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Dec. 2, 2008

Melanie Phillips: The Mumbai atrocity is a wake-up call for a frighteningly unprepared world

Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report: Strategic Motivations for the Mumbai Attack

Dec. 1, 2008

Max Freidlander, as told to Jacklyn C. Wadler: India Inkings

Mark Steyn: Whodunit!?

Nov. 28, 2008

Rabbi Ahron Rapps: An evil seed that didn't have to be

Melanie Phillips: Carpe diem --- or can we all relax now?

Nov. 26, 2008

Michael Feldberg: Meet the Orthodox Jew who laid groundwork for scientific development of ordnance that undergirds America's current world leadership

Andrea Simantov: Shades of life

Nov. 25, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : Getting Emotional For Influence

The Kosher Gourmet by Ethel G. Hofman : Thanksiving feast!

Nov. 24, 2008

Rabbi S. Binyomin Ginsberg: 'I just Became a grandchild!'

Barry Rubin: Don't flatter your enemies, protect your friends

Nov. 21, 2008

Rabbi A. Henach Leibowitz: Money matters?

Caroline B. Glick: Civilization walks the plank

Nov. 20, 2008

Rabbi Avi Shafran: Bronfman's blindness

The Kosher Gourmet By Linda Gassenheimer: Portobellos add a hearty flavor to pasta with pesto

Nov, 19, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : Spread the wealth? Jewish tradition and income equality

Elliot B. Gertel: 'Mad Men': Tackling prejudices or reinforcing them?

Nov, 18, 2008

Dr. Debby Schwarz Hirschhorn: The End of the Age of Reason

Jonathan Tobin: Does Barack + Bibi = Disaster?

Nov, 17, 2008

Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The End of the Age of Reason

Diana West: Gulling Americans into making terror legit?

Nov, 14, 2008

Rabbi A. Henach Leibowitz: The Power of Spiritual Inertia

Caroline B. Glick: The perils ahead

Nov, 13, 2008

Stratfor Intelligence Briefing: How Bush and Obama together could change the Middle East dynamic

The Kosher Gourmet by JeanMarie Brownson: Sweet and savory, crispy and meltingly tender bestilla

Nov, 12, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : Tyrannical Co-Workers

Michael Doyle: High Court to consider today donated monuments that may have religious messages in public parks

Nov, 11, 2008

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Will Obama stop government officials considering institutionalizing financial jihad?

Jonathan Tobin: They Will Decide Their Own Fate

Nov, 10, 2008

Rabbi Avi Shafran: $8 billion, modern-day Tower of Babel being built?

Barry Rubin: A letter to the president-elect from a Middle East realist

Nov, 7, 2008

Rabbi Francis Nataf: Of Children and Immortality

Caroline B. Glick: Livni's Obama strategy

Nov, 6, 2008

Rabbi Yonason Goldson: How I tricked a classroom of apathetic students into grasping the fallacy of moral relativism

The Kosher Gourmet By Gina Kim: Tips for making the perfect soup --- includes recipes

Nov, 5, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist By Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Destitute Debtors

Bruce Weinstein: 'Religulos': Bad title,even worse movie

Nov, 4, 2008

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Treasury Dept. submits to Shariah law

Frida Ghitis: A surprise for Obama in the Middle East

Nov, 3, 2008

Jonathan Rosenblum: Who says Jews are Smart?

Jonathan Tobin: Was He Wrong About Everything?

March 22, 2007

J-Rhythms with Avraham Rosenblum: JWR's cutting-edge music program showcasing performers -- singers, song writers, musicians, and bands -- who learn and live the Torah lifestyle (OUR NEWEST IGODCAST !)

Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Feb. 28, 2008 / 22 Adar I 5768

A Redwood Falls in the Forest

By Bob Tyrrell


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | William F. Buckley Jr., who died Wednesday, appropriately enough in his study, was one of the most stupendous educated Americans of the 20th century. He was among the founders of the American conservative movement that crept out of the New Deal years, advocating market economics, traditional social values, and aggressive resistance to communism. Such ideas were viewed disdainfully by the reigning orthodoxy, liberalism, but by the 1980s, Buckley's positions pretty much had defeated liberalism wherever democratic elections could be held. Without him, this change would have been either impossible or much-delayed.


He brought together serious intellectuals, for instance James Burnham and Russell Kirk, to found what became modern conservatism's first great organ of opinion, National Review. He and his colleagues wrote important books that served as the foundation of their movement and made them and their political leader, Sen. Barry Goldwater, popular figures in the early 1960s. Even members of the liberal media nodded in respect, at least until Goldwater allowed himself to be drafted as the Republican presidential candidate in 1964. From that point on, the liberals' template was set. Conservatives were stupid, warmongers and bigots through the Reagan years, the Gingrich years and right up to the present. But in the early 1960s, this was not the liberal consensus. Some respect was shown.


It was in those years that Buckley was everywhere assisting in the founding of conservatism's student wing, the Young Americans for Freedom; its ideological forum, the American Conservative Union; and the Conservative Party of New York. He began what was soon one of the most popular syndicated columns and, in 1966, a weekly television debate series that became public television's longest-running talk show. For years, he lectured and debated a couple of nights a week. In an era when intellect still flourished, Buckley was the finest debater in the country.


Often he turned up on college campuses, which is where I met him at the beginning of a friendship lasting 40 years. I had just founded my anti-radical magazine at Indiana University and invited him to lecture. His arrival was a whirlwind. He visited my pals on the world-champion Indiana University swimming team, reminding me that his Yale roommate was also an Olympian. He had to visit a bar named "The Stardust," telling me that it was the site where Hoagy Carmichael wrote, said Bill, "the greatest jazz song of the 20th century." And at a reception given for him by my fellow students, he fit right in. A professor nearby confided, "That man will be forever young. He will look like that as an old man." Alas, that was not to be. Bill just burned himself out, and — devout Catholic that he was — in his last months, longed for the hereafter. As his friend, the writer Taki Theodoracopulos, put it, Bill "was looking forward to being united with Pat," his recently deceased wife.


In his 82 years, Bill covered a lot of ground. Along with founding a political movement, he became a national figure as much for his superior sophistication as for politics. The feat will not be duplicated. He played the harpsichord, painted (I have an oil of his in my library) and sailed trans-atlantically. All of that — and he ran a third-party race for mayor of New York.


In a new and authoritative history of modern conservatism's evolution, Alfred Regnery describes Bill's 1965 mayoral race as one of the three great political campaigns that put modern conservatism on the map, along with Goldwater's 1964 defeat and Ronald Reagan's 1980 victory. It also launched Bill as an enduring national figure. With it and his weekly television show, fame enhaloed him. One could not walk through an airport with him or down a street in a major urban center without encountering autograph seekers.


Not often recalled is how Bill's life changed during his half-century on the national scene. At first, he was an energetic herald of the new conservatism, a rigorist for the conservative position. After the excitement of his mayoral race, however, he became much more political. By 1968, he had trimmed back his conservative orthodoxy and actively counseled the Nixon campaign. He encouraged other conservatives to join the Nixon administration. He held minor posts in the administration. Through all the ideological backsliding of the Nixon years, Bill stood by the president. In fact, he became more of a fixture in the Nixon administration than he would become in the administration of his close personal friend, Ronald Reagan. The explanation is Watergate. Bill stuck by Nixon until the autumn of 1973. The experience left him permanently disappointed in Nixon and stunned by the brutality of politics.


At the height of Bill's political phase, he beheld dreams of the presidency. He entertained the idea of mounting a Conservative Party campaign in 1970 for Robert Kennedy's old Senate seat and using the Senate as a springboard to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Watergate dampened his ardor. His biographer, John Judis, tells us that Bill resolved to write a novel, sail his sailboat across the Atlantic, and perform Bach on his harpsichord with a professional orchestra. That is precisely what he did and more. He buzzed the Titanic from a submarine, as his drift from politics continued.


Bill had many gifts, and one was a sense of the times in which he lived. He had a prevenient sense for shifts in the zeitgeist. Increasingly in the 1970s and 1980s, I think he recognized that high intelligence was leaving the world of political thought. When he began his campaign to advance modern conservatism, he was surrounded by learned, highly intelligent intellectuals on both the left and the right. As the years went on, they all passed away. His co-founders at National Review were among the first to go. Burnham and Kirk died long ago. Now even his adversaries are gone. His old debating opponent John Kenneth Galbraith died a few years back. Recently Norman Mailer and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. withdrew. Practically all the great figures of the ideological battles of Bill's life are gone.


And so the baton is passed. On the conservative side, it passes from Buckley to Ann Coulter. I do not know as much about the liberal side.

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

JWR contributor Bob Tyrrell is editor in chief of The American Spectator. Comment by clicking here.

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