Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Carl T. Bogus is professor of law at Roger Williams University and a nationally recognized expert on politics, law, and the Constitution. His previous books include Why Lawsuits are Good for America and The Second Amendment in Law and History (co-editor).

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Buckley

bloomsbury press

Contents

Chapter One

William F. Buckley Jr.'s ideology was not the product of study and reflection. It was practically inherited. Bill and nine siblings were brought up by powerful and opinionated parents. Their father had made a small fortune in the oil business, and until high school they lived in a velvet cocoon. Except for one year in an English boarding school, Bill, and his siblings, were home schooled by professional tutors and coaches at the family estate, Great Elm, in the bucolic town of Sharon, Connecticut. When the children reached adulthood, they discovered, somewhat to own their surprise, that they all held a common and distinct political philosophy. There wasn't an ideological black sheep among them.

Much has been written about the family dinner table, at which the children supposedly were expected to present their views about current events and defend them under rigorous questioning from their father. The children, we are led to believe, underwent an almost deliberate program of political indoctrination. In private interviews, however, two of the children – Priscilla and James, the third and fourth oldest of the ten siblings – assure me that the portrayals of political science seminars at the family dinner table are grossly exaggerated if not downright fallacious. There was, in fact, not especially much discussion about politics within the Buckley household, at least not overtly. That does not mean there was no conversation about politics. The children knew, for example, that their parents subscribed to the America First doctrine, which held that America should not become embroiled in the Second World War, and that they considered Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal socialistic. But that was about as far as the expressly political talk went in the Buckley household.

How then did Bill and his siblings acquire their distinctive political philosophy? Something more powerful than dinner table political science seminars was going on in the Buckley household: a father was telling his children evocative stories about his experiences in Mexico. William Frank Buckley, Sr., "Will," as he was called, lived in Mexico during his own politically formative years. Will was in Mexico from ages twenty-seven to forty, when the president of Mexico expelled him for conspiring to overthrow the government. These were also the years that shaped modern Mexico, the period of the Mexican revolution. The stories Will told his children were focused more on his own adventures than on the philosophical differences among the factions fighting for control of Mexico. When the children became older, they wondered whether their father's stories had been exaggerated – for their father was a dramatic storyteller, and he knew how to make a tale more colorful for children. But whether Will's stories were entirely true is beside the point. Bill and his siblings believed them, at least while they were children.

Will's stories may not have to be overtly political, but they reflected a particular way of looking at the world that was forged during his experiences in Mexico. He assimilated his children into that worldview just as other parents assimilate their children into their particular realities: by describing the world and explaining events against a backdrop of particular assumptions. Will's children themselves recognize that their father's years in Mexico molded both his perception of the world and their own. Reid Buckley, the third youngest of the ten siblings, writes that his father's "experiences in Mexico stamped our father's character and beliefs ever after, in turn indelibly stamping the assumptions, attitudes, perspectives, and political inclinations of his children."

To understand Bill's political philosophy, therefore, we have to understand his father's worldview, and to do that, we must understand Will's time in Mexico. As ironic as it may seem, the seminal influences of the new conservatism flow from Will Buckley's experiences during the Mexican Revolution.

Will Buckley was born in 1881 into a family of Irish immigrants living in San Diego, Texas. Most of the residents in this town of 2,000 in southern Texas were Hispanic origin. While English was used in the public schools, Spanish was spoken more often in town generally, and Will was bilingual from an early age. Will's father was, in turns, an insurance salesman, the elected sheriff of Duval County, and a sheep rancher. Will's mother was a devout Catholic, and the children were tutored in Latin and Catholicism by Father John Peter Bard, a parish priest from the Basque region in Spain who is described in a book published privately for the Buckley family as "a scholar and linguist" and a man of "rugged individualism." Father Bard had a strong influence on Will. The relationship was so strong, in fact, that Will continued as altar boy for Father Bard for more than fifteen years, returning to San Diego to assist his mentor during college vacations even after the Buckley family had moved to away. One of the undercurrent themes in the Buckley family book is that even as a young boy in Texas, Will learned to distrust both the people and the government. The book states, for example, that during his childhood in San Diego, Will "knew firsthand of armed rising and rebellions, and of the ruthlessness of the Texas rangers."

In the fall of 1900, Will entered the University of Texas at Austin, which was then, as it is now, the premier state university in Texas. By majoring in Spanish, in which he was already fluent, Will was able to earn eight course credits by simply taking the final examinations and quickly leap ahead to advanced courses in Spanish literature. His proficiency in Spanish also allowed him to earn money by coaching other students in Spanish and working as a translator in the University's land office. He joined a fraternity and was elected editor-in-chief of Cactus, the University yearbook. While Will was in college, his father died, and the family moved to Austin. Will's sister Priscilla took a position as a school teacher, helping to put Will, brothers Claude and Edmund, and sister Eleanor through the University of Texas.

A story about Will's undergraduate days is revealing. At a basketball game between the University of Texas and St. Edwards College (now St. Edwards University), a Catholic school in Austin, played on the latter's home court, tempers were running high when a priest serving as referee made a call in favor of St. Edwards. A Texas student in the audience yelled, "That damn priest is lying." Will immediately flattened him with a powerful punch.

After earning their bachelor's degrees, Will and his brothers continued on to law school at the University of Texas. In 1908, Will, a newly minted lawyer, decided to seek his fortune in Tampico, Mexico. Tampico, a seaport on the Gulf of Mexico, is in the heart of Mexico's oil producing region. For two years, Will worked for another lawyer whom he described in a letter to a friend as "a crook." He quit working for this man, and for a period of about a year – without resources or friends to fall back upon – had no source of income. Will did not give up however. He...