We’ve lost a great man

HOW HE SEES IT

We’ve lost a great man

By JAY AMBROSE

Scripps Howard News Service

William F. Buckley, the brilliant conservative controversialist who helped restructure political America with acts of the mind, has died, and I will mourn the loss. He did something invasively personal in my life. He changed the way I think.

I met and briefly chatted with him a couple of times, but that’s not what did it, nor was it the several speeches I heard him give, nor the books of his I read nor his newspaper column that I followed closely for a number of years. I kind of hate to admit it, but it was his TV show, “Firing Line.” The boob tube was the tool.

Fascinated by the show, I would watch as some of my liberal heroes would appear, and could hardly wait for them to flatten this impudent, sometimes supercilious figure who had made so bold as to stand up to a whole, vast structure of thought that seemed to dominate the American landscape.

These guests, who were sometimes thinkers of vast accomplishment, represented an ideology I had grown up assuming was the only true way. The left was right and the right was wrong, by my lights. The magazines I had read mostly said so. The books I had read mostly said so. Nothing I encountered from my professors in college much contradicted these and other influences of friends and family.

In fact, it seemed to me that conservatives were chiefly stupid. They were often rednecks, crass and unlettered. Others were rich people who did not care about the poor. Some were John Birchers — wild-eyed conspiracy theorists — and still others were out-and-out racists. Liberals, it seemed to me, were the opposite of all of that. They were smart and educated and compassionate and good.

Tough questions

But when these liberals would show up on the Buckley show, earnest, articulate and ready to strike, they often struck out. Buckley would pose questions they could not answer. He would then proffer his own answers, which made good sense, it seemed to me. The show prodded me to examine many of the social and political conclusions I had once proudly showed off at the slightest opportunity, leading me to decide that many could not be sustained. My conversion was not overnight, and it wasn’t only at the hands of Buckley that it occurred, but he was pivotal. What he did, in short, was demonstrate conservatism’s intellectual and moral respectability, and that was crucial in amending the views of many like me. And this nation, I sincerely believe, owes a mighty debt to William F. Buckley, whose brilliance mostly elucidated and furthered some of the noblest principles in human affairs.

X Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers, is a columnist living in Colorado.