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Dinner with William F. Buckley 2/28/2008 10:48:00 AM
By Dan Proft
When the news came over the transom yesterday that William F. Buckley, Jr. had passed, I turned to pick up a 14-year-old framed photograph on the desk in my office that I had not looked at for some time.
The picture is of a strapping young man that used to be me shaking hands with the godfather of modern American conservatism as we posed for the snapshot at the base of the stairway leading from the lobby at the Omni Orrington Hotel in Evanston, Illinois.
Through a conservative student group I had run at Northwestern University, we brought Bill Buckley to speak on campus in the fall of 1994.
Up until that evening and from that time until his death, I knew Buckley only the way in which others around the world knew him--through his work as a trailblazing intellectual and by his reputation as an authentic Renaissance man.
Those characteristics were most certainly on display for those in attendance that night in Evanston.
Buckley gleefully recounted the relatively recent demise of the Soviet Union which had the dual benefits of both extending freedom to hundreds of millions of people and of tubing the Cold War arguments of old Buckley nemeses like Carl Sagan and John Kenneth Galbraith.
Buckley had the crowd howling as he openly contemplated whether or not he would have to extend his famous edict that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston phone book than the entire faculty at Harvard to his alma mater of Yale, given the two Yale Law alumni that had ascended to the White House.
The best part of the night, however, was after the speech--dinner with Buckley.
For three hours William F. Buckley sat with a half-dozen undergrads discussing academia, politics, and life in general. And it was a true discussion not a monologue. Buckley solicited input, postulated questions and offered friendly advice.
After dinner, Buckley leaned back in his chair and enjoyed a snifter of brandy which elicited his signature wry smile as he shared anecdotes about his own experiences as an undergrad and what led him to found National Review, among other such insights.
I remember feeling almost as much at ease as he appeared to be. Not only was Buckley incredibly generous with his time, he was genuinely curious where others of substantially less intellect would have been patronizing.
I learned a lifelong lesson that night to appreciate the contributions of others to the thoughtful discourse from whence knowledge springs.
The 18th Century English poet Edward Young observed, "We are all born originals; why is it so many of us die copies?"
Were that it was possible to copy William F. Buckley, Jr.
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