Candidate.(Remembering WFB)(William F. Buckley, Jr.)(In memoriam)

WHEN I reflect on the famous mayoral victory of 1965, I think first not of Bill's wit and grace and charm, all of which have been justly celebrated, but of his courage, both physical and moral. In those days, people who stirred passions in the public arena tended to attract not just criticism but gunfire. John Kennedy, George Wallace, Martin Luther King--it wasn't so much their brand of politics as the intensity of their campaigns that made them targets. And the Buckley campaign was nothing if not high-intensity. I kept a file of the threats, but Bill was never interested.

For the other part, moral courage, Bill was pretty much on his own. Of the dozens of great lines he coined for the bedazzlement of the media, one popped out on the sidewalk next to the old New York Times building on Times Square. Asked how he felt after leaving his session with the editorial board, he replied: "I feel as if I've just passed through the Berlin Wall." Lifeless today, the jape, in context, had snap and crackle. There really was a Berlin Wall in those days, and people were getting shot while trying to climb over it. And when Bill confronted the editorial board, he was not arguing the relative merits of covering 92 percent or 96 percent of the populace with some leviathan insurance scheme. He was proposing to uproot the Establishment, cast it aside and replace it with something better. The Times's editorial board, sitting at the epicenter of that Establishment, was in full self-preservation mode: They had met the enemy and they were determined to destroy him. It was tense in there. But just as there are ...