William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives

pp. 37, 43, 59

p. 37: When Bill was five, “he began to mimic his father’s gestures and attitudes.” Even though he was just “a little thing with a high falsetto voice,” Patricia recalled, he “pontificated” just like his father, and spoke with the same “edge of sarcasm” toward opinions that did not conform to his own. Like his father, “he would brook no opinion that was not his own.” P. 43: At Millbrook School, later, he was a loner. “To his masters he was very obnoxious. Nobody likes to be talked politics to by a fifteen-year-old.” P. 59: At Yale, Buckley wasn’t really ‘interested in scholarship or even in the play of ideas . . . He regarded his education as an “instrument–as a means of buttressing his existing convictions and strengthening his hand in public debate.”