A Torch Kept Lit

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  “Howard Hunt, RIP”

  Syndicated column, January 26, 2007.

  My name has been linked to that of Howard Hunt, who died on Jan. 23, and I readily acknowledge that we were associates and close friends during the period (1951–52) when I worked for the Central Intelligence Agency in Mexico. Howard Hunt was my boss, and our friendship was such that soon after I quit the agency and returned to Connecticut, he and his wife advised me that they were joining the Catholic Church and asked if I would agree to serve as godfather to their two daughters, which assignment I gladly accepted, continuing in close touch with them.

  Not so with their father. Howard Hunt, as has been widely recalled on his death, had a sensational career, including, in his 50s, 33 months in federal prison on charges of conspiracy, wiretapping, and burglary. Some time after leaving prison, he asked me to recommend presidential clemency, which would have had the effect of clearing his name and reauthorizing him to vote. I told him I was reluctant to do this because in fact he had been involved in conspiracy, wiretapping, and burglary, but I was careful to say that the reason he committed these crimes was that he thought himself engaging in public service by protecting the interests of President Richard Nixon.

  He was terribly mistaken there, and in fact he was more responsible than any single other human being for bringing about Nixon’s resignation. Because it was Hunt who organized the Watergate break-in, seeking to advance the partisan cause of Nixon in 1972. He had at the time already committed a crime by breaking into the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, on a mission probably authorized by Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell.

  Hunt came to see me, with one of my goddaughters, shortly after his devoted and alluring wife was killed in an airplane crash. He recounted the story of Watergate, giving me information not known to the press or even to the prosecution. Notwithstanding his plight, he wore a jaunty sports coat and, pipe in hand, reported that, soon after his arrest, “I said to myself, ‘Where’s the fix? Why didn’t they fix me up?’ ”

  It was a genuinely appealing professional query. Howard Hunt had lived outside the law in the service first of his country, subsequently of President Nixon. The way things had worked for him, in Mexico, in Uruguay, in Japan, was the way he expected them to work now. You break the law in pursuit of your country’s interest as prescribed by your superior or by your cognitive intelligence of political reality. You get caught; and, if feasible, your government looks after you. If it’s bail that’s needed, it materializes. If it’s looking after your widow and children, that is done. If you are in Washington, D.C., having committed a crime on the authority of the attorney general or the president, why—Howard Hunt was saying—somebody…does something. And the charge against you for trespass, or burglary, or whatever, washes away.

  But Hunt, the dramatist, didn’t understand that political realities at the highest level transcend the working realities of spy-life. He ended up in prison, a widower with some of his children on drugs, and bankrupt. I got him a fine volunteer lawyer.

  I remember with sad amusement an earlier experience of Hunt’s with the law, this time involving his novels. Allen Dulles, then head of CIA, called him in one day and said, Howard, I know the rules are that this office has to clear all manuscripts by our agents. But you write so many, you’re wearing us out. So go ahead and publish your books without our clearance, but use a pseudonym.

  Hunt handed me his latest book, Catch Me in Zanzibar,* by Gordon Davis. I leafed through it and found printed on the last page, “You have just finished another novel by Howard Hunt.” I thought this hilarious. So did Howard. The reaction of Allen Dulles is not recorded.

  We visited once or twice after his remarriage, when he was trying to reestablish himself as an author. But estrangement crept in. A year ago he asked me, through an intermediary, to write the introduction to his memoirs [American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond]. I read them with great misgivings. There was material there that suggested transgressions of the highest order, including a hint that LBJ might have had a hand in the plot to assassinate President Kennedy. The manuscript was clearly ghostwritten.

  I declined to write the introduction. But when the manuscript was resubmitted to me, with the loony grassy-knoll bits chiseled out, I said OK, but wrote an introduction restricted to describing our early friendship in Mexico. The book will be published (by John Wiley) in March.

  And this former colleague here registers his old affection and admiration for a civil servant who ran into bad luck and lost his judgment, but who sought to serve his country and look after his children.

  * * *

  * The Library of Congress does not list a book with this title under Hunt’s name or any of his aliases. Among the three novels “Gordon Davis” published during Dulles’s tenure as CIA director, one—I Came to Kill (1953)—ended with: “THE END/of a novel by/Howard Hunt.” However, the novel makes no reference to Zanzibar. It is possible that WFB got the title wrong or that he received a novel that never was published.

  WFB supported a national holiday for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but always insisted that we see “the other Dr. King.” He believed MLK had achieved his legislative aims by 1965 and thereafter lost his moral clarity. As early as 1969, Buckley declared that for a memorial on the National Mall: “It is time that we mute the memory of one Martin Luther King, the advocate of civil disobedience who once likened America’s foreign policy to Nazi Germany’s; and stress instead the qualities that made him admirable—his courage, his moral strength, his great eloquence.”

  The fact of it is that Dr. Martin Luther King was a hero and a martyr in one respect. In others—one thinks of his celebration of civil disobedience—he was the spokesman for a point of view on citizenship which in the opinion of some—e.g., me—is mortal to civil society.

  When it was disclosed that the FBI had wiretapped the civil rights leader in flagrante delicto in various hotel rooms, Buckley denounced it: “I consider this the single most serious charge leveled against the FBI….Assaults on his privacy, if they do not bear remotely on the security of the nation against crime or subversion, are inexcusable.” Over time, Buckley saw the focus on the wiretapping and killing of King displacing thoughtful consideration of him. “I have been writing about Dr. King since 1955 and have not once mentioned the matter of the sex tapes,” WFB wrote in 1987.

  What is scandalous, we are led to believe, is exclusively the tapes’ existence and the uses to which they were put by the FBI. What we are not permitted to meditate is whether the subject matter of those tapes was scandalous….Are we or are we not saying that that which is scandalous is that which offends the public ethic, and that even though we know about the prevalence of sin, we honor especially those who struggle successfully not only to preach the Commandments of God, but to follow them?

  Buckley and National Review had, of course, been dreadfully wrong about civil rights in MLK’s heyday, with Buckley arguing at the time that Southern whites, as “the advanced race,” inherently possessed the power to take any measures necessary to preserve civil order during the period of blacks’ transition to equality. The biographer Sam Tanenhaus, surveying Buckley’s Southern roots, concluded that he had “actually inherited views on race that were fairly progressive for his time and place” and that his later recantations were “strenuous.”

  “Martin Luther King, RIP”

  Syndicated column, April 9, 1968.

  It is curious, and melancholy, that hours after the death of the Reverend Martin Luther King, and one-hundred thousand words after the doleful announcement of his murder, not a single commentator on radio or on television has mentioned what one would suppose is a critical datum, namely that Mr. King was an ordained minister in the Christian faith, and that those who believe that the ministry is other than merely symbolic servitude to God must hope, and pray, that he is today happier than he was yesterday, united with his Maker, with the angels and the saints, with the pro
phets whose words of inspiration he quoted with such telling effect in his hot pursuit of a secular millenarianism.

  Those who take seriously Dr. King’s calling are obliged above all to comment on this aspect of his martyrdom, and to rejoice in the divine warranty that eyes have not seen, nor have ears heard of, the glories that God has prepared for those who love Him.

  No, it is the secular aspects of his death that obsess us; very well then, let us in his memory make a few observations:

  1. Whatever his virtues, and whatever his faults, he did not deserve assassination. There are the special few—one thinks of Joan of Arc—whose career dictates, as a matter of theatrical necessity, a violent end, early in life. Dr. King was not of that cast. His virtues were considerable, most notably his extraordinary capacity to inspire. But although the dream he had seemed to many Americans, particularly the black militants, but not excluding many orthodox liberals, less and less useful (freedom now, in the sense he understood it, was a dream, mischievously deceptive), it simply wasn’t ever required that, in order to reify that vision, he should surrender his own life. In that sense his martyrdom was simply not useful. Because it is plainly impossible that, on account of his death, things are going to change. The martyrdom he seemed sometimes almost to be seeking may commend him to history and to God, but not likely to Scarsdale, New York: which has never credited the charge that the white community of America conspires to insure the wretchedness of the brothers of Martin Luther King.

  2. And concerning his weaknesses, it would take a lunatic (his murderer has not at this point been apprehended, but he is sure to be one) to reason that Dr. King’s faults justified a private assassination. The theory to which most of us subscribe is that there is no vice so hideous as to justify private murder. Even so, we tend emotionally to waive that categorical imperative every now and then. If someone had shot down Adolf Eichmann in a motel, the chances are that our deploring of the assassin’s means would have been ritualistic. The only people who were genuinely annoyed by Jack Ruby’s assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald were those who maintained a fastidious interest in the survival of Oswald, for the sake of the record.

  Dr. King’s faults, and they most surely existed, were far from the category of the faults of those whose assassination is more or less tolerated, as we all of us tolerated the assassination of George Lincoln Rockwell. Those faults were a terribly mistaken judgment—above all. A year ago he accused the United States of committing crimes equal in horror to those committed by the Nazis in Germany. One could only gasp at the profanation. Ten days ago in his penultimate speech, delivered at the Washington Cathedral, he accused the United States of waging a war as indefensible as any war committed during the 20th century. Several years ago, on the way back from Stockholm, where he received the Nobel Peace Prize, he conspicuously declined to criticize the Gbenye movement in the North Congo, which was even then engaged in slaughtering, as brutally as Dr. King was slaughtered, his brothers in Christ. But for such transgressions in logic and in judgment, one does not receive the death sentence.

  3. The sickening observation of the commentators is therefore particularly inapposite. The commentators (most of them) said: How can we now defend nonviolence? Surely the answer is: more perfervidly than ever before. It was, need we remark, violence that killed Dr. King. Should we therefore abandon nonviolence?

  Those who mourn Dr. King because they were his closest followers should meditate the implications of the deed of the wildman who killed him. That deed should bring to mind not (for God’s sake!) the irrelevance of nonviolence, but the sternest necessity of reaffirming nonviolence. An aspect of nonviolence is subjugation to the law.

  The last public speech of Martin Luther King described his intentions of violating the law in Memphis, where an injunction had been handed down against the resumption of a march which only a week ago had resulted in the death of one human being, and the wounding of fifty others.

  Dr. King’s flouting of the law does not justify the flouting by others of the law, but it is a terrifying thought that, most likely, the cretin who leveled his rifle on the head of Martin Luther King, may have absorbed the talk, so freely available, about the supremacy of the individual conscience, such talk as Martin Luther King, God rest his soul, had so widely, and so indiscriminately, made.

  “Israel is more than merely a state, is it not?” WFB asked Golda Meir during an interview in her Tel Aviv office in March 1972. “It is and it isn’t,” the prime minister replied warily. Buckley’s visit predated the Munich Olympics and the Yom Kippur War, but even before those wrenching events, he saw Meir presiding over two Israels: one a state bound by convention yet fiercely survivalist, the other a universal ideal, the locus of man’s hopes. “What then is Israel?” WFB asked afterward. “What is it that defines a Jew? To which question the accepted answer has come to be: to believe oneself to be one. By the same token, Israel is whatever the individual Israeli believes it to be.”

  “Golda Meir, RIP”

  National Review, January 5, 1979.

  Behind her desk in her office—surely the most tatterdemalion of any occupied by a chief of government anywhere in the world—were two pictures, one of Richard Nixon (the year was 1972), one of John Lindsay. On being asked about the criteria for qualifying to have one’s picture on her wall, she chuckled and said that the President of the United States (whoever he is) is regularly there. As for John Lindsay, then mayor of New York, she said she loved him, and indeed that she had got him elected in 1969 during his crisis with the Republican Party. “Yes,” she said, “I did it,” and chuckled. “I get along very well with American politicians. I make it my business.” Asked about McGovern, she warned of the implications of his anti–Defense Department policies. Why didn’t she speak out to world Jewry on the subject? Well, she agreed she was chief of government of a Jewish state, but she wasn’t going to start giving Jews orders whom to vote for in American elections. Israel needed U.S. good will and U.S. support, but Israel would otherwise look after itself. There was no alternative. “I was in the Waldorf Astoria when at the Security Council they were talking about a cease-fire resolution, and the talk talk talk went on for three days, and before they got to the resolution, India had overrun East Pakistan. And you know what the delegates were doing? While Pakistan was going down the drain? They were laughing! It could have been Israel.” She leaned back and lit another cigarette and talked about the reluctance of Israel to give up the captured territories in the absence of believable guarantees, nowadays defined as guarantees with a higher Moody rating than those we gave to Taiwan. “You know, I just love American Presidents. They are so nice to me. But—” her laughter, though coarse, was infectious—“you know, I have yet to find a U.S. President who has offered me command of the Sixth Fleet.” Golda looked after her people with ruthless disregard for lesser matters. And all other matters were lesser matters. If she had been President of the United States, we’d have had peace in Indochina, in the Mideast, in the Far East; and Moscow, a quaint duchy in the heartland of Asia, would be exporting wheat and importing Jews. God be with her. She will look after Him. —WFB

  Present at the creation: In 1968, Henry Kissinger, a Harvard professor and Rockefeller adviser, contacted WFB—a friend since the 1950s, when Buckley had lectured Kissinger’s international relations seminar (attended, Buckley observed, “only by students who intended to become prime minister or emperor”)—to ask if he would relay a private message to President-elect Nixon. Buckley dutifully placed a call to John N. Mitchell, Nixon’s law partner and campaign manager and the closest thing Nixon had to a friend; the result was the Nixon–Kissinger foreign policy. Long Island–raised, Jesuit-educated, Mitchell was Wall Street’s premier municipal bond lawyer. Using JNM’s innovation, the “moral obligation bond,” cities and states across the country financed countless public works. When Mitchell’s law firm merged with Nixon’s, the former vice president, plotting his comeback, eyed his new partner’s network of contacts and steely-
eyed taciturnity. “I believed,” Nixon later wrote, “that I owed my election as president in 1968 largely to his strength as a counselor and his skill as a manager.” Concerned about his second wife, Martha, an alcoholic with psychiatric problems, Mitchell only reluctantly capitulated to Nixon’s pleas to serve as attorney general in the tumultuous era that produced Kent State and the Weather Underground. Amid all that, JNM advised on Vietnam and China, picked four Supreme Court nominees, desegregated the Southern schools, and defused the crisis when Nixon’s “plumbers” discovered that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had spied on the president. Running Nixon’s reelection campaign, Mitchell became ensnared in Watergate, making him the highest-ranking U.S. official ever to serve time. Buckley erred in ascribing responsibility for the Watergate break-in to Mitchell; the former attorney general’s denials on that score were truthful. But WFB harbored a soft spot for JNM—it was a grant from Buckley, in 1991, that launched my work on a biography of Mitchell—and Buckley’s eulogy draws both on his novelistic skills, with a comic rendering of Mitchell’s Hitchcockian appearance, and on WFB’s own memories, uniformly unhappy, of the tormented Martha.

  “John Mitchell, RIP”

  National Review, December 9, 1988.

  A bond dealer! It was a part of the grander design that John Mitchell should have had that profession, and that face. He looked like the Anonymous Man, clerking his time away until the Social Security payments began. And all the while, in private life and in public, he was a picaresque figure.