By Henry Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 28, 2008

What a grand and grandiloquent monster of genial and mischievous self-creation William Buckley was.

"If you want me to pur suuuuuuuue in that direction," he'd warn leftist theorist Noam Chomsky on television in his strange demi-Anglican drawl, lighting his phrases with italics and exclamation points while he shot his jaw, tapped his lip with a pen and slouched ever further in his chair while his teeth bared in the grimace that reminded you of a woodchuck and a hung-over duchess at the same time.

While the eyebrows -- the eyebrows! -- wandered off like the vagaries of life itself, one frowning while the other vaulted up his forehead in triumph, horror, irony. Dead now at 82, but so alive in memory. And yet:

"Everything I do and say and the way I do and say it annoys me," he said once, explaining why he never watched himself on "Firing Line." However, while sailing in his yacht he was known to listen to a tape of David Frye imitating him.

Of course: He was the Connecticut millionaire's son trained to despise affectation and love modesty -- and yet . . . he had the gifts of a great comedian, gifts that are irresistible to anyone in this land that so honors the perpetual undergraduate. And such a vortex of contradictions: the Roman Catholic prep-school Skull and Bones Yalie heir to an Irish family's Mexican oil fortune. (He spoke Spanish before he spoke English.) Foe of anti-Semites, advocate of tattooing AIDS carriers on the buttocks, champion of McCarthyist Communist-hunting, and of the legalization of marijuana. His outrageousness immunized him against effective condemnation.

In 1986, he wrote in the New York Times Book Review: "I asked myself the other day, 'Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?' I couldn't think of anyone." A monster, or, as the French say, a monstre sacré, one whose grandeur puts him beyond criticism.

One imagines him in his rooms at Yale, winking at onlookers while he enwrapped some hapless one-world liberal in the python grip of prose worthy of an 18th-century political philosopher such as Edmund Burke, an Englishman who supported the American Revolution and also deeply grieved the execution of Marie Antoinette. (At the age of 8, Buckley wrote a letter to the king of England demanding payment of a war debt to America.)

Burke was one of the forefathers of the movement that the mischievous Buckley is now credited with rescuing from the fusty, teacup frustration of the Franklin D. Roosevelt years, from an obscurity so great that a cornerstone of Buckley's thought was a 1943 book by Albert Jay Nock titled sadly "Memoirs of a Superfluous Man."

By 1950, Lionel Trilling, a grandee among intellectuals, could proclaim: "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." How Buckley must have chuckled. He would soon scandalize the academic establishment with "God and Man at Yale," which portrayed an atheistic nest of liberal degeneracy there in old New Haven.

One could pity Nock, but no one pitied Buckley in the next decade when he founded the National Review. He was getting too much attention, laughing too hard, skewering too many enemies and getting away with it. Buckley may have been friends with public liberals such as John Kenneth Galbraith, but he never made any gesture toward accommodating Galbraith's progressive politics. Instead, he stood up amidst the United Nations future-building of the post-war era and defined his conservatism as "tacit acknowledgment that all that is finally important in human experience is behind us."

This is perhaps the sort of comment that led cultural critic Dwight MacDonald to accuse Buckley of "soggy facetiousness." But there wasn't much MacDonald could do with puns such as the one that appeared in the National Review when it was learned that the American Academy of Dermatology and Syphilology was dropping the last two words of its title: "Skinicism is only sin deep."

Buckley seemed to be having so much fun, no matter how dark and difficult his positions could be, such as his magazine's early support of segregation or his defense of Joe McCarthy. So much fun, in fact, that he could debate Ronald Reagan over handing the Panama Canal over to Panama -- Buckley favored the hand-over, unpredictably enough -- and remain friends with Reagan even after saying to him: "The force of my illumination would blind you."

Of course, the argument could be made that there would have been no Reagan presidency without Buckley, the man who made conservatism exhilarating, the man who convinced a substantial part of the public that it was liberals, not conservatives, who were the lugubrious navel-gazers.

Buckley was a man of wild energy, a man who claimed to write his syndicated column in 20 minutes, a feat possible because he was, in the words of a former employee, "the fastest typist I ever saw." He wrote 5,600 of those columns, by one account. He wrote more than 50 books, including 10 spy novels and journals of his sails across the Atlantic, along with a children's book he claimed to have written in 45 minutes. He gave 70 speeches a year. He ran for mayor of New York. With his wife, Pat, he conducted a blue-chip social life. His television show, "Firing Line," ran for 33 years. He played the harpsichord.

Norman Mailer, who also attained monstre sacré status but had to work at it harder, said of him: "No other actor on earth 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 from next door, and the snows of yesteryear." He was in the Army during World War II, and in the CIA afterward.

If not a barbaric yawp, he was a wry yawp of conservatism, and his life love alone should make it no surprise that toward the end of Jack Kerouac's life, the original beatnik found favorite reading in the National Review.

Once I saw him debate William Shockley on "Firing Line." Shockley had won the Nobel Prize for his work on transistors but had moved on to a theory of racial inferiority based on intelligence tests.

Buckley despised him, but like a creationist, a Shockley is unbeatable in argument -- they're too good at defending themselves, and they always get the last word.

The program was a donnybrook of true vexation on the part of Buckley. I thought maybe he'd have to leave Shockley with a draw. Then he made the move he must have been waiting to make the whole time.

I have to quote from long-ago memory, but I think I have the sense of it: One topic we have neglected to light upon is the remarkable fact that Asians and Jews tend to score markedly higher on intelligence tests than members of our ethnic group, Dr. Shockley.

Before Shockley could summon up his full harrumph, Buckley glanced at his wristwatch, and no doubt with a flash of the eyes, a dance of the brows, and a glare of a smile, he said: "But I see we've run out of time. This is William Buckley, for 'Firing Line.' "

The last word, at least, was Buckley's. And the last laugh.