Buckley’s Belligerent Obit

by Doug French on July 19, 2026

Doug French, “Buckley’s Belligerent Obit,” DouglasinVegas.com, 2023/7/19

In her wonderful book The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries, Marilyn Johnson pointed out “There are people vanishing, good people dying out there, and the obit writer’s job is to shepherd them out with dignity.”

In 1959,“Rothbard physically applauded Khrushchev in his limousine as it passed by on the street. He gave as his reason for this that, after all, Khrushchev had killed fewer people than General Eisenhower, his host,” snipped William F. Buckley in his 1995 Rothbard obituary.¹

“In Murray’s case, much of what drove him was a contrarian spirit, the deranging scrupulosity that caused him to disdain such as Herbert Hoover, Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, and — yes — Newt Gingrich…”

Buckley’s comment makes me think Buckley didn’t know Murray very well. The National Review founder took just days after Murray’s death to write his version of an obituary. As Louise Perry wrote recently, “Historians are of course permitted to make an honest assessment of the long-dead, but there is a mourning window that should be observed. To do otherwise is vulgar, insensitive, cruel—even, in some circumstances, belligerent.”² Belligerent would describe Buckley’s piece.

Yes, Murray had a sense of humor and contrarian spirit. For instance, the first time I spoke with him was one night when there was a bomb scare at UNLV’s Beem Hall where our classroom and the school of business instructors’ offices were housed.³ Not being able to enter the building I went to the student union and saw Murray sitting with one of my classmates.

I asked what was going on, and Murray mentioned the bomb scare.

I sardonically suggested to him, “We should send some underclassman in there to find it.”

“I like the way you think, Douglas,” Murray shot back, cackling.

Murray understood my joke.

As for the esteemed men Murray had such disdain for which Buckley was attempting to impugn Rothbard’s character. Brian Doherty wrote in Reason.com “When I interviewed Milton Friedman the year Rothbard died, I learned that Friedman continued to worry over Rothbard’s critiques for decades, despite being a more famous and respected Nobel winner.”⁴ It’s funny that Mark Skousen claimed that “today Friedman’s influence is ten times Rothbard’s.” As Laurence Vance wrote.⁵ “Of course, that wasn’t true in 2000 just as it wasn’t true in 2011 when Don Boudreaux said that ‘Rothbard wasn’t 1/100th the economist that Friedman was.’” Liberty editor R.W. Bradford reprinted Rothbard’s piece on Ronald Reagan from the March 1989 issue to spur sales of the magazine.

Skousen is probably still put out about Murray’s criticisms of Ben Franklin. I know he is about Murray’s dim view of Adam Smith. Skousen had engaged Murray to write a free market counter to Robert Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers. Murray couldn’t stop at one small volume and the project turned into the two volume An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought with a third volume in his head when he died. I remember Murray telling me that Skousen was unhappy with him for going beyond what he had been hired to do and saying “poor Skousen.”

As for Hoover and Gingrich. Since when were they ever worthy of anyone’s notice, let alone esteem.

“I wish I’d known him is the response every good obit writer tries to elicit; it’s a universal marker of obit success,” Johnson wrote in The Dead Beat.

Everyone wishes they knew Murray Rothbard, no thanks to Mr. Buckley.