Devout Catholics with continental pretensions — Bill learned Spanish and French before English — the Buckleys were a mischievous and musical bunch who stood out in staid, protestant New England. From his father, Willam F. Buckley Sr. (“Will”), an oil speculator from Texas who dabbled in various counterrevolutionary plots in Mexico before his expulsion in 1920, Bill inherited politics — Will’s were Anglophobic, anticommunist, antisemitic, and implacably isolationist — and a lifelong weakness for intrigues, gambling, and get-rich schemes. From his attractive mother, Aloise, who was, Tanenhaus writes, “ever just out of reach,” Buckley inherited piety and his fathomless need to please, entertain, and captivate.
Will’s Jew-hatred was ingrained enough that his elder children — 11-year-old Bill was excluded — burned a cross on the lawn of a Jewish resort in 1937. “I wept tears of frustration,” Bill Buckley recalled many years later, over being excluded from this “great lark.” Buckley’s childhood esteem for Charles Lindbergh was also untroubled by the latter’s forays into Hitlerism.
https://www.theideasletter.org/essay/a-practical-fanatic/
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