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Pernicious Foreigner. Buckley's conservatism is very much a family affair. His father, William Frank Buckley Sr., who made millions in oil in Mexico and later in Venezuela, was understandably devoted to unfettered free enterprise. His mother, Aloise, was from a deep-rooted family of New Orleans, where she acquired a distinct distaste for importunate Yankees and their progressive ideas. The family conservatism was, if anything, strengthened when the elder Buckley was thrown out of Mexico as a "pernicious foreigner" in 1921 and his holdings expropriated. "It gave him," says his daughter Priscilla, "a lifelong distrust of revolutionary and socialist governments."
This distrust he successfully communicated to his ten children, not one of whom ever deviated from the conservative faith of the father or from his staunch Roman Catholicism. "Perhaps the reason we did not rebel," thinks Buckley, "is that Father was a dissenter all his life. Had he been an establishmentarian, there might have been a greater impulse to rebel." In the influence that he exercised over his brood, until his death in 1958 at 77, Buckley Sr. bore considerable resemblance to that other patriarch of Irish descent, Joseph P. Kennedy. But beyond the Irishness, the Buckleys do not own up to any similarities. "My greatest accomplishment is not having one single child who has been a failure," says Aloise Buckley. Yet personal ambition may not have been so vigorously instilled in them as in the Kennedys. "Our family plays touch football too," says Bill, "but not so ferociously."
Buckley Sr. subjected his children to a rigorous, if haphazard education. Unimpressed by the schools as he moved from Venezuela to France to England and back to the U.S. (Sharon, Conn., where Mrs. Buckley Sr. still lives), he stressed education at home. Not the kind of businessman who sneered at the liberal arts, he hired tutors in dance, architecture, painting, herb gardening, and one who was expert at building boats inside bottles. "We thought we had tried about everything," recalls Bill, "and in would come yet another professor." All the children were trilingual, or at least bilingual. Bill learned to speak Spanish and French along with English. He also learned to play the piano and—as his detractors are fond of emphasizing—that reactionary instrument, the clavichord.
Buckley père revered, above all, the English language. "Father was always a language purist," says Buckley. "Bad grammar was for him like dirt under the fingernail." Buckley developed his father's respect for words, and used them freely, furiously and all too literally. While attending Millbrook School in New York, he appeared uninvited at a faculty meeting and proceeded to complain about his teachers' politics—too liberal, of course. Even his father felt constrained to admonish him: "I like very much your attitude of having strong convictions, but you will have to learn to be more moderate in the expression of your views and to express them in a way that would give as little offense as possible to your friends." That was about the only piece of advice from his father that Buckley managed to ignore.