William F. Buckley Jr. & Blackford Oakes (RIP)

Before there was Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Before Rush Limbaugh, George Will, Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, Sean Hannity, Matt Drudge and Phyliss Schlafly, Bill Buckley stood alone.

In the Mid-50's, the beginning of the cold war, he went after the Soviet sympathizers in the media and the atheists in academia. He was aggressive and verbally savage.

Not only did Buckley communicate the principles that each Republican candidate today says that he best represents...Buckley defined them.

He founded National Review magazine. He started the TV Show Firing Line, where he appeared as the moderator for twenty years.

He wrote cold war thrillers, about a CIA agent Blackford Oakes, just because every other author was trashing America and the CIA.

He was an army veteran, a Patriot, and a devout Catholic. He was an intellectual with the guts and brainpower to go after and beat anyone who attacked his values, his character, his faith and his country.

He once said, sometime in the sixties, that he would rather be governed by the first hundred people in the Cambridge phone book than by the faculty at Harvard. A prophetic statement, more true today than it was when he said it.

He will never be replaced.


Submitted by D.B. Jackson