Philatelic honor for Buckley

United States Postal Service

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In 1950, a graduating Yale senior named William F. Buckley Jr. was asked to speak at the university’s Alumni Day. When the administration read a draft of his remarks, they asked him to tone it down. He declined and withdrew from the engagement. The following year, he expanded the speech into a book, God and Man at Yale, that painted the university as leftist and anti-religious, thus launching a career as the lonely conservative who “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”

Seventy-five years later, in the centennial year of his birth, Yale celebrated Buckley on September 9 by hosting the unveiling of a US postage stamp with his visage. Among the speakers at the event on Beinecke Plaza were Yale College dean Pericles Lewis, pundit George Will, and Christopher Buckley ’75, the honoree’s son. Lewis said the portrait on the stamp by Dale Stephanos, based on a 1960s photo of Buckley on his sailboat, “aptly captures the spirit of sharp intellect, determination, and thoughtful discourse that shaped Buckley’s time here at Yale College and his intellectual leadership of the conservative movement.”