OPINION:
With antisemitism at a fever pitch, it’s hard to believe that William F. Buckley Jr. ever existed. Put another way, when people ask me what I miss most about my friend and mentor, Bill, it’s that he stood boldly at the border of conservatism, yelling “Stop!” to antisemitism. That border has become porous and poisonous, not only on the right and left but everywhere.
People speak of guardrails, but what we’re truly missing are guardians of our civilization. Bill Buckley was one of those, and we are poorer without him. Today, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, I’m honored to share my story and the unlikely story of a Jewish kid from St. Paul and one of the foremost Catholics of the 20th century.
I was 19 when I first met this colossus, William F. Buckley Jr. It was 1995, and I was studying to become a concert pianist in New York. In the autumn of 1994, I had the audacity to send a letter to his office at National Review offering him a thank-you present, in the form of a piano recital, for having emboldened Soviet Jewish immigrants to come to America and to make it here. My parents did exactly that in 1975, and I grew up as a Reagan kid in Mondale’s Minnesota.
This made me a bit of an anachronism in elementary school, and Buckley loomed large in our home, with my parents watching “Firing Line.” When I arrived in New York to study at the Manhattan School of Music, I sought out Buckley, 50 years my senior, and he wrote back, inviting me to play for him at his majestic maisonette on East 73rd Street and Park Avenue. After that surreal experience, we stayed in touch for a few years through letters. In the interim, I moved back to Minnesota and graduated from Macalester College, not a conservative institution by any stretch. This was 1998, and this time I wrote to him boldly proclaiming that I wanted to do for classical music what he had done for conservatism in America.
Bill’s next move was to offer me a $25,000 grant, which brought me back to New York to study the role of music education in New York City schools and to pursue my ambition to start a performing arts cable channel and become a classical music impresario. Before I knew it, he became my friend, “Bill,” and a mentor who changed my life.
All this happened because I wrote Bill a letter and he wrote back. There are countless stories about Bill answering letters and becoming a mentor to legions of proteges. A couple of months ago, the U.S. Postal Service unveiled a Buckley stamp. How appropriate to honor one of the great letter writers of the 20th century with a stamp. When he passed away, Yale University received 1,100 shoe boxes of Buckley correspondence for its archives. Now you, too, can write a letter to someone you revere and affix a Buckley stamp.
Bill’s initial reply and invitation to play for him was one of many gestures he made during our unlikely friendship, which changed the course of my life. We met because he fostered a culture where timely correspondence with countless people was of paramount importance to him. This virtue was even more impressive since he was one of the busiest people in America: host of “Firing Line,” editor of National Review, public speaker, syndicated columnist, author of 55 books, sailor, harpsichordist and one of the foremost Catholics.
I learned from many of Bill’s virtues, and his character shone brightest among them. He had an uncanny ability to add a diverse array of friendships to his life. The fact that he welcomed me, a Jewish kid from St. Paul, into his world illustrated that he was always expanding his circle. What a lesson for today, as people wean out friendships based on politics.
After 13 years of friendship, on Feb. 26, 2008, I was Bill’s last dinner guest, dining with him at his home in Connecticut. I was staying over because he had invited me to play a recital for his friends the next day, a tradition we started nearly a decade earlier where every six or eight months he would choose a different work by Bach or Beethoven for me to learn for salon concerts at 73rd Street. I was in his living room on Feb. 27, 2008, practicing Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations,” Bill’s favorite work, when he passed away. He was in his office, a converted barn overflowing with memorabilia from his prolific life. Fittingly, he was writing a book about his protege, Ronald Reagan. One week earlier I had played “the Diabelli,” as he called the work, for what turned out to be the last gathering of his siblings.
Classical music always played a central role in Bill’s life, so much so that as a teenager, he briefly flirted with becoming a concert pianist but lacked the requisite talent. At Great Elm, Buckley’s childhood estate in Sharon, Connecticut, he and his nine siblings were required to play piano and listen to classical music nearly every day. Nothing gave him greater joy than listening to Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” and other masterpieces. Decades later, Bill curated the recitals, which served as a centerpiece of the East 73rd Street salon presided over by his wife Patricia T. Buckley, a social doyenne of New York, who would quip, “Bill married me for the piano.” This is where the Buckleys’ ideologically varied friends, including Schuyler Chapin, Peter Duchin and Henry Kissinger, listened to pianists Rosalyn Tureck, Simone Dinnerstein, Bruce Levingston, Ignat Solzhenitsyn and me.
At the end of one of these dinner parties, I asked Bill a political question and he responded, “Politics is my vocation, not my avocation.” His statement speaks louder than ever in this hyper-politicized era. William. F. Buckley Jr. — the man who made conservatism cool, stood against antisemitism and helped defeat the Soviet Union by ushering in the Reagan era — was telling me that politics should not be what drives our lives.
Today, I release a recording I made of Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations” on the Buckleys’ Bosendorfer piano several months after Bill passed away. It’s my way of honoring Bill’s memory on this special day.
Let’s celebrate Buckley’s 100th birthday and emulate him by writing more letters, forging more friendships that transcend ideologies, religions and generations, and remembering that our avocations should balance our politics for the good of our nation.
• Lawrence Perelman is the founder and CEO of Semantix Creative Group and the author of “American Impresario: William F. Buckley, Jr. and the Elements of American Character” (Bombardier Books 2025).
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