William F Buckley Jr, who has died aged 82 after suffering from diabetes and emphysema, was one of the most important builders of the conservative ascendancy in America. His great single achievement was to make intellectual conservatism respectable for the first time for a generation. He did this through his own spiky but elegant polemical writings and through the magazine he founded in 1955, National Review, which fused together the warring tribes of the American right and gave encouragement to an entire generation of rightwingers.

In his television show Firing Line (1966-99), he became the most feared controversialist in America. Kind and generous in private, Buckley could be sarcastic and cruel in defence of his beliefs. His gladiatorial contests on air reached a climax in an infamous row with Gore Vidal in 1968. When Vidal persisted in suggesting that Buckley's views made him something close to a fascist, Buckley burst out: "Now, listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in the face!" Buckley was ashamed of himself for losing control, and developed a gentler style.

He loved to shock those he regarded as wimpish liberals, but it was important to him to present himself as a gentleman. He was a man of culture, a gifted writer and brilliant debater, and a sincere Catholic. He was also an accomplished pianist, and from 1976 onwards wrote a series of popular novels about CIA agent Blackford Oakes. In all, he produced more than 40 books and 5,600 of his biweekly newspaper columns, On the Right. A keen sailor, Buckley made a number of voyages, across the Atlantic and the Pacific, in large yachts loaded with friends, vintage wine, hundreds of hours of taped Mozart and Motown, word processors (for captain and crew to write their books on) and a piano for the captain's Bach.

At the same time, he freely expressed views most people would regard as oafish. For a long time he approved of racial segregation, though later he seems to have come to understand that this would conflict with his stylish image. He continued to write with gross insensitivity about Africans. He was openly homophobic, and when Aids first appeared, he suggested that gay men should be tattooed on the buttocks. As a young man, when asked about his beliefs, he replied: "I have God and my father, and that's all I need."

Born in Manhattan, he was the sixth child of Will Buckley, a Texas Irishman who made and lost a fortune in Mexican oil and then made it back in Venezuela. Buckley Snr rescued priests during the Mexican revolution and brought up his children to think of themselves as counter-revolutionaries. After taking the children to live in Mexico, France and England, he settled on an estate in rural Connecticut.

Buckley Snr resembled his contemporary Joseph Kennedy in that he was a self-made Irish millionaire, anti-communist and isolationist who had a fierce determination that his children must succeed in competition with the Protestant elite. Young William's older sister recalled that they were given professional instruction in "apologetics, art, ballroom dancing, banjo, bird-watching" and so on alphabetically for a long paragraph to "tennis, typing and tap-dancing".

Buckley Snr was a bigot who sent his children (not including Bill) to burn a cross, symbol of the Ku Klux Klan, on the lawn of a Jewish hotel. Like Kennedy, he was also an Anglophobe. Young William rejected his father's anti-semitism and was ambivalent about things English. He retained for life the slight English accent he acquired at the Catholic public school, Beaumont, which he attended from 1938 to 1939. He had many English friends, especially the historian Alistair Horne. But he derived glee from having Blackford Oakes sleep with the Queen of England.

The young Buckley was deeply influenced by his father's friend Albert Jay Nock, a defrocked Anglican clergyman. In an autobiography called The Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, Nock expressed contempt for the democracy and "economism" of the modern American world. He borrowed from the prophet Isaiah the idea that people such as himself and the Buckleys were a "remnant" who would fail to persuade their contemporaries but would influence generations to come.

After war service in the army (1944-46), Buckley studied political science, economics and history at Yale. He was a member of the elite insiders' club, Skull and Bones; star of the debating team (he won a famous victory over the Oxford team of Robin Day and Tony Benn); and editor of the Yale Daily News. After graduating in 1950, he met his sister's tall and beautiful friend Pat Taylor, daughter of a Canadian businessman. He proposed within a week and was accepted. It remained the model of a happy marriage. She died last April; their son Christopher survives them both.

Once he had left Yale, he wrote a caustic attack on the university's lack of religious faith, a book called God and Man at Yale (1951). Yale reacted with fury. When it put up McGeorge Bundy, later President Kennedy's national security adviser, to denounce him as a "twisted and ignorant young man", Buckley's name was made.

After a brief stint as a CIA agent in Mexico — where his boss was the future Watergate burglar E Howard Hunt — he co-wrote a provocative apologia for the liberals' bete noire, McCarthy and his Enemies (1959), about the witch-hunting senator from Wisconsin.

He founded National Review with a gifted and pugnacious team of editors, many of them converts from the left. They included Whittaker Chambers, an ex-communist who was the denouncer of Alger Hiss in the high profile trial of the McCarthy years; the talented ex-Trotskyite James Burnham; and another American ex-communist, Frank Meyer.

Buckley shone as the ringmaster of this ideological menagerie. National Review's great achievement was to bring together the authoritarian, often intolerant, strand of American conservatism with the libertarian, free-market tradition. The common ground was anti-communism. National Review had many of the faults of the politicised little magazine, including sectarianism and infighting. But countless American conservatives have testified that it made them feel part of a movement that would eventually change society.

By the 1960s, however, Buckley was losing interest in the magazine. He took to spending long holidays near Gstaad, in Switzerland, and worked on a book, to be titled The Revolt Against the Masses, which was never finished. There he made friends with the film star David Niven, and — incongruously — with the arch-liberal Harvard economist, John Kenneth Galbraith.

In 1966 he threw himself into Firing Line, which made him an instant celebrity. He ran for mayor of New York, though with no hope of winning. But increasingly he was more interested in the role of a Manhattan man about town whose speciality was to épater les bourgeois with patrician arrogance and rightwing insolence.

The election of his friend Ronald Reagan in 1980 restored his reputation. and enabled his family to enjoy a celebrity vacation with the Reagans at Claudette Colbert's house in Barbados. But his serious political influence was over. However, he could take consolation from the praise of George Will, National Review's former Washington correspondent, who said he had equipped the Republican party with an "intellectually defensible modern conservatism".

He proclaimed the decline of civilisation, while enjoying the best it had to offer in his big house on the Connecticut shore of Long Island; in Switzerland, which he called the antechamber to heaven; and in the salons and restaurants of Manhattan. His prosperity was dented, but not destroyed, by a series of business rows and reverses.

He will be remembered among other things for his self-deprecating wit. When he was running for mayor, a reporter asked him, "conservatively speaking", how many votes he expected to get. "Conservatively speaking," he replied, "one". "What would you do if you were elected?" the reporter asked. "Demand a recount."

William Francis Buckley Jr, editor, writer and television personality, born November 24 1925; died February 27 2008