one of his best books on politics, The Unmaking — of a Mayor as well as one of his best quips — When asked, ‘ “What will you do if elected,” Buckley responded, “I’ll demand a recount.” And Mr. Buckley has been an advisor to Presidents including . Presidents Nixon, Ford & Reagan and receiving in 1991 the Presidential

Freedom award from President Bush.

But of all of his diverse interest and accomplishments, the most important according to his biographer was that Buckley was singularly responsible for transforming the fractious and irrelevant Right of the fifties into a strong, respected conservative movement which despite its ups and downs continues to influence the political environment of the nineties. So just who is this rare, productive, unique individual who despite his rapier wit and biting tongue tends to charm his adversaries as well as his friends? To find the answer I read John Judis’ Biography called William F. Buckley Jr, Patron Saint of the Conservatives.

Bill Buckley was born in 1925, one of ten children raised in a devout Catholic household located on a 47 acre estate in Sharon, CT, with a winter home in Camden, SC.

His mother Aloise Buckley was a southern belle from New Orleans; a charming, vivacious, intelligent woman proud of her southern roots and her Catholicism. I remember meeting Mrs. Buckley at their winter home Kumchatqua in Camden when she opened her home for a tour. She was a delightful

diminutive woman with the most expressive pale blue eyes, startlingly like those of her son Bill.

Her husband, Will Buckley, had made a fortune in Mexico in oil which he subsequently lost and returned to the states to make a second fortune in oil in Texas. He was a devout catholic, raised in Texas, fiercely independent and the unchallenged authority in the Buckley home. Young Bill adored him, and was strongly influenced by him. Will Buckley’s politics stemmed directly from his Catholicism and his strong opposition to communism. His passion in life was the education of his children, in every phase of which he was intimately concerned. For he hated the accumulation of wealth for its own sake and wanted his children to excel morally and intellectually so that they might use their wealth to follow whatever higher pursuits appealed to them. They did so and only one son followed his father into the oil business.

Young Buckley and his siblings received the broad education envisioned by his father through excellent tutoring at home and abroad as well as attendance at fine prep schools. Throughout his youth and adolescence, young Bill developed strong convictions on politics and religion which he defended with wit and the supreme confidence of one who knows he is right. Buckley was a very clever boy and no doubt an arrogant one.

At 18, Buckley was inducted into the Army, like many other young men, his two-year Army service was a truly broadening experience. His arrogance and dogmatism had not made him very popular at Millbrook Preparatory School, but once in the army he wrote his father, “When I went. in the army I learned the importance of tolerance and a sense of proportion in all matters even in regard to religion and morality.”

Young Bill .h . not abandoned his fierce political and religious convictions nor sense that he had to defend them in a world, seemly hostile to his beliefs. I think this

stemmed in part from being in an overwhelmingly protestant environment. But in the Army he had learned to distinguish between the rules of personal friendship and those of political combat.

He carried with him this newly won tolerance when he entered Yale in 1946, and despite his strong views was considered charming and gregarious. William Sloan Coffin who was a year ahead of Buckley, invariably at odds with him politically, still liked him and said, “He was a prima donna and he knew it and could be kidded about it. He wasn’t a waspy smug arrogant type — just a cocky arrogant which was a lot more becoming.”

There were two overriding interests which Buckley pursued at Yale and which were to provide invaluable skills and experience for his future endeavors.

He made the Freshman debate team and was eventually Editor of the Yale Daily News. It was on the Debate Team that he met Brent Bozell, a flamboyant former tank

commander and a brillant orator. They made a devastating team, probably the best Yale has ever produced before or since. Their debating style was English rather than American

- relying far more on sarcasm and biting humor than the rapid fire marshalling of facts more in the American style, This debating style which Buckley had witnessed first-hand in London, stood them in good stead when Oxford U. sent a debate team on tour of the Ivy League colleges. Yale was the last stop on the circuit. The English team had flattened all their opponents but at Yale, Buckley and Bozell won hands down. The two of them became campus heros.

They also became a formidable political team both in

debating and in the political union where members debated candidates and issues.

Allen Fineberg, Pres. of the political union said of them, “They were extremely effective and dedicated and fiercely ideological. Many of us wished we could be as certain about anything as they were about everything”!

In addition to his exuberant performance on the Debate team, he gave an equally exuberant and perhaps more controversial performance as chairman of the Yale Daily News, a coveted position at Yale. He wrote masterful and highly controversial editorials to the distress of his staff who would have preferred smoother sailing.

But Buckley had accomplished exactly what he wanted to at Yale — the admiration and acclaim of the administration and his fellow students and at the same time carrying on a crusade against communism and atheism. He had been selected to the prestigious secret society of Skull and Bones. And finally he had honed his skills in journalism and debating which set the shape for his lifelong work — communicating with speech and pen.

Shortly after leaving Yale, Buckley won his first triumph with his pen — the publication of his book God & Man at Yale one year after his graduation. The dedication read “For God, for Country and for Yale in that order and in it he charged that Yale had abandoned both the religion of God

- Christianity and the economics of man — free enterprise. Buckley took particular exception to Yale’s Economics Dept. where he believed the free enterprise system was being given short shrift and that socialism, equalitarianism and communism were treated with far more respect,. He also believed that generally speaking the Yale Faculty treated religion with indifference if not outright contempt.

Published in October, 1951 with 5000 copies, God & Man at Yale soon became 16 on the N.Y. Times best seller list and by spring had sold 35,000 copies. The book drew some favorable review such as Seldon Rodman of Saturday Revieew who, although dissenting from Buckley’s conclusion hailed his challenge to “that brand of liberal materialism which by making all values relative, honors none.” I believe such a statement continues to resonate in the nineties — some 45 years later.

But along with some praise, the book also drew scathing criticism, not the least of which came from the administration of the university which was furious that one of their own had seen fit to criticize professors and curriculum so harshly. It resorted to virulent personal attacks on Buckley rather than attacking his ideas. Responding to Yale’s outrage, George McDonald, a maverick journalist wrote “Yale has reacted to God and Man at Yale with all the grace and agility of an elephant cornered by a mouse.”

The mouse referred to was somewhat taken aback by the raging controversy his book had caused but he fought back vigorously in print and on the lecture circuit thus forging for himself early on a promising career in journalism and debate. This controversy also hardened him for the battle to come as he preached his brand of conservative thinking.

At this time of rising expectations in Buckley’s personal life, the fortunes of the American Right appeared dim indeed in 1954. According to his biographer John Judis, “Taft was dead, McCarthy discredited, and the Democrats had recaptured Congress. The principal right wing groups were thought to be anti-semitic and neo isolationist throw backs to the thirties and the forties. To claim to be a right wing intellectual was to court ridicule. But during what appeared to be the collapse of the American Right, Buckley set out on the boldest political and intellectual adventure of his life.”

In the summer of 1954 he found someone as eager as he to start a new magazine expressing a strong, conservative view point — this was Willi Schlam a former communist who had escaped from Naziism in Austria and then had fled from communism in Czechoslovakia. He and Buckley shared their sense of the dangers inherent in the Soviet Union. They also shared the sense that they were part of a remnant crying out for a new defiant conservative agenda. Together they wanted to create a magazine, the purpose of which would be to cover politics and the Arts and be pitched to opinion makers rather than the general public, and to exert pressure from the right on the so called “liberal establishment” — a new term attributed to Buckley. The editor promised to oppose the growth of gov’t, defend the organic moral order and fight communisum.

They believed there was a liberal point of view on national & world affairs that the leading opinion makers shared whereas they saw conservatism as a radical and dissenting philosophy, which he addressed in the first issue of National Review in 1955, “ The launching of a conservative weekly in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks rather like publishing a royalist weekly in the walls of Buckingham Palace. It is not that, of course. If National Review is superfluous it is so for very different reasons: it stands athwart history, yelling STOP at a time when no one is

inclined to do so or to have much patience with those who do.”

The magazine was launched, greeted positively from the right while the left dismissed it as dull and irrelevant. But the strong reaction to the magazine did show that it was being taken seriously by the very opinion makers to whom it was aimed. Its biting wit, sardonic humor and overall panache rather than boring the opposition exerted a certain fascination.

National Review also attracted some excellent contributors such as George Will who had first met Buckley while still a student at Princeton. Will joined the staff of National Review as its regular Washington Columnist in 1972,

leaving it several years later to join Newsweek.

In December, 1980, NR celebrated its 25th anniversary and the election of its most prominent subscriber, Ronald Reagan. George Will was one of the speakers on this occasion and summed up the prevailing assessment.

“What happened in 1980 I believe is that American conservatism came of age. In 1964 Barry Goldwater made the Republican Party a vessel of conservatism and starting before that and particularly after that National Review magazine has filled that vessel with an intellectually defensible modern conservatism. The principal architect of this achievement of course is Wm F. Buckley, Jr.”

In the early days of the magazine, Buckley already much in demand for speeches and debates, took on as many public appearances as possible to help defray the expenses of a new magazine. This constant public exposure honed his skills of style and delivery and no doubt led eventually to his hosting of Firing Line.

But prior to his advent into TV his public persona was greatly enhanced by his newspaper column syndicated by Universal Press. Harry Elmmark the head of the syndicate in Washington thought of Buckley as a nut and a crackpot but at the urging of a young assistant, he sent out queries on a Buckley column and received enthusiastic responses. Buckley agreed to do a column 3x a week, representing not only Buckley’s opinion but that of an emerging political movement of which he and Goldwater were important voices. His column gave him a readership and influence well beyond that of National Review.

In the turbulence of the sixties, both the political left wing and the right wing took on new life and combativeness and Buckley thrived in the intellectual battle of conflicting political views and movements. According to his biographer, “Buckley was one of a small group of extremely articulate intellectuals that the new interest in politics elevated to celebrity status. Buckley, Thomas Mailer, James Baldwin and Gore Vidal became better known than senators and congressmen. Their debates became major public spectacles.

Buckley’s celebrity status enhanced by his intense polemical style sent students flocking to his lectures the

way they did to rock concerts. To take advantage of his popularity, Neil Freemen of the TV station WOR om NYC hired Buckley to host a debate between himself and a guest. Thus was born Firing Line which soon became an incredibly popular show which in 1968 won an Emmy, TV’s highest award.

A considerable number of episodes of Firing Line were produced here on the u.s.c. campus. And the most prominent one, that I’m sure many of you will remember, was the famous

debate on the Panama Canal Treaties staged in the Longstreet theatre in January, 1980. The Washington Post described it as the super bowl of the Right and it did have a stellar cast. Ronald Reagan had accepted Buckley’s invitation to a 2 hour debate and was accompanied by George Will and James Burnham.

Reagan who had become the national leader of the

campaign against President Carter’s proposed treaties to relinquish the canal, appeared tanned and relaxed. Buckley appeared somewhat disheveled, his hair fashionably long and his eyebrows popping up and down ( a trademark of his). He opened his remarks to the effect that Lloyds of London has been asked to give the odds that he Buckley would be disagreeing with Ronald Reagan on a matter of public policy, there would have been no takers. The statisticians would have reasoned it was inconceivable for Mr. Reagan to make a mistake. And Buckley went on to say, “But of course it happens to everyone. I fully expect that someday, I’11 be wrong about something.”

George and I attended that debate and the reception for the participants that followed in the Faculty house.

That night when we got home we had about five phone calls from friends across the country who were watching the debate and caught a glimpse of George and me as the camera surveyed the audience. It was a memorable night for Firing

· Line and even more so for the Haimbaughs.

I’m sure all of you are familiar with the slogan, “come see the softer side of Sears”. And so in conclusion, I want to show you the softer side of Bill Buckley for his private persona does not fit harmoniously with the public persona which has been carefully crafted to reflect his political and philosophical agenda.

Nothing so illuminates the man himself as his books on sailing. In May of 1975, Buckley, an avid yachtsman since childhood, his son Christopher and five others set out from Miami to cross the Atlantic and reach Mirabella, Spain in approximately one month. The following year he wrote Airborne, a fascinating account of the actual voyage but more importantly a marvelous insight into Buckley’s thoughts and feelings and wonderful relationship with his son.

As Barnaby Conrad has written, “Airborne is a book about sailing the way Moby Dick is a book about whaling.”

This book and the three others that followed after other ocean voyages, is not only a fascinating chronicle of

a sea voyage but more importantly describes a special and precious kind of human experience the camaraderie of people who join together in a physical enterprise that is both demanding and hazardous as well as idyllically tranquil and therapeutic. The shared experience at sea produces a unique intimacy and openness rare to achieve in the hurly burly of professional and personal lives.

Of course the sea is not always therapeutic. Eighteen years prior to Buckley’s first Atlantic crossing, he asked my brother Bill and five other classmates from Yale all members of Skull and Bones, to join him in a week’s run from Bermuda to St. Thomas in a 42' cutter. Only Buckley and Van Gailbraith (later to become Ambassador to France) were accomplished seamen.

As it turned out their sailboat encountered a storm front that relentlessly pursued them all the way. Everyone got seasick eventually and got battered and bruised trying to keep on course despite winds and seas that roller coasted them a thousand miles. Buckley reminisces on this wild journey in his book Airborne. “The wind and sea were relentless and it wasn’t until we got right into the harbor at St. Thomas, that we got any relief. The wife of one of my friends recounted a week or so later that three times at three in the morning, her husband had suddenly risen stiffly out of bed, stared straight ahead and declared somnambulistically but firmly, I have to go on deck’ where upon he would walk straight into a closet which sharply but reassuringly jolted him back to the knowledge that this nightmare cruise was over!” The friend happened to be my brother.

But this experience did not deter my brother Bill

Draper from again enthusiastically signing on for a transatlantic crossing with Buckley in 1990 in celebration of Christopher Columbus’ 500 Birthday. This crossing followed the path of Columbus from the Canary Islands to Barbados. Buckley referred to this voyage as “4,400 miles of decompression at sea, the cradle of God”. He had just celebrated 35 years as editor of National Review and 10 years of marriage to his wife Pat, a striking woman of impeccable style and biting wit. An example of this is when first apprised of Buckleys desire for his first transatlantic crossing with their only son, she retorted. “if you come back from this trip I’ll kill you”.

WindFall, the End of the Affair, is his chronicle of

following the path of Christopher Columbus. But like Airborne is a book of relationships, that with his wife, his adoring and rebellious son, his friends who share with him a special intimacy. It is a book that reveals his passionate love of music, his experiences of playing Bach on a harpsichord with the Phoenix symphony orchestra, his enjoyment of painting and his intense pursuit of the intricacies of celestrial navigation. According to my

brother who has a strong personal relationship with him as well as his biographer who does not, Bill Buckley is a

person of immense generosity and loyalty, of incredible

focus and discipline. He is combination of warmth and charm whose lives are touched by his.

endowed with that rare that endears him to those

To sum it up Douglas Bernon, a friend of Buckley’s son, Christopher, was also crewing on the Columbus voyage, put the following comments in his journal about those older men on the ship.

“Buckley, Draper and Gailbraith. Three Little boys all grown up and enjoying each other. But still three little boys. Kids playing in this 71 foot toy in Mother Nature’s liquid sandbox. Playing in a way that only old friends can manage. Cajoling, teasing, tweaking. Proud of each others accomplishments, tickled by their own, grateful for good fortune , aware of the chaos and pain of life and despite that, perhaps especially because of that happy to be together. Van so comical, but capable of being professionally serious and seemingly dogmatic. Draper, the loyalist, serving as the devil’s advocate. Buckley, the conductor, his sextant, his baton.”