Remembering William F. Buckley
Posted: Wednesday, February 27, 2008 6:06 PM by Cathy Finkler
If you want to influence someone, get to him or her in high school. It's my experience that people at that age are the most impressionable, the most searching for guidance, for example, for purpose.
It was in high school that I came under the charm and influence of William F. Buckley, the dashing, charismatic young conservative who wrote "God and Man at Yale," "McCarthy and His Enemies" and founded the wistful, precocious, companionable monthly magazine "National Review."
As a high school student, I could tell you which drug store got National Review first. I went to hear Bill Buckley at a meeting of the Montgomery County Young Republicans and it was from National Review that I gained my early affection and appetite for political philosophy and argument.
To start out as a young conservative is not to end up there. But you have to start somewhere. You have to "care" before you can think, think before you can change your mind, and in my case, not stop changing.
I owe that start to the man who died today, at his desk, the great author, writer, sailor of the ocean sea, Alpine skier, Renaissance man and, in mine as in so many millions of cases, teacher and political guidance counselor.
I offer two last thoughts on Bill Buckley. In the 1950s, when it needed to be done, he exorcised old conservatism from its pre-World War II isolationism and, its redolent anti-Semitism.
There is something else to be said for William F. Buckley and it concerns his own religious faith. He wrote once of the young man who stood alone in an empty church juggling balls in the air. It was something he could do: throw balls into the air and catch them, each without dropping in a swirling feat of personal mastery. It was the one thing he could do.
It was the thing he could offer up to God when they were, as best he could arrange it, alone together. In all the books and columns he wrote, in all the editions of National Review he published, our great William F. Buckley, Jr. was offering up "his" prayer. This is what he was doing, his work, at his desk, when he was taken home.
To work is to pray. Laborare est orare. Watch video.
