National Review

William F. Buckley Jr., America's most celebrated conservative intellectual, died Wednesday at the age of 82.

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it." So wrote Karl Marx, and William F. Buckley Jr. was no Marxist. But few American intellectuals have lived up to Marx's injunction as completely and impressively as Buckley. He was the intellectual paterfamilias to a movement that rose from obscurity to govern the United States, and a man whose efforts -- both as the founding editor of National Review and as a tireless proselytizer in books and essays and television interviews -- helped make once-unfashionable ideas seem first plausible, then persuasive, and finally obvious to countless Americans. There probably would have been some sort of successful right-of-center movement in late-twentieth century America without Buckley, but his Catholic-libertarian perspective shaped it, and it owed its immense success in no small measure to his wit and charm and indefatigability. MORE