The Meaning of Heritage

On October 20, William F. Buckley Jr. delivered a speech on the subject of "heritage." The event took place at The Pierre hotel in New York City. Mr. Buckley's speech was the last in a series of speeches sponsored by the Heritage Foundation of Washington, D.C., a series designed to mark the Foundation's twenty-fifth anniversary. Mr. Buckley was introduced by his son, Christopher, editor of Forbes FYI and the author of several acclaimed novels, the latest of which is Little Green Men.

I first met William F. Buckley Jr. in September 1952. I was struck by his considerable . . . height. From the first moment I set eyes on him, I found myself looking up to him. Over the years, I reached his approximate height in feet and inches, but I have never stopped looking up to him.

The theme tonight is "Heritage." Your honoree is well suited to talk about that. His own roots go deep in the American soil. His grandfather was a Texas sheriff. The family does not widely advertise that, owing to the fact that he was a Democrat. The sheriff's son became a Texas oilman, from which point on the family's voting registration remained staunchly Republican.

William F. Buckley Sr., the father of tonight's honoree, was by all accounts a remarkable man. Self-made, devoutly Catholic, a risk-taker. He once talked Pancho Villa out of shooting a train conductor for committing lese-majeste. He indignantly refused to become the American governor-civil of Veracruz after Woodrow Wilson trained the U.S. Navy's guns on the city. A few years after that, having lent his support to the losing side in that week's revolution, he was obliged to depart Mexico under sentence of death. He came home to America, married a young Catholic beauty from New Orleans, and raised ten children, not one of whom grew up speaking English as a first language. It was said of him that he worshiped three things: God, his family, and education . . . in that order.

That was the heritage that William F. Buckley Jr. inherited. Not a bad one. Like his father, he grew up devout, risk-taking, and occasionally supporting the losing side, though ultimately, as intellectual godfather to the movement that produced the election of Ronald Reagan, he was a very big winner. Yet even when he was on the losing side, he managed, unlike his father, to stay on the right side of the firing line.

At Yale, he made a glorious pain in the ass of himself with an administration and faculty that in his view had turned its back on that college's heritage. His first book-of some 40, at last count-sought to reassert that heritage and those principles, which he held sacred, then as now. It was Act One in a remarkable public life.

He served in the CIA and founded a magazine whose stated mission was "to stand athwart history, yelling 'Stop!'" He has written a thrice-weekly column for almost 40 years. He ran for Mayor of New York, making the Conservative party safe for James L. Buckley and Alfonse D'Amato. He became host of Firing Line, the most substantive dialogue ever produced on television. Two months from now he will tape the last show, and enter the record books as the longest-running single host of a television program in history.

He was delegate to the United Nations, where for a brief shining moment he made life intolerable for so many deserving tinpot potentates who up to then had viewed that forum as a dumping ground for their latest grievances about the United States, enemy of humanity.

At 50 he became a bestselling novelist and sailed himself across the first of many oceans. Concert pianist at 60. Ex-concert pianist at 61.

He has been there, done that. Flown in the cockpit of an F-4 Phantom jet, and dived three miles deep to peer into the skeleton of the Titanic. One March day on Long Island Sound after an accident, he dragged a drowning friend a half-mile through freezing water and saved his life, an incident that should excite his biographer, if trends in current biography are any indication.

I've watched the President of the United States in the White House hang a medal around his neck and call him a hero. I've listened as Cardinal O'Connor-who is in our prayers tonight-addressed him in a room crowded with important prelates and called him "the jewel in the crown of American Catholicism." And I have heard my mother say one thousand times, "Your father is impossible."

And you know, they were all right.

To those voices I can only add my small prayer of gratitude tonight to Providence for being so bountiful that day in 1952 in the matter of my own heritage.

Ladies and gentlemen, William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr.

My father was a friend of Albert Jay Nock who, silverheaded with the trim moustache and rimless glasses, was often at our house in Sharon, Connecticut. There, at age thirteen or fourteen, I scurried about, going to some pains to avoid being trapped into hearing anything spoken by someone so manifestly professorial. Most of what my father would relate about him-relate to me and my siblings-was amusing and informative, not so much about such Nockean specialties as Thomas Jefferson or Rabelais or the recondite assurances of the Remnant; but informative about him. I remember hearing that Mr. Nock had made some point of informing my father that he never read any newspapers, judging them to be useless and, really, infra dignitatem. But one day my father stopped by at the little inn Mr. Nock inhabited in nearby Lakeville, Connecticut, to escort Mr. Nock to lunch, as arranged. Inadvertently my father arrived a half hour earlier than the planned meeting time. He opened the door to Mr. Nock's quarters and came upon him on hands and knees, surrounded by the massive Sunday editions of the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times. My father controlled his amusement on the spot, but not later, when he chatted delightedly with his children about the eccentricities of this august figure, this great stylist-my father preferred good prose to any other pleasure on earth, if that can be said credibly of someone who sired ten children. He thought Mr. Nock the most eloquent critic in America of, among other things, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his shortcomings.