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William Frank Buckley Jr. (born William Francis Buckley; November 24, 1925 – February 27, 2008) was an American conservative writer, public intellectual, and political commentator. Born in New York City, Buckley spoke Spanish as his first language before learning French and then English as a child. He served stateside in the United States Army during World War II. After the war, he attended Yale University, where he engaged in debate and conservative political commentary. Afterward, he worked for two years in the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1955, he founded National Review, a magazine that stimulated the conservative movement in the United States. In addition to editorials in National Review, Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale (1951) and more than 50 other books on diverse topics, including writing, speaking, history, politics, and sailing. His works include a series of novels featuring fictitious CIA officer Blackford Oakes and a nationally syndicated newspaper column. From 1966 to 1999, Buckley hosted 1,429 episodes of the public affairs television show Firing Line, the longest-running public affairs show with a single host in American television history, where he became known for his distinctive Transatlantic accent and wide vocabulary. Buckley's views varied, and are considered less categorically conservative than those of most conservative intellectuals today. His public views on race rapidly changed from the 1950s to the 1960s, from endorsing Southern racism to eagerly anticipating the election of an African American to the presidency. Buckley called himself both a conservative and a libertarian. He is widely considered one of the most influential figures in the conservative movement. Early life Childhood William Frank Buckley Jr. was born William Francis Buckley in New York City on November 24, 1925, to Aloise Josephine Antonia (née Steiner) and lawyer and oil developer William Frank Buckley Sr. (1881–1958). His mother hailed from New Orleans and was of German, Irish, and Swiss-German descent, while his father had Irish ancestry and was born in Texas to Canadian parents from Hamilton, Ontario. He had five older siblings and four younger siblings. He moved as a boy with his family to Mexico before moving to Sharon, Connecticut, then began his formal schooling in France, where he attended first grade in Paris. By age seven, the family had moved to England and he received his first formal English-language training at a day school in London; due to the family's movement, his first and second languages were Spanish and French. As a boy, he developed a love for horses, hunting, music, sailing, and skiing, all of which were reflected in his later writings. He was homeschooled through the eighth grade using the Homeschool Curriculum developed by the Calvert School in Baltimore. Just before World War II, around the ages of 12 and 13, he attended the Jesuit preparatory school St John's Beaumont in the English village of Old Windsor. Buckley's father was an oil developer whose wealth was based in Mexico and became influential in Mexican politics during the military dictatorship of Victoriano Huerta, but was expelled when leftist general Álvaro Obregón became president in 1920. Buckley's nine siblings included eldest sister Aloise Buckley Heath, a writer and conservative activist; sister Maureen Buckley-O'Reilly (1933–1964), who married Richardson-Vicks Drugs CEO Gerald A. O'Reilly; sister Priscilla Buckley, author of Living It Up with National Review: A Memoir, for which Buckley wrote the foreword; sister Patricia Buckley Bozell, who was also an author; brother Reid Buckley, an author and founder of the Buckley School of Public Speaking; and brother James L. Buckley, who became a U.S. senator from New York and a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. During the war, Buckley's family took in the English historian-to-be Alistair Horne as a child war evacuee. He and Buckley remained lifelong friends. They both attended the Millbrook School in Millbrook, New York, graduating in 1943. Buckley was a member of the American Boys' Club for the Defense of Errol Flynn (ABCDEF) during Flynn's trial for statutory rape in 1943. At Millbrook, Buckley founded and edited the school's yearbook, The Tamarack; this was his first experience in publishing. When Buckley was a young man, libertarian author Albert Jay Nock was a frequent guest at the Buckley family house in Sharon, Connecticut. William F. Buckley Sr. urged his son to read Nock's works, the best-known of which was Our Enemy, the State, in which Nock maintained that the founding fathers of the United States, at their Constitutional Convention in 1787, had executed a coup d'état of the system of government established under the Articles of Confederation. Music In his youth, Buckley developed many musical talents. He played the harpsichord very well, later calling it "the instrument I love beyond all others", although he admitted he was not "proficient enough to develop [his] own style". He was a close friend of harpsichordist Fernando Valenti, who offered to sell Buckley his sixteen-foot pitch harpsichord. Buckley was also an accomplished pianist and appeared once on Marian McPartland's National Public Radio show Piano Jazz. A great admirer of Johann Sebastian Bach, Buckley wanted Bach's music played at his funeral. Religion Buckley was raised a Catholic and was a member of the Knights of Malta. He described his faith by saying, "I grew up, as reported, in a large family of Catholics without even a decent ration of tentativeness among the lot of us about our religious faith." The release of his first book, God and Man at Yale, in 1951 was met with some specific criticism pertaining to his Catholicism. McGeorge Bundy, dean of Harvard at the time, wrote in The Atlantic that "it seems strange for any Roman Catholic to undertake to speak for the Yale religious tradition". Henry Sloane Coffin, a Yale trustee, accused Buckley's book of "being distorted by his Roman Catholic point of view" and stated that Buckley "should have attended Fordham or some similar institution". In his 1997 book Nearer, My God, Buckley condemned what he viewed as "the Supreme Court's war against religion in the public school" and argued that Christian faith was being replaced by "another God [...] multiculturalism". He disapproved of the liturgical reforms following the Second Vatican Council. Buckley also revealed an interest in the writings and revelations of the 20th century Italian writer Maria Valtorta. Education and military service Buckley attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico (or UNAM) until 1943. The next year, upon his graduation from the U.S. Army Officer Candidate School (OCS), he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army. In his book Miles Gone By, he briefly recounts being a member of Franklin Roosevelt's honor guard upon Roosevelt's death. He served stateside througho.... Discover the Susan Buckley popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Susan Buckley books.