William F. Buckley Jr.

WFB Jr. has passed away at the age of 82.

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

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 biweekly edition — “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.”

I think that Buckley was almost single-handedly responsible for marshaling the threads of nascent conservatism into a true movement. That the movement has faltered, and supplanted by an increasingly authoritarian Republican party that rejected the small-government, fiscal discipline, and foreign policy pragmatism foundations of conservatis thought, is almost surely because the GOP drifted away from Buckley's anchor. Of his generation, only Derbyshire remains at The National Review.