Marking the death of William F. Buckley, Jr. yesterday, TNR asked James K. Galbraith to share his thoughts on the influential conservative journalist and intellectual. Galbraith--whose father, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, was a close personal friend of Buckley's--is a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin.
What Bill Buckley once said of my father was equally true of him: He was “syntactically pure.” Love of language and of the writer’s craft bound them together, the left pea to the right. That, and their winter migrations to Switzerland, where the Gstaad Papeterie would signal the arrival of each by placing a book in the window, and where Bill parked his car in our garage. Of my father on skis, he wrote somewhere: “Like Charles DeGaulle, in an elevator.”
Dad’s blurbs for his novels would read, “Mr. Buckley has a great talent for fiction, as readers of his columns know.”
In Switzerland Bill wrote, skied, and also painted--mostly seascapes. Once, my mother was present at the Chateau Buckley in Rougemont when Marc Chagall was visiting; Bill offered him a studio tour. Chagall uttered just two words: “poor paint.”
Back in Connecticut, just before my first wedding, Bill and Pat invited us to dinner. Over desert, the subject of a present came up. “I can give you a toaster,” he said, “or a case of this wine.” A Margaux. We disappeared into the cellar, and I emerged not only with that on one shoulder, but with an almost equally nice Pauillac on the other. Pat’s voice was then heard, “You’re not giving him two, are you darling, after he called you depraved?”
In 1986, E.J. Dionne quoted me on Reagan’s Tax Reform Act (which I favored), pumping me up by noting that I was “associated with the left wing of the Democratic Party.” Buckley took the cue: “James K. Galbraith, who according to EJ Dionne Jr. of The New York Times, is ‘associated with the left wing of the Democratic Party'...” I wrote to say that his exposé of my associations had not reached Texas in time to block my tenure. The reply: “I am shattered. But the next time you’re in Gstaad you may still borrow the car.”
In my father’s declining years, Bill was his most faithful friend. Every two months, he took the train from Stamford, arrived in Cambridge for lunch, and returned the same afternoon. Once after an unsuccessful outing--difficulties of mood and hearing aids--he wrote to my brother Alan that he would not go again. But it was a resolution he did not keep. And the visits went on, despite difficulties with his own health, until the end.
My last words with him were by email--which he used with enthusiasm and approximate spelling. Two months ago, I wrote to say that I’d been invited to give a “Milton Friedman Distinguished Lecture” in Ohio--but that he couldn’t publish on it, because the invitation might be revoked. An immediate response: “Jamie: What a wonderful opportunity to REPENT!!!!!!”
Two weeks ago, deeply afflicted by emphysema, he sent my mother, now 95, roses for Valentine’s Day.
Erudite, funny, generous: Bill Buckley was a magnificent human being, by any standard.
--James K. Galbraith