The U.S. Postal Service unveiled a new postage stamp Thursday featuring conservative icon William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder of the conservative editorial magazine National Review.
Buckley, a leading voice for the modern conservative movement, founded National Review in 1955 to publish conservative commentary and analysis focused on politics, current events and culture. The magazine still exists today and publishes 12 magazines annually, in addition to its daily news site.
The stamp features a graphite and charcoal portrait of Buckley, drawn by Dale Stephanos, according to the U.S. Postal Service.
Historian George Nash described Buckley as “arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century” in 2008 following Buckley’s death.
“For an entire generation he was the preeminent voice of American conservatism and its first great ecumenical figure,” Nash wrote in National Review.
The magazine forged together several ideological branches and provided an outlet for views including free-market capitalism, libertarianism, traditionalism and anti-communism, according to the Bill of Rights Institute.
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William F. Buckley, Jr., founded the conservative commentary magazine National Review in 1955. (Getty)
In addition to spearheading National Review, Buckley also hosted the Emmy Award–winning television program “Firing Line” from 1966 to 1999, which became well-known for its ideological diversity of guests ranging from former President Ronald Reagan, former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, economist Friedrich Hayek, scholar Noam Chomsky and liberal author Gore Vidal.
“The success and long run of Firing Line proved that there was a place on television for civilized debate between conflicting ideologies that could entertain and inform the American public,” according to Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
The public policy think tank, led by former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, houses a massive videotape collection of “Firing Line’s” more than 1,500 episodes, in addition to program preparation materials, photographs, transcripts and sound recordings.
Buckley, a devout Catholic, also authored dozens of books, including “God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom,’” published in 1951, about his experience attending Yale University. The book offered a harsh assessment of Yale’s secular academic climate, and Time magazine cited it in 2011 as one of the top 100 “best and most influential” books written in English since 1923.
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William F. Buckley Jr. hosted the television program “Firing Line” for more than 30 years. (Getty)
New York Times columnist David Brooks, who launched his career as an intern with National Review, wrote after Buckley’s death in 2008 that Buckley’s “greatest talent was friendship,” and that the conservative icon was an avid writer of letters.
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“His second great talent was leadership,” Brooks wrote in the New York Times. “As a young man, he had corralled the famously disputatious band of elders who made up the editorial board of National Review. He changed the personality of modern conservatism, created a national movement and expelled the crackpots from it.”
“He loved liberty and felt it must be constrained by the invisible bonds of the transcendent order,” Brooks wrote.
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