As Editor in Chief, which he handed to O’Sullivan.
But he retained his role as Chairman of the magazine, and was the ultimate decision-making authority until 1999 or 2000.
“As Peter Brimelow has related, much of the subsequent purges in the ‘90s centered around the then-burgeoning debate on immigration, and more specifically, the fact that Buckley’s hand-picked replacement as editor, John O’Sullivan, had brought in NR writers seriously interested in the “national question,” Brimelow and Steve Sailer among them. With O’Sulliavan, NR was on the cutting edge for perhaps the last time in its history, publishing in 1992 Brimelow’s extensive 14,000-word call to “Rethink Immigration.”
Within five years, O’Sullivan was gone, as Buckley and his second attempt at an intellectual heir, Rich Lowry, moved the magazine in a direction that made it not only more palatable with the Wall Street Journal-set but the neconons, then close to being regnant within the conservative movement. “
http://takimag.com/article/national_review_purges_buckley/print#axzz4AH1RTqGz
Taki’s timeline doesn’t match up with what I can find but I guess it’s a moot point either way. Buckley is dead and Lowry and Goldberg have run things even further into the ground.