Word: buckley
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...Buckley Sr. subjected his children to a rigorous, if haphazard education. Unimpressed by the schools as he moved from Venezuela to France to England and back to the U.S. (Sharon, Conn., where Mrs. Buckley Sr. still lives), he stressed education at home. Not the kind of businessman who sneered at the liberal arts, he hired tutors in dance, architecture, painting, herb gardening, and one who was expert at building boats inside bottles. "We thought we had tried about everything," recalls Bill, "and in would come yet another professor." All the children were trilingual, or at least bilingual. Bill learned...
...Buckley père revered, above all, the English language. "Father was always a language purist," says Buckley. "Bad grammar was for him like dirt under the fingernail." Buckley developed his father's respect for words, and used them freely, furiously and all too literally. While attending Millbrook School in New York, he appeared uninvited at a faculty meeting and proceeded to complain about his teachers' politics-too liberal, of course. Even his father felt constrained to admonish him: "I like very much your attitude of having strong convictions, but you will have to learn to be more...
Chosen class orator for alumni day 1950, Buckley submitted a speech rebuking the university for its aimless liberalism and lack of a sense of mission. It was turned down by a shocked administration. "They all figured I was a bright, facile guy who just didn't understand," says Buckley. "So, en passant, I mentioned it to a publisher. He was patronizing, but liked my brashness and said go ahead." In July 1950, Buckley married a Vassar Girl, Pat Taylor; in September, after a "hedonistic summer," he sat down and "batted out" God and Man at Yale...
...rocked the Yale campus-and the world beyond. Buckley debunked "academic freedom" as a screen behind which the faculty was indoctrinating gullible students in liberalism and atheism; he even named the offending professors and exposed what he supposed to be their brainwashing techniques. The liberal academic establishment rose in wrath against this upstart. "As a believer in God, a Republican, and a Yale graduate," wrote McGeorge Bundy at the time, "I find that the book is dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author...
Professors on several campuses challenged Buckley to open debate-only to find, to their consternation, that the boy could talk as well as he could write. He left behind him some badly bloodied academic reputations. Taking the cue from Brother, Sister Patricia wrote a magazine article criticizing Vassar for being too leftist; another sister, Aloise, uncovered some "Communists" on the Smith campus and urged the alumnae to stop contributing to the college until the matter was investigated. Unlike the Yalies, however, the Smithies could not have cared less...