As soon as the news of William F. Buckley Jr.’s passing came this morning, my thoughts went back to my undergraduate days at Oklahoma State University in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I had been an energetic conservative activist with Young Americans for Freedom and Teen Age Republicans since high school and among the very first serious books I read as an adolescent was his “God and Man at Yale.” That was followed by “Did you ever see a dream walking,” which was Buckley’s compilation of and commentary upon scholarly essays by other conservatives on a variety of the major issues of the day.
To say Buckley had a profound effect upon me and millions of my contemporaries does not begin to do the man justice. I thought of my days at OSU because there was only one newsstand in town that stocked National Review and I couldn’t wait for each new issue to arrive. Even at a land grant state school like OSU, the liberal orthodoxy in the classroom was suffocating, so every NR issue was like a gulp of fresh air. Buckley was a lifeline to a world of ideas and thought whose depth and richness scaled the heart of the Western intellectual tradition.
