COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL Although Buckley Comes Across As Solidly New England, His Family’S Immediate Roots Were in the South
c01.qxd 2/20/07 4:52 PM Page 5 1 Life before National Review n 1954, the twenty-eight-year-old Bill Buckley started lining up I funding for a magazine that would “stand athwart history, yelling Stop,” as he would write in the Publisher’s Statement in the first issue of National Review. By “history” he meant the growth of centralism, collectivism, and secularism here in the United States and, abroad, the marching on of Communism through the world. But the name of Ronald Reagan’s “clipboard-bearing Galahad” was not yet a household word. Oh, he was known here and there—as the author of two highly controversial books, one criticizing his alma mater, Yale, and the other defending Joe McCarthy. He was remem- bered in the Ivy League as one of the most brilliant debaters it had ever produced. But in the rest of the country a lot of people, being invited to support this new venture, were asking, Just who is this William Buckley? COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL Although Buckley comes across as solidly New England, his family’s immediate roots were in the South. His Buckley great-grandparents— the husband a Protestant, the wife a Catholic—had immigrated to Canada from Ireland (County Cork) in the 1840s, settling in south- ern Ontario. Their son John, a big, gentle, tough-minded man, mar- ried a devout Catholic girl, Mary Ann Langford, whose parents had emigrated from Ireland (County Limerick) at about the same time as 5 c01.qxd 2/20/07 4:52 PM Page 6 6 STRICTLY RIGHT the senior Buckleys.
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