One hot and sticky August morning, I arrived at Buckley Towers in Manhattan. As I entered the office, editors were marking up an issue, publisher Jack Fowler was talking baseball, and writers — whom I had known only as bylines and cable stars — were riffing on Obamacare as deadlines loomed. It was quite the scene, like "Mad Men" meets "All the President's Men," without the skinny ties or liberal pablum.

For the next twelve months, the energy and fun of that first day never waned. As NRI's inaugural Buckley Fellow, I had an adventure — and a political education.

Though unable to enjoy a ride on Patito, WFB’s sailboat, I was lucky enough to jump aboard his beloved mothership. NR’s merry leaders — Rich Lowry, Kathryn Lopez, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Jay Nordlinger, to name a few — mentored me each step of the way, sharing invaluable tips on the craft of reporting, editing, and commentary. Every evening we put an issue to bed, I was there with our crack editing team, coffee in hand, helping to finalize things. Every other Monday, I was at editorial meetings, batting around ideas with Rick Brookhiser, John Derbyshire, and others. It was graduate school for the conservative mind.

During my time with NRI, National Review Online published many of my articles, including two co-written with Lowry. Beside countless Corner posts, I was also able to captain four reported blogs for NRO — Bay State Report (about Scott Brown’s campaign for the Senate), two health-care blogs, and "Rogue" (about Sarah Palin). My reporting was cited by everyone from Rush Limbaugh to the Wall Street Journal. Numerous talk-radio shows invited me on as a guest political analyst. At the end of my fellowship, I wound up on the roundtable at MSNBC's "Morning Joe." What a ride.

In every sense, my experience was a young political writer’s dream: Driving through New York City with Mitt Romney and debating American foreign policy was a thrill. So was interviewing Sarah Palin about her memoir. Having long talks on health care with Rep. Paul Ryan outside the House chamber during tense votes was more than a scoop — it was a front seat to history. So was diving deep into the contentious NY-23 House race and covering Chris Christie on the trail and on election night. But I also had time to mull the larger issues, such as when I brought Newt Gingrich to NR to talk about God and American politics, or when I had lunch with the remarkable Linda Bridges, NR's editor-at-large. NRI president Kate O'Beirne, the dean of Beltway conservatives, was always there, too, providing encouragement and perspective.

Now, as a Buckley Fellow alum, gratitude fills my spirits. I know that I started my journalism career in the best way possible: learning from the best and keeping busy, all while remembering the legacy of leaders like WFB, who paved the way. We’re all in his debt. Contributing to what he started was a great honor.

Robert Costa
William F. Buckley Fellow 2009
Cambridge 2009
Notre Dame 2008

On my first day at National Review, our publisher, Jack Fowler, scurried me through a maze of cubicles, plunked me down at an open desk, checked my computer for signs of life, and said, “Make yourself at home!” It’s been a wild ride ever since.

Immediately, Rich Lowry sent me on the campaign trail all over New England: a senatorial debate between Richard Blumenthal and Linda McMahon in Hartford, Conn.; a meet-and-greet with Sen. Scott Brown in Lincoln, R.I.; a surprise press conference with gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker in Boston, Mass. After the elections, I covered the race to replace Michael Steele as chairman of the GOP on the reporting blog, RNC Watch. My beat culminated in attending the RNC election itself with its backroom deals, whispering campaigns, and thumb-cramping blackberries. In between the horse races, I’ve gotten to pursue my own ideas, including interviews with two of my favorite presidential biographers, Ron Chernow and Edmund Morris.

But what I’ve enjoyed most over the past year is getting to know my colleagues, especially the newest additions to NR: Matthew Shaffer, Katrina Trinko, Andrew Stiles, and Bob Costa. It’s a privilege to learn from the greats, but it’s also a blast to trade war stories with your fellow newbies. NR is keeper of the conservative flame, and this fellowship will help insure that there will be people to tend to it in the future.

Brian Bolduc
William F. Buckley Fellow 2010
Harvard 2010

The William F. Buckley Fellowship in Political Journalism is the best opportunity for a 22-year old to use intellect for influence. One of the great things about modern online journalism is how we can watch ideas in action. After a piece goes live on National Review Online, one can watch it tweeted and retweeted, clipped on blogs, commented on and passed around on Facebook, and picked up by aggregators and radio and TV shows. With a platform like NRO’s a writer really can shape the debate.

That’s what I’ve loved most. Twice, Sean Hannity read from my pieces on Fox News when I caught a liberal congressman telling a tall tale. A Texas congressman read one of my pieces aloud during testimony.

All of which was pretty cool. It’s also a pretty good feeling — at first, a pretty weird feeling — when Senators return to your phone calls, or gubernatorial candidates leave their donors aside to get a drink with you.

In college, I didn’t follow the news or political commentary. I was conservative because I idolized Bill Buckley, and the conservative canon. But I had astonishing gaps in my knowledge of contemporary American politics.

That all changed, very, very quickly, that sunny morning I arrived at National Review last summer, and Rich Lowry, editor-in-chief, asked me to do a piece about a person I’d never heard of before. I was suddenly thrown in the pack with the sharpest political minds in the country, and expected to keep up. It was a thrill and an honor.

The same thing happened for my writing. Editing the Pulitzer Prize winners we publish on a daily basis, and having my work edited by office higher-ups, is probably the best thing I could do for prose style. It teaches an attentiveness to word choice, grammar, and metaphor that makes for clearer thinking, too.

Journalism is changing very quickly, so the task of a Buckley Fellow does, too. I’ve done some video editing and many midnight shifts of comment moderation — but there’s much to be learned even from those.

The Buckley Fellowship is partly what the Buckley Fellow makes of it. Management here is accommodating. I like abstract ideas more than the political horse race — so I got a cool beat doing extended interviews with public intellectuals. Sometime in the winter I got an itch for foreign affairs — soon, I was running my own Mideast-watch blog.

But my favorite part is being a generalist. I turned down graduate school because I couldn’t tolerate thinking about only one topic all the time. That is — to say the very least — not a hazard of the Buckley Fellowship. One day you might be learning and writing about the Geneva Convention; another, about the structural problems with a federal housing program. I spent a recent afternoon on the phone with nuclear engineers, trying to get up to speed on, well, nuclear fission, radioactive isotopes, the volatility of Cesium, the radioactivity required for statistically significant cancer uptick — you know, basic stuff. A Buckley Fellow becomes both hedgehog and fox, forced to quickly learn practically everything that’s going on in that little section of the world called the Beltway, and a little bit about practically everything else.

It’s a challenging job. I go home at night with strained eyes and a stretched brain. And even then, I do some extra writing for Ricochet.com — a former Reagan speechwriter invited me to contribute after noticing my work for NRO. At times it all gets a bit overwhelming.

And that — how many 22 years olds can say that about their jobs? — is the best endorsement I can give the Buckley Fellowship.

Matthew Shaffer
William F. Buckley Fellow 2010
Yale 2010