Back in 1959, Buckley excoriated the flabbiness of thought that attended an invitation to Nikita Khrushchev to visit the United States. He concluded: "Khrushchev cannot take permanent advantage of our temporary disadvantage, for it is the West he is fighting. And in the West there lie, however encysted, the ultimate resources, which are moral in nature. In the end, we will bury him." Throughout the decades, with his intellectual pickax, Buckley uncovered those ultimate resources.
He spoke often of the gratitude we owe our civilizational forebears and regretted that "a country -- a civilization -- that gives us such gifts as we dispose of cannot be repaid in kind. There is no way in which we can give to the United States a present of a bill of rights in exchange for its having given us the Bill of Rights."
But Buckley did his utmost to repay it in kind. Long ago, he himself entered what he liked to call freedom's House of Lords, and he is now due what he once movingly called for: "We need a rebirth of gratitude for those who have cared for us, living and, mostly, dead. The high moments of our way of life are their gifts to us. We must remember them in our thoughts and in our prayers; and in our deeds." RIP.