Buckley's Life: A Success(Rich Lowry eulogizes Bill Buckley)

The warm tributes to William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative hero who died Wednesday at age 82, have emphasized all that everyone could appreciate about him: the formidable intelligence, the capacious vocabulary, the otherworldly productivity, the playful wit, the graciousness and deep, wide-ranging friendships.

He was a beloved figure who had entered American lore and, in that sense, belonged to all of us. But in the fond reminiscences, it shouldn't be forgotten what he hated. Buckley was an anti-Communist to the marrow of his bones, whose lifelong mission was to crush Marxist totalitarianism. In this, he was uncompromising, relentless, and -- this is what makes it possible to minimize it now -- successful.

Buckley was a master debater who took on (and usually beat) all comers, but he insisted that, with Communists, there could be no dialogue. He convinced the Yale Political Union in 1962 to rescind an invitation to the head of the Communist Party U.S.A., Gus Hall. Buckley argued, bracingly, "We can no more collaborate with him to further the common understanding than Anne Frank could have collaborated with Goebbels in a dialogue on race relations."

Buckley's anti-Communism had many roots. His father, an oilman who did business in a Mexico roiled by revolution, was a committed anti-Communist. And Buckley's Catholic faith made him a natural foe of atheistic Marxism. But the deepest foundation of Buckley's anti-Communism -- and his politics generally -- was a belief that the individual is paramount and can flourish only in freedom.

This was a philosophical and religious conviction, but also -- if you will -- a personal one. No one was more an individual than Bill Buckley.

Good words Rich - but when will you print something on communist genocide?

The new monument in Washington has gotten minimal coverage and this is the 75th year of the Ukrainian Famine Genocide that was covered up by Duranty and FDR.

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Duranty was sent by the Times to make up for these disasters. He took it as a mandate for coverage that was fawning. Toadying certainly paid off. Duranty’s coverage won him special access to Soviet leaders and he was able to visit otherwise forbidden areas of the Soviet Union. These Communist tyrants knew they were getting a great deal from the paper of record. How many Americans, who looked to the prestigious New York Times to learn about the world, saw the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s and concluded that Communism wasn’t such a bad thing after all?

Well, we certainly know that one very important American was influenced by Duranty. After his victory in the 1932 election, FDR held a celebrated meeting with Duranty. An historian of Soviet-American relations has noted the significance of FDR’s deferring to Duranty’s judgment.

“The implication of the meeting was that there was no genocide in Soviet Russia, and if some peasants were dead, it was the inevitable result of Stalin’s understandable effort to develop the Soviet Union quickly, especially in the face of Japanese threats.”32 The road to Operation Keyhaul,33 to an American policy that rationalized the crimes of the Gulag and made excuses for Soviet crimes,34 begins here.

It became very easy for FDR, who seemed to fall for every Soviet trick, to sell Americans on the idea that the Soviet Union deserved recognition and American capital.

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