I read some things on William F. Buckley, and from what I read it seemed like a lot of the things that he advocated for history seemed to view as wrong. He went back later on a lot of the things, but they were still wrong initially. For example, he seemed to advocate for continued segregation in the South. He supported the Vietnam War. A lot of what I read seemed to be the "wrong side of history," and when I hear him argue, he did seem very intelligent, I didn't get the "OK I disagree with what you're saying, but I understand it and can see your point of view." From what I've seen it's more of "No that's wrong."
Part of the esteem for Buckley was due to the fact that although many on the left disagreed with Buckley, he was often quite considerate of differing political opinions and actively pursued debate. This was something mainstream conservatives of the Although Buckley's show Firing Line pioneered some elements of political theater that would dominate American networks (eg Crossfire), the show also provided a venue for public intellectuals to debate important issues. Buckley often gave his guests ample time to present their opinions and he had a quick wit and sometimes came of as a genial rival. In his 2008 remembrance of Buckley, Christopher Hitchens described Buckley and Firing Line thus:
Ahh, Firing Line! If I leave a TV studio these days with what Diderot termed l'esprit de l'escalier, I don't always blame myself. If I wish that I had remembered to make a telling point, or wish that I had phrased something better than I actually did, it's very often because a "break" was just coming up, or the "segment" had been shortened at the last minute, or because the host was obnoxious, or because the panel had been over-booked in case of cancellations but at the last minute every egomaniac invited had managed to say "yes" and make himself available. But on Buckley's imperishable show, if you failed to make your best case it was your own damn fault. Once the signature Bach chords had died away, and once he'd opened with that curiously seductive intro ("I should like to begin . . . "), you were given every opportunity to develop and pursue your argument. And if you misspoke or said anything fatuous, it was unlikely to escape comment. In my leftist days, if I knew I was going on the box with Buckley, I would make sure to do some homework (and attempt to emulate him by trying to make sure it didn't show).
He was in so many ways the man to beat. Facing him, one confronted somebody who had striven to take the "cold" out of the phrase "Cold War"; who had backed Joseph McCarthy, praised General Franco, opposed the Civil Rights Act, advocated rather than merely supported the intervention in Vietnam, and seemed meanwhile to embody a character hovering somewhere between Skull-and-Bones and his former CIA boss Howard Hunt. On the other hand, this was the same man who had picked an open fight with the John Birch Society, taken on the fringe anti-Semites and weirdo isolationists of the old Right, and helped to condition the Republican comeback of 1980. Was he really, as he had once claimed, yelling "stop" at the locomotive of history, or was he a closet "progressive"?
Of course, not everyone held a high opinion of Buckley. Brian Morton's Dissent article That’s Not the William Buckley I Remember took memory of Buckley to task. And Noam Chomsky had a rather passive-aggressive commentary on Buckley's passing.