How a conservative icon shook the establishment, lost an election and got the last laugh

The year was 1965, according to Thomas E. Lynch in "Only Half in Fun," published in the fall 2015 issue of Modern Age, and Claire Booth Luce, a Republican congresswoman from New York who had long represented the traditional conservative values of the Republican establishment, could look over the still smoldering remains of Barry Goldwater's disastrously ideological presidential campaign and shake her head in dismay. She had much the same low opinion of New York City, which she described as "the biggest urban mess on Earth." The state of the Union that year wasn't much better.

And then along came 39-year-old William F. Buckley Jr. to shake the country