A conservative lion passes away

William F. Buckley, Jr., the author and conservative intellectual who founded National Review magazine, passed away on Wednesday at age 82.

William F. Buckley, Jr. at The Heritage Foundation

“Buckley ‘taught’ modern conservative thought to me and millions of other Americans who now proudly live this philosophy,” Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner said in a statement. “I will miss my teacher and my friend.”

Heritage has lowered its flag to half-staff to honor his memory.

» Read Buckley’s essay in Heritage’s book The March of Freedom, plus an introductory note from Feulner

“[T]hose on the left have long classified conservatives as occupying a niche somewhere between boors and barbarians,” Feulner said in 1999 as he presented Buckley with Heritage’s Clare Booth Luce Award. “Week after week, for the past 34 years, Bill has displaced that image with one that conservatives and conservatism can wear with pride. And he accomplished it simply by being himself—the consummate and civil defender of conservative principles. Bill has often devastated an opponent’s position, but I have never known him to devastate an opponent.”

Buckley, he continued, “made American conservatism in the 20th [century]. It is a rare thing when so much can be so clearly attributed to one man, and we need no poetic license to say that this is a great man.”

Feulner wrote in 2000 that “National Review helped inspire thousands of conservatives to organize themselves into a powerful political movement.”

This is no exaggeration. His work—above all founding National Review, which in its first editorial proclaimed itself “stand[ing] athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it”—enabled the conservative movement to flourish in America, explains Heritage scholar Lee Edwards. “Buckley by his words and his actions forced the reigning Liberal Establishment to acknowledge that a major new political force had emerged in America.”

“When I am asked how important Bill Buckley was to the conservative movement,” Edwards writes, “I can think of only one reply: Would there be the earth without the sun?”

As George Will wrote in National Review in 1980, “before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind, and the spark in 1980 has become a conflagration.”

That conflagration remains alive today.

Rest in peace, William F. Buckley.

Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.