WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY WAS A CRANKY OLD MAN

before he became old. In 1964, at the age of 39, he wrote that the Beatles were a terrible group and a few years later, he decided to make a show of his "higher" morality by attacking a young coed at Barnard College for the inexcusable crime of living with her boyfriend.

Here's the gist of the coed story:

Students: Linda the Light Housekeeper
Friday, Apr. 26, 1968
TIME Magazine

Pert, lank-haired Linda LeClair, 20, from Hudson, N.H., enrolled as a freshman at Manhattan's Barnard College in 1965. Soon afterward, she met Peter Behr, a Columbia University freshman from New York City, at a dormitory dinner. Romance blossomed, and when Linda became ill and had to drop out of school a few months later, the couple moved into a West Side apartment together. Last year, still living off-campus with Peter, Linda resumed her studies.

Plenty of other student couples share co-ed flats—so many, in fact, that the New York Times last month decided to run a story on students' light-housekeeping arrangements. To a reporter for the paper, Peter and Linda freely explained that they began living together because they regarded marriage as "too serious a step." As for Barnard's strict housing regulations, which require that noncommuting students under 21 live in supervised housing unless they have live-in jobs, Linda explained that she had simply given the college a false address where, she told the school, she was employed as a maid.

That neat little lie was too much for Barnard. Although the Times did not use Linda's real name in its story, the school had no trouble identifying her, and promptly charged her with violating the residence regulations.

Buckley decided this was worth an editorial:

"Linda's Crusade", National Review 20, no. 2, (May 21, 1968), p. 518¹
Dozens upon dozens of Miss LeClair's classmates stepped forward to admit that their living arrangements were similarly loose-minded,...

Mr. Behr, who is a draft evader, is apparently unable to take up the slack; so that perhaps the indomitable Miss LeClair will list herself as an unemployed concubine and apply for relief from the City,...

There isn't anyone around who seems prepared to say to Miss LeClair: Look, it is wrong to do what you have done. Wrong because sexual promiscuity is an assault on an institution that is central to the survival of the hardiest Western ideal: the family. In an age in which the Playboy philosophy is taken seriously, as a windy testimonial to the sovereign right of all human appetites, it isn't surprising that the LeClairs of this world should multiply like rabbits, whose morals they imitate.

LeClair was a member of SDS and did not subscribe to Playboy's "philosophy." She merely wanted, as many other young women did, the same sexual rights as men. There is no evidence that she was promiscuous or "loose."

¹America in the sixties--right, left, and center : a documentary history
Author: Peter B Levy
Publisher: Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1998.
Pages 176-78