Ahead Of His Time

David Frum pens a striking appreciation of William F Buckley Jr in Yale's alumni magazine. Money quote:

With God and Man at Yale, William F. Buckley was audaciously claiming that a Catholic could speak to Yale with all the rights of an insider -- rather than with the grateful deference appropriate to an outsider. In time, similar claims would be made by Jewish students, by African American students, by women, by gays, and by the children of the great post-1970 immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Many (not all) of their particular claims would have appalled the author of God and Man at Yale. And yet those claims were also anticipated and to some degree made possible by him. A strange outcome -- but then again, maybe not so strange. At once reactionary and rebel, conservative and iconoclast, religiously orthodox but culturally heterodox, a man of the 1950s in his politics but a man of the 1960s in his literary sensibility, Buckley was a man of many dimensions.