There have been so many tributes to Bill Buckley, but I might as well add some more. The modern history of conservatism, no less, is the subject of his life. It would be impossible to describe one without the other.
From about 1960, while we were still at Harvard, George Gilder and I published a moderate Republican magazine, Advance. We ambitiously aimed to counter the conservative magazine, National Review, that seemed to us well established, but actually had only been in existence for a half dozen years. In his own career, though it would not have seemed so to us (NR at the time described me as "a well-scrubbed youngster"), Bill Buckley, was still pretty young himself.
We saw National Review as too negative and pessimistic. We argued that Republicans should apply conservative principles to solving problems, not just opposing the proposals of the left. More than that, we specifically opposed acceptance of the paranoid right--meaning the John Birch Society, whose head, Robert Welch, called Eisenhower a communist--and we affirmed the need for civil rights legislation to protect blacks in the South. On both subjects we considered National Review to be on the wrong side.
Oddly, in his article just published in the March Commentary--posthumously, it turns out--Bill Buckley tells the inside story of how he worked to anathematize the Birch Society in the early 60s. I guess I didn't really know this story in detail, though some years ago I learned it in outline. It is gratifying to see that Buckley had come to the same conclusion we had. But Buckley, seeing, as Sen. Goldwater apparently did, that many fine people had been attracted to the Birch Society and were best weaned away from it rather than attacked, had a quieter way to approach the problem. I think it's safe to say we at Advance didn't see what was going on at the time and didn't give Bill any credit. Nor, at the time, did he want any.
Buckley also eventually came to see that it was a mistake to tie the GOP to the segregationist traditions of the South--or, as George Gilder and I had put it, to "hitch our wagons to the fading star of segregation." The thing is, this change at National Review took place so slowly that it was not evident, at least to George and me, at the time. (The Republicans in Congress, not the Democrats, it always bears remembering, provided the great bulk of the votes to enact civil rights legislation in the end. Meg Greenfield, among others, acknowledges this in her boo, Washington.)
So Buckley, the exemplary conservative, Mr. Hard Core, did change over time on certain issues. (He changed, but being intelligent, he did not "evolve".) So,too, however, did certain moderates like Gilder and me. And we may have changed more. George moved faster right than I and brought much of what was then the Ripon Society with him. I was fascinated, but, being involved in local and state government, didn't start to see myself as a conservative until the late 70s.
George wrote an article for Playboy, of all things, on Bill Buckley, in the late 60s (I can't find a link for it) and in the writing of it had Bill's full cooperation. Astonishingly, Bill invited George to go to Phoenix on a trip with him and they both wound up staying at Barry Goldwater's ranch. Another house guest was Claire Booth Luce. It must have been quite a weekend. Among other things, former Air Force Gen. Goldwater took George up in his private plane and flew him through the Grand Canyon. A reconciliation was thus effected. In any case, regarding Buckley, George, who had always appreciated him as a writer, came to admire him as a thinker.
All of this makes me sad that it took me so long to get acquainted with Bill Buckley, and when I did, the meetings were fleeting. One of the most pleasant, nonetheless, was in Atlanta where he moderated a debate on intelligent design about ten years back. He was very encouraging on the issue of Darwinian evolution, as one would expect from the author of God and Man at Yale, 1951. (Among other things--it is nice to remind the current editors of NR, Buckley wrote in that book, "I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.") Over the years I had the chance to write for NR a few times and to see many friends, not the least of whom was George Gilder, become influential there.
Buckley's kindness to other writers is famous. Two I'd like to list here are my brother (and Discovery Adjunct Fellow) Howard Chapman and my DI colleague David Klinghoffer. The latter served under Bill Buckley at NR for several years. Both pay Bill warm tributes.
http://www.discovery.org/a/4504
http://www.discovery.org/a/4505