I only met William F. Buckley Jr. once. It was a few years ago, in the summer of 2003, when I was interning at National Review, the magazine Buckley launched in 1955 at the ripe old age of 29. I was invited (as all National Review summer interns were) to the biweekly editorial dinner at his posh Manhattan townhouse. I was nervous and intimidated, fully expecting to say something stupid or, in a clumsy attempt to keep pace with Buckley’s legendary wit, crack a joke that fell flat. Better to stay tight-lipped, I reckoned, and chew my food quietly.

I am hardly the first person—indeed, I am probably the eight millionth person—to say that Buckley’s warmth, thoughtfulness, and easygoing manner made one feel surprisingly comfortable around him. When it was time for dinner, he beckoned me to sit next to him at the table. When he asked me about school—I was then just a few weeks removed from my junior year in college—he seemed genuinely interested in the response.

Buckley’s immense curiosity and cornucopia of interests—writing, skiing, sailing, Bach, the harpsichord—reflected his intellectual passions, his zest for life, and what F. Scott Fitzgerald, in an entirely different context, called the “capacity for wonder.” But it was his generosity and kindness that most impressed me—along with so many others. Some celebrities are uncomfortable with their fame; others are insufferably arrogant; Buckley was neither. He managed to be affable, self-effacing, and unpretentious. For a man of such prolific and diverse accomplishments, that was no small feat.

His celebrity transcended journalism, politics, and intellectual life. He earned a mention in Woody Allen’s classic 1977 movie Annie Hall (“Why don’t you get William F. Buckley to kill the spider?”) and later was mimicked, ever so briefly, by the Robin Williams-voiced Genie in Disney’s Aladdin. Years earlier, Williams had impersonated Buckley on “Saturday Night Live.”

More than four decades ago, Buckley remarked, with typical wryness, “It is generally believed in Europe that the principal contribution America can make to Western thought is not to think at all.” He proved the foolishness of such snobbery. Back when Buckley founded National Review, it was by no means inevitable that moral traditionalists, free-market libertarians, and hawkish anti-Communists would gather under the same ideological tent and make common cause as the “conservative movement.” Nor was it inevitable that such a movement would be able to purge the cranks, bigots, anti-Semites, and other reprobates lurking around its fringes. But, thanks to Buckley, both of these things eventually happened.

In many ways, he was the first megastar political journalist; indeed, as Sam Tanenhaus has noted, Buckley’s long-running television show essentially 'invented TV punditry.'

In many ways, he was the first megastar political journalist; indeed, as Sam Tanenhaus has noted, Buckley’s long-running television show “Firing Line” essentially “invented TV punditry.” In the course of achieving fame, he unleashed an intellectual tidal wave on the right side of American politics. The proliferation of magazines, think tanks, TV shows, radio programs, and, ultimately, websites that followed cannot be attributed solely to Buckley and National Review. But he played a big role—a bigger role, certainly, than any other single journalist.

Buckley is correctly described as “the father” of modern U.S. conservatism. But he was no dogmatist or rigid ideologue (neither, incidentally, was Ronald Reagan, despite some current attempts to cast him that way). In the 1970s, for example, Buckley became an unlikely supporter of the Panama Canal treaties, which Reagan, and most other conservatives, opposed. He even invited Reagan to debate the issue on “Firing Line.” The debate aired live in January 1978.

“Some have assigned to this debate something of historical significance,” Buckley wrote in Miles Gone By, his 2004 literary autobiography. “Whether this is to inflate its effect I do not know. Certainly it was of consequence in my own career—I received disparaging mail for having deserted first principles, and the stand I took is still here and there cited as evidence of my unreliability as a conservative.”

So was his position on the drug war. As early as 1972, National Review ran a cover story urging the decriminalization of marijuana use. A quarter century later, Buckley declared, “The cost of the drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment with drugs.” In 2004, he wrote that, “although there is a perfectly respectable case against using marijuana, the penalties imposed on those who reject that case, or who give way to weakness of resolution, are very difficult to defend.”

During his final years, Buckley changed his mind about the ongoing Iraq war, which he had originally backed. “With the benefit of minute hindsight, Saddam Hussein wasn’t the kind of extra-territorial menace that was assumed by the administration one year ago,'' he told The New York Times in June 2004. “If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war.”

He changed his mind about other things, too. As Peter Robinson points out, Buckley eventually regretted that the United States had intervened in Vietnam, and he appreciated the outcome of the 1960s-era African-American civil rights movement, even though, at the time, he had criticized that movement on constitutional grounds. Buckley’s stance on civil rights in the late 1950s and early 1960s remains a blemish on his legacy, as journalists like Timothy Noah remind us. But the evolution of Buckley’s thinking must also be acknowledged.

With his death this week, at age 82, America lost an authentic intellectual giant. Yet the consequences of his life continue to be felt. As The Economist magazine’s “Lexington” column observed in March 2006, “America now far outclasses Europe in its ability to produce intellectuals with root-and-branch schemes for improving society.” William F. Buckley deserves a healthy share of the credit.

Duncan Currie is managing editor of THE AMERICAN.