WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

Considered by many, including myself, to be one of the, if not the, greatest American conservative commentators of the 20th century, Mr. Buckley was born in New York City to a lawyer and successful oil baron. He lived for a while as a youth in Mexico when his father operated out of that country. He graduated from the University of Mexico in 1943 and immediately enrolled in the U.S. Army's Officer Candidate School from which he was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant. One of his first duties as such as to be part of President Roosevelt's honor guard upon that leader's death. When the War ended, he enrolled in Yale where his conservatism took hold. He was the Chairman of the Yale Daily News for a time. He was said to have been an excellent debater and he became a member of the secret Skull and Bones society. After Yale, he went to work for the CIA. He was assigned to Mexico, a region he knew well, and was under the direction of E. Howard Hunt, famous CIA operative and spy novellist and Watergate conspirator. Back in civilian life, he founded the National Review, a soon-to-be major voice in the conservative movement and later started the weekly commentary program Firing Line on PBS.