The New York Times is reporting that Bill Buckley is dead. They have no story to go with the headline yet.
Obviously I didn't agree with much he ever said or wrote, but the guy was leagues better than the spittle-spewing Limbaugh-Fox types that pass for "conservative commentators" nowadays. I for one will miss him.
Updates below...
UPDATE: The Times now has a full three-page obit up at http://www.nytimes.com/...
The obit pulls no punches, noting that Buckley's second book was a defense of Joe McCarthy, and that National Review in its early days was very explicitly against civil rights. I knew of the racist views of Buckley and NR previously, but I bet a lot of people will be surprised by that -- it hasn't been well-publicized enough. Good for the Times for not white-washing the ugly parts of Buckley's intellectual legacy.
I'll be interested to see if the AP obit, and others, are similarly blunt. So far all I can find from the AP is a three-sentence blurb.
UPDATE 2: The AP has a short obit out. See it at http://hosted.ap.org/...
It's completely positive toward Buckley, although a longer obit might be forthcoming.
UPDATE 3: The AP story is now about twice the length it was when I first linked to it, and it does mention National Review's odious defense of segregation. It also brings up Buckley's famous denunciation of The Beatles, although not his admission years later that he was "simply wrong" about them.
Like the comments people have made below, my feelings toward Buckley are very mixed. Many of his opinions were not merely wrong, but downright appalling, as in NR's defense of Jim Crow. But he had genuine intellectual heft, and was never afraid to defend his ideas against the other side's sharpest minds. He was in a totally different weight class than the bloviating talk show hosts who carefully screen their calls to make sure no one ever challenges their bullshit. The idiots and shriekers who pass for "conservative thinkers" nowadays have always made me nostalgic for the days when Bill Buckley was the lead dog of that pack. I'm sorry that they're still here and he's gone. For all his faults, he was vastly better than those who followed him. Rest in peace, WFB.
UPDATE 4: jlkenney posted a link in the comments to a really lovely memorial to Buckley by liberal author Rick Perlstein. It's such a good read that I wanted to link to it up here instead of leaving it buried several screens down: http://www.ourfuture.org/...