DEBOUCHING.(The Talk of the Town)(Buckley)

The driving directions to the Buckley residence overlooking Long Island Sound, in Stamford, include a caveat--the Buckleys being Yale people--for those travelling from New Haven: "You will need to turn left on debouching from I-95." It's a small, slightly anachronistic touch, and one that illustrates nicely the contrast between the mannered, Blue State conservatism of the author, William F., and the gruff, Red State conservatism of the recently reelected President, George W., another Yale man.

Make no mistake: despite his public misgivings about the Iraq endeavor, and about the growth of (big-"G") government during the current term, Buckley was for Bush. Now seventy-eight and in the retirement phase of his career (he recently relinquished his ownership stake in National Review, the opinion journal that he founded in 1955), Buckley was in Manhattan on Election Night to host a small gathering--"the people who were there are well renowned and disparate"--at his East Seventy-third Street town house, as he has every four years for a few decades. Bob Silvers, the co-editor of The New York Review of Books, attended, as did Tom Wolfe and Henry Kissinger.

"Last time around, of course, there was a lot of equivocal business, and I finally forced people to leave at around one," Buckley recalled last Wednesday. "Yesterday--I've been kind of sick, so I went to bed around eleven-thirty," he said. "Most people went home by midnight."

It was dusk, and Buckley had just recently returned to Stamford, after filing his syndicated column, in which he speculated that the next election might be his last. He had dropped by his study--a converted garage cluttered with books and memorabilia ("William F. Buckley, Justice of the Peace")--to participate gamely in a call-in radio show, and to work on a book review about Isabel Paterson. ("You'll have no reason to know who she is, but it's interesting: she was one of three women--the others are Rose Wilder Lane and Ayn Rand--who published libertarian books in 1943.") Such is his retirement.

Now, at last, there was a moment for reflection--cocktails--and he began leading the way to the house, accompanied by his Cavalier King Charles spaniels, Sebby and Lizzie. "Careful--watch your step now," he said. "Let's go sit in the music room. Now, what will you have from the bar?"

Fifty years ago, when Buckley was just starting out, it would have been nearly impossible to imagine the current state of American politics: solid Republican majorities in the House and the Senate, majority Republican governorships, a two-term conservative-Republican President. The South then was still largely Democratic; the great Blue/Red divide had not hardened so firmly. Roe had not yet met Wade. Buckley, through it all, has maintained a broad, largely unaffected, historical perspective.

"I do feel disconnected, but I always have," he said, sitting down with a Scotch. "Here's an example. The first election party I sat in, I was at the faculty club of Yale, to which I was invited by Professor Willmoore Kendall. And this was nineteen hundred and forty-eight, and there were twenty-three faculty members in political science. They'd done a straw poll, Truman or Dewey: twenty-three Truman, zero ...