Overdrive

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  There aren't many running points of tension in my household, but one of them is that Pat persists in perching a half-dozen photographs on the harpsichord. The mere effort of removing these discourages thoroughly impromptu, three-or four-minute sessions on an instrument that, unlike the piano, really requires that it be opened up in order to do any justice to the subtlety of its tone. The instrument here in the hallway in New York belongs to the great Fernando Valenti, a Challis presented to him by his friends and students in the mid-fifties. It was proclaimed by him to be the finest Challis ever made, by that shy little harpsichord maker with Parkinson's disease who twice, before dying in 1974, came to tune and voice the instrument, both times before Fernando's occasional recitals here. Valenti recorded over eighty long-playing records on this instrument, and gave it up only after fashion, with its iron foot (yes, it is so also in music), ruled that harpsichords shouldn't have a sixteen-foot register, which register permits the player to sound a note an octave below the note he is depressing. I stay out of the argument among the professionals and the theorists. All I say is that used correctly (as by Fernando), the sixteen-foot can achieve simply wonderful musical effects, and I do not doubt that J. S. Bach and Scarlatti, if they had heard the sixteen-foot (and it is not absolutely established that they did not), would have welcomed its discreet use, and perhaps even have specified its use, here and there. Recitalists at my apartment regularly use it.

  Anyway, I must run. I go back upstairs, change, Jerry gets the bag. Soon I wend my way through the Waldorf to the indicated meeting room, which is empty because the audience is listening to the luncheon speaker. It is ten minutes to two, and I am scheduled to begin at two. A hospitable woman with Yankelovich comes and keeps me company, and soon the audience of several hundred files in.

  They were to have heard Senator Bill Bradley at lunch, but he couldn't make it, and instead they listened to Richard Blumenthal, an attractive young Democrat, formerly U.S. Attorney in Connecticut. I am sorry I didn't hear him, or an earlier speaker, Michael Novak, a friend and contributor to National Review. I chat with Mark Green, who will speak after me. Fie is a liberal activist, ten years with Ralph Nader (if you can bear it). Fie apparently bore it well because he is young, fresh, enthusiastic, and resourceful. That is the reason I use him with such frequency on "Firing Line," in the role of examiner. He is to follow me, I learn; and after him, Don Hewitt, executive producer of CBS's "60 Minutes." But in accepting the engagement my office warned my hosts that I would need to fly out of New York right after speaking (indeed, in a private plane) to meet a prior commitment in Toledo. Everyone seems in a good humor about this; I am introduced, get up, and perform, my eyes carefully on the clock.

  I think this very important when there are other scheduled speakers. Once, in Philadelphia many years ago, Louis Auchincloss, Ralph Nader, and I were scheduled to speak between eleven and twelve, twenty minutes each, to the annual booksellers' convention. We were begged to keep our remarks to the specified time, as any failure to show up at noon in the dining room would cause three thousand soufflés to collapse, or whatever. Nader began. And spoke for forty minutes. Auchincloss and I looked at each other. I was scheduled as the third speaker, so I raised all ten fingers, and he understood that each of us would cut our prepared remarks in half. Not easy to do.

  At the Waldorf the questioning was lively, and when I left I had the feeling (I get this about half the time) that 1 had given the audience meaty propositions, and had upheld their plausibility during the question period.

  Back in the car, I spoke on the phone with Frances most of the way to LaGuardia. Little things, but they needed attention. Mark Dichter, the cinematographer who last summer sailed with us as far as Bermuda (from St. Thomas) on the boat I chartered, needs a date to do joint work on the documentary we have planned (OK to set up, I tell Frances). It is a coincidence that that is exactly what Allen Stanley needs, who is producing a documentary on the earlier trip in 1975, about which I wrote in my book Airborne (OK). Frank Mankiewicz wants me to go to a luncheon for National Public Radio (there is a conflict, but I could make it for the pre-lunch reception). John Fox, who is working on a book about Whittaker Chambers, needs some time (OK), and Molly Ingram of Holiday Yachts wants to find out what we want in the way of food during Christmas when we cruise aboard the Sealestial (answer: ask Pat).

  The airplane, dispatched for me by a friend of the Friends of the University of Toledo Libraries, is a little Grumman, and the pilots are anxious to go, because there are heavy head winds, and I am supposed to be at a cocktail party before the dinner. The two pilots lift the ship into the air, and during the next two hours my seat belt is never off. Reading is extremely difficult, and I am working on the research folder for the guest on one of two "Firing Line" programs that we are taping tomorrow, namely John Brown, Governor of Kentucky. I don't get motion sickness (though I am careful never to say that I never will get it—I have seen too many virgins suddenly, inexplicably, collapse at sea), so the movement didn't upset me, it just made things difficult. Which is nothing to what I did to my hosts, two of whom were waiting at the airport most anxiously when we came in, almost an hour late.

  They zoomed me to the Inverness Club, and I learned the background of the association that sponsors this annual dinner, devoted to maintaining interest in free library service under the patronage of the University of Toledo. My hosts (Mr. and Mrs. Leslie Sheridan) were wonderfully pleasant and good-humored, and, arriving too late for the cocktail party, I was taken to my seat, and wine was served. The dinner was very long.

  I have often reflected on this. A secret ballot, I am quite certain, would reveal that ninety percent of those who attend large, festive hotel or club dinners, which are to be followed by speeches, would be infinitely grateful if the first and third courses were decorously pre-situated at their places, leaving to the waiters only the burden of bringing the main course. When I was not yet thirty, I spoke to the largest seated dinner audience I have ever addressed: sixty-five hundred Philadelphians who had attended retreats at St. Joseph's in the Hills during the preceding year. It was held at Convention Hall, the lobster salad was there when we arrived, and behind the bread plates, a raspberry tart, with a slice of cheese alongside. It remained only for the waiters to bring piping hot filet mignon, baked potato, and beans. Red' wine was on the table in carafes. The speaking began forty-five minutes after we filed into the room, everyone satisfied. At least by the food.

  The introduction took me by surprise. Most introductions are contractions of your Who's Who and/or the kind of thing one would expect if being nominated for President, in which, to use Mencken's metaphor, you are compared to the rising sun, the full moon, and the aurora borealis. In the professional fraternity of public figures I doubt there are many who are influenced in the least by such ritual sycophancy. It serves a purpose, of course, with the audience, particularly if it is an audience partly conscripted by the philanthropic nature of the event. It is pleasing for them to know they have come to listen to Shakespeare, or Abraham Lincoln. One does come upon, every five years or so, an introduction inherently interesting to the speaker, either because of the felicity of the composition, or the resourcefulness of the research. A historian at the University of Texas once introduced me to an audience of students by saying that he had done research into my family. I knew that my grandfather had been sheriff of Duval County. I knew that he had been a Democrat, knew that he had been a law-and-order sheriff. "But I am not certain that Mr. Buckley knows that his grandfather's allegiance to the Democratic Party surpassed his allegiance to law and order, because although Sheriff Buckley died in 1904, he voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1948." That was fun. Tonight the vice-president for academic affairs, English scholar William Free, began by quoting those nice lines of Pope: "Yes, I am proud: I must be proud to see/Men not afraid of God, afraid of me:/Safe from the bar, the pulpit, and the throne,/Yet touch'd and shamed by ridicule alone." It transpires that as an undergraduate at Yale Mr. Free had,
along with a classmate, challenged me in a public letter. "The letter is long forgotten, but not the response. Whatever the merits of our arguments, the skill with which his were put taught us a lesson in humility that made a lasting impression." Free quoted Auden, and by now convinced me that his generous amiability concealed a continuing distaste for my views: "Time . . . Worships language and forgives/Every-one by whom it lives; . . ./Time that with this strange excuse/Pardoned Kipling and his views,/And will pardon Paul Claudel,/Pardons him for writing well." I'd need instruction in what exactly it is we're supposed to pardon Kipling for.

  "The nation's best-known conservative man of letters unfolded a 'liberal' attack on sloppy rhetoric and collectivist economics Thursday night at the Inverness Club," the following day's paper related. "William F. Buckley, Jr., whose own prose has almost never been called sloppy—or liberal—regaled the annual dinner for the Friends of the University of Toledo Libraries with an hour of droll 'reflections on current contentions,' especially those concerning economic policies." There followed a gratifyingly accurate account of what I actually said, by a staff writer (Mr. Jack Lessenberry) of the Toledo Blade, though marred, I thought, by the subhead toward the end of the story, "Buckley Says Andrew Carnegie/'Was an Awfully Dumb Man.' " "Mr. Buckley, whose father was a millionaire oil magnate, drew his biggest laugh of the evening when responding to a questioner who asked him about Andrew Carnegie's theory that all inheritances be outlawed, so that the United States would be led by an 'aristocracy of talent, not of inherited wealth.' 'He was an awfully dumb man,' Mr. Buckley, who received $4,000 from the library association for his Toledo speech, said."

  I don't think I said that, or if I did I misspoke, as the expression goes, intending merely to say that the notion of confiscatory death penalties was a very dumb idea. I went on to say that F. A. Hayek, in his Constitution of Liberty, insists most persuasively that if one came upon a society in which no one was wealthy, that society would be better off endowing one hundred people at random with a million dollars each than being without citizens with surplus funds. One trouble with confiscatory death taxes, I explained, is that they would place a most unhealthy incentive on profligate spending in later years. Moreover, the tribal instinct being what it is, many men work for their families and children, and the idea that property once acquired, i.e., after the tax has been paid on it, isn't one's to disburse as one likes is primitive in its collectivist bias. Something like that. Carnegie was in many ways an eccentric, but anyone shrewd enough to contrive the kind of protective tariff that nursed his steel business along was hardly dumb.

  After it was over, a biographer of Ezra Pound with whom I have corresponded wanted to take me off for a nightcap, and I thanked him but begged off, because I have to write my Friday column tonight, and dictate it to New York before flying to Louisville tomorrow. I shook hands all the way round, slipped out to the elevator, and opened the door of my room.

  The feeling, after lecturing, on regaining the occupancy of one's own room is a delight whose resonances have been insufficiently sung. The sheer relief of silence is a part of the magic. The stillness of the surroundings. Pat packs me a flask of vodka and little cans of grapefruit juice, and I disrobe, pour a vodka and grapefruit juice, and, since there is work to do, unzip the typewriter, this without relish. I have in my briefcase the New York Times with the whole of Reagan's speech on disarmament, the European challenge, etc.; so I write my column under the title "The Year of Europe" and assess, country by country, the probable reaches of the peace movement currently being encouraged (and in some instances, engineered) by the Soviet Union. "Mr. Joseph Sobran," I write happily, "the bright and witty columnist, has remarked yet one more terminological usurpation by the Left. To call those who, without compensating concessions by the Soviet Union, are prepared to dismantle our defensive arsenal in Europe members of a 'peace movement' would be to say that Neville Chamberlain led the peace movement in Great Britain during the late thirties, or that Henry Wallace led the peace movement during the forties. The Soviet Union has from now until mid-1983 to ascertain exactly what will be the consolidated picture within Europe on the designated eve of the deployment of our Pershing and Cruise missiles designed to counteract the Soviet weapons." My pitch is: that we must hold absolutely firm on the matter of deployment of the theater nuclear weapons. I argue that Soviet leaders will make no substantial concessions unless they judge as resolute our determination to deploy the missiles, and Europe's disposition to accept them.

  Having twice checked the alarm clock, because I am due at the airport at 9 a.m., I read something about somebody and, turning off the light, remember to count on my fingers the five decades of the rosary, a lifelong habit acquired in childhood, and remembered about half the time. That half of my life, I like to think, I behave less offensively to my Maker than the other half.

  Five

  FRIDAY

  Leslie Sheridan rang that he was downstairs and ready to convey me to the airport. I had breakfasted, talked with Frances, and decided there would, after all, be time to telephone in the column from Louisville before the (12:30) deadline, so I left. In the car, we chatted and Leslie pronounced the previous evening a great success, which was nice to hear, though in fact the preceding evenings are always pronounced great successes, hosts being as nice as generally they are. At the field it was cold. I greeted the pilots and said I hoped the air wouldn't be as choppy as yesterday's, and got a reassuring reply. The flight was about two hours and I dug into the portfolio on the other television program, this one having to do with busing as an instrument designed to effect school desegregation, or integration. It had been a while since my mind dwelled on the subject, and there was much to catch up on.

  We flew at about 7,500 feet and encountered little turbulence. There was snow as we came over Cincinnati, and I remembered that extraordinary fortnight fifteen years ago. I had been scheduled to speak one night in Louisville, but the pilot landed the plane in Cincinnati because of bad weather in Louisville, and I took a 110-mile taxi ride, arriving in Louisville forty-five minutes after my speech was supposed to begin. One week later (what are the odds against such a thing?) I was scheduled to speak in Cincinnati and the airplane landed in Louisville, requiring me to take a 110-mile taxi ride to Cincinnati, breaking into the banquet room after some of the guests had simply given up.

  When I arrived in Louisville, the car from the local television station whisked me off to the Galt House, where the young, attentive manager reminded me I had been there a couple of years before. The hotel in question is sort of Diamond-Jim-Brady-Western, and in my huge suite, thirty-two Muscovites could have been housed.

  Warren Steibel, who, when the program is taped outside New York, generally gets in a day ahead to supervise technical arrangements, rang me before I had even sat down, and I told him to come on up. Warren has produced all but the first dozen or so "Firing Lines"; we have been everywhere together, and I have long since developed a huge admiration for his professional competence and a special gratitude for his knowledge of my own (by no means eccentric) likes and dislikes (foremost among the latter, to be made to arrive at a studio much before the technicians are ready to roll). He gives me a rundown on the schedule. The first show will be with the two professors, on the busing question. The second show will be with the governor. A hundred-odd supporters of the station will compose the studio audience, and after the second show there is to be a reception, but that reception will last no more than forty-five minutes, guaranteed. After that, Warren had promised our hosts, I would read several commercials calling for local support to the station. Then we would be whisked away to the airport, in plenty of time to catch the 6:30 flight back to New York. Did I need anything?

  Just the time to finish my research, and type out the two scripts. But I took Warren's telephone numbers—he and his assistant, George, need to be at the studio several hours ahead of time, to arrange the setting and practice with the technicians.

  I telephone my office, an
d dictate the column into the recording machine. Moments after hanging up, my brother Jim reaches me by phone from Washington. He dined last night with Clare Boothe Luce, and she professed her indignation at the Time mag story, and it was left to Jim to ask me whether I thought a call from her to editor-in-chief Henry Grunwald was in order. God no, I said; surprised, actually, that Clare had made the offer, having on more than one occasion heard her express her powerlessness at Time even when Harry was alive and running things, so mighty was the fortress separating Henry R. Luce, editor-in-chief, Time Inc., from Harry Luce, husband of Clare. Probably the gesture was a mere act of civility, even as it may be difficult for a congressman not to offer to look into the matter if he finds himself spending an evening with an old friend whose grandmother didn't receive her last Social Security check. Jim agrees, and the social circuit is completed.

  It is only a quarter to twelve, but I am suddenly ravenous and order a hamburger and a beer. I eat the hamburger while still standing, because I had given myself a minute to read the front page of The Wall Street Journal, which was spread out on the desk. I gulped down a glass of beer, unzipped the typewriter, and spread out my research. Then I was hit—it happens sometimes—with a most awful, undeniable, need for sleep. In the Infantry, during the first hour you march for fifty minutes and then take a ten-minute break. In succeeding hours, the break is reduced to five minutes. The question, back in 1944-45, was always whether to smoke a cigarette—or attempt sleep. Half the time I would sleep; and ever since I have had no problem at all in sleeping for ten minutes. The alarm on my clock isn't calibrated finely enough, so I set it for fifteen minutes. I am instantly soundly asleep, and wake before the alarm goes off, substantially refreshed.

  For reasons I haven't fathomed, the half hour to forty-five minutes I give to writing out the introductions to "Firing Line" guests, and making notes of questions from the material previously researched, I continue to find the single most taxing activity I engage in. I don't know why this should be so. My introductions follow an uncomplicated formula. If the guest is vastly illustrious, his identity is given in the opening paragraph. If less than that, the whole of paragraph one is devoted to the issue being discussed during that hour. The whole of paragraph two is devoted to a biography of the guest. There is then a one-sentence mention of the examiner, with the promise that he will be introduced more substantially "in due course."