Overdrive

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  In the drawers of this desk is an accumulation, twenty-five years of assorted matter, but I know where the paper clips are and, indeed, the loaded pistol. (I loaded it after my friend the Columbia University philosophy professor Charles Frankel and his wife were shot at night, in their country home, a few years back.) The office has two armchairs, one of them folding out into a cot of sorts, good for a catnap. The walls are packed with books, research materials, and photographs. Most of the surface of the table is piled high with papers and the usual paraphernalia— dictating machines, reference books, a large Royal standard typewriter, purchased at Yale when I was a freshman and in perfect operating condition. I am content here, and productive.

  The car, coming down the drive, has passed my window: Jerry has come for me. I look at my watch. No problem; I will be in New York easily by three. My column has been phoned in, and I have written that morning the promised piece for TV Guide on "memorable guests of 'Firing Line.' " ("The most effective guests on 'Firing Line' are those who talk, listen, and who plead seductively, masters of their argument, serene in their convictions. The most effective guests are not, however, always the most memorable.") I wrote of guests who had appeared ten years earlier, in 1971. Of Huey Newton (as in "Free Huey") who had flummoxed me by an absolutely perfected double-talk, absolutely inscrutable as to meaning. Of Bernadette Devlin, the young Ulster militant whom I had flummoxed by instinctively lighting her cigarette halfway through the show, causing her inadvertently to say "Oh, thanks very much"—thus shattering her carefully cultivated bellicose front. (Afterward she told me heatedly that lighting her cigarette was a typical act of male chauvinism.) Of Harold Macmillan who, having reached the sixteenth century in the course of making a historical tour d'horizon, suddenly said, "Oh, isn't this program over yet?" And of Jimmy Hoffa, who told me how necessary it was to be tough in this world if one wanted to survive; soon after, disappearing below some cement somewhere.

  Jerry was back at the garage within ten minutes, with Rebeca and Olga, respectively a solicitous and fussy Guatemalan and an otherworldly and gay-spirited Ecuadorian, who have been with us for a number of years. Neither speaks English, both are infinitely good-natured. And of course my beautiful old pooch Rowley, who had already made one round trip in his beloved car, Jerry having driven Pat to the city earlier, while I stayed behind to write and attend to correspondence. Jerry Garvey is a huge man who, while a firefighter, ran a driver service when off duty, his reserves of energy being inexhaustible, even as his competence is complete in all but mechanical matters: He shares my difficulty in distinguishing between pliers and tweezers.

  When Jerry was on duty in the Fire Department Tom, also a fireman, would substitute for him, it having been contrived that Tom and Jerry would never simultaneously be on duty at that fire station. Jerry elected to retire from the service after twenty years, and now drives full time for me. In fifteen years I have never heard him complain, not even about his brain-damaged but apparently contented daughter, whom he permits to sit with him in the front seat, but only on weekends, and when the car is empty, or when I alone occupy it.

  It is a large car. I remember having no exact figure in mind when the manager of the garage in Texarkana asked me how long I wanted it, so I simply extended my legs from the desk chair I was sitting in and suggested it be two feet longer than the current standard model. What happened was that three years ago, when it came time to turn in my previous car, which had done over 150,000 miles, the Cadillac people had come up with an austerity-model limousine, fit for two short people, preferably to ride to a funeral in. The dividing glass between driver and driven was not automatic, there was no separate control for heat or air conditioning in the back, and the jump seats admitted only two, because now the axle was raised a good six inches, making it impossible to furnish uninterrupted seat space stretching across the middle (all these features were Cadillac's accommodation to the fuel economies specified by Congress). This simply would not do: I use the car constantly, require the room, privacy, and my own temperature gauge, else I'd have to live off Jerry's, and how could that air, cold or hot, find its way aft with the partition closed, which is how I usually keep it, so that Jerry can listen to the radio, while I do my telephoning or dictation?

  There was, as usual, a market solution. You go out (this was in 1978) and buy a plain old Cadillac. You deliver it to a gentleman in Texarkana. He chops it in two, and installs whatever you want. Cost? Interesting: within one thousand dollars of the regular limousine, and I actually don't remember which side. The only problem is that people who come into the car will, unless warned, wheel about and sit down allowing for the conventional interval.

  They land on the floor, because the back seat is—two feet behind where it normally is.

  Olga is up with Jerry. Rebeca sits with me. Rowley is sleeping, over the heat ducts, but we are used to this. The briefcases and other paraphernalia have been carried out of my office. I ask Jerry if he turned on the burglar alarm in the house (Gloria has taken the train, to meet an early appointment), and he says yes, he did. For fifteen years we didn't even have a key to the house, having lost the one the owners left us. But then there was a burglary, and they took all the silver. I say "they" because notwithstanding that there were servants sleeping on the third floor, the burglars took their time, and evidently were, or became, hungry: the next morning, when the police came, the remains of two table settings, rather formal under the circumstances, I thought, were still there on the kitchen table with the apple cores, bread crumbs, and so on. The diners had plenty of silver for their modest needs.

  So now we have one of those alarms which ring first at the switchboard of the company's headquarters in New Jersey. From there, someone reacts by dialing your number. If there is no answer, or if the person who answers does not recite the code word, then the switchboard immediately notifies the police and a neighbor (you have given the switchboard two neighborly neighbors' numbers). The plot is that everyone then convenes at your house, and your neighbor, who has a passkey, opens the door, the police arrest the burglar, and you feel your money was well spent. Several times the police have arrived at our place to find an empty house. The false alarms are embarrassing, but it is also true that there have been no further burglaries.

  I turn on my Dictaphone, and check to see that the battery is alive. It is. It always is. Dictaphone has managed to construct a portable recording machine which is about the only thing around to remind us that we actually won the war against Japan. You turn on the unit, and start to look through your pile of papers. But the difference between this machine and others is that unless you actually depress the microphone button and talk into the machine, it does not expend battery energy. This is a datum of huge importance. For the sake of experiment, last spring I took a measurement. During five hours of uninterrupted work flying to San Francisco, I accumulated only eighteen minutes of dictation. Five hours—three hundred minutes—divided by eighteen. That adds up to one minute of dictation for every sixteen minutes of standby. I then calculate: the Japanese machines, which burn up energy once you've turned them on, whether you're talking or not, use up batteries sixteen times as fast as my beautiful Dictaphone which, I suppose it is fair to add, costs about six times as much.

  I'd have written to Dictaphone to volunteer a testimonial, save for my experience with Smith-Corona. That was seven or eight years ago when we reached Switzerland, as usual, at the end of January. I lugged out a Smith-Corona I keep there, having bought it ten years earlier—a $170 portable electric. I turned on the power switch, and as ever it performed perfectly. I was seized by the moment, stuck in a sheet of yellow paper and wrote to the president of Smith-Corona, "Dear Sir" (not knowing his name): "I wish to advise you that your portable electric model so and so is the most wonderful electric typewriter I have ever experienced, having given me no trouble whatever during ten years. You may use this tribute in any way you desire, so long as you make clear that I was not paid for it." The letter was neve
r acknowledged. Five years later, an advertising agency most decorously approached my secretary to ask whether Mr. Buckley ever gave testimonials to a commercial product? His client, Smith-Corona, was interested. (Mr. Buckley does not.)

  On the seat between me and Rebeca is a briefcase, and I take a plunge. The Public Agenda Foundation desires me to serve as a member of its Policy Review Board. Ugh. But careful—it is my old friend Frank Stanton, longtime president of CBS, who suggested my election; mustn't hurt his feelings. I read about the duties of the Policy Review Board I am asked to join. It "serves a critical function in this work. The Board, consisting of leading citizens with many different backgrounds, philosophies, and experiences, functions to guarantee the objectivity of the Public Agenda's work. Board members review Public Agenda projects, publications, and other materials to insure that they are free of ideological bias, that they are balanced and thoughtful, and that they represent the highest level of analysis and research." Prose like that gags, doesn't it? I mean, if leading citizens with different backgrounds, philosophies, and experiences guarantee objectivity, then why isn't the United Nations objective? And are we so sure we want to be free of ideological bias? Isn't a hierarchy of values valuable? And if so, do we then not inherit a working bias of sorts, susceptible of rearrangement—e.g., when we elect to go to war?

  And just when is a bias "ideological"? Is ours for democracy ideological? And in order to be balanced, does this mean that every time we make the case for human freedom, we need to present the other case? I do not tire of quoting Randall Jarrell in Pictures From An Institution who spoke of the professional toleration of Flo, the wife of the professor of sociology . . . "If she had been told that Benton [College], and [her husband] Jerrold, and [her son] John, and [her daughter] Fern, and the furniture had been burned to ashes by the head of the American Federation of Labor, who had then sown salt over the ashes, she would have sobbed and sobbed, and said at last— she could do no other—'I think that we ought to hear his side of the case before we make up our minds.' "

  But these are well-meaning and gifted people, and the organization no doubt does good, whatever exactly it does; but would it do better for my efforts? I write that my schedule is hectic and my availability for meetings therefore uncertain, but that of course I will happily discuss the question with Frank Stanton when he calls, which he never did, and I take the matter to be closed.

  John LeBoutillier is a young and very energetic congressman. Having experienced him, I can understand how he contrived to get an interview with the most reclusive man in America, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I don't know just how he managed, but his tenacity evidently paid off: and now he wishes National Review to publish his interview, which we'll almost certainly do. John wrote Harvard Hates America, an expose of his alma mater; and perhaps at this remove (the book was written three years ago) I can confess my opinion of it, namely that the title is the very best thing about it. But John will go far, and no doubt, in encountering him, Solzhenitsyn detected one or two familiar Bolshevik traits. The interview says nothing entirely new, but Solzhenitsyn speaks with continued force, and I marvel at his capacity to sustain the high level of his rage. "In December 1973," he tells LeBoutillier, "when I was still in the Soviet Union, I have published (sic) the Gulag Archipelago in the West, and the Voice of America—one speaker, one announcer—has immediately read an excerpt from this book, and immediately Radio Moscow was up in arms. There was an uproar, and they said that the Voice of America has no right to interfere in internal affairs of the Soviet Union. And what did the Voice of America do? Together with the State Department, and with the consent of the State Department, the Voice of America prohibited the reading of the Gulag Archipelago over the radio. Not only that, they went even further. They prohibited even any mention of Solzhenitsyn so as not to antagonize the Soviet leaders, meaning that my book was written for the Russians—in the West, millions of people have read it. And in my country nobody can read it. . . . Your radio broadcasting does not provide the needed spiritual help for people."

  More. The Firing Line Newsletter, describing the program that would air that Sunday, rates it three stars each (out of a possible four) for Public Interest, Performance, and Entertainment. The newsletter goes out to all television critics and program managers in the cities that air "Firing Line," approximately two hundred and fifty. I am pleased with the idea, which I generated fifteen years ago when "Firing Line" was in its infancy. When a show goes on week after week, television critics (and program managers) should have some idea what's in it, and how it came off. The trick is to get someone of independent turn of mind who, notwithstanding that his/her editorial stipend comes in from "Firing Line," will make ruthlessly objective judgments. Such a woman exists—in Columbia, South Carolina, the administrative home of "Firing Line." I have never met her, know nothing about her, but her judgment is excellent, her critical style sprightly. The format begins with a comment: "Mr. [Mark] Green wields a wicked needle, attempting to stick Mr. Buckley with Budget Director Stockman's views on supply-side economics, and also with the envisioned sumptuary laws of the Moral Majority. Mrs. [Harriet] Pilpel zeroes in on the subject of abortion and announces, with the authority of Moses, what the law is. Sometimes the questions are too long, including a rebuttal to Mr. Buckley's supposed reply before he can answer. Some arguments reach an impasse. . . ." That critique is followed by the text of my introduction to the program, which is useful in supplying background material on the guest(s). And, finally, the newsletter contains a page of excerpts from the program's transcript.

  "Firing Line" celebrated its fifteenth birthday earlier this year, its guest invitation list comprising everyone alive who had ever been on the program. Shortly after the party began I was yanked from the receiving line by the maitre d' of the New York Yacht Club who informed me that within one minute, the President of the United States would be on the line; that when he spoke, I was to hold the telephone up against the microphone so that the crowd could hear the exchange. Silence was secured with the weighty announcement that the (freshly inaugurated) President was on the line, and of course it was a technological fiasco. President Reagan began by greeting me and the program. I replied that at hand were Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, and did the President have any instructions? But the result of the neat little scheme of pushing the telephone up against the mike was that the President couldn't hear my replies and the audience couldn't hear his voice, so the colloquy dissolved in a blur of congratulations and reciprocal compliments.

  "Firing Line" is now one of the twelve oldest consecutively run television programs. I am constantly astonished by the variety of people who look at it. A fairly recent poll reckoned that 980,000 households tune in every week, and that figure is not of course impressive as television goes. Contrast 100 million viewers of the Super Bowl. On the other hand, contrast one million households viewing "The Dick Cavett Show," which runs only a half hour. A careful reading of additional data encourages certain tentative conclusions. It transpires that the average viewer will stay tuned to the Cavett show for eight minutes, to "Firing Line" for thirty-eight minutes. The reason why is readily discernible. The Cavett show is on nightly, and the listener can tell in a few minutes whether the guest interests him. "Firing Line" is known to be comparatively exhaustive. It would follow that the prospective viewer would first establish the identity of the guest before reaching a decision whether to tune in. If interested in the subject (or the guest), he will tune in. And, already aware of the tempo of the program, he is not made restless by its pace. Television talk programs in recent years have quite intentionally paced up their talk segments, so that typically they run five or six minutes. Five or six minutes is long enough to declare war, recite the Gettysburg Address, or seduce Fanny Hill, but isn't generally enough for a satisfying, measured analytical exchange.

  Ken Galbraith and I worked "The Today Show" in Miami in 1972 (he was backing McGovern, I Nixon), back when the time limit of a segment was fifteen or twenty minutes,
and the exchange was lively, useful, and, the record suggests, popular. Four years later in Kansas City we were asked back, but were limited to the new time allowance. We were both dissatisfied with the outcome, even as (we take it) the network was. "Anything that requires us merely to exchange wisecracks doesn't work," was Galbraith's postmortem, and I agree with him. Later in the season I was asked by "Good Morning, America," Would I debate on Election Day with Norman Mailer on the subject, Carter or Ford?

  "How long?" I asked the producer.

  "Six minutes."

  "No."

  "What!"

  "No."

  "Why?"

  "Because in six minutes you can't count on getting anything said."

  There was a most awful consternation at the other end of the telephone, and after a summit conference, no doubt attended by major stockholders, it was decided to give us eleven minutes. Two years later I caught the same program, on which Alfred Kahn, President Carter's inflation czar, or rather anti-inflation czar, was given six minutes to explain the reasons for the then-current sixteen percent inflation rate. At the end of six minutes he was cut off, so that we might, with a guest plumber, view the causes of, and requisite ministrations to, a leaky faucet.