‘American giant’ Bill Buckley dies at 82

America has lost its most famous long-serving right-wing commentator. William F Buckley Jr, who helped shape the modern conservative movement well before President Reagan arrived on the political scene, died on Wednesday at the age of 82. "With Bill's passing, freedom has lost one of its greatest defenders,” said the Republican presidential frontrunner John McCain. Buckley was "an American giant who shall be missed".

The erudite Ivy Leaguer founded the National Review in 1955, when he was 29, and for 35 years used it to advocate individual liberty, limited government and the defeat of communism. But it was TV that brought Buckley a national audience. Firing Line, which launched in 1966, drew a wide array of guests, including Margaret Thatcher, Allen Ginsberg and Groucho Marx. When Robert F Kennedy repeatedly refused to appear on the show in the early days, Buckley quipped: "Why does baloney reject the grinder?'' The show ran until December 1999.

His healthy ego and use of arcane language, coupled with a New England prep-school drawl, made him a formidable debater. In 1968, Buckley appeared in a series of televised debates with author and social critic Gore Vidal, his ideological enemy. During one debate, Vidal called Buckley a "pro-crypto Nazi", to which Buckley replied, "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I will sock you in your goddamn face, and you will stay plastered".

Despite his conservative politics, he was not a fan of George Bush's foreign policy. In a February 2006 column, Buckley stated unequivocally that, "One cannot doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed."

The son of a multimillionaire with oil holdings in seven countries, William Frank Buckley Jr was the sixth of 10 children. Buckley's wife, American socialite Patricia Buckley, died last April. Their son Christopher Buckley is a satirist best known for his novel Thank You for Smoking, which was made into a film in 2005.

Buckley, who had been ill with emphysema, died in his home in Connecticut and was found in his study, at his desk. "I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition," he wrote in the New York Times Book Review in 1986. "I asked myself the other day, 'Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?' I couldn't think of anyone."