editorials

It is almost exactly a year since William F. Buckley composed an obituary column about the historian Arthur Schlesinger. That they had never become friends (at least in Buckley's telling) caused him regret: "For one thing, to behold him -- listen to him, observe him, read him -- was to co-exist with a miracle of sorts," he wrote, in words that might just as well have described himself. Then he planted the knife: "It is an awful pity, as one reflects on it, that nature is given to endowing the wrong men with extraordinary productivity."

It's tempting to describe an incision like that one as surgical, because of Buckley's mastery with the scalpel; but surgeons swear to do no harm, and Buckley felt free to inflict pain on anyone who disagreed with him, and did so with evident relish.

As in: "I won't insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said."

Or this, on the occasion of being disinvited to speak at Vassar College in 1980: "The majority of the senior class of Vassar does not desire my company and I must confess, having read specimens of their thought and sentiments, that I do not desire the company of the majority of the senior class of Vassar."

Or: "Norman Mailer decocts matters of the first philosophical magnitude from an examination of his own ordure, and I am not talking about his books."

You don't earn titles like "father of modern conservatism" without breaking a few egos. Buckley, founder of National Review and host of the television program "Firing Line," died Wednesday at age 82, forever frustrating the hopes of many who may have longed, someday, to get the last word.

One writer who started out at National Review, columnist George F. Will, wrote an appreciation of Buckley more than 20 years ago that strikes us as perfect:

"Bill has been stigmatized (yes, stigmatized) as 'clever,' meaning 'merely' clever. People who have lost arguments to him have said they lost only -- only! -- because he is articulate, whereas they just cannot quite give voice to their razor-like thoughts.

"But Bill's career as a controversialist has underscored, at the expense of adversaries, the fact that you cannot think what you cannot say."

If Buckley's mind could think what he could say, it was quite a mind.

"We have nothing to offer but the best that is in us," he wrote in the mission statement he published with the launch of National Review. "That, a thousand Liberals who read this sentiment will say with relief, is clearly not enough! It isn't enough. But it is at this point that we steal the march. For we offer, besides ourselves, a position that has not grown old under the weight of a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy, a position untempered by the doctoral dissertations of a generation of Ph.Ds in social architecture, unattenuated by a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand different pressure groups, uncorroded by a cynical contempt for human freedom. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaves us just about the hottest thing in town."