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Popping in to the Yale Daily News

With a bit of time to spare between the rugby match and dinner, we discovered a friend of ours was exploring the newly renovated headquarters of the Yale Daily News and were invited to join in. The handsome gothic structure is now overshadowed by an ugly extension to the previously ugly Yale School of Architecture, widely believed to be the ugliest building in town. Henry Luce paid for the YDN building out of his own pocket in memory of his Yale classmate Briton Hadden, who died just 31 years old. The place went up in 1932 and underwent a multi-million-dollar renovation over the summer, and the place was looking good.

One of the staff rooms features photographs of the boards of years long since gone. Of course, I immediately went to look for the most famous name of all, and there he is: William F. Buckley Jr., 1950, Chairman of the Yale Daily News. He made such an impression as chairman that when he left, they abolished the position.

Up in the Board Room, I decided to try out WFB’s old throne. Surprisingly comfy.

Published at 1:00 pm on Wednesday 27 October 2010. Categories: Errant Thoughts Journal Photos.
Comments

Buckley? Pshah!
Famous, undeniably. Admirable? Only if one admires his destruction of the true conservative movement in America. He perverted National Review, his own creation, for the sake of comfortable dinners with his wife’s third rate café society friends. He became a tool, perhaps reluctantly, of the neo-conservatives, and destroyed the careers of men more talented than himself (I think of the recently deceased Joe Sobran) at the behest of people who offered him in return little more than favorable reviews in their own forgettable magazines of his equally forgettable and self-indulgentt novels.
A wasted life, and a corrupted legacy.

— L Gaylord Clark 28 Oct 2010 4:41 am

Mr. Clark, Bill Buckley inspired a great movement, helped win the Cold War, brought style and panash to political discourse and had enough fun for three lifetimes in the process of sustaining a marriage, albeit imperfect, for 50 years. He was also one of the most kind and generous public figures by near all accounts. How many books have you written?

Wasted life. Hardly. We should all be so wasteful.

— George Shadroui 28 Oct 2010 9:51 am

Looking good Andrew… it’s nice to notice that the Yale Daily News still looks like a proper newspaper these days unlike so many other college papers.

— K. Dontoh 28 Oct 2010 3:59 pm

The whole point about Buckley is that he started brilliantly, and offered so much. His life was “wasted” because he diverted his talents to non-essentials (elegant parties and frivolous fiction) and , worst of all, betrayed his original inspiration (the so called “old Right”) at the behest of interlopers (the former Trotskyites who invented neo-Conservatism).
Read Paul Gottfried.

— L Gaylord Clark 29 Oct 2010 5:59 am
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