The following piece is drawn from Knight Errant: The Enduring Inspiration of William F. Buckley Jr., a collection of essays from today’s conservative leaders to celebrate the life and work of Bill Buckley during his centennial year. These essays give insight into the mentorship and inspiration that Buckley provided to generations of American conservatives in business, public service, and beyond. For more information, or to purchase a copy ($25), please contact Claire Aguda at claire.aguda@nrinstitute.org.
‘I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.”
When you consider the spectacular implosion of Harvard in the last year, those words—spoken by William F. Buckley Jr. some 60 years ago—are about as great a testimony to his insights as one can conceive. This man knew human nature and he wasn’t shy about expressing his opinions in the most memorable manner.
When I first ran for public office in 2010, I was a novice. I had built and run a business (Cold Stone Creamery) for ten years and had watched with alarm as Barack Obama led us in a direction that I thought was terribly wrong. The accelerated concentration of power in Washington, D.C., via Obamacare and other policies—combined with the explosion of deficits and debt—concerned me deeply. So I threw my hat into the race for state treasurer of Arizona. (The level of debt in 2010 seems almost quaint compared to the volume of debt we’re consistently racking up now. At some point one of our two major parties will rediscover the importance of controlling spending, but that surely isn’t the case now, unfortunately.)
As I prepared for my first debate with my Democratic opponent—a Harvard-educated wonk—I asked a friend to gather some memorable debate clips so I could study various techniques and prepare. He pulled together a dozen or so, describing them as “a wide range of situations that will help you be prepared for anything, from righteous indignation to high-brow discussions.”
There were the usual suspects—“There you go again,” for example, from Ronald Reagan’s exchange with President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential debate. However, two of the video clips were of William F. Buckley. One was his heated exchange with Gore Vidal, which became so famous that a documentary about it, The Best of Enemies, was made about it in 2015. The other was a Firing Line debate in 1978 regarding the Panama Canal treaties, with Buckley debating his dear friend Ronald Reagan.
It’s hard watching today’s political debates after viewing the Buckley versus Reagan encounter. It should be required viewing for today’s young conservatives, as a reminder of what “could be,” rather than the shouting matches and rudeness that currently dominate today’s discourse. Buckley and Reagan elevated everything they touched, and can serve as a model for what we should aspire to.
What’s notable about these two episodes is the contrast. The Left has long been focused on the Vidal–Buckley exchange—nearly ten of the 80 to 90 minutes of the recent PBS documentary was dedicated to it—but never shows or talks about the Panama Canal debate. The Left’s point is to drill home the notion that conservatism is all incoherent and barely stifled rage and resentment and not about ideas, principles, and the values of a moral, free society.
Buckley and Reagan showed us otherwise. We would do well to study their behavior and to adjust ours accordingly.
I met William F. Buckley only once, at a Goldwater Institute event in Arizona, and well before I decided to enter public life. I was still a businessman at the time, but I’d grown up reading National Review and was eager to meet someone of such consequence and stature in the conservative movement. Meeting him in person didn’t disappoint. He was funny, gracious, principled, and sharp, all at the same time. He had perspective that could come only from someone who’d fought big battles that were worth fighting—and had relished every moment of the combat.
What is amazing to me about Bill Buckley is how consequential his undertakings were when he was still so young. Consider the following monumental achievements, which would be singularly impressive for any individual at the age Buckley was at the time: He wrote God and Man at Yale at just 25, an amazingly prescient book, given the various cancers that have enveloped academia over the past few decades; he launched National Review a mere six days before turning 30, at a time when conservatism was considered dead after two decades of FDR-driven New Deal dominance; at 39, he ran for mayor of New York on the Conservative Party ticket because he understood that the John Lindsays and Nelson Rockefellers of the Republican Party were not sufficiently conservative; and, at 37, he picked fights with the John Birchers because their loopy ideas threatened to impose on thoughtful conservatism an indelible stain.
And he was just getting started!
For me, the most important thing Bill Buckley did was provide both intellectual and moral support to two of conservatism’s most consequential figures—Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.
Both Buckley and Reagan were very involved in the Goldwater campaign. Reagan’s political career was essentially launched with his famous “A Time for Choosing” speech during the 1964 campaign. It also set the stage for his election as governor of California in 1966. There he demonstrated that conservative ideals could, in fact, change the seemingly inexorable trajectory of bigger, more intrusive government. And the entire time, the platforms that Buckley built—Firing Line, National Review, his syndicated news columns—provided support for amplifying Reagan’s views. Goldwater never made it to the presidency, of course, but Reagan did, and it’s fair to say that President Reagan changed the course of American history and put us back on track when it was clear our government had lost its way.
William F. Buckley died in 2008, before my public career began. And yet his influence was profound. I have always gone out of my way to find occasions to honor him and keep his legacy alive, whether it was by attending an Ideas Summit for National Review Institute in 2017, participating in a virtual retreat during Covid in 2021, or traveling to New Haven to be part of an awards dinner named after him.
An underappreciated element of Buckley’s legacy is that, beyond his love of ideas, he was a very practical man. He could tilt at windmills, for sure, but he appreciated the importance of translating ideas into actual governance. His goal was to gain ground for conservative principles every day, with persuasion as his primary weapon, not shouting and histrionics. And he was ingenious at developing publications, the TV show, and his syndicated columns and at finding every way possible to reach a broader audience. As implausible as it might seem, I have no doubt that William F. Buckley would be a social media phenomenon today if he was alive, with podcasts and tweets and a Facebook page and every other form of communication available.
He was one of a kind, and America is better off for having patriots like William F. Buckley Jr. engaged in the big fights of the day. We could use a few more like him today.