At the age of five he changed his middle name to Frank in order that he might have his father's name. The symbolism in this action is significant, as William Frank Buckley, Sr., was the primary influence on his son's development. A devout Catholic and self-described counterrevolutionary, the elder Buckley infused his children not only with the staunchly traditional values he held but also with an insurgent's eye toward promoting them.
Buckley, Sr., known as Will, and his wife, Aloise Steiner Buckley, had ten children and raised them as a close-knit family, despite the somewhat peripatetic lifestyle of a Texas lawyer with foreign oil interests. The Buckleys spent 1926 in Venezuela and lived from 1929 to 1933 in Europe. The Buckley fortune had arisen from Mexican oil interests, and Mexico was a country where the elder Buckley had great influence until the revolution of the late 1910s. Will joined in counterrevolutionary activities to support the government against the insurgents, and when the government was overthrown, his activities led the new regime to confiscate all of his Mexican holdings in 1922. This experience reinforced his hatred of revolution, a hatred he worked to instill in all of his ten children.
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