Gary Will's "Daredevil"

This is a story of great friendship and the author Garry Will tells it with passion.  At first this story did not really catch my attention but after awhile I began to think of Bill as my friend and I wanted to learn about his life and the kind of person that he was.  It took only the first story to get the idea that Bill was and why he was so important to Willis.  When Will told the story about the said boat incident I saw both how daring and brave Bill was when he saved is friend who had fallen overboard without an ounce of fear.  Will goes on to describe some of the stigmas that Bill had to deal with such as, social snob, ideological snob, and intellectual snob.

I thought that at some points Will was making Bill sound almost to perfect.  No one is flawless and I thought that Will did not want to admit that Bill had any flaws.  Now the more I thought about it I could see why it would be difficult to talk about anything other than how great he was.   The section about social snob show how kind and generous he was to his friends.  I thought it was wonderful and Bill set Will up with his sister, it shows that he truly cared a lot about making his friends happy and his family too.  Bill also had a spirit for helping people out of small bind such as, leaving a briefcase at the airport.  I thought this brought a down to earth persona to Bill’s personality. 

The second issue, ideological snob, was quickly pushed aside by Will’s statement in the final paragraph of the section.  “By the time of his death, even Bill’s earlier critics admitted that he had done much to make conservatism respectable by purging it of racism and fanatical traits earlier embedded in it.”  This was powerful for me because it showed that Bill was able to bread down the barriers that had been built around his political party and show that in his lifetime he had made a difference.  The paragraph goes on to describe men in Bill’s party that had created the prejudices and how Bill was able to distance himself and his followers from these men.

Finally, intellectual snob, one point in this portion of the essay stuck out to me because I was able to relate to the words.  “Bill lived and wrote and lectured- and played and socialized and exercised- at a furious pace.  Partly because he bored so easily. But party to make money.”  Some may say that to do these things simple because he was bored or to make money is greedy and selfish.  But I see it as determination, because he did not want to live off of what other people had done.  I have also been one to want to make my own money and not live off of my parents forever.   I am a strong believer in working hard and if it means at a furious pace like Will says then that is what had to be done.