Linda Bridges
Tribute to Bill Buckley

The Philadelphia Society
44th National Meeting
Arlington, Virginia
April 11, 2008

        Some of us who are here this evening were at Vic Milione’s memorial service this afternoon, and some of us were at Bill Buckley’s memorial Mass just one week ago in Manhattan, and of course this is all one story. As Ed Feulner pointed out this afternoon, Bill’s early connection with ISI is not widely remembered, but that was a story he loved to tell. As Bill put it, “Frank Chodorov told me one day that I would be the president of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists”—as ISI was originally named. Bill continued: “It was my habit in those days to do anything Frank asked, and so for a while I was president of ISI. Then one day I got a note from him, a note that sticks easily to the memory. It said, ‘Dear Bill: You’re fired. I’ve decided a Jew will do better at fundraising as president of ISI, so I have appointed myself. Love, Frank.’ ”

In fact, Frank was not very good at fundraising, and eventually he was succeeded by his longtime deputy, Vic Milione, who was not Jewish but a Catholic of Italian and Irish descent, and who also wasn’t very good at fundraising. But he was a very successful president in other respects, and it was a thriving, if threadbare, enterprise that he turned over to Ken Cribb in 1988. Ken has been a very successful president, including the fundraising department, even though he is a Methodist of English, Scots, and French Huguenot descent. And come to think of it, Bill—a Catholic of Irish and Swiss descent— did pretty well too, not to be sure at ISI, but raising enough money every year for his beloved National Review to survive—though, truth to tell, barely. As he put it at his grand 80th birthday party two years ago, “I think there may be an extra-sensory perception at work, guiding our friends to look after only our exact and direst needs. Extra-sensory perception—because we are never with a dollar left over.”

And of course the connection between ISI and the Philadelphia Society is, as Bill might put it, umbilical. Back in 1964, in the middle of the Goldwater campaign, a young Hoosier named Don Lipsett, who had worked for Bill in the early days of National Review, was Midwest Director of ISI. At that time ISI was focused more exclusively on students than it is now that it has its impressive publishing arm, and Don saw the need for an organization for older conservatives. The following year, he and his old friend Ed Feulner, who at that time was studying at the Wharton School, managed to get Bill together with Milton Friedman in a New York hotel room. Incidentally, that was the first meeting of Bill and Milton, who became such good friends and skiing buddies. Anyway, Bill and Milton  agreed that the new organization Don and Ed were promoting would be a good thing. But what I love about this story is a mistake that Bill made in telling it that is absolutely characteristic of him, in understating his own generosity. The way he put it, speaking to the Society’s annual meeting in 1991, was: “It was almost thirty years ago that Ed Feulner and I each put up fifty dollars to incorporate the Philadelphia Society. I swear, I never got a bigger bang for a buck.” Ed agrees with the second part of that statement but points out that graduate students in 1965 didn’t have fifty dollarses to spare: the hundred bucks, he tells me, all came from Bill; Ed’s contribution was to take it to the bank and open the account. 

I reckon there are members of four generations present here this evening, and I imagine that for most of you in the younger cohorts, William F. Buckley Jr. is mostly a name seen on dust jackets of books, or on the newspaper column that he wrote till the end of his life. But for those of us who were following Bill in his glory days—roughly the period when he hosted Firing Line, from 1966 to 1999—he was a phenomenon like nothing else we had seen. He was everywhere, from late-night TV with Johnny Carson to the irreverent prime-time Laugh-In. He was interviewed by Playboy, at about the same time as he was editing a serious volume of conservative writing of the twentieth century—to which, however, he gave the cheeky title Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? In the 1950s he had devoted most of his time to National Review—first raising the money to start it, and then being its hands-on editor. He did not write a book between McCarthy and His Enemies, published in 1954, and Up from Liberalism, published in 1959. But by that time NR had survived its infancy, and Bill had capable lieutenants—notably James Burnham and Bill’s older sister Priscilla. So he was ready to branch out. Besides the column and the television and a speaking calendar that took him to every state of the Union, he also turned out a book nearly every year—and if he missed one year, he often made up for it with a second book the following year. One of those books, back in 1971, was an account of a week in his life. He titled it Cruising Speed, and many admirers took that as an appropriate description of Bill’s life.

Eventually, of course, his cruising speed had to slow down. He stopped doing Firing Line in 1999, and said farewell to the lecture circuit in 2001. But he still wrote his column to the end. True, he was on leave from the column at the time he died, because of a broken bone in his right hand.  But he was due to resume writing it the following Tuesday. And he still wrote books.  Flying High, a memoir of Barry Goldwater, was published three weeks after Bill died, and he had just finished drafting a similar memoir of Ronald Reagan—dictating the last three chapters, because of that broken bone. We’re pretty sure he wrote enough that it will be publishable.  Keep an eye out for it, in a year or so.

And even though he had slowed down, his habits of mind hadn’t changed. The last conversation I had with him was on the afternoon before he died. He had been in New York City that morning for a doctor’s appointment, and when he returned home to Connecticut he left behind his pocket diary and phone book. Late that afternoon he phoned me and asked me to FedEx it to him.  Sure, I can do that, I said.  But I reminded him that his driver, Jerry, was going to be bringing some guests out the next afternoon, and couldn’t he bring it?  “Well, no,” said Bill.  “It would reach me five hours later that way.”

Bill never wavered in his love for the Philadelphia Society or his judgment of its importance.  In 2004, he broke his rule of no more speaking engagements and flew out to Chicago for the Society’s 40th anniversary Gala. He paid tribute to Lee Edwards, and Ed Feulner, and above all Don Lipsett, of whom he said, “There was a benignity there which seemed to detoxify any malign culture that was stirring. The puffs from his pipe didn’t exactly dissipate ideological or historical or philosophical differences, but they managed to convey to us that life would go on, strengthening the one impulse dormant in all of us, namely that we would never permit anything that would disappoint Don Lipsett.”

      Bill closed his remarks, “I have been with you from the beginning, and my investment in our Society has surely yielded a historic harvest.” The Philadelphia Society, like ISI, like National Review, is dedicated to guarding the permanent things and handing them on to the next generation, and that is enough to ensure on Bill’s part —I want to say “undying gratitude,” and I’m confident that I can indeed say that, even though Bill’s earthly life is ended. I am also confident that he, and Vic, and Don―and maybe even Frank, if the idea wouldn’t be too appalling to a Jewish quasi-atheist―are, even as we meet here, hymning the virtues of this Society in the choir celestial.