IN LOVING MEMORY OF WILLIAM J. BUCKLEY, JR. (NOVEMBER 24, 1925 TO FEBRUARY 27, 2005) [PRO DEATH PENALTY QUOTE]

 

William F. Buckley, Jr.

If you believe, as the families of the victims of the robbery believe, that society owes to its members the ultimate protection from murder, then capital punishment raises its august hand, the most solemn form of retribution against the killer of innocent people.

[The Fight to Kill: Capital considerations. September 23, 2003, 5:37 p.m.] 

AUTHOR: William F. Buckley, Jr. (November 24, 1925 - February 27, 2005) was an American Conservative author and commentator. He founded the political magazine National Review in 1955, which had a major impact in stimulating the conservative movement. He hosted 1,429 episodes of the television show Firing Line from 1966 until 1999, where his public persona was famous for a sesquipedalian vocabulary. He also wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column, and wrote numerous spy novels.

George H. Nash, a historian of the modern American Conservative movement, states that Buckley was "arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century... For an entire generation, he was the preeminent voice of American conservatism and its first great ecumenical figure." Buckley's primary contribution to politics was a fusion of traditional American political conservatism with laissez-faire economic theory and anti-communism, laying groundwork for the new American conservatism of U.S. presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan.

Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale (1951) and over 50 other books on writing, speaking, history, politics and sailing, including a series of novels featuring CIA agent Blackford Oakes. Buckley referred to himself as either a libertarian or conservative. He resided in New York City and Stamford, Connecticut. He was a practicing Roman Catholic, regularly attending the traditional Latin Mass in Connecticut.

In the late 1960s, Buckley joined the Board of Directors of Amnesty International USA. He resigned in January 1978 in protest over the organization's stance against capital punishment as expressed in its Stockholm Declaration of 1977, which he said would lead to the "inevitable sectarianization of the amnesty movement".