Founder of a movement -- WFB jr

William F. Buckley, Jr., author of numerous non-fiction books (most notably God and Man at Yale) and novels, father of the modern conservative movement in the US and the founder of National Review has decided to quit (in a way) instead of dying onstage (to paraphrase him) -- he decided to sell his voting stock in National Review to five trustees and stepped down as CEO in favor of Ed Capuano. Details are here.

Buckley is 78; National Review is 49 and has influenced political thought in this country probably more than any other periodical during its existence.

Here is a nice essay by Jeff Jacoby regarding Buckley.

And here is the famous Publisher's Statement that ran in the first issue of National Review and set the tone for modern conservatism: "standing athwart history yelling STOP." Some highlights from the Statement:

NATIONAL REVIEW is out of place, in the sense that the United Nations and the League of Women Voters and the New York Times . . . are in place. It is out of place because, in its maturity, literate America rejected conservatism in favor of radical social experimentation. Instead of covetously consolidating its premises, the United States seems tormented by its tradition of fixed postulates having to do with the meaning of existence, with the relationship of the state to the individual, of the individual to his neighbor, so clearly enunciated in the enabling documents of our Republic.

"I happen to prefer champagne to ditchwater," said the benign old wrecker of the ordered society, Oliver Wendell Holmes, "but there is no reason to suppose that the cosmos does." We have come around to Mr. Holmes' view, so much that we feel gentlemanly doubts when asserting the superiority of capitalism to socialism, of republicanism to centralism, of champagne to ditchwater — of anything to anything . . . The inroads that relativism has made on the American soul are not so easily evident. One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things.

* * *
We have nothing to offer but the best that is in us. That, a thousand Liberals who read this sentiment will say with relief, is clearly not enough! It isn't enough. But it is at this point that we steal the march. For we offer, besides ourselves, a position that has not grown old under the weight of a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy, a position untempered by the doctoral dissertations of a generation of Ph.D's in social architecture, unattenuated by a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand different pressure groups, uncorroded by a cynical contempt for human freedom. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaves us just about the hottest thing in town.

Read the whole thing -- National Review's purpose is as relevant today as it was 49 years ago.