Conservative pundit William F. Buckley, who died yesterday at the age of 82, was one of the heroes of my adolescence.

George Will once said, "before there was Ronald Reagan there was Barry Goldwater, before there was Goldwater there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was William F. Buckley."

Will was right. Incredible as it may seem now, there was a time in America when many took it for granted that no thinking person could be a conservative. To identify yourself as a conservative then, as I did during my teen years, was to be instantly dismissed as an Archie Bunker. But then I could always refer my snooty liberal classmates to Bill Buckley: Yale graduate, syndicated columnist, magazine editor, prolific author and dazzling talk-show host.

Buckley was a phenomenon. He was a man who could sail across the Atlantic on his own yacht, ski with the smart set in Gstaad, play Bach on the harpsichord and yet still attract a mass audience. He actually managed to make his use of exotic words part of his appeal. Comedian Jack Parr once quipped that whenever Buckley was on TV, the whole Parr household would gather around the tube with a bowl of popcorn and a dictionary.

Buckley could do more than argue on equal terms with the best liberal minds of the day. He possessed a stiletto wit and was liable to make his adversaries appear pompous and absurd when they least expected it. On one occasion, he challenged economist John Kenneth Galbraith to a debate on the free market. Galbraith agreed, but requested an alternative date for the encounter. He was sorry, he said with a touch of condescension, but he had a previous commitment; he had been invited to lecture at the University of Moscow. Buckley pretended to be impressed and then asked, with studied innocence, “What do you have left to teach them?”

Small wonder that historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once called Buckley “the scourge of liberalism.” He was that and more. He was an intellectual who could say that he would rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the entire faculty of Harvard. He could also say of liberals that they are always talking about the importance of hearing other points of view –- but then, they are always a little bit surprised to discover that there are other points of view.

Even in old age, Buckley retained the air of an enfant terrible. Deep down, he was still the precocious scamp who, at the age of six, wrote an indignant letter to King George V demanding that Britain pay her war debt.

The obituaries have been studded with some of the best of Buckley’s scintillating remarks. One of the most often quoted is from1955, when he launched National Review. In the first issue of his magazine, he said that to be conservative was to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop.” He was kidding. He was a serious thinker despite his flippancy, and understood that a true conservative is not opposed to real progress. What he did oppose –- fiercely, brilliantly and relentlessly -- were the ideologues and social tinkerers who sought to limit individual freedom in the name of “social justice,” “equitable distribution of income,” “non-threatening speech” or some other high-sounding abstraction that in reality masked an itch to control.

For that reason, the quote by which I best remember Bill Buckley was not original to him. It was from the Soviet dissident writer Illya Ehrenburg. Buckley used it often in his speeches, including the speech he gave on the one occasion, over 30 years ago, when I met him in person. As I remember, the quote goes like this: “When the whole world is paved over, a single blade of grass will spring up –- and the asphalt will part.”

When he started out as a conservative gadfly, Buckley was like that single blade of grass. Today there are scores, even hundreds, of conservative opinion-makers –- in print, on the radio, on TV and throughout the blogosphere. They are the real measure of Bill Buckley’s influence on American politics. The pity is that none of them can do the job with the same blend of erudition, culture, humanity and sheer fun that he did.