F. Reid Buckley, a novelist, columnist, founder of a school of public speaking and, in family lore, the most literary of Aloise and William F. Buckley Sr.’s 10 children, including former Senator James L. Buckley and the conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr., died on Monday in hospice care in Columbia, S.C. He was 83.
The cause was cancer, his son William Huntting Buckley said. Mr. Buckley had lived in Camden, S.C., since the early 1970s.
He was often mistaken for his brother William, the founder of the conservative magazine National Review. The brothers not only looked alike. They also shared political views; a somewhat aristocratic, stiff-jawed accent; and a love of polysyllabic words.
Partly to set himself apart from his siblings, Reid Buckley lived overseas for much of his early life. He wrote articles and columns for National Review and other conservative publications.
He considered himself first and foremost a novelist, however. His first novel, “Eye of the Hurricane” (1967), was described in reviews as a prophetic early warning against Americans’ ecological depredations. The second, “Servants and Their Masters” (1973), was a novel of manners about post-Franco Spanish society. Neither did well commercially. Other novels were self-published.
He settled in Camden after returning to the United States and was content to stay. “I glory in Bill’s success,” he told an interviewer in the 1980s. “I couldn’t be happier for him or admire him more. But it’s not for me, that life. I despise the ‘lit’rary’ life. I avoid New York. I like to be with my family on my farm.”
In the 1980s, he established the Buckley School of Public Speaking in Camden, whose clients are mainly business executives.
His political writing was considered less polite and even-tempered than his brother’s. A column he wrote in the journal Southern Partisan in 1984 drew particularly sharp criticism for its assertion that a whole range of racial and ethnic groups had “no temperament for democracy.”
“It may be impolite and unpolitic to bring the subject up,” he wrote, “but can our democratic system endure unless we close up the frontiers to peoples who are not ... predisposed to honor its assumptions?"
Richard Quinn, the journal’s editor, said of Mr. Buckley, “Our readers think of him as the Confederate Buckley.”
Fergus Reid Buckley was born in Paris on July 14, 1930, the eighth of the 10 children. He was educated in Europe and in Mexico, where his father, an oil executive, had oil interests. He attended Yale, where, like his brother William, he was a member of Skull and Bones and the debate squad. He graduated in 1952 and served in the Air Force for two years before beginning his writing career in Europe.
His first marriage, to Elizabeth Huntting Howell, ended in divorce. Besides his son William, he is survived by his second wife, Rosaria Leguina, known as Tasa; three other children from his first marriage, Claude, F. Reid Jr. and Elizabeth Buckley Riley; four stepchildren, Francisco, Patricia, Santiago and Francisco, all of whose family name is de Olano; his brother James; a sister, Carol V. Buckley; and 22 grandchildren. Another stepchild died before him.
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