William F. Buckley Jr.

William Frank Buckley Jr. (November 24, 1925 to February 27, 2008) was an American writer, editor and television host. He founded National Review in 1955, hosted Firing Line from 1966 to 1999, and was a member of Skull and Bones at Yale University.¹ He served as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency in Mexico City under E. Howard Hunt beginning in 1951, and wrote of that service in his own words in 2005.² A CIA station chief of the same name, kidnapped in Beirut in 1984, has a separate page at William Buckley.

Family and the Mexican oil business

William Frank Buckley Sr. (born July 11, 1881 in Washington, Texas) took a law degree at the University of Texas, worked as a Spanish translator at the Texas Land Office, and began practicing law in Mexico City on November 1, 1908. The FBI headquarters file on his son records that he set up his own office in 1909 and was joined within two or three years by his brothers, Claude H. Buckley and Edmund L. Buckley, under the firm name Buckley & Buckley. The firm opened an office at Tampico about 1911 and "represented a number of large oil companies." The father left the firm in 1913 or 1914 and entered the oil business. In about 1919 he sent an organization into Venezuela and formed the Pantepec Oil Company, of which he was president for many years; the file states that the company was financed in the 1920s by E. A. Pierce & Company, later Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane.³

A biography published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2023, John A. Adams's William F. Buckley Sr.: Witness to the Mexican Revolution, 1908-1922, with a foreword by James L. Buckley, describes him as having built the Pantepec Oil Company, "the most profitable small petroleum producer in Mexico," and as having "ultimately was expelled from the country."⁴ An item from a Mexico City newspaper of December 1921, reprinted in the FBI file, reports a statement by the father to a representative of the Excelsior at San Antonio, Texas: "After residing in Mexico during thirteen years and during which time I acquired property valued at several million dollars, I was ordered to leave the country on Wednesday, November 23rd." In the same statement he attributed his expulsion to his opposition to President Obregon's government and said he had sent memorials on conditions in Mexico to the State Department in Washington.⁵ A Bureau summary memorandum of the 1950s gives the expulsion as 1922 "by the Obregon Government allegedly for activities opposing the Obregon Government," and records that the Bureau held its own main file on the father.⁶

The oil interests passed to the next generation. A son, John William Buckley, a Yale graduate of 1942 and an Army intelligence officer in North Africa and France, was president of Catawba Oil Explorations Company, which the FBI file describes as representing "various Venezuelan companies, a Canadian company, and an Ecuadorian company."⁷ A biographical directory entry reproduced in the same file lists him as president and director of "Can. So. Petroleum, Ltd." from 1954 and as president of United Canso Oil & Gas Ltd. and Pantepec International, Inc.⁸ A directory entry for James L. Buckley in the file lists him as vice president and director of Catawba Corp. from 1953 to 1970.⁹

A background check on William F. Buckley Jr., opened in June 1969 when the White House nominated him to a federal advisory body, records in a memorandum of June 12, 1969 that "The Catawba Corporation is apparently controlled by the Buckley family and Mr. Buckley is on the Board of Directors."¹⁰ In August 1973, when the Bureau updated the check for a second appointment, a Catawba Corporation officer in New York told agents that the appointee "continues to be a director" and that the president of the corporation was John Buckley, the appointee's brother.¹¹

Yale and Skull and Bones

Buckley attended St. John's Beaumont College in Old Windsor, England, in 1938 and 1939, the Millbrook School in New York from 1940 to 1943, and the University of Mexico in 1943.¹² He was inducted into the United States Army on August 10, 1944, accepted a commission as second lieutenant on May 12, 1945, and was discharged on May 27, 1946; he resigned from the Officers' Reserve Corps on March 8, 1949.¹³ Yale records reviewed by the FBI in June 1969 show that he entered Yale in September 1946, received his B.A. on June 12, 1950, and was appointed assistant instructor of Spanish for 1947 through 1951 but resigned the appointment in November 1950.¹⁴

A memorandum of October 20, 1950 from Louis B. Nichols to Clyde Tolson records that Buckley "was the editor of the Daily News" the year before, meaning the Yale Daily News, and that he had sponsored a forum at which Nichols spoke. Nichols called him in New Haven, arranged for him to call at the Bureau on October 25, and wrote that "An Agent in Mr. Jones office will take Buckley on a very special tour."¹⁵ A later summary records that Nichols had spoken at the 1949 forum on the Bureau's position, that Buckley acted as its chairman before an audience of about 500, and that Buckley and his wife were given "a very special tour of Bureau facilities" and met the Director on October 25, 1950.⁶ In April 1953 Buckley told Nichols that he was writing a book "to counteract the Alan Barth and Biddle books denouncing loyalty and security investigations."¹⁶

The membership of Skull and Bones is recorded in Antony C. Sutton's index of members by class year, which lists "Buckley, William Frank Jr." in the class of 1950 beside, among others, William Henry Draper III, Thomas Henry Guinzburg, Evan Griffith Galbraith, Sidney Lovett and William Hitchcock MacLeish. The same index lists "Buckley, James Lane" in the class of 1944, "Buckley, Fergus Reid" in 1952 and "Buckley, Christopher Taylor" in 1975, and a passage on communications names "William Buckley ('50) of National Review" among Bonesmen.¹ In Sutton's list of members of The Order and the Council on Foreign Relations, Buckley appears as "Editor, National Review and The Order's house conservative." Sutton also wrote that "National Review published by William Buckley (The Order) runs a perpetual deficit. presumably made up by Buckley," and that "So far as we can trace, only William F. Buckley is a member of the Bilderbergers and The Order."¹⁷

Ron Rosenbaum's article "The Last Secrets of Skull and Bones" in Esquire of September 1977 places Buckley in the sequence of Bonesmen who entered the CIA. Rosenbaum wrote that one could ask "Bill Bundy or Bill Buckley, both of whom went into the C.I.A. after leaving Bones," whether their Skull and Bones experience was useful training for the clandestine trade. He wrote that William Sloane Coffin Jr. "headed for the C.I.A. not long after graduation from Bones," and that "the man Coffin tapped for Bones, William F. Buckley Jr., was himself tapped by the C.I.A. the following year."¹⁸ "Bill Bundy" is William P. Bundy. The same passage asks McGeorge Bundy whether he "wrestled naked in a mud pile" as part of his initiation, and the article describes Blackford Oakes, the hero of Buckley's spy novel Saving the Queen, as "a true-blue Bonesman."¹⁸

Kris Millegan's Fleshing Out Skull & Bones (2003) lists "Bill Buckley (S&B '50)" and "James Buckley (S&B '44)" among Bonesmen connected with the intelligence community, together with Coffin (S&B '49) and "Dino Pionzio (S&B '50), CIA Deputy Chief of Station during Allende overthrow," and writes that "Bush tapped Coffin, who tapped Buckley." Elsewhere the book says that Buckley "had a family oil business in Mexico" and "was a close ally to CIA covert operations manager E. Howard Hunt."¹⁹ The Covert Action Information Bulletin reported in 1990 that, according to "several experts on the CIA," Buckley began cooperating with the Agency in Mexico City in 1952, where Hunt was station chief.²⁰

God and Man at Yale

God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom" was published by the Henry Regnery Company in 1951.²¹ A summary memorandum in the FBI file notes that the columnist George Sokolsky wrote "most favorably concerning Buckley and his book" in his column of October 15, 1951.⁶ In his 1974 memoir E. Howard Hunt wrote that he met Buckley through James Burnham, a former professor of philosophy whom Hunt described as "a consultant to OPC on virtually every subject of interest to our organization." Through Burnham, Hunt wrote, he was to meet "a young Yale graduate, William F. Buckley, Jr., whose God and Man at Yale was stirring great controversy within the Eastern academic establishment." Hunt added that Burnham told him Buckley was looking for "the optimum way of working against the Stalinists" and that Buckley was trilingual in English, Spanish and French.²²

Michael Isikoff, writing for SpyTalk in June 2025 about a new biography of Buckley by Sam Tanenhaus, placed the book's publication in the fall of 1951. He recorded that McGeorge Bundy, then a Harvard professor, reviewed it in The Atlantic as "A twisted, ignorant young man," and wrote that "At the time of the publication of his book, Buckley was secretly on the payroll of the CIA."²³

Mexico City, 1951 to 1952

Hunt wrote that he volunteered to open the Office of Policy Coordination station in Mexico City, beginning in the late summer of 1950, and that "First on my list was Bill Buckley, who readily agreed and set about working out details of his cover."²² The Office of Policy Coordination was the covert-action office within the CIA. Isikoff wrote that Buckley was "an undercover officer working out of the agency's Mexico City station," posing "as a businessman trying to break into the import-export trade under the alias 'Geoffrey T. Bolgiano.'"²³

Hunt's memoir places Buckley among his first recruited agents in Mexico: "One by one, my outside agents were arriving in Mexico, Bill Buckley among the first, with his pregnant wife, Pat." Hunt wrote that he and Buckley frequently lunched "at what was then the only good French restaurant in Mexico City."²⁴ Buckley's wife was Patricia Taylor, whom he married on July 6, 1950.²⁵

Hunt assigned Buckley to help Eudocio Ravines, a Chilean former Communist living under an alias in Mexico City, to finish The Yenan Way and translate it into English. "For several months this project occupied most of Buckley's time; and when the English translation had been accepted in New York by Scribner's, Buckley decided to leave Mexico and CIA." Hunt wrote that Buckley was "thinking either of purchasing the American Mercury magazine, which had been on the downgrade for several years, or founding a magazine of his own."²⁶

A 1985 article in The Spotlight, a weekly newspaper, attributes to an anonymous source the claim that Buckley "inaugurated this era of CIA potboilers," and says that in "1952 or '53" Allen Dulles developed "a personal interest in a well-known Chilean defector, Eudocio Ravines," whom the CIA flew from Paris to a safehouse in Mexico City, where Buckley, "then working as a Clandestine Services operative," was assigned to revise a manuscript that Charles Scribner's Sons then published as The Yenan Way. The article names Hunt as the officer who supervised the project.²⁷

Buckley's own accounts agree with Hunt on the sequence. In a National Review piece of November 1, 2005 he wrote: "When in 1951 I was inducted into the CIA as a deep cover agent, the procedures for disguising my affiliation and my work were unsmilingly comprehensive. It was three months before I was formally permitted to inform my wife what the real reason was for going to Mexico City to live. If, a year later, I had been apprehended, dosed with sodium pentothal, and forced to give out the names of everyone I knew in the CIA, I could have come up with exactly one name, that of my immediate boss (E. Howard Hunt, as it happened)." He added that "In my case, it was 15 years after reentry into the secular world before my secret career in Mexico was blown, harming no one except perhaps some who might have been put off by my deception," and recalled that in 1980 a former president of Mexico seated next to him at a ski-area restaurant asked what he had done when he lived in Mexico, and that he answered: "I tried to undermine your regime, Mr. President."²

In a Paris Review interview of summer 1996, asked how much of his novels was true, Buckley said: "I poach on history to the extent that I can. For instance, when I was in the CIA it was reported to me that the evidence was overwhelming that the destruction of Constantin Oumansky's airplane" was "an act of terrorism, executed by Stalin." Oumansky was the Soviet ambassador to Mexico.²⁸ Reader's Digest reported in January 1986 that Blackford Oakes, the hero of Saving the Queen, "went to Yale and was later recruited by the CIA. So, indeed, was Buckley, who in 1951 served in Mexico under Howard Hunt." The article quotes Buckley: "My admiration for the mission of the CIA," he stressed, "was never confused with any evaluation of its overall effectiveness." It says that after leaving the Agency he wrote in National Review that "The attempted assassination of Sukarno has all the look of an 'operation' by the CIA: everyone got killed except the appointed victim."²⁹ The same article records that at the fifteenth-anniversary party of Firing Line in 1981, when President Ronald Reagan telephoned with congratulations, Buckley told him: "By the way, I have Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt here. Do you have any instructions?"²⁹

The published biographical entries for Buckley that the FBI collected in 1969 list his early 1950s employment as "Sr. editor American Mercury, 1952" in one edition of a biographical directory and "Asso. editor Am. Mercury, 1952" in another.²⁵ The Bureau's inquiry of June 1969 recorded that the Yale alumni office's records showed Buckley indicating, on May 22, 1952, employment with The American Mercury as associate editor. William Bradford Huie, whom the Bureau described as a former owner and editor of the magazine, told an agent at Miami Beach that Buckley "was only associated with the magazine approximately 2 to 3 months" and could not recall his position or title.³⁰ His sister Priscilla Buckley appears in a directory entry in the same file as "reports officer CIA, Washington, 1951-53."³¹

At the 1985 libel trial of Liberty Lobby, the publisher of The Spotlight, against National Review and Buckley in federal court in Washington, Liberty Lobby's attorney Mark Lane accused Buckley in his closing argument of working with Hunt "to put Spotlight out of business." The Washington Times reported that "Hunt was Mr. Buckley's supervisor when he worked briefly for the CIA in Mexico City during the early 1950s, according to testimony in the present trial." The jury found on October 25, 1985 that Liberty Lobby had libeled National Review and awarded $1,001 in damages.³²

Hunt, the children and the estate

Hunt wrote in a footnote that he and his wife had asked Buckley "to become guardian of our children and executor of our estate in the event of our death." Buckley, Hunt wrote, was "already the children's godfather," and "Bill agreed."²⁶ Hunt's wife died on December 8, 1972, when United Air Lines Flight 553 crashed while approaching Midway Airport in Chicago.³³

Hunt's earlier path crossed the family in Spain. Hunt wrote that when he arrived in Madrid in 1964, he and his family moved by prearrangement into the apartment owned by Buckley's brother Reid Buckley, who was summering on Spain's northern coast.³⁴

On January 17, 1973 Hunt flew to San Francisco, and the next morning he appeared at station KQED in the Firing Line taping, before students from Mills College. Hunt wrote that Buckley had telephoned to ask whether he could tape the segment, that Hunt replied that discussing Watergate would be against his interests, and that Buckley "had no intention of putting me in so difficult a position" and wanted instead to discuss the CIA and foreign policy with Mario Lazo.³⁵ Alvin Felzenberg wrote that in the preface to Buckley's 1975 collection Execution Eve and Other Contemporary Ballads Buckley explained that he had written little on Watergate between December 1972 and April 1973 because he felt "greatly encumbered," unable to reveal details a friend had confided to him about the friend's part in several misdeeds on Nixon's behalf, and that he absented himself from National Review editorial meetings when Watergate was discussed. Felzenberg identified the friend as Hunt and wrote that Hunt telephoned Buckley ten days after his wife's death to say that she had named Buckley alternate executor of her estate.³⁶

In August 1973 an FBI background check on Buckley, opened for a government appointment, recorded a statement by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. that Buckley "is a good friend of E. Howard Hunt, connected with the Watergate break-in, and is the godfather of some of his children." Schlesinger told agents that he "would not recommend him for a government position," and described him as a loyal American citizen.³⁷

Hunt wrote that after his conviction in the Watergate case, Maryland authorities removed him as executor of his wife's estate, and that his successor under the terms of her will was "William F. Buckley, Jr."³⁸ The same footnote describes the effect: "Thus stripped of even the right to engage in litigation, I realized that I was on my way to becoming a nonperson, though still very much a taxpayer."³⁸

After Hunt's Senate testimony, he wrote, the Senate "received several thousand telegrams and letters in the wake of my testimony and those were answered by a small committee William Buckley established in my behalf at his National Review offices." Hunt wrote that "Buckley solicited funds to pay for my legal defense and, when returns were disappointing, suggested my retaining his personal attorney, C. Dickerman Williams, at no cost to me."³⁹ A Baltimore lawyer, William Snyder Jr., "who had been handling my wife's estate at Buckley's request," also assisted him.³⁹

On his release, Hunt wrote, he traveled to New York with Snyder and they went to "Buckley's town house at noon," where Hunt found one of his sons "with Pat and Bill Buckley and Dick Williams." After lunch "we discussed my situation and decided that for the present I would make no public statements or appearances." Hunt added that he remembered "Buckley's jovial comment" that he had better not attend his appeal, "for every time I'd been in court I'd lost."⁴⁰

National Review

The first issue of National Review was dated November 19, 1955. Its opening statement by Buckley said that the magazine "stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it."⁴¹ A profile of Buckley in the CIA's files, from Reader's Digest of January 1986, states that $350,000 was raised to start the magazine, plus $100,000 from Buckley's family, and that the magazine had been running annual deficits of $450,000 to $550,000 in recent years.²⁹

A 1969 interview summarized in the FBI file, with an unnamed interviewee, describes Buckley as "considered a financial wizard inasmuch as he succeeded in publishing the 'National Review' for many years in spite of the fact the magazine operated at a financial loss." The same interviewee said Buckley "has offset losses by soliciting contributions from friends and subscribers."⁴² The file records that Peter Starr, president of Starr Broadcasting Group of Omaha, Nebraska, who had known and worked for Buckley since 1954, told agents that the company had been founded "with Mr. Buckley's financial backing," and that Buckley was its majority stockholder and chairman of the board.⁴² The file also records that Buckley had been on the Bureau's Special Correspondents List until May 25, 1967, when he was removed "after writing a mock editorial of the New York Times" for National Review.⁴³

In a letter to Nichols of July 30, 1957, summarized in a Bureau memorandum of December 5, 1957, Buckley advised that a Mexican colonel, Emiliano Izaguirre, had asked him to arrange an introduction to the Director because he had information to give. The memorandum records that Buckley referred the colonel to another office and that the person he referred him to "refused to see" him.⁴⁴

A CIA file holds letters from Whittaker Chambers to Buckley. One, dated March 10, 1957 and addressed "Dear Bill," begins: "My silence has lasted too long." It recalls that "Mr. Allen Dulles said words to this effect: 'There seems no reason to suppose that the Russian mind is not the equal of the American mind,'" and continues: "Perhaps Bukharin's last words should hang in Mr. Dulles' office too, in the offices of both Mr. Dulleses." The CIA's copy bears a check mark beside the Dulles passage.⁴⁵

A CIA file holds a 1966 clipping from the New York Daily News reporting that the Historic Research Foundation, of which Buckley was a trustee, planned a $2,000 grant to study the Warren Commission report. The clipping states that the idea "originated with William F. Buckley Jr., editor of the National Review."⁴⁶ In 1968 the New York Times reported that Buckley was starting a newsletter to expose "Communist intrigues" in American life. Buckley said the publication would become "the rallying point for the forces struggling to restore an ordered America."⁴⁷

A 1971 CIA clipping from the San Bernardino Sun-Telegram describes a set of "secret Vietnam documents" that National Review published, with dispatches attributed to former Secretary of State Dean Rusk and to the CIA. The article quotes Buckley as saying the purpose was to demonstrate that "the Pentagon and the CIA are not composed of incompetents."⁴⁸

Young Americans for Freedom and the Sharon Statement

Young Americans for Freedom was founded at a meeting at Buckley's home in Sharon, Connecticut. The organization's own history states that the Sharon Statement was adopted on September 11, 1960 "by a group of 100 young conservatives who convened at the home of William F. Buckley in Sharon, Connecticut," and that the meeting was held "with the purpose of creating Young Americans for Freedom."⁴⁹ The statement opens: "In this time of moral and political crises, it is the responsibility of the youth of America to affirm certain eternal truths." Its first clause holds "That foremost among the transcendent values is the individual's use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force."⁴⁹

The organization names Ronald Reagan as its honorary national chairman. The statement's tenth clause reads: "That the forces of international Communism are, at present, the greatest single threat to these liberties."⁴⁹ The FBI file records that in April 1953 Buckley was president of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists.⁶

The 1965 mayoral campaign

Buckley ran for mayor of New York in 1965 as the candidate of the Conservative Party of New York. He announced his candidacy at the Overseas Press Club on June 24, 1965, after telling the party chairman, J. Daniel Mahoney, on June 7 that he would accept the nomination.⁵⁰ The Ripon Forum of November 1965 reports that polls had shown him "up to 18%" of the vote, that he polled "only 13.4%," that Buckley "drew more heavily from Beame than Lindsay," and that Samuel Lubell found Buckley voters listing their second choice as "7-5 Beame over Lindsay." It reports a Buckley worker at Conservative headquarters who, when a network announced John Lindsay as the winner over Abraham Beame, concluded: "Oh, my God, Buckley has elected Lindsay."⁵¹ Lindsay won with 45.3 percent to Beame's 41.3 percent.⁵⁰

Buckley's account of the campaign, The Unmaking of a Mayor, appeared in 1966.⁵² J. Daniel Mahoney was the attorney who argued National Review's libel case against Liberty Lobby in 1985.⁵³

Firing Line

Firing Line ran from 1966 to 1999. The Hoover Institution holds the broadcast records for the program, 1966 to 1999, in 190 manuscript boxes and 222 oversize boxes, with an episode guide, transcripts and program research files.⁵⁴ A New York Times report by Val Adams, filed in the CIA reading room, announced the series in early 1966: "Firing Line With William Buckley" was to be presented by WOR-TV on Saturdays from 10 to 11 P.M., with a different opponent each week, and with Theodore Sorensen, the former special counsel to President Kennedy, considering an invitation to debate Buckley on the first program. The article describes Buckley as "the Conservative party's mayoralty candidate last year" and says R.K.O. General Productions would syndicate the series.⁵⁵

On January 21, 1973, WETA in Washington broadcast a Firing Line segment on the CIA and Cuba with Hunt and the Havana lawyer Mario Lazo. Buckley introduced Hunt as having been "intimately involved as an official in the CIA in the Bay of Pigs." He then said: "The presiding judge and Mr. Hunt's own lawyer have forbidden him to speak about Watergate."⁵⁶ Hunt had pleaded guilty in the Watergate case the previous Monday. Asked whether he had been arrested, Hunt said: "I was never arrested." Later in the segment he said: "I was never a fugitive." Asked whether the Watergate break-in could have been a CIA operation, Hunt answered: "perhaps I shouldn't have answered your earlier question as definitively as I did," and he cited the CIA's support of the National Student Association as a domestic operation.⁵⁶

On September 29, 1974, Firing Line broadcast a segment on the CIA in Chile with Edward Korry, the former ambassador to Chile. Buckley described the controversy over the role of the CIA in Chile during the Salvador Allende years and asked Korry whether he acknowledged the testimony of CIA Director William Colby to a congressional committee.⁵⁷

Nixon administration appointments

On May 28, 1969 President Richard Nixon announced his intention to nominate Buckley to the United States Advisory Commission on Information, the advisory body of the United States Information Agency; the nomination of June 13, 1969 was for a three-year term expiring January 27, 1972, in place of Sigurd S. Larmon.⁵⁸ A syndicated column by Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson of May 1969, printed in the Philadelphia Bulletin and held in the CIA files, reported that Buckley would replace Larmon of Young and Rubicam on the commission.⁵⁹ The FBI inquiry opened on June 2, 1969 at White House request, with instructions that no neighborhood investigation be conducted without Bureau approval; the Bureau's memorandum of June 12 states that persons interviewed "furnished favorable comments."⁴³

The Nixon Library's finding aid for Buckley lists a photograph of June 9, 1970 of Nixon meeting Buckley, Frank Shakespeare, director of the Information Agency, and Henry Kissinger, and one of December 7, 1970 of Nixon with the commission, whose members included Frank Stanton of CBS, Hobart Lewis of Reader's Digest, James Michener, John Shaheen of Shaheen Natural Resources, and Buckley.⁶⁰ The same guide lists a National Security Council name file on Buckley covering May 1970 to August 1972, a letter from Buckley to Pat Buchanan of December 19, 1972 on a list of campaign contributors, and a memorandum from Buchanan to H. R. Haldeman of January 4, 1973 on a letter from Buckley, with handwritten notes added by Higby and John Dean.⁶⁰

Buckley was named a public delegate to the United Nations General Assembly in 1973.⁶¹ Reader's Digest reported in 1986 that Reagan had joked during the 1980 campaign about appointing Buckley an ambassador, and that Buckley was later sounded out about the post of ambassador to the United Nations and said no.²⁹

The CIA reading room file

The CIA's reading room holds a series of items on Buckley's public activities. They include a letter of April 10, 1978 from Buckley to Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner ("Dear Stan"), in which Buckley wrote that "the Hartford Courant's precis of what you said is not really distorted," that he was "very happy to hear from you about Tom Polgar," who "wrote me an indignant letter," and that he found Frank Snepp's treatment of Polgar "not entirely unsympathetic." Buckley asked whether Turner had objections to his publishing Turner's letter in his editor's column in National Review. A letter of October 3, 1979 from Buckley to Turner accepts an invitation, says that he cannot attend on November 14, and asks that Turner's people find a date when he is free.⁶²

James L. Buckley

James L. Buckley, Buckley's brother, served in the United States Senate from January 1971 to January 1977, elected on the Conservative Party line in 1970.⁶³ The CIA reading room holds letters from him to Turner in 1977 and to William Casey in 1982.⁶⁴ Millegan lists him among Bonesmen connected with the intelligence community.¹⁹ The Covert Action Information Bulletin reported in 1990 that he was Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology in 1981 and 1982, and cited Donald Freed and Fred Landis, Death in Washington (1980), for the statement that on September 14, 1976, a week before the assassination of Orlando Letelier, Michael Townley and Guillermo Novo visited Senator Buckley's office in New York.²⁰

H.L. Hunt

Buckley's comment on H.L. Hunt appears on the Hunt page in the account of his will and estate. Texas Monthly reported in March 1975 that in a column published shortly after Hunt's death Buckley declared that Hunt had left "capitalism a bad name, not, goodness knows, by frenzies of extravagance, but by his eccentric understanding of public affairs, his yahoo bigotry and his appallingly bad manners."⁶⁵

Skull and Bones and the 1992 campaign

The George H.W. Bush Presidential Library's file FOIA 2009-0116-F, on the society, describes its contents as "related to the Skull and Bones Society at Yale University, of which George H. W. Bush and his father Prescott Bush were both members."⁶⁶ The file contains "correspondence from President Bush to William F. Buckley, Jr. and Thomas W. Ludlow Ashley regarding an article Buckley wrote for National Review." The article "responded to Pat Buchanan's characterization of Bush's foreign policy as 'Skull and Bones foreign policy' during the 1992 campaign."⁶⁶

Last years

Buckley died at his home in Stamford, Connecticut, on February 27, 2008, at the age of 82. His son Christopher told the New York Times that he had suffered from diabetes and emphysema and was found at his desk in the study of his home.⁶⁷