… I finished the latest book about our 40th president, thanks to winter weather’s interference with the normal work schedule.

This is the book William F. Buckley Jr. was writing on the day he died: The Reagan I Knew. 

No one should choose this volume as an introduction to Reagan biography or to Buckley’s writing, but it is a fascinating, anecdote-based account of the relationship between a founding father of postwar American conservatism and the political leader who best exemplified that intellectual disposition.

Buckley chooses letters and stories that emphasize friendly banter, occasional disagreements over policy, and mutual admiration. He concludes the short book with an encomium that includes the following:

No era associated with a single successful leader ? not Pericles’, not Metternich’s, not Victoria’s ? is fairly evaluated by dredging up surviving delinquencies, deeds left undone. The 1980s are most certainly the decade in which Communism ceased to be a creed, surviving only as a threat. And Ronald Reagan had more to do with this than any other statesman in the world.

…

The Reagan years accustomed us to a mood about life and about government. There were always the interruptions, the potholes of life. But Ronald Reagan had strategic vision. He told us that most of our civic problems were problems brought on or exacerbated by government, not problems that could be solved by government. That of course is enduringly true. Only government can cause inflation, preserve monopoly, and punish enterprise. On the other hand it is only a government leader who can put a stamp on the national mood. One refers not to the period of Shakespeare, but to the period of Elizabeth. Reagan’s period was brief, but he did indeed put his stamp on it. He did this in part because he was scornful of the claims of omnipotent government, in part because he felt, and expressed, the buoyancy of the American Republic.

It’s sad that Buckley won’t be around to assess President Obama’s impact on the “national mood” or the “buoyancy of the American Republic.”