Rightly using dollars and brains

Say your daddy is rich. Say you're smart. How should you spend his money and your life? Bill Buckley, who died yesterday at age 82, answered that question well.

Born in 1925, he was the sixth of ten children fathered by a Catholic oil millionaire. In college he headed the Yale Daily News, then gained national attention by writing God and Man at Yale, which accused his alma mater of proselytizing for atheism and collectivism.

After a year in the CIA and other short stops, Buckley in 1955 used $100,000 from his father to start National Review, which was important in many ways. Its wit showed that conservatives weren't hicks. It laid out reasonable alternatives to regnant liberalism. It gave a start to young conservative writers. It routed right-wing ranters like John Birch Society founder Robert Welch, who had called President Dwight Eisenhower a communist agent.

Buckley gained personal visibility largely through his television program Firing Line, on which he consulted his clipboard, used big words, arched his eyebrows, licked his lips, and flashed a wolfish grin just before cleverly eviscerating liberal opponents. He became so well-known that the Disney movie Aladdin has the genie transforming himself into the polysyllabic speaker, who leans back in a chair and explains the permutations of the "three wishes" rule.

Buckley also sailed across the Atlantic, took up playing the harpsichord, and wrote at least 55 books, including 11 action-adventure spy novels. He and his wife Patricia married in 1950 and stayed married until she died last April. They called each other "Ducky" and had one son, Christopher, a witty writer as well.

Last Wednesday Buckley, who had recently suffered from diabetes and emphysema, was found dead at his desk in his home. "He might have been working on a column," his son said.