Right at the end: William F. Buckley's last gift to conservatism may have been his opposition to the Iraq War

American Conservative, The, March 24, 2008 by Jeffrey Hart

Soon after Bill Buckley died, William Kristol published a column called "The Indispensable Man" in the New York Times. He celebrated Buckley as the founder of the conservative movement, and his tone was not only celebratory but affectionate. And surely Kristol was right: Buckley was indispensable. Without his leadership there would have been no conservative movement. Yet at the end of his life, Buckley believed the movement he made had destroyed itself by supporting the war in Iraq.

The central foreign policy initiative of the Bush administration had two rationales: eliminating Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and, by establishing democracy in Iraq, turning the country into a beacon of liberty in the Middle East. Both National Review and Kristol's Weekly Standard followed Bush on Iraq and continue to do so. But Kristol must have known that Buckley had grave doubts about the war.

Buckley published three syndicated columns about Iraq, all of which were reprinted in National Review. The first argued that it is doubtful that an effort "hugely greater in scale and more refined in conception" would produce the desired result. When no weapons of mass destruction were found, Buckley speculated that this rationale for the invasion, now discredited, would not matter if all ended well. But as the 2004 presidential election approached, he compared the evident quagmire to the French defeat by a brutal insurgency in Algeria.

In these pieces, Buckley diverged sharply from the generally optimistic view of Iraq taken by National Review. Kristol must have read these columns at the time but had perhaps forgotten them when he wrote his column about Buckley--or else dismissed them since the Weekly Standard still believes that the Iraq effort has been a success.

But the conviction hinted in the columns only hardened during the last year of Buckley's life, when he arrived at a tragic view of the Iraq War. He saw it as a disaster and thought that the conservative movement he had created had in effect committed intellectual suicide by failing to maintain critical distance from the Bush administration.

His entire life as a conservative leader lends authority to this judgment, which should stand as the final word of Mr. Conservative, so allow me to provide some impressions of Bill Buckley as I knew him.

Matthew Hart, the youngest of my four children, is Buckley's godson and now lives near Lake Tahoe in California. When he heard that Buckley had died he sent me an e-mail:

   I just wanted to send you my condolences
   about Mr. Buckley. I
   know you two have been friends
   for a really long time. He was
   always nice to me as a kid, and still
   wrote to me on my birthday up to
   my 20s. He didn't have to but he
   did. It really shows class when
   someone like him takes time to
   engage us kids. He could have
   spent the time talking with adults
   who were around (and who probably
   wanted more of his time) but he
   didn't. For some reason he seems
   like the type of person who doesn't
   exist much any more. I'll always
   have the memories of Switzerland
   and skiing with the A-team and
   being reminded not to pass the
   leader but [being] led off into some
   sort of gulch that we had to hike
   out of in three feet of snow. Well,
   what can you do? We did make it
   out after all. That's what happens
   when you leave the trail I guess.
   There's a metaphor in there somewhere ...

Matthew was in Gstaad only once. I went several times beginning in the 1970s--I had been a senior editor at National Review since 1969--and a glimpse of life there provides a sense of the joi de vivre that was characteristic of Buckley's life.

At Gstaad, the Buckley schedule ruled our social life, and it was always the same. We all skied in the morning while Buckley worked in his chalet on his latest literary project. Then all the skiers met for lunch at one bistro or another at the bottom of one of the mountains. After lunch, fortified by plenty of wine, we followed the leader to another mountain and skied there until the end of the day.

At the top of one mountain was a restaurant called the Sky Club, members only. One morning Buckley and I were skiing together, and he decided that we would have lunch at the club. As we were putting our skis on the rack outside, Buckley indicated an elderly man wearing a one-piece ski outfit a short distance away and whispered that he would tell me about him when we found a table.

Over lunch he said that he had stayed with this man, the Count von Something, in his castle in Germany to do some research for a novel he was writing. The first night they sat down in front of the fireplace and there, above the mantle, were life-size oil portraits of Josef Goebbels and Hermann Goering. Came the obvious question: Why were they there? "Because they were my godfathers," said the Count. Oh.

Buckley's chalet, which he leased annually, was an enormous place, located at the base of one of the mountains. You could finish a day by skiing right to the back door. On my first visit, I entered the front door of the chalet, which seemed the normal way to get in, but found myself in a large kitchen with a stone fireplace suitable for cooking meat on a spit. All it needed was a cook in a leather apron, preferably a dwarf.