After Bill Buckley, the family member who has had the biggest impact on the magazine he founded, National Review, and on conservative thought generally might be his older sister, Priscilla Buckley.

Living It Up at National Review
By Priscilla L. Buckley
Published by Spence Publishing Company (2005)
Hdbk., 247 pgs.
ISBN: 1890626597

The first family of American conservatism over the past 50 years is indisputably the Buckleys.
 
William F. Buckley, Jr., of course, is the most famous of the Buckley clan, with former Senator James Buckley (also a federal judge) and Reid Buckley, a fine writer in his own right, also well known to many conservatives.
 
But after Bill Buckley, the family member who has had the biggest impact on the magazine he founded, National Review, and on conservative thought generally might be his older sister, Priscilla Buckley, who served as managing editor of NR for over 30 years.
 
Her memoir, Living It Up At National Review, is a warm, personal and insightful book in which Ms. Buckley juxtaposes chapters detailing her love of sports, travel and adventure with the goings on at America’s foremost conservative journal of opinion.
 
For Buckley historians, the book offers fresh insights not deeply explored in other family histories, including detailed accounts of family tragedies. Ms. Buckley writes about these sorrows with moving understatement – and they add texture to a family portrait that usually focuses almost exclusively on the two famous brothers.
 
After sister Maureen’s death, for example, Ms. Buckley writes disconsolately: “Now the magic was gone, gone forever. And the blows would continue to fall. Two years later, John’s beautiful blonde wife, Ann, age thirty-eight was also gone….and the following year death struck again when our older sister Aloise Heath died of a massive brain hemorrhage. In three years’ time eighteen children in the family would be motherless.”
 
On the public scene, she brings into sharp relief the many characters who graced (or haunted) National Review over the years. Readers are reintroduced to William Rusher, Jeffrey Hart, James Burnham, George Will, Joe Sobran, Linda Bridges and Richard Brookhiser, all well known to National Review’s dedicated readers.
 
While you might not expect Nika Hazelton to receive near as much attention as these icons, for Ms. Buckley this colorful writer on wine, food and travel was worthy of several pages of exploration. I hadn’t even realized NR had a wine, food or travel section, and in this regard Ms. Buckley dutifully sheds light on those who have gone unnoticed in other histories. She adds to the rich mixture of personalities glosses on resident poet William Von Dreele, Austrian contributor Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, and the various artists who have contributed covers over the years.
 
Joe Sobran is described as a brilliant but slovenly writer whose office was so messy that he had trouble locating his phone under the piles of books, magazines and newspapers that cluttered his office. If the genial Ms. Buckley concludes that Willmore Kendall was cantankerous, we can accept this as the final word on the subject, for she rarely encounters anyone about whom she cannot find something pleasant to say.
 
We learn about Ms. Buckley, too, who apparently shared her famous brother’s love of adventure and sports. Skiing, golf, whitewater rafting, hunting, and, yes, sailing with WFB are among the activities chronicled here.  Like the rest of the family, she is determined to celebrate even as she documents the ideological fisticuffs that define life at an opinion journal.
 
Journalistically, several accounts are particularly riveting. The magazine had been ready to go to press in 1968 with a sharply critical profile of Robert F. Kennedy by James Kilpatrick, and an equally inflammatory cover, when news of his assassination became known.
 
The editors quickly swung into action. They remade the cover, produced new editorial content on deadline, and removed all sharply critical references to the late senator. Alas, one communication eluded them – an insert subscription notice that featured the original pre-assassination cover. Not quite Dewey defeats Truman, but the kind of thing about which managing editors of magazines and newspapers have nightmares. And then there were the famous (or infamous) fake Pentagon papers, which idea WFB executed to near perfection, much to the annoyance of mainstream media.
 
What mostly comes through is the Buckley sense of humor and fun. It is hard not to marvel at the family's gift for mischief, friendship, adventure and high spirits. Family money might have played a part in their serene confidence, but more likely it is an abiding faith that enables them to weather major setbacks with grace, and smaller ones with wit and humor.
 
Like any such enterprise, there are casualties both biological and ideological. Whittaker Chambers’ separation from the magazine is well known but not documented here – and in any case he passed away only a few years after befriending WFB. Frank Meyer passed away in the 1960s. Burnham served as a stabilizing force, though his final decade is related here with deep feeling and compassion.
 
Ideological differences are not explored, perhaps because this ground is covered in other books. Still, it is worth recalling that Max Eastman, Sobran, and Garry Wills, among others, departed less than content with the magazine’s political direction.
 
Others sought gainful employment elsewhere. Chris Simonds, for example, whom Ms. Buckley describes as one of the most gifted writers to ever work at NR, decided to teach at a prestigious prep school. Other graduates of NR constitute a galaxy of journalistic star power: Paul Gigot, David Brooks, Joan Didion, Renata Adler, John Leonard and John Gregory Dunne being among a talented crop of writers who learned under the tutelage of the Buckleys and the NR editorial team.
 
As the title might suggest, this memoir is NR done lightly – Ms. Buckley mostly avoids unpleasant conflicts (such as the Kirk-Meyer feuds) and focuses instead on the many personalities who were so integral to NR’s issue-to-issue survival over many years.
 
And one personal note. I have never met Ms. Buckley or heard her speak in person or on television or radio (in sharp contrast to her brother, whose voice is as well known as any conservative who ever lived.). She is usually reduced to a few lines in history books on modern conservatism or a smiling face in an NR reunion photo. But there is one letter that I prize as much as any I have received as a journalist. It arrived in the summer of 1984 while I was studying at the language school in Middlebury, Vermont.
 
That letter praised a profile I had written on Cairo (never published), where I had lived the previous year, and on the basis of which I was offered my first assignment as a writer for National Review – covering the Hunt-Helms North Carolina Senate race that became a national focal point that election year. The letter came from Priscilla Buckley – and it put me on a natural high that lasted for nearly a year.
 
The Senate profile ran, my picture graced the inside of the magazine, and I was off and running at the age of 27, or so I thought. Alas, unlike writers with greater gifts or better instincts, I never managed to nurture my debut with National Review into a regular gig or the sort of opportunities most young journalists crave. Two book reviews over the next decade were all I could manage.
 
I mention this because I could be accused of personal bias in arguing that the magazine began to slip as the Buckleys faded from the scene, first with the retirement of Ms. Buckley in 1985 and then when WFB turned the helm over to John O'Sullivan in the early 1990s. O’Sullivan was an able successor but one who lacked Buckley's genius for spotting offbeat talent or nurturing independent voices.
 
The slide has been even more precipitous since then, as the old school editors have wearied or departed. A young cast of writers and editors has allowed the magazine to slip intellectually. The articles and essays are competent but mostly predictable, and lack the brilliance of days past when pioneers like Buckley, Burnham, John Tagg, Chambers, Kirk, Sobran and Novak, among others, contributed major thought pieces that rivaled the best work found in the New York Review of Books or Atlantic Magazine.
 
Of course, that may simply be the voice of age and nostalgia talking, and surely one can forgive current editor Rich Lowry for not being Bill Buckley. Who else is, after all? But he and the magazine would be well served if they spent more time beating the bushes for talent even among those who might walk to the beat of a different drummer. This would restore some of the edgy freshness that made NR an anti-establishment vehicle and such a delightful read in its heyday. Christopher Buckley, WFB’s son, might have the potential to rekindle in the magazine some of the old fire, but ironically he probably lacks the ideological purity some on the right demand.
 
All of that said, I am, like millions of Americans, grateful to the Buckleys and the editors of National Review for stimulating a vital debate in this country and for introducing conservative ideas to the political mainstream. All of us owe them and Priscilla Buckley a deep debt of gratitude.

Living It Up at National Review is available on Amazon.com.