Cocksure William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives by John B. Judis Simon & Schuster; 528 pages; $22.95

By R.Z. Sheppard

Thirty years ago, William F. Buckley Jr. was widely viewed as a reactionary young fogy. Ten years later his critics were content to see him as a leading spokesman for conservatism and a worthy opponent. Today the editor of the National Review, TV host, columnist, lecturer, spy novelist and yachtsman is an Establishment celebrity admired for his charm but reproached for his unbearable lightness of being.

If Buckley worries about his public persona, he does not show it. Snook cocked, polysyllables bristling, he goads his critics by making everything he does look easy or, even more rankling, look like fun. There is a price. His books sometimes show signs of having been written with one eye on an in-flight movie. His syndicated column occasionally follows the hasty recipe, ad hominem, mix and half-bake. Yet he possesses genuine literary gifts and first- strike verbal capabilities that are devastating in debate.

The Buckley that emerges from John Judis' equitable biography is a versatile though not especially complex man. He establishes most of his positions from two fixed points: his Roman Catholic faith and his anti-Communist passion. Understanding his motives and drives, however, requires some adjustment. Most liberals consider Buckley a member of the privileged class. But as Judis describes him, Buckley sees himself as an outsider and counterrevolutionary battling entrenched atheism, collectivism and moral relativism.

He started early. At age seven, in 1932, he wrote King George to demand that Britain pay its war debts. He named his first sailboat Sweet Isolation. After Stateside service in the Army during World War II, Buckley went to Yale, where he used the rostrum and the columns of the university paper to crusade against liberalism. He formalized his quarrels in God and Man at Yale and became an unexpected best-selling author in 1951.

Judis provides useful insights into Buckley's conservative lineage. One early influence, Albert Jay Nock, an anarchist and enemy of mass culture, had visions of an intellectual elite he called the Remnant. Another, Yale Political Scientist Willmoore Kendall, argued that the interests of the majority should always prevail over individual rights. A loathing of the left had already been passed on to Buckley by his father Will, a Texas-born oilman who made a fortune in Mexico, only to have most of his property there seized in the years after the 1910 revolution.

By the time Buckley founded the National Review in 1955, he had abandoned ambitions to be a political philosopher. The long scholarly pull did not suit his polemical talents and gregarious nature. His friend Literary Critic Hugh Kenner put the matter concisely when he said that Buckley "was simply moving too fast to think, by which I mean that thought had become reflex."

Judis, an editor at the leftward newsmagazine In These Times, fosters this and like assessments without endorsing them. He is more definite in his conclusion: since conservatism triumphed with the election of his pal Ronald Reagan, Buckley has lost his competitive urge. The last lap of the 20th century may provide a new liberal challenger, but until then we are left with a small irony. Reagan, the former actor, entered the White House at about the same time that Buckley, the political activist, began changing into an entertainer.