WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR., 82, DIES; SESQUIPEDALIAN SPARK OF RIGHT

William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, arched
eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to
the center of American political discourse, died on Wednesday at his
home in Stamford, Conn. He was 82.

Mr. Buckley suffered from diabetes and emphysema, his son,
Christopher, said, although the exact cause of death was not
immediately known. He was found at his desk in the study of his home,
his son said. "He might have been working on a column," Christopher
Buckley said.

William Buckley, with his winningly capricious personality, his use of
ten-dollar words and a darting tongue writers loved to compare to an
anteater's, was the popular host of one of television's
longest-running programs, "Firing Line," and founded and shepherded
the influential conservative magazine National Review.

He also found time to write more than 50 books, varying from sailing
odysseys to spy novels to dissertations on harpsichord fingering to
celebrations of his own dashing daily life. He edited at least five
more.

In 2007, he published a history of the magazine called "Cancel Your
Own Goddam Subscription" and a political novel, "The Rake." His
personal memoir of Senator Barry M. Goldwater is scheduled to be
published this spring, and he was working on a similar volume on
President Ronald Reagan at his death.

The more than 4.5 million words of his 5,600 newspaper columns, titled
"On the Right," would fill 45 more medium-size books. His collected
papers, which were donated to Yale, weigh seven tons.

Mr. Buckley's greatest achievement was making conservatism -- not just
electoral Republicanism, but conservatism as a system of ideas --
respectable in liberal postwar America. He mobilized the young
enthusiasts who helped nominate Mr. Goldwater in 1964 and saw his
dreams fulfilled when Mr. Reagan and the Bushes captured the Oval Office.

President Bush said Wednesday that Mr. Buckley "brought conservative
thought into the political mainstream, and helped lay the intellectual
foundation for America's victory in the Cold War."

To Mr. Buckley's enormous delight, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the
historian, termed him "the scourge of liberalism."

In remarks at National Review's 30th anniversary in 1985, President
Reagan joked that he picked up his first issue of the magazine in a
plain brown wrapper and still anxiously awaited his copy every two
weeks -- "without the wrapper."

"You didn't just part the Red Sea -- you rolled it back, dried it up
and left exposed, for all the world to see, the naked desert that is
statism," Mr. Reagan said.

"And then, as if that weren't enough," the president continued, "you
gave the world something different, something in its weariness it
desperately needed, the sound of laughter and the sight of the rich,
green uplands of freedom."

War on Liberal Order

The liberal primacy Mr. Buckley challenged had begun with the New Deal
and so accelerated in the next generation that Lionel Trilling, one of
America's leading intellectuals, wrote in 1950: "In the United States
at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole
intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that there are no
conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation."

Mr. Buckley declared war on this liberal order, beginning with his
blistering assault on Yale, from which he graduated with honors in
1950, as a den of atheistic collectivism.

"All great biblical stories begin with Genesis," George Will wrote in
National Review in 1980. "And before there was Ronald Reagan, there
was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater there was
National Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill
Buckley with a spark in his mind, and the spark in 1980 has become a
conflagration."

Mr. Buckley wove the tapestry of what became the new American
conservatism from libertarian writers like Max Eastman, "free market"
economists like Milton Friedman, traditionalist scholars like Russell
Kirk and anti-Communist writers like Whittaker Chambers. He argued for
a conservatism based on the national interest and a higher morality.

He found his most receptive audience in young conservatives who were
energized by Barry Goldwater's emergence at the Republican convention
in 1960 as the right-wing alternative to Nixon. Some met in September
1960 at the Buckley family home in Sharon, Conn., to form Young
Americans for Freedom. Their numbers -- and influence -- grew.

Nicholas Lemann observed in Washington Monthly in 1988 that during the
Reagan administration "the 5,000 middle-level officials, journalists
and policy intellectuals that it takes to run a government" were
"deeply influenced by Buckley's example." He suggested that neither
moderate Washington insiders nor "Ed Meese-style provincial
conservatives" could have pulled off the Reagan tax cut and other
policy transformations.

Speaking of the true believers, Mr. Lemann continued, "Some of these
people had been personally groomed by Buckley, and most of the rest
saw him as a role model."

Mr. Buckley rose to prominence with a generation of talented writers
fascinated by political themes, people with names like Mailer, Capote,
Vidal, Styron and Baldwin. Like the others, he was a magnet for
controversy. Even people on the right -- from members of the John
Birch Society to disciples of the author Ayn Rand to George Wallace to
moderate Republicans -- frequently pounced on him.

People of many political stripes came to see his life as something of
an art form -- from racing through city streets on a motorcycle to a
quixotic campaign for mayor of New York in 1965 to voicing startling
opinions like favoring the decriminalization of marijuana. He was
often described as liberals' favorite conservative, particularly after
suavely playing host to an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead
Revisited" on public television in 1982.

Norman Mailer may indeed have dismissed Mr. Buckley as a "second-rate
intellect incapable of entertaining two serious thoughts in a row,"
but he could not help admiring his stage presence.

"No other act can project simultaneous hints that he is in the act of
playing Commodore of the Yacht Club, Joseph Goebbels, Robert Mitchum,
Maverick, Savonarola, the nice prep school kid next door and the snows
of yesteryear," Mr. Mailer said in an interview with Harper's Magazine
in 1967.

Mr. Buckley's vocabulary, sparkling with phrases from distant eras and
described in newspaper and magazine profiles as sesquipedalian
(characterized by the use of long words), became the stuff of legend.
Less kind commentators preferred the adjective "pleonastic" (using
more words than necessary).

And, inescapably, there was that aurora of pure mischief. In 1985,
David Remnick, writing in The Washington Post, said, "He has the eyes
of a child who has just displayed a horrid use for the microwave oven
and the family cat."

William Francis Buckley was born in Manhattan on Nov. 24, 1925, the
sixth of the 10 children of Aloise Steiner Buckley and William Frank
Buckley. His parents had intended to name him after his father, but
the priest who christened him insisted on a saint's name, so Francis
was chosen.

When the younger William Buckley was 5, he asked to change his middle
name to Frank and his parents agreed. At that point, he became William
F. Buckley Jr.

The elder Mr. Buckley made a small fortune in the oil fields of Mexico
and Venezuela and educated his children with personal tutors at Great
Elm, the family estate in Sharon, Conn. They also attended exclusive
Roman Catholic schools in England and France.

Family's Deep Catholicism

Young William absorbed his family's conservatism along with its deep
Roman Catholicism. At 14, he followed his brothers to the Millbrook
School, a preparatory school 15 miles across the New York line from
Sharon.

In his spare time at Millbrook, young Bill typed schoolmates' papers
for them, charging $1 a paper, with a 25-cent surcharge for correcting
the grammar. He graduated from Millbrook in 1943, then spent a half a
year at the University of Mexico studying Spanish, which had been his
first language. He served in the Army from 1944 to 1946 and managed to
make second lieutenant after first putting colleagues off with his
mannerisms.

In his 1988 book, "William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the
Conservatives," John B. Judis quoted Mr. Buckley's sister Patricia as
saying that the Army experience changed Mr. Buckley. "He got to
understand people more," she said.

Mr. Buckley then entered Yale, where he studied political science,
economics and history; established himself as a fearsome debater; was
elected chairman of The Yale Daily News; and joined Skull and Bones,
the university's most prestigious secret society.

As a senior, he was given the honor of delivering the speech for
Yale's Alumni Day celebration, but was replaced after Yale's
administration objected to his strong attacks on the university. He
responded by writing his critique in the book that brought him to
national attention, in part because he gave the publisher, Regnery,
$10,000 to advertise it.

Published in 1951, "God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of
'Academic Freedom,' " charged the powers at Yale with having an
atheistic and collectivist bent and called for the firing of faculty
members who advocated values out of line with what he saw as Yale's
traditional values.

After a year in the Central Intelligence Agency in Mexico City (his
case officer was E. Howard Hunt, who went on to participate in the
Watergate break-in), Mr. Buckley went to work for the American Mercury
magazine, but resigned to write on his own.

Over the next few years, Mr. Buckley worked as a freelance writer and
lecturer and wrote a second book with his brother-in-law L. Brent
Bozell. Published in 1954, "McCarthy and His Enemies" was a sturdy
defense of the senator from Wisconsin, who was then at the height of
his campaign against communists, liberals and the Democratic Party.
The book made the New York Times best-seller list.

In 1955, Mr. Buckley started National Review as a voice for "the
disciples of truth, who defend the organic moral order," with a
$100,000 gift from his father and $290,000 from outside donors. The
first issue, which came out in November, claimed the publication
"stands athwart history yelling Stop."

It proved it by lining up squarely behind Southern segregationists,
saying that Southern whites had the right to impose their ideas on
blacks who were as yet culturally and politically inferior to them.
After some conservatives objected, Mr. Buckley suggested instead that
both uneducated whites and blacks should be denied the vote.

Mr. Buckley did not accord automatic support to Republicans. For
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom National Review was founded in
part to oppose, the magazine ultimately managed only a memorably tepid
endorsement: "We prefer Ike."

Circulation increased from 16,000 in 1957 to 70,000 at the time of
Goldwater's candidacy in 1964, to 115,000 in 1972. It is now 166,000.
The magazine has always had to be subsidized by readers' donations,
supplemented by Mr. Buckley's lecturing fees.

Along with offering a forum to big-gun conservatives like Russell
Kirk, James Burnham and Robert Nisbet, National Review cultivated the
career of several younger writers, including Garry Wills, Joan Didion
and John Leonard, who would shake off the conservative attachment and
go their leftward ways.

National Review also helped define the conservative movement by
isolating cranks from Mr. Buckley's chosen mainstream.

"Bill was responsible for rejecting the John Birch Society and the
other kooks who passed off anti-Semitism or some such as
conservatism," Hugh Kenner, a biographer of Ezra Pound and a frequent
contributor to National Review, told The Washington Post. "Without
Bill -- if he had decided to become an academic or a businessman or
something else -- without him, there probably would be no respectable
conservative movement in this country."

Mr. Buckley's personal visibility was magnified by his "Firing Line"
program, which ran from 1966 to 1999. First carried on WOR-TV and
then on public television, it became the longest-running program with
a single host -- beating out Johnny Carson by three years. He taped
1,504 programs, including debates on scores of topics like "Resolved:
The women's movement has been disastrous."

There were exchanges on foreign policy with Norman Thomas, feminism
with Germaine Greer, and race relations with James Baldwin. Not a few
viewers thought Mr. Buckley's toothy grin before he scored a point
resembled nothing so much as a switchblade.

To the New York City politician Mark Green, he purred: "You've been on
the show close to 100 times over the years. Tell me, Mark, have you
learned anything yet?"

At age 50, Mr. Buckley crossed the Atlantic Ocean in his sailboat and
became a novelist. Eleven of his novels are spy tales starring
Blackford Oakes, who fights for the American way and beds the Queen of
England in the first book.

Others of his books included a historical novel with Elvis Presley as
a significant character, another about the Nuremberg trials, a
reasoned critique of anti-Semitism and journals that more than
succeeded in dramatizing a life of taste and wealth -- his own.

Mr. Buckley's spirit of fun was apparent in his 1965 campaign for
mayor of New York on the ticket of the Conservative Party. When asked
what he would do if he won, he answered, "Demand a recount." He got
13.4 percent of the vote.

In retrospect, the mayoral campaign came to be seen as the beginning
of the Republican Party's successful courtship of working-class whites
who later became "Reagan Democrats."

Unlike his brother James, who served as a United States senator from
New York, Mr. Buckley generally avoided official government posts. He
did serve from 1969 to 1972 as a presidential appointee to the
National Advisory Commission on Information and as a member of the
United States delegation to the United Nations in 1973.

In his last years, as honors like the Presidential Medal of Freedom
came his way, Mr. Buckley gradually loosened his grip on his
intellectual empire. In 1998, he ended his frenetic schedule of public
speeches, about 70 a year over 40 years, he once estimated. In 1999,
he stopped "Firing Line," and in 2004, he relinquished his voting
stock in National Review. He wrote his last spy novel (the 11th in his
series), sold his sailboat and stopped playing the harpsichord publicly.

But he began a new historical novel and kept up his columns, including
one on the "bewitching power" of "The Sopranos" television series. He
commanded wide attention by criticizing the Iraq war as a failure.

On April 15, 2007, his wife, the former Patricia Aldyen Austin Taylor,
died. Mr. and Mrs. Buckley called each other "Ducky."

He is survived by his son, Christopher, of Washington; his sisters,
Priscilla L. Buckley of Sharon, Conn., Patricia Buckley Bozell of
Washington, and Carol Buckley of Columbia, S.C.; his brothers, James
L., of Sharon, and F. Reid, of Camden, S.C.; a granddaughter; and a
grandson.

In the end it was Mr. Buckley's graceful, often self-deprecating wit
that endeared him to others. In his spy novel "Who's on First," he
described the possible impact of his National Review through his
character Boris Bolgin.

"'Do you ever read the National Review, Jozsef?' asks Boris Bolgin,
the chief of KGB counter intelligence for Western Europe. 'It is
edited by this young bourgeois fanatic.'"