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William F. Buckley, Jr. -- 1925 to 2008

William F. Buckley, Jr., the intellectual founder of the modern American conservative movement, died Feb. 27, 2008, at his home in Stamford, Conn. Buckley founded the influential National Review in the 1950s, giving voice to a conservative movement that had been marginalized during and after the New Deal era.

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Although primarily a political, cultural and social critic, Buckley did run for political office once. In 1965, he won 13 percent of the vote as the Conservative Party candidate for mayor of New York. He lost in a three-way race to Republican John V. Lindsay. Asked what he would do had he won, Buckley said, "Demand a recount."

William Francis Buckley Jr. was born Nov. 24, 1925, in New York, the sixth of 10 children. His father presided over an oil empire with holdings in seven countries and left his children a sizable fortune at his death in 1958.

Buckley attended the University of Mexico for a year, then served in the Army from 1944 to 1946. His father decided he should attend Yale, partly because of its proximity to the family home in Sharon, Conn. Buckley was chairman of the Yale Daily News student newspaper and a member of Skull and Bones, the secret society whose membership includes both Presidents Bush.

He married, Patricia Taylor, a Vassar classmate of his sister, on July 6, 1950, shortly after graduation from Yale.

During Buckley's year as a CIA agent in Mexico, he had for a case officer E. Howard Hunt, who decades later was convicted of burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping in connection with the Watergate break-in. Buckley helped pay his legal expenses.

With his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell, he wrote "McCarthy and His Enemies" (1954), arguing, "As long as McCarthyism fixes its goals with its present precision, it is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks." Their book was published one month before the start of the televised Army-McCarthy hearings that led to McCarthy's censure by the Senate and downfall.

In its early years, the National Review attacked all U.S. policies it perceived as concessions to communism, condemned what it called the "welfare state" and defended the South's resistance to racial integration. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the magazine criticized President John F. Kennedy for his agreement with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev not to invade Cuba in exchange for removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba.

At the magazine, Buckley gave a start to conservative columnists George F. Will and David Brooks, and published the writings of Garry Wills, Joan Didion and John Simon.

In 1960, Buckley helped the conservative Young Americans for Freedom organization, and in 1961, he was a founder of the New York Conservative Party. In 1970, his older brother, James L. Buckley, was elected to the U.S. Senate on the New York Conservative ticket.

His newspaper column, "On the Right," began in 1962, and his weekly television broadcasts of "Firing Line," began in 1966. Guests included presidents, prime ministers, conservative political leaders and occasional notables such as Groucho Marx. In November of 1967, he was on the cover of Time magazine.

Initially, Buckley and his magazine supported the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, under whom he served on the advisory board to the U.S. Information Agency and as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly. But Buckley called for Nixon's resignation during the Watergate crisis.

Buckley retired as editor of National Review in 1990, and Firing Line's last broadcast was in December of 1999.