In addition to editorials in National Review, Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale (1951) and more than 50 other books on diverse topics, including writing, speaking, history, politics, and sailing.

Buckley's father was an oil developer whose wealth was based in Mexico and became influential in Mexican politics during the military dictatorship of Victoriano Huerta, but was expelled when leftist general Álvaro Obregón became president in 1920.

[45] The book defended Senator Joseph McCarthy as a patriotic crusader against communism, and asserted that "McCarthyism ... is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.

Each particular strain of thought had predecessors earlier in the twentieth (and even nineteenth) centuries, but they were joined in their distinctive postwar formulation through the leadership of William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review.

The fusion of these different, competing, and not easily reconciled schools of thought led to the creation, Nash argued, of a coherent modern Right.Buckley sought out intellectuals who were ex-Communists or had once worked on the far Left, including Whittaker Chambers, Willi Schlamm, John Dos Passos, Frank Meyer, and James Burnham,[52] as editors and writers for National Review.

[55] Buckley and his editors used National Review to define the boundaries of conservatism and to exclude people, ideas, or groups they considered unworthy of the conservative title.

[59][60] In 1964, he wrote of "her desiccated philosophy's conclusive incompatibility with the conservative's emphasis on transcendence, intellectual and moral", as well as "the incongruity of tone, that hard, schematic, implacable, unyielding, dogmatism that is in itself intrinsically objectionable, whether it comes from the mouth of Ehrenburg, Savonarola—or Ayn Rand.

Nevertheless, historian Jennifer Burns argues, Rand's popularity and influence on the right forced Buckley and his circle into a reconsideration of how traditional notions of virtue and Christianity could be integrated with all-out support for capitalism.

[40] For many Americans, Buckley's erudition on his weekly PBS show Firing Line (1966–1999) was their primary exposure to him and his manner of speech, often with vocabulary common in academia but unusual on television.

[77] An article by Buckley about the case, published in Esquire in November 1965, drew national media attention:[77] Smith said he told [friend Don Hommell] during their brief conversation ... on the night of the murder just where he had discarded his pants.

Buckley, visibly angered, rose several inches from his seat and replied, "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face, and you'll stay plastered.

[92] Buckley maintained a philosophical antipathy toward Vidal's other bête noire, Norman Mailer, calling him "almost unique in his search for notoriety and absolutely unequalled in his co-existence with it.

[95][96] Buckley was also a friend of economist John Kenneth Galbraith[97][98] and former senator and presidential candidate George McGovern,[99] both of whom he frequently featured or debated on Firing Line and college campuses.

Buckley opined that temporary segregation in the South was necessary at the time because the black population lacked the education, economic, and cultural development to make racial equality possible.

[113][114][115] Buckley claimed that the white South had "the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races".

[122] On January 15, 1963, the day after George Wallace, the white supremacist governor of Alabama, made his "Segregation Forever" inaugural address, Buckley published a feature essay in National Review on his recent "South African Fortnight", concluding it with these words concerning apartheid: "I know it is a sincere people's effort to fashion the land of peace they want so badly.

"[123][124] In his report, Buckley tried to define apartheid and came up with four axioms on which the policy stands, the fourth being "The notion that the Bantu could participate in power on equal terms with the whites is the worst kind of ideological and social romance".

[125] After publishing this defense of the Hendrik Verwoerd government, Buckley wrote that he was "bursting with pride" over the West German social critic Wilhelm Röpke's praise of the piece.

[127] According to Politico, the turning point for Buckley was when white supremacists set off a bomb in a Birmingham church on September 15, 1963, which resulted in the deaths of four African American girls.

"[148] In 2020, the Columbia Journalism Review uncovered documents that implicated Buckley in a media campaign by the Argentina military junta promoting the regime's image while covering up the Dirty War.

[151] Of the Iraq War, Buckley said, "The reality of the situation is that missions abroad to effect regime change in countries without a bill of rights or democratic tradition are terribly arduous."

[156] Buckley wrote a pro-marijuana-legalization piece for National Review in 2004 in which he called for conservatives to change their views on legalization, writing, "We're not going to find someone running for president who advocates reform of those laws.

Calling it "a fact" that AIDS is "the special curse of the homosexual", he argued that people infected with HIV should marry only if they agreed to sterilization and that universal testing—led by insurance companies, not the government—should be mandatory.

[162] Sociologist Patricia Leavy called it "Buckley's High Church, mid-Atlantic accent (taught to actors in the Hollywood studios of the 1930s and 1940s) that was curdled by an ascendant tincture of Southern drawl that softened somewhat the supercilious inflection that very likely was spawned during his education at Yale".

"[171] George H. Nash, a historian of the modern American conservative movement, said in 2008 that Buckley was "arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century.

"[172] Conversely, political consultant Stuart Stevens, who served as a top strategist on Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign[173] and later as a leading figure with The Lincoln Project, wrote, "for all his well-crafted sentences and love of language, Buckley was often a more articulate version of the same deep ugliness and bigotry that is the hallmark of Trumpism.

New York Times critic Charlie Rubin wrote that the series "at its best, evokes John O'Hara in its precise sense of place amid simmering class hierarchies".

Initially it was reported that he was found dead at his desk in his study, a converted garage, and his son, Christopher Buckley, said, "He died with his boots on after a lifetime of riding pretty tall in the saddle.

"[195] But in his 2009 book Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir, he admitted this account was a slight embellishment on his part; while his father did die in his study, he was found lying on the floor.

Notable members of the Republican political establishment paying tribute to Buckley included President George W. Bush,[199] former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, and former First Lady Nancy Reagan.