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

NOW that Bill has met God, he'll have some idea of how I felt when I met him. I joined the staff of NR in 1979, the year I finished college. Bill was in his early 50s and his "cruising speed" was about 500 miles per hour. Who was that traipsing down the hall? A 60 Minutes camera crew. Who was waiting downstairs? A Nobel Prize winner come for lunch. Where is Bill today? London, Antarctica? Who's calling? Johnny Carson? Margaret Thatcher? Alexander Hamilton?

It would have been dizzying just to observe. But Bill drew everyone in. Even a lowly editorial assistant was permitted to write for the magazine--under the careful discipline of Bill's red pen. NR was not for the faint-hearted. One of my early efforts came downstairs with "Needs a cold shower" written in red ink across the top.

Bill had the capacity to make all of us feel that we were delightful to him. If you chanced to run into him on the stairway or in the hall, he would break into the widest grin in the Western hemisphere and greet you as if this meeting were all he needed to cap his day.

Some of my happiest memories are of times when I made Bill laugh. In 1985, NR was ...