Blessed by Buckley

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William Buckley
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Kathryn Jean LopezTen years ago this February, William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review, died, and my life started making much more sense. I was fairly successfully editing a trailblazing website at the flagship conservative magazine he founded in 1955. But in the days and weeks and months and years and now decade after his death, I realized I was where I was in the world to remind people of the eternal things, the things that motivated him.

In Buckley’s final years, I got to know him as a bit of a grandfatherly figure. He was all kindness and presence, and I tried to be the same. I tried to be helpful, if that were ever possible, and always be attentive to the occasional opportunity to learn to be a better writer from the best of them. He was long retired from editing the magazine, but in some of those years I would be a liaison for some of his guest editing, and he would always be involved in one way or another, giving input or correction.

But it’s the wisdom that I learned most from him. And the gratitude. The wonder. So much of it rooted in his faith. And I still learn it from him.

I write to you from San Francisco, where we’re celebrating his life as part of a National Review Institute multi-city tour, and I’ve been remembering some of the tributes that came in during the days after his death. The phrase “happy warrior” came up many times. But he was more than that. In looking back, I saw that my friend and colleague Jonah Goldberg captured it within minutes of my announcing his death online: He had joy.

And he gave joy.

My favorite story to tell is of the people who wrote to me to tell me their William F. Buckley story — how they met him at an airport, hosted him on their college campus, or sat next to him at a dinner and he treated them like the most important person in the world. There were the priests — and at least one religious sister — who told me that he had influenced their religious vocations. There was a medical doctor who explained how, while many people’s fathers had introduced them to National Review and his long-running PBS show “Firing Line,” Buckley was a father to him: “I was introduced to him by my mother, another wordsmith, telling us to be quiet because ‘Firing Line’ was on.”

He continued that National Review “became my fortnightly routine, cover to cover, a diet that could not but nourish the soul, mind and spirit. Mr. Buckley made me feel one of the family. With due respect to [his son] Christopher, I was able to sail, savor music, skewer opponents and myriad other experiences with WFB, my ‘father.'”

There are a number of speeches and writings I love to quote, but here’s one from 1988 that captures things quite nicely:

“We cannot repay in kind the gift of the beatitudes, with their eternal, searing meaning. … But our ongoing failure to recognize that we owe a huge debt that can be requited only by gratitude — defined here as appreciation, however rendered, of the best that we have, and a determined effort to protect and cherish it — our failure here marks us as the masses in revolt; in revolt against our benefactors, our civilization, against God himself.”

When we look around the world today and think about repair and recovery and renewing and rebuilding, the beatitudes — which are so much about gratitude, and in no small part to the Divine Giver himself — would be an excellent place to start.

Ten years later, I continue to pray for the repose of Bill Buckley’s soul and to thank God for him.

 

Kathryn Jean Lopez

Kathryn Jean Lopez is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and editor-at-large of National Review.