AND HE WAGED WAR ON OUR OWN KOOKS:

Beginning in 1955, National Review provided a public platform for the champions of libertarian thought like Max Eastman and Frank Meyer, traditionalist ideas like Russell Kirk, and uncompromising anti-communism like Whittaker Chambers.

With Frank Meyer's help, Buckley developed the idea of fusionism, a blending of the three major strains of conservatism, and persuaded conservatives to stop fighting each other and focus on the real enemies--Soviet communism abroad and overweening federal government at home.

Buckley took as his model the liberal New Republic. In a memorandum for investors, he called his new publication "a formative journal" that would "change the nation's intellectual and political climate" just as the Nation and the New Republic helped usher in "the New Deal revolution."

The time was right, he said, for a magazine--and a movement--that would oppose ever bigger government, expose eager social engineers, and challenge those who counseled coexistence with communism, intellectual conformity, the elimination of the market economy, and world government.

National Review was only the first political step by Buckley to build a movement. Next came the formation of Young Americans for Freedom that served as the ground troops for Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater's "glorious disaster" in the 1964 presidential election and Ronald Reagan's capture of the presidency in 1980.

Buckley was also a founder of the Conservative Party of New York that nominated and helped elect James Buckley in 1970 to the Senate. Undoubtedly, his most audacious political act was to run in 1965 for mayor of New York City, the citadel of liberalism.

In that race, he threw down a conservative gauntlet to demonstrate that conservatism was not dead and buried, despite the overwhelming Goldwater defeat, but very much alive. He presented a conservative alternative to working-class Irish and other ethnic Catholics repelled by the ever more liberal policies of the liberal Democrats who dominated New York City politics.

On Election Day, an impressive 13.4 percent (341,226) of the electorate voted for Buckley. Political analyst Kevin Phillips, author of the landmark work, "The Emerging Republican Majority," cited Buckley's vote as a "harbinger" of the new majority that elected Richard Nixon in 1968.

The apogee of Buckley's political efforts came in 1980 with the election of Reagan as the most conservative president in modern times. By his own admission, Reagan had learned much of his conservatism by reading National Review and forging a close friendship with its editor-turned-presidential adviser.

Tweet   @brothersjudd