Man of thought, man of action.(William F. Buckley, Jr.)(In memoriam)

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.--"Bill" to that half of the world he knew personally--was the star of many odd and significant stories. In two of the oddest and most significant stories involving him, however, Bill was not the central figure at all but one of history's "extras."

The better known story concerns his presence at Heston Aerodrome when Neville Chamberlain returned from his famous meeting with Hitler. Bill's father made a detour while driving his son to boarding school in England to witness Chamberlain's arrival. So WFB was on hand to hear Chamberlain announce that it was his and Hitler's joint intention never to go to war again in their lifetimes.

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Bill made less of this story than most of us would have done. In Miles Gone By, he tells us merely that, beset by homesickness, he spent his first ten days at the school praying for war so that his parents would have to bring him home. In later conversation he doubted this brush with history had particularly influenced his views on foreign policy.

Maybe. But it is hard to believe that a precocious (everyone agrees on that) twelve-year-old would not have drawn some conclusions from his small connection with such momentous events. After all, so many of Bill's subsequent opinions--from the wickedness of appeasing the unappeasable to the general vanity of human wishes--are illustrated in advance by this tableau of Chamberlain's earnest delusion. It suggests God tapping Bill on the shoulder and telling him to pay attention.

The second story I had entirely forgotten until I read Bill's obituary in the Financial Times. This revealed that during his two years of military service, from 1944 to 1946, Bill had served as part of an honor guard at the funeral service of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Few dramatists but God would attempt such heavy symbolism--maybe Shakespeare. For Bill had come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. He was to spend the next sixty years seeking to deconstruct two of FDR's main achievements: the New Deal welfare state and the Yalta settlement of Europe. Even as he accompanied FDR's physical corpse, did Bill sense that his soldierly duty also indicated his ideological mission?