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Wed 27 Feb 2008 12:26
by Kevin McGehee
34° and partly cloudy
in Coweta County, GA
[Our Times]
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An era has ended.
William F. Buckley Jr., the erudite Ivy Leaguer and conservative herald who showered huge and scornful words on liberalism as he observed, abetted and cheered on the right’s post-World War II rise from the fringes to the White House, died Wednesday. He was 82.» William F. Buckley Jr. Dies at 82
Years ago he gave a talk in Sacramento, and I took my mother to hear him speak. He sat slumped in an easy chair on stage, not unlike he was wont to do on “The Firing Line,“ and talked about a wide range of topics. What I remembered most was a well-dressed young woman who came down one of the side aisles to ask Buckley about abortion, and who seemed satisfied with his answer. Oddly, my mother’s main comment after the event was that Buckley’s clothes were rumpled and untidy-looking. I guess she was expecting a conservative, Yale-educated intellectual to look more like a conservative than like a Yale-educated intellectual.
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