For some unfathomable reason, my dear, departed mother considered WFB to be an ideal role model for a male child growing up in post WW2 America. Before National Geographic and the other ‘educational’ magazines started showing up in the mailbox in my name courtesy of gift subscriptions from assorted aunts and uncles, our home regularly received two magazines: Life and National Review.    I was raised in a home where, in the very early 1960s, mom was forced to split her political enthusiasm between WFB and our first Catholic President, JFK. Although these two stood on opposite sides of many of the crucial policy debates of the day, neither could do any wrong in her mind. A few years later, for an hour every week, my father’s westerns and my sitcoms were pre-empted by “Firing Line’ featuring the man with the reptilian tongue.

At the time, my political knowledge was limited to what I absorbed watching the evening news: I knew that WFB was on the wrong side, but I had no idea that he *was* the wrong side. In my limited experience, anyone over twenty-five who also happened to be a Republican belonged to the “them” team in the great ‘us versus them’ divide splitting our country in half. It would be another decade before I realized that WFB was responsible for articulating many of the Right’s more cogent arguments. His conclusions were universally dead wrong, but he could sure “throw words” as we used to say back then.

Mom’s interest in WFB was so strong that when our family was looking to relocate after my father’s retirement, we came very close to buying a small farmhouse adjacent to the Buckley estate in Sharon, CT.   I left for college around that time and managed to avoid reading a single issue of NR for many years. But I’ll admit to watching Firing Line a few times during the haziest years of the nineteen seventies; I probably took a small amount of illicit glee at watching WFB while under the influence of illegal (and vaguely socialist) drugs.  

It was years later while visiting for the holidays that I was first introduced to WFB’s Blackford Oakes series of ‘spy novels.’ The hero stood firmly against everything I believed in. Castro, Che, socialism, and be bop were the controversies that divided Left and Right during the timeline covered by the Oakes books I read; roughly 1950 through 1965. Even though the protagonist got it wrong on all of these (and many more) hot button issues, I was a sucker for a well written Cold War spy story. (as were most people alive during that era.)

As the Reagan era (and Reagan….) faded into memory, Buckley seemed to disappear as well. There would be the odd editorial in the NY Times, or a brief appearance on one of Firing Line’s countless imitators, but I always viewed these later glimpses of WFB to be little time capsules. He just didn’t seem to be “of this time” and I had so many memories of him from the 1960s that I saw no need to keep up with his more recent life.

Then I clicked on the little house avatar on my web browser to access CNN after finishing a two hour meeting earlier today. There was the announcement of his passing. As a radical leftist who questions the humanity of anyone who doesn’t acknowledge the positive aspects of socialism, I tried to file away the announcement as inconsequential; the passing of an enemy. But in my mind, the ties between WFB and my mom were too great to ignore. I’ve spent most of the past few hours reminiscing about my early life and my family. This is an all too rare occurrence, and for that, if *nothing* else, I thank WFB and offer him a non-judgmental RIP.