Buckley was born November 24, 1925, in New York City to lawyer and oil baron William Frank Buckley, Sr., of Irish ancestry, and Aloise Josephine Antonia Steiner, a New Orleans native of Swiss-German origins. The sixth of ten children, Buckley moved as a boy with his family from Mexico to Sharon, Connecticut, before beginning his formal schooling in Paris, where he attended first grade. By age seven, he received his first formal training in English at a day school in London; his first and second languages were Spanish and French.[10] As a boy, Buckley developed a love for music, sailing, horses, hunting, skiing, and story-telling. All of these interests would be reflected in his later writings. Just before World War II, at age 13, he attended high school at the Catholic preparatory school Beaumont College in England. During the war, his family took in the future British historian Alistair Horne as a child war evacuee. Buckley and Horne remained lifelong friends. Buckley and Horne both attended the Millbrook School, in Millbrook, New York, and graduated as members of the Class of 1943. At Millbrook, Buckley founded and edited the school's yearbook, The Tamarack, his first experience in publishing. When Buckley was a young man, his father was an acquaintance of libertarian author Albert Jay Nock. William F. Buckley, Sr., encouraged his son to read Nock's works. As a youth, Buckley developed many musical talents. He played the harpsichord very well, later calling it "the instrument I love beyond all others".[11] He was an accomplished pianist and appeared once on Marian McPartland's National Public Radio show "Piano Jazz".[12] A great admirer of Johann Sebastian Bach,[11] Buckley said that he wanted Bach's music played at his funeral.[13] In 1950, Buckley married Patricia Aldyen Austin "Pat" Taylor (1926--2007), daughter of Canadian industrialist Austin C. Taylor. He met Pat, a Protestant from Vancouver, British Columbia, while she was a student at Vassar College. She later became a prominent fundraiser for such charitable organizations as the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the Institute of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery at New York University Medical Center and the Hospital for Special Surgery. She also raised money for Vietnam War veterans and AIDS patients. On April 15, 2007, she died of an infection after a long illness at age 80.[14] After her death, Buckley seemed "dejected and rudderless," according to friend Christopher Little.[15] The couple had one son, author Christopher Buckley. William F. Buckley Jr. had nine siblings, including sister Maureen Buckley-O'Reilly (1933--1964) who married Gerald A. O'Reilly, the CEO of Richardson-Vicks drugs; sister Priscilla L. Buckley, author of Living It Up With National Review: A Memoir, for which William wrote the foreword; sister Patricia Buckley Bozell, who was Patricia Taylor's roommate at Vassar before each married; brother Fergus Reid Buckley, an author, debate-master, and founder of the Buckley School of Public Speaking; and brother James L. Buckley, who became a U.S. Senator from New York and was later a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.[16] Buckley co-authored a book, McCarthy and His Enemies, with his brother-in-law, attorney L. Brent Bozell, Jr., (Patricia's husband), who worked with Buckley at The American Mercury in the early 1950s when it was edited by William Bradford Huie.[17] Buckley's oldest sister Aloise Buckley Heath was a writer and conservative activist. His nephew is political consultant Bill O'Reilly.[18] Buckley was raised a Catholic, and was a member of the Knights of Malta.[19] He described his faith by saying, "I grew up, as reported, in a large family of Catholics without even a decent ration of tentativeness among the lot of us about our religious faith."[20] As a child, he attended St. John's, Beaumont, a boarding school in Old Windsor, for a time before the outbreak of World War II. Later, he attended Millbrook, a Protestant school, but was permitted to attend Catholic Mass at a nearby church. As a youth, he became aware of anti-Catholic bias in the United States, particularly American Freedom and Catholic Power, a Paul Blanshard book that accused American Catholics of having 'divided loyalties.' The release of his first book, God and Man at Yale, was met with some specific criticism pertaining to his Catholicism. McGeorge Bundy, dean of Harvard at the time, wrote in The Atlantic that "it seems strange for any Roman Catholic to undertake to speak for the Yale religious tradition." Henry Sloan Coffin, a Yale trustee, accused Buckley's book of "being distorted by his Roman Catholic point of view" and stated that Buckley "should have attended Fordham or some similar institution." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_F_Buckley

• published: 27 Oct 2013
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