Posted 2/29/2008 04:19:00 PM by Douglas

More on Buckley. I like it that The New York Times used the word sesquipedalian in its obit of the man, but if you want the real scoop, you gotta go to the Telegraph. Some highlights:

His spirit began to show at the age of eight, when he wrote King George V a sharp note reminding him of the debts Britain owed the United States for the First World War.

After Millbrook School at Millbrook, New York, where he earned a dollar a page typing up his schoolfriends' essays (with a surcharge of 25c for correcting the grammar as he went) he progressed, in 1943, to the University of Mexico.

Oh, I bet he would correct your grammar like a son-of-bitch. And his most famous quote, from the first edition of National Review:

Buckley started the National Review in 1955, with his own and his wife's money, as an antidote to what he perceived as the dangers of liberal influence on public affairs. The magazine, he declared when setting out his intentions in the first issue, would "stand athwart history yelling 'Stop!'".

But who could forget his heated exchange with Gore Vidal:

He also appeared in a series of television debates during the 1968 Democratic convention with Gore Vidal. The atmosphere often became heated. Vidal, in one programme, called Buckley a "crypto-Nazi", to which Buckley replied: "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I will sock you in your goddam face."

Too bad he didn't. But you gotta love this comment, and from a Brit, no less:

Constantine Fitzgibbon, in The Daily Telegraph, characterised Buckley - a rich man with no need to work, vigorous and successful in all he undertook - as "what the English used to expect of their aristocrats".

They don't make 'em like that anymore.

Labels: Telegraph Obits