Krishna

Ol' William F. Buckley died yesterday, many years after surviving his encounter with Allen Ginsberg:

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[Richard]

As a teenager in 1965, I worked in the campaign of Republican-Liberal candidate for New York mayor, Rep. John Lindsay, but Buckley’s campaign on the Conservative Party line was a delight to watch. His erudition and wit shone through everything he did, as did his joie de vivre.

As someone wrote today, he may have hated the things liberals believed in, but Buckley never hated liberals, many of whom were his close friends.

He harkens back to an era of elevated public discourse when we did not see the crass and often vulgar insults that pass for political discourse on the airwaves and online.

Buckley was a terrific writer on any subject, and as an author, I’m grateful to his inclusion of me in his Buckley-Little Catalogue project back in the 1980s.

His Blackford Oates novels are really good.

I met him once at an Authors Guild event at the Lotos Club in Manhattan and he was as charming as I expected.

I had told him the story of my first HIV test. At that time, in the early 1980s, Buckley was calling for mandatory tattooing and confinement of HIV-positive people. When my doctor told me I should be tested, he also advised me to sign the form with a pseudonym so that no one could track me down in case of such an action as Buckley had recommended — easy to believe in a time of hysteria like 1986.

So I signed my AIDS test consent form “William F. Buckley Jr.”

Buckley laughed when I told him this and said he was happy to find out he tested negative.

[auntie scott]

richard-
that is awesome!