Will has become conservatives' elder statesman

By Hillel Italie
Associated Press
Published: Sunday, June 29, 2008 12:12 a.m. MDT
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WASHINGTON — George F. Will, the conservative columnist and pundit, seems too young and young-looking to be anyone's "elder statesman." He is 67, his hair still boyishly parted, his face hardly lined, his wire-rimmed persona that of a graduate student whose idea of a vice is skipping class to catch a ball game at Wrigley Field.

But Will has been a presence in print, and on the air, for more than 30 years. He has written thousands of columns and reviews and spent thousands on hours on television, mostly as a panelist on ABC's "This Week." He has also published more than a dozen books, his latest, "One Man's America," the first to come out in a world not shared by his friend and hero, William F. Buckley Jr.

"I went to see Bill late last year, up at Stamford (Conn.), just to say 'Hi.' It was very clear then that he was very unhealthy and very unhappy," Will says of Buckley, who died in February at age 82, less than a year after his longtime wife, Pat, had passed away.

"Bill was a founder of the conservative movement and his task, beginning with 'God and Man at Yale' and the National Review (in 1955), was to make it acceptable. That's long been achieved, vastly simplifying the work of people like me."

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With the death of Buckley, no conservative thinker has been as active for so long. Neo-conservative founders Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol are in their 80s and semiretired. Other leading voices, from David Brooks to Andrew Sullivan to Charles Krauthammer, are years younger.

Will describes Buckley as the "point of a spear," his once singular power dispersed among many, a sign, Will says, of health for the right. He doesn't pretend to Buckley's haughty charisma or to the lockstep following of a Rush Limbaugh, but peers say he has inherited Buckley's place as a thinker and as a conscience, his commitment so long and deep that he can, respectfully, disagree.

"George Will is one of the most important conservative voices out there — a real believer in limited government, in freedom, in prudence as an indispensable political virtue, and yet open to the appeal of a liberal like (Barack) Obama," Sullivan says. "After Buckley, he's the best there is. He's a calm, clear, always individual voice."

"He's the gold standard among conservative columnists," says Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review, the conservative magazine Buckley headed for decades. "The amount he produces and the incessantly high quality of it is simply astonishing."

Interviewed recently on a sunny afternoon, Will works out of a brick Georgetown town house that could easily be converted to a flea market for baseball, with its bats and posters and pictures, and its CD of songs about the Chicago Cubs. But this is Washington, and his office is set for serious business, from its fireplace and executive-sized desk, to its armchairs and power photos, including a signed picture of Will and President Ronald Reagan in the White House.

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"George Will is one of the most important conservative voices out there — a real believer in limited government, in freedom, in prudence as an indispensable political virtue, and yet open to the appeal of a liberal like Obama," Andrew Sullivan says. (J. Scott Applewhite, Associated Press)
J. Scott Applewhite, Associated Press
"George Will is one of the most important conservative voices out there — a real believer in limited government, in freedom, in prudence as an indispensable political virtue, and yet open to the appeal of a liberal like Obama," Andrew Sullivan says.
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