Sam Tanenhaus, The New Republic, March 19, 2007.

Excerpt:

Although he remains the most eminent conservative in the United States, his face and voice recognized by millions, William F. Buckley, Jr. has all but retired from public life. At the apex of his influence, when Richard Nixon and, later, Ronald Reagan occupied the White House, Buckley received flattering notes on presidential letterhead and importuning phone calls from Cabinet members worried about their standing in the conservative movement. Since those heady times, Buckley has, piece by piece, dismantled the formidable apparatus through which he tirelessly promulgated conservative doctrine over the course of half a century. In 1998, he ended his frenetic schedule of public speeches (some 70 a year over the course of 40 years, he once estimated). In 1999, he taped the last segment of “Firing Line,” the debate program begun in 1966 that invented TV punditry. And, in 2004, he relinquished his controlling stock ownership of National Review, the magazine he founded in 1955 and had continued to direct from behind the scenes even after yielding his place atop the masthead in 1988.

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