Overdrive

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  The examiner has been coached by Warren, and his instructions are simple. 1) He must stand, at the outset of the program, behind his lectern, so that the camera can bring him in when I mention his name. He can then sit, but 2) he must, beginning after thirty minutes, watch me for any sign that I am about to introduce him, because when that introduction is performed, 3) he must be back at his lectern.

  I introduce him sooner, or later, depending on several factors. If the guest is dull, I bring in the examiner early, for relief. If the guest and I are in substantial agreement, I bring in the examiner early. Or—if the guest is brilliant, but I feel that the right moment has come for a change of gears, then I bring the examiner in early. But as a rule of thumb, the examiner comes in fifteen minutes before the hour's end. His instructions are to take his time in phrasing his questions, from which he should not endeavor to conceal his own bias, but not to be preachy. Finally, he should ask questions not only of the principal, but of me. My introductions close with a phrase that has become standard: "I should like to begin by asking [Mr. Blow] why [he believes the earth is flat]?"

  I devote the hour to composing the introductions, and to making my notes, then I change my clothes and, as Warren directed, report down at the lobby at exactly 2:45, where the kind lady from the studio is waiting; and we say goodbye to the Galt House.

  The studio appears busy. Like most studios, it comprises mostly hallways and small rooms, and people in a hurry. I am made up—years ago Warren told me sternly never to forget to instruct unfamiliar technicians to put makeup on my hands, because I bring them often to my cheeks, and awful visual anomalies happen when chalk-white hands come up against ruddy brown cheeks.

  The studio is full of WKPC's guests, and I walk over and greet my own guests, who are already seated and plugged in. I sit, a technician clips the tiny mike to my necktie, applying an inch of adhesive tape to cause the electric wire to set out vertically toward my waist, and I check the little stopwatch on my clipboard, which George hands me. It is pre-set so that when it reaches zero, the show is ended, fifty-seven minutes and twenty seconds after the music begins. On the table to my right is a digital stopwatch, a reserve in case my regular stopwatch stops working (this happens, curiously, a half-dozen times per year). "QUIET IN THE STUDIO!" Then the monitor is seen 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1. Then the music from Bach's Second Brandenburg, while the viewer sees the opening credits. I look down at my notes. I am to begin talking when the music stops playing, which it does after about thirty seconds. . . .

  MR.BUCKLEY: It's been a long time since we have visited on this program the question of busing as a means of effecting interracial comity. The issue appears to rise to high pitches of noisy advocacy, both by those in favor and those opposed, and then to recede from the headlines, at least for a while. To the end of determining what's up in the busing world, we have two distinguished scholars here in Louisville, one of them also an attorney, to report on the question.

  Willis Hawley is the dean of Peabody College in Vanderbilt University, where he is a professor of education and political science. Professor Hawley received all three of his degrees at the University of California at Berkeley, after which he taught at Duke and at Yale, settling down finally at Vanderbilt. There he has undertaken the principal responsibility for a government-financed study entitled "The Assessment of Current Knowledge About the Effectiveness of School Desegregation Strategy," a massive document stretching to nine volumes, for which an alternative use would be to throw these volumes at teachers or students who disagree with their findings. These we will discuss presently; suffice it to say for the nonce that they would appear to endorse busing in virtually every respect.

  Professor Robert Sedler, really, goes further. In a recent law article he advocated a construction of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which would in effect abolish the traditional differential between de facto segregation—that is, such segregation as occurs when all the kids in the neighborhood simply happen to be of a single race—and de jure segregation, where schools are segregated as the result of machinations of the school board. Professor Sedler teaches at the Wayne State University Law School, having before that been with the University of Kentucky Law School. Fie is a most active litigant, having figured in a number of constitutionally prominent anti-segregation cases. He has written a number of books, including, after three years as a professor at Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, a book called Ethiopian Civil Procedures, published shortly before Ethiopia gave up civil procedures. He has written profusely for the law journals.

  [There are generally no examiners when there are two guests.]

  I should like to begin by asking Mr. Hawley whether the views or findings of Arthur Coleman were examined in your lengthy report?

  [I was off to a bad start.]

  MR. HAWLEY: James Coleman?

  MR.BUCKLEY: Arthur, I think his name is—is it James? It is James, isn't it, yes. [The two big names are James Coleman, and Arthur Jensen.]

  MR. HAWLEY: James Coleman has written a great deal. I'm not sure what you have in mind.

  [I have in mind leading him to a quote from Coleman, but I'm not yet ready to use it. I give him a hint.]

  MR.BUCKLEY: '78.

  MR. HAWLEY: The white flight issue, yes, of course. Mr. Coleman, as well as most other scholars who have studied this question, have found that school desegregation brings about white flight from public schools under certain circumstances. I don't think there's much debate about that. The question is whether that needs to happen, whether it can be reduced and whether the longterm effects—

  MR.BUCKLEY: [attempting levity] Mr. Sedler could pass a constitutional amendment against it, couldn't he?

  MR. HAWLEY: [smiling] He's not the only one who would like to do that. But in general I'd say that the folks who point to white flight as the most serious problem of school desegregation generally overstate the effects of desegregation in that regard. There are lots of things going on in the country that would otherwise explain whites leaving public schools.

  MR.BUCKLEY: I didn't actually have that finding [the problem of white flight] of Mr. Coleman primarily in mind. I had [another finding] the summary of which, in his words, is, "There are as many cases where achievement levels decline as where they increase; thus, the notion that black children will automatically increase their achievements in integrated schools is shown to be false." Had you [sarcasm] forgotten that one? MR. HAWLEY: No. Mr. Coleman didn't himself do that study. Fie reported on a study that was published in 1975, which in turn dealt with the studies up until 1973. More recent evidence shows, to the contrary, that school desegregation in most instances brings about positive consequences for minority children with respect to academic achievement. Indeed, I think there is considerable consensus among scholars on that question. The only issue, I think, about that has to do with whether those effects occur throughout the school period or whether it's primarily an early school effect. We find that the effect is primarily in the early grades.

  [Coleman had affirmed the work of another reliable scholar, but it is left sounding as if Coleman had been relying on stale studies.]

  MR.BUCKLEY: Is David Armor a considerable scholar? [He was the author of the study in question. A Harvard Ph.D.]

  MR. HAWLEY: He is. He has not studied this question. That's not his particular area of expertise. [I am left in doubt now. Coleman was quoting some study, and I thought it was Armor's. Perhaps it was Jensen's. But I had better go on the offensive rather than take a chance dropping another name.]

  MR.BUCKLEY: Is your definition of a particular area of expertise somebody who agrees with you?

  MR. HAWLEY: No, of course not [he laughs], but in this case it's a question of who is studying the issue.

  MR.BUCKLEY: Is Tom Sowell [useful here: the black economist who has done trenchant work in sociology] a considerable scholar?

  MR. HAWLEY: He is, but he has not studied the effects of school desegregation on children.

  [A wise old bird.
He's not going to volunteer the name of the author of the study. I decide to make light of it all.]

  MR.BUCKLEY: I think you're saying it's Greek, and that I can't win. [The allusion is to the old story about the white voting registrar administering a literacy test to a Negro. In Greek. The Negro studies the text and says: "It say no Nigra's goin' to vote here today."]

  [It is time to turn to Mr. Sedler, who begins by saying that his interest is not so much in whether blacks profit from integrated schooling as it is that the two races should study together.]

  MR. SEDLER: The primary justification for school integration in my view, both from a constitutional and from a policy standpoint, is that it brings black and white children together during the educational process, teaches them how to live together in a multiracial society and a multiracial world. . . . When black children go to school only with other black children and when white children go to school only with other white children, neither black children nor white children, in my view, learn how to function as effective adults.

  MR.BUCKLEY: [I need now to spear the philosophical point.] I think your views are extremely interesting, but I'm sure that you, as a lawyer, would upbraid me if I failed to ask whether your views are constitutionally relevant?

  And so it goes. Mr. Sedler wishes to make the point that if equality is written into the Fourteenth Amendment, then you have got to effect equality, and one way is to require integrated schooling. Mr. Hawley is happiest talking about the sociological advantages—empirically demonstrated, he insists—of integrated schooling. I am left arguing that the sociological proofs are at least ambiguous, and that to read equality into the Constitution via the Fourteenth Amendment as authorizing compulsion is an invitation to the ideologization of an instrument that was devised as a compact between free people. The program is pretty good. Everyone gets a chance to say what he wishes, and there is a sense of consummation after the hour is over.

  Warren (who is a massive physical figure) beckons to me imperiously from the door of the studio and such a signal from him, so unusual, signifies a crisis of sorts (The governor's secretary called! The governor has been impeached! Can't possibly make it!) and so I go directly to him, forswearing the conventional little disengaging chatter with my guests. He has a piece of paper in hand, and tells me that the President is trying to reach me on the telephone. The floor manager ushers me into his office. I dial the White House. The operators there are renowned for their general knowledge and tact, but I announce myself in the obvious way: "This is ... I am returning the President's call." They then ask what number you are calling from, and one must suppose this is to guard from someone at Elaine's restaurant going to a pay phone and hiccoughing that he/she is Henry Kissinger/Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. I reply that the call was placed to my office, giving that number, but that I am in Louisville, Kentucky, giving this number. In a few seconds the operator advises that the President is tied up, but could he reach me in about a half hour? I say that unhappily he can't, forswear saying that the President will understand that the show must go on, and say simply that an hour-long television program will begin in about five minutes, but that I can call back then. Another silence, and then I am told that an hour from now would be just fine.

  This communication was hardly extraordinary, involving merely me, a phone operator, an assistant, and the President. But the resources of presidential communications systems are not to be underestimated. When President Nixon decided, ever so cautiously, to back the candidacy of my brother Jim for the Senate in 1970, Mr. Nixon disclosed his plans to me in the Oval Office, and in an extensive conversation advised me that he would have the Vice-President identify himself in some way with Jim, notwithstanding that the incumbent running against Jim, Charles Goodell, was the Republican nominee and Jim was running as a conservative, under the banner of New York's Conservative Party. Ten days later, the chairman of the luncheon in New York, at which Vice-President Agnew was to speak and my brother to be present in the audience, called to question me on whether the Vice-President was merely to be seen shaking Jim's hand (Version A), or whether the Vice-President in his speech was actually to say quote unquote how glad he was to see James Buckley in the audience (Version B). The chairman refused to go with Version B unless the White House explicitly cleared it.

  So, I called Bob Haldeman at the White House—but learned that he was in Spain, with the President. I asked then for presidential assistant Peter Flanigan, who thinks on his feet as fast as any man alive, so that in ten seconds I was able to describe the problem. "Can you hang on a minute?" he asked. Certainly. Well, it took closer to two minutes. Flanigan was back on the line. "We'll go with Version A." "Great," I said. Wondering whom he had talked with, I remembered that, in addition to Haldeman, John Mitchell had been in the Oval Office when Mr. Nixon had disclosed his plans. "Who'd you check with— Mitchell?" I asked. "No. I checked with Haldeman. He wasn't sure, so he asked the President." It is well known that George Bernard Shaw, on being informed of the discovery that the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second, commented that this was the most obvious lie he had ever heard. GBS wouldn't have been so skeptical if he had listened in on that conversation.

  It was time to go with John Y. Brown, Governor of Kentucky. A delicate matter in introducing him is how exactly to handle the presidential business. Some of my guests on "Firing Line" have been presidential nominees, some have been candidates for the presidency, some explicit contenders for the candidacy, some inexplicit contenders for the candidacy, some have simply been known to harbor a quiet conviction that all the reticulated factors argue their presumptive qualifications. It is in this last category that John Brown fits, and therefore in introducing him you do not wish to shove him farther up on the scale, as this might require him to make disavowals uncomfortable to him, and disrupting to the viewer, who may have tuned in to have a look at someone who might yet be President.

  So, in my introduction, I handle this by saying, . . [Governor Brown] is most conspicuous for identifying himself with the need to bring to state government the approach of business. Moreover, he has taken this position while simultaneously serving as a) a Democrat and b) a Democrat who is widely interpreted as profoundly believing that his nostrums for the state of Kentucky ought not to have a mere one state as their beneficiary. He would, or so it is assumed, consent to serve as President of the United States."

  So we go into the whole matter of the extent to which government is "business." I remind him that his own father once said that "government is not a business," and he replies that a knowledge of business is always relevant, and I counter that mental homes, for example, don't lend themselves to strict business accounting, and he says that really I've got to understand that everything lends itself to business analysis; for instance, he asked the head of the Kentucky Council on Higher Education a while ago how much does it cost per student per year in Kentucky colleges? And he didn't know—how do you like that? So I say the measurement of cost can't always be relevant, look at Karen Anne Quinlan, and he says it is always relevant, even if you aren't guided by it, and for instance Ronald Reagan's background had nothing to do with business, and that is one of the reasons why Reagan isn't really equipped to do everything he might do as a leader, and I say well, Pericles, Napoleon, Lincoln, and Churchill didn't have a business background, and they did all right, and he says wouldn't they have done better if they had had business experience?

  And so on. He is an engaging man, and along the line it occurs to me that the effort to get him to intellectualize his point is a) not working; and b) that it's not working could well be testimony to the effectiveness of such a man, whose skills and concepts are in every sense practical. John Brown bought the Kentucky Fried Chicken business from the white-suited Colonel for peanuts years ago and built it into a national compulsion. He makes, and stresses, a further interesting distinction, namely that men engaged in businesses they do not own haven't anything like the kind of concern for economy exercised by men who do own
their own business; and this I do believe, a point that did not escape James Burnham's notice when he wrote The Managerial Revolution.

  It's over, and I go out dutifully to call the President. But he is still tied up, so I go and mix with the audience—alert, sophisticated folk, mostly middle-aged. A young woman accosts me as "Uncle Bill" and kisses me, and holds my hand, and I am garrulously dumbstruck until the lady with the station asks, amiably, "When did you last see your goddaughter?" Suddenly I recognize that it is Howard Hunt's daughter Lisa, and indeed I haven't seen her for several years. I get to meet her husband for the first time; and then Warren is there, telling me please to come quickly to the telephone, and for the third time I am back in the office, and the telephone operator says would I hang on for a minute, which I do, and presently my old friend the commander-in-chief is on the line.

  He wanted, he begins, to thank me for my letter. That was not the letter I just finished writing, but one about a month old. I tell him I just finished writing him a fresh letter, and I mention, to be concrete, the Barbara Walters bit, and we discuss for a moment or two the appropriate answer if indeed she decides to ask him that question next week (she didn't). He tells me he has just come back from an exercise with George Bush, a war game in which the enemy launches from the Caribbean. That, he said, would give us three to eight minutes to launch back. I said the Founding Fathers could hardly have imagined a plebiscite on whether to do so in the time involved. I then told him Ron and Doria had enjoyed Nicholas Nickleby, and he said he knew that already, and thanks for asking them, and I told him Christopher, my son, had enjoyed the movie at the White House. I thanked him for calling, told him to give my love to his wife, while promising, at his request, to convey his to Pat, and I told him I knew how busy he was, and we said goodbye. A social call.