I worked in Bill Buckley's campaign for mayor of New York City in 1965. Being 17 at the time, and given that he didn't get terribly close to winning, I obviously wasn't much help. Still, my participation was enough to make a strong impression, not just on me, but also on my family, who assumed -- or at least hoped -- I was going through a phase.

Members of my family, with their not-distant roots in Eastern Europe and immigrant New York, and all the socialist and similar affinities implied, were not exactly charter members of New York's Conservative Party. Nor, for that matter, were they original subscribers to National Review.

Yet save for one uncle who did go batty, my family indulged me. Perhaps they were confident that once I went off to college, only a year later, I would be swept back to the left. Which I was, I'm afraid, though not nearly all the way, and for but a spell.

The Center of the American Experiment had the pleasure of hosting Buckley only once. The timing of his visit could not have been better, coming as it did just a few weeks before Mikhail Gorbachev keynoted our annual dinner in 2000. To the extent that friends might have thought we were going soft by entertaining the former leader of the Evil Empire, Buckley's appearance assured them we hadn't strayed.

Over and above, my thanks to Buckley were multiple.

One had to do with his bravery and success in defining a modern conservative movement that had no place or patience for racists, anti-Semites, or other assorted bigots and crackpots. Now, it goes without saying that bigots and crackpots never have been members in good standing in any decent American movement or school of political thought, be it right, left or sideways. But Buckley performed an absolutely pivotal service, starting at mid-century, by making clear that anyone who thought, for example, President Dwight Eisenhower was an active agent of the Soviet Union (as John Birchers did) wasn't welcome in any club he was in the midst of organizing.

Then there was the civility he extended to those holding other points of view; a way of going about my own career that I've at least tried to emulate. Needless to say, opposing viewpoints, after an hour of slow cooking on his long-running show "Firing Line," routinely emerged fricasseed. But the men and women who came bearing them were always treated as honored guests and good friends, not as the main course itself.

Perhaps less recognized or appreciated was Buckley's intellectual openness and the counterintuitive positions he sometimes took. There was the time in the 1970s, for instance, when he supported Carter administration efforts to turn control of the Panama Canal over to Panama, and how he debated not-yet-President Ronald Reagan on the point.

There also was his correctly encompassing understanding of what conservatism ought to be about most fundamentally: not just economics, but character; not just policy, but the very culture we breathe.

And, of course, there was always the sheer and simple (or not so simple) beauty of his language.

It's said Ronald Reagan put a sunny face on conservatism. What kind of face did Bill Buckley put on it?

Erudite? Certainly.

Patrician? Surely, at times.

Funny? Yes, regularly.

A little disheveled? That was the case, too, especially in the way he was never able to tie his tie as well as Don Shelby or even lesser anchors.

In finely sculpted sum, the face Bill Buckley affixed to American conservatism for more than a half-century was one of both fireworks and sobriety. Nearly daily, or so it seemed, he made intellectually and morally compelling sense out of what were (and remain) dangerous and decisive times for our nation and freedom. Without the smallest question, along with Reagan, he was one of the two most important architects of modern American conservatism.

Mitch Pearlstein is founder and president of the Center of the American Experiment.