"The so-called conservative, uncomfortably disdainful of controversy, seldom has the energy to fight his battles, while the radical, so often a member of the minority, exerts disproportionate influence because of his dedication to his cause," he would observe in God and Man at Yale, the book that stands today as the founding text of the modern conservative movement. Fully 50 percent of its undergraduates identified themselves as Republicans in a campus poll published in Buckley's sophomore year, as opposed to 17 percent Democrats and 3 percent Socialists.īut to Buckley, majority views, expressed passively in a poll, mattered less than the tenor of ideological debate, and there liberals and even the few campus leftists seemed to hold the advantage. On the surface, Yale was not in need of conservative indoctrination. Buckley came with a mission: to advance the conservative ideology he had grown up with and taken with him to boarding school in Millbrook, New York, and then to the army. He was taking initiatives as soon as he got to Yale. But Bill was someone to be reckoned with immediately. "There were some very strong and visible, successful undergraduates. "He was the most impressive figure, most visible figure in class," remembered the almost equally driven Tom Guinzburg ’50, one of Buckley's closest college friends-his coeditor on the Daily News, fellow Bonesman, later his occasional book publisher. ’51, the future presidential speechwriter who came to Yale in 1947, at age 17, and observed the vets with awe. "They were men," recalled Raymond Price Jr. Two-thirds were veterans hundreds had seen action in Europe or the Pacific. Most members of the Class of 1950 had put up with a great deal more. These were inconveniences, not hardships. Buckley and his classmates stood for hours on registration lines and began the term eating meatless meals because of job actions by strikers and meatpackers and delays from the Office of Price Administration in Washington. Vestiges of wartime "processing" remained. Others bunked as far away as Allingtown, three miles from New Haven. The Old Campus, built to accommodate 850 people, now held 1,200. Bill, the Class of 1950 was by far the largest in Yale history, its 1,800 members more than double the prewar average. Army, arrived in New Haven, he entered a university undergoing a profound transformation. Buckley Jr., 20 years old and freshly discharged from the U.S. "Sonorous pretensions notwithstanding, Yale (and my guess is most other colleges and universities) does subscribe to an orthodoxy," he wrote.
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