WFB in 1984, about six years after I met him. Photo from NY Times story here.

Strange but true: I shook this man’s hand. It’s strange because I never enjoyed the two or three episodes of “Firing Line” I watched when I was a high school debater and eager to learn more about the dark arts of competitive argumentation. I didn’t like the snark (I can do snark, I understand snark, I do not like snark). I didn’t like the shouting and posturing. I didn’t like the predictability of the side-taking and the uber-partisan politics. I didn’t like the way WFB’s voice seemed to come out of his mouth and his nose simultaneously. And at that time in my life, anything remotely resembling patrician would get my hillbilly blood boiling. (I’m still not real big on patrician, but I don’t tar all patricians with the same broad brush anymore.)

But it came to pass during my junior or senior year at Wake Forest University–I forget which–that William F. Buckley, Jr. was invited to speak on campus. For reasons I no longer remember, but probably related to my work at Wake’s NPR station WFDD-FM, I ended up backstage with Buckley in the green room before he gave his talk. I shook his hand and exchanged pleasantries as best I could given my age and my mixed feelings about the encounter. Standing before him, I found that Buckley had a great deal of presence in person, though unusually so: it wasn’t a matter of physical size or charisma or extraversion so much as it was a matter of still intensity and a preternatural alertness. He seemed to me to be completely undistracted. That I was the person in his visual field was both unnerving and weirdly compelling, as he was completely undistracted from me, when there was no earthly reason he should be paying anything but cursory, polite attention to a 20-year-old college kid who had no clear reason for being in the room with him at all.

I’ve often noted how distractable many folks are in conversation. Their attention will wander, and their eyes will follow, and for some reason it doesn’t matter that the thread is lost. Most of the time these folks don’t even notice their attention has wandered, which of course suggests their attention has wandered long before any explicit sign of the wandering appeared. But Buckley had none of those signs of distraction. Quite the contrary. As soon as we had finished our how-do-you-do’s, he began asking me direct, warm questions about who I was and what I did at WFU. I answered him. He asked more questions, not to interrogate me, but certainly not as a matter of small talk either. I was shocked to get the strong feeling from him that he actually cared about my responses and was learning from them. I found this a little confusing, but also bracing. I mentioned that I worked at the campus NPR affiliate. He asked me how I liked that, what I thought about NPR, what programming I enjoyed most, what my particular role at the radio station was, and so forth. There wasn’t a whiff of condescension in his manner or his questions.

We couldn’t have talked for more than ten minutes, if that. I never saw him again in person. I didn’t follow his career, and I haven’t read his books–though one day I may–and I didn’t watch “Firing Line” with any more frequency or enjoyment than I had before. Nevertheless, in the years that have followed I have often thought of that brief conversation, and how rare it is to be able to feel any authenticity of encounter in such a situation, and how great it was when I did feel it that evening. I think what I felt a little of in that moment was not only Buckley’s intelligence but also his talent for friendship, a talent that many have testified to in the stories I’ve read since his death last week. That’s why I may yet read his books, whether or not I agree with any of his political points. In that moment, he not only put me completely at my ease, he taught me that I must never lose faith in the possibility of authentic conversation, no matter how exotic or odd the encounter.