Overdrive

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  I tell a nice man in Fort Lauderdale who wants me to put out a collection of my journalism that in fact I have put out a lot of collections.

  The chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Associates of the Yale Medical Library writes a charming letter asking me to be the speaker at their annual function. "Unfortunately, our purse is small and the honorarium consists of only one hundred dollars and carfare." I am reminded of my friend Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, the hardest-working man I have ever met, who has struggled all his life with poverty while writing, lecturing, translating, in a dozen languages. Ten years ago he was asked by the Harvard International Relations Council could he please give an address to some large assembly at Cambridge, which he managed to do by taking a 3 p.m. plane from Chicago, and a midnight plane back to Chicago to meet his morning engagement. A few weeks later he received a check for twenty-five dollars. "So, I returned it, wiss a leetle noht. I said: Eef thiss iss intended ass a fee, it ees not enough. Eef thiss iss intended ass a teep, I do not take teeps." That sounds snotty, and I think I make it plain to the good doctor that my obligations to National Review, with its annual loss in the several-hundred-thousand-dollar range, require me to give priority to commercial dates; all of this I explain as courteously (and factually) as possible. But I should have leveled with the doc and suggested that he do away with the hundred-dollar business, and merely stress the honor of it all. It would be wonderful to be able to speak only to those assemblies that, for whatever reason, particularly appeal. And, preferably, to audiences of one hundred or fewer.

  We are all familiar with the saw about the criminal evidence seminar in law school where suddenly someone enters with a popgun, fires it at a startled student in the front row, and bolts out the window; after which the professor asks the class to set down a record of what happened, what the fellow looked like, where he came in from, where he went out, etc. The fun comes in reading out loud the papers, which tend to disagree on almost all particulars. A lady writes that she is outraged because of the "exchange of sick humor" between me and the person I was speaking to on "Firing Line." "[You] intimated that perhaps it was not such a bad thing to be disabled because of all benefits which would accrue from the federal government. I recently became disabled because of multiple sclerosis and have great difficulty walking a short distance. I can assure [you] that money does not help the agony of disability. I was deeply offended by [your] cruel and stupid exchange." In such matters there is no need even to go and look at the transcript. Some things you know simply cannot be, and this is one of them; so I write: "I cannot imagine my saying anything that suggested that people gladly become handicapped. You must have misunderstood me," and console myself by thinking of the law professor's experiment.

  The current issue of the Authors Guild Bulletin reveals that its editor, Stuart W. Little, is resigning. I met him first when my brother Jim brought him down from Yale, as the imposing chairman of the Yale Daily News, in, oh, 1940, when I was fourteen. He has been the compleat writer: drama critic, book reviewer, speechwriter, editorial writer, biographer. And his son Christopher, a gifted professional photographer and human being, came with me on a trip across the Atlantic on a sailboat, a venture chronicled by me, with photographs by Christopher, in my last book, Atlantic High. I write Stu, who has not disclosed his plans, wishing him well.

  A friend with contacts within the academic community of the University of South Carolina asks whether, in the event the invitation should be forthcoming, I would accept an invitation to be the commencement speaker, and receive an honorary degree? Oh dear.

  In the past I have generally said yes to such invitations, but experiences a year ago at Vassar and this year at William & Mary have rather thoroughly affected my attitude.

  I was invited in March to deliver the commencement address at Vassar; I accepted (my wife and a sister were at Vassar), and many weeks later saw for the first time issues of the Vassar newspaper. After a few telephone calls with the president of Vassar, I made my decision and wrote to her a letter I gave to the New York Times, parts of which received considerable publicity.

  "The majority of the senior class of Vassar [this I learned from the Vassar paper—53 percent of the senior class asked that the invitation to me be withdrawn] does not desire my company, and I must confess, having read specimens of their thought and sentiments, that I do not desire the company of the majority of the senior class of Vassar. Really, they appear to be a fearfully ill-instructed body, to judge from the dismayingly uninformed opinions expressed in their newspaper, which opinions reflect an academic and cultural training very nearly unique—at least, in my experience. I have spoken, I suppose, at five hundred colleges and universities in the past thirty years, and nowhere have I encountered that blend of ferocious illiteracy achieved by the young men and women of Vassar who say they speak for the majority of the graduating class and, to some extent, say so plausibly by adducing the signatures of the majority of that class in their recall petition. One professor of English writes to the newspaper, 'It was Buckley who offered pridefully in those days the caste of mind and insinuating attitudes toward academic which intellectually veneered the crudities of Joe McCarthy, and in so doing, fueled McCarthyism at its most virulent pitch with respect to the academic community.' That the man who composed that sentence should be teaching English at Vassar rather than studying it suggests that Vassar has much, much deeper problems than coming up with a suitable commencement speaker."

  At William & Mary earlier this year no recall petition had been circulated, but protests were vehement, occupying most of several issues of the student newspaper, and there were threats of protests during the ceremony. I thought of simply pulling out, which Pat wanted me to do, but decided finally to go ahead, and see what happened. However, I resolved also both to seduce and challenge the graduating class. I asked Tom Wendel, who is a professor of colonial history at San Jose State University and one of my oldest and closest friends, if he would collect for me some anecdotes involving William & Mary, which he did, around which I constructed an introduction calculated to immobilize active protest, without committing sycophancy. . . .

  Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen of the graduating class:

  A couple of weeks ago I was talking to the Prince of Wales [Message: I manage to get around even without William & Mary], who earlier that day had received the hospitality of this institution [Message: W&M knows how to be hospitable—e.g., to British royalty], which he characterized as quite wonderful [Message: obvious].

  I suggested to him that the geographical location of William 8c Mary symbolized the realization of the perfectly appropriate relationship between the American people and a British monarch. Williamsburg, after all, is equidistant from Jamestown—the point at which the British elected to establish a North American Empire— and Yorktown, the point at which the North American Empire made conclusively clear to the British that they had gone too far [Message: there is such a thing as going too far].

  At Williamsburg a fortnight ago history suggested that the proper relationship between America and Great Britain is halfway between servility and hostility. Friendship and courtesy among equals [Message: I extend the metaphor of how behavior should be governed] .

  Besides, William & Mary's charter should have prewarned his Royal Highness that he would be well treated. Your charter speaks of founding a college "to the end that the church of Virginia may be furnished with a seminary of ministers of the gospel and that the youth may be piously educated in good letters and manners" [There, my message is now plainspoken]. We all realize that any attempt to teach virtue has got, in this imperfect world, to be asymptotic: one never quite achieves the goal. And by no means is this always the fault of students. Professor Edmund Morgan [of Yale; who would also receive an honorary degree], in whose company I am honored to find myself [my near embarrassment was hilarious. I had taken Wendel's quotation attributed to Edmund Morgan as the work of an eighteenth-century American historian, and had so written him into
my speech. When I found myself, at dinner the evening before, seated next to Edmund Morgan I had to search out and destroy the first page of three copies of my address, thoughtfully handed out earlier that afternoon], recorded in his classic Virginians at Home the commentaries of a shrewd observer during the last decades of the colonial period, namely that he had known "the professors [of William & Mary] to play all night at cards in public houses in the city and often seen them drunk in the streets" [Message: my compliments on the one hand to those faculty members who had also written in to protest my appearance; and a reminder to the students that I know that their elders can also misbehave].

  But Williamsburg was to go through a great deal, particularly during the Revolutionary War and immediately after it. Bishop Asbury, the great circuit rider, noted in his journal on December n, 1782, "I rode to Williamsburg, formerly the seat of government, but now removed to Richmond. Thus the worldly glory is departed from it. As to divine glory, it never had any. The place has suffered and is suffering: the palace, the barracks, and some good dwelling houses burned. The capitol is no great building and is growing to ruin. The exterior of the college not splendid; and but few students. The bedlam house is desolate, but whether none are insane or all equally mad, it might perhaps be difficult to tell" [Message: W&M has had a, well, interesting history, in which other evils have figured than miscast commencement speakers].

  All institutions have high and low days. So is it with commencement speakers. What should our posture be? Surely, also, somewhere between servility and hostility [Message: I intend to be friendly and courteous, but that's it]. What rule should govern their attitude toward honorary degrees? [Message: this is for those of you who wrote in to the paper suggesting that I be okayed as a commencement speaker, but that the offer of an honorary degree should be withdrawn.] A pragmatic one, surely. Nicely expressed by Professor John Kenneth Galbraith, who told me that his policy with respect to honorary degrees was to have one more than Arthur Schlesinger. My policy in commencement addresses is straightforward, namely not to let words come from my mouth which I would be embarrassed to utter before my colleagues at National Review, who are my chosen colleagues [Message: I'm not going to depart from my chosen positions . . .]. Because, of course, to do otherwise would be to beguile and cheat the student body, which it would be infamous to do on the day you complete your formal education and matriculate into extra-academic life [. . . and you shouldn't want me to]. It is also important, I think, to acknowledge that there is no law that says that commencement speakers are any better, or any worse—that they utter nobler, or less noble thoughts—than student speakers. I remember about ten years ago serving as commencement speaker at Gettysburg College. The student speaker who preceded me arrived at the lectern with two differently pitched saxophones strapped around his neck. He spoke about the complicated interrelationships between truth, justice, peace, beauty, and love. Each time he completed one of his dozen formulations, he would put one or the other saxophone to his lips, striking a single note which he understood to be the musical equivalent of the harmonious interrelationship he had verbally constructed. His exegesis lasted forty minutes [Message: students can also be boring, and obnoxious]. That evening, short on cosmic material, I wrote a newspaper column describing the tortured afternoon. Three days later I received an indignant letter from the president of the graduating class advising me that in his opinion my own address had been no great shakes. Allowing me to make the obvious reply —namely, that I was hardly surprised, since after all Gettysburg owed its reputation substantially to its historical underestimation of great orations. I note from the William & Mary Quarterly a dispatch published in August of 1798 as follows: "Our noble President was burned in effigy in Williamsburg on the fourth of July by the students of William & Mary College." The President in question was, of course, John Adams. At any rate, if you proceed to burn me in effigy after I am done, you will demonstrate that I and John Adams have yet one more thing in common.

  Well, it worked. The audience was calm, and appreciative. But what a lot of work. Pat Moynihan, who that same year had had an experience at the University of Pennsylvania equivalent to mine at Vassar, called me up when he read about my withdrawal to say grouchily, "Do those little bastards [the demonstrators] think we have nothing else to do with our Sunday afternoons?"

  I write my friend that I will need to know that the invitation incorporates accepted procedures of student democracy at the University of South Carolina. Hell, it's their commencement.

  We have pulled into my driveway, the weeping willow trees on my right, the scrubby little apple trees on my left, and Jerry stops, as ever, opposite the garage study, which is where I leave my papers. He then drives on to the main house with the bags, and I walk there. As I climb the stone steps the sea becomes fully visible, looking gray and gusty. Burlap bags cover Pat's huge pots and the plants they harbor. I open the main door and feel the warmth of the heating and of my home, and David Niven bounds over and we embrace, French-style, and gabble on as we walk into the sunroom.

  Though the talk is full of levity, all is not well. David was last here three weekends ago. He had set out the following Monday on a pretty grueling ten-day trip to promote his novel Go Slowly, Come Back Quickly, just published by Doubleday, already a best-seller in England and destined for best-sellerdom in the United States. I had noticed then that he wasn't in full control of his speaking voice. Saturday night we showed him the tape made the preceding spring when he appeared as master of ceremonies at the fine two-hour Hollywood tribute to Fred Astaire. We had seen him in Switzerland before and after the Astaire business, and he had told us he had had a most fearful time controlling his voice, so much so that at one point he was not sure he would be able to go on. So we listened intently as we viewed the videocassette, in David's company (he had never seen it), and although he did sound a little laryngitic, the problem was not distracting to the viewer. But three weekends ago he'd had clear difficulty in enunciation, and was so worried about it that he reduced his liquor consumption from his normal three glasses of wine per day to a single glass; this, though, had made no difference. He had told Pat and me that the doctor in London had deduced that it was a plain matter of physical fatigue (he had been working very long hours on a movie) and that after the lecture tour was over he was heading for Acapulco and there, as a guest of Loel Guinness for ten days, he expected to recuperate fully. So now I listened to him attentively as he described his travails on the promotion circuit, to see whether in fact he had licked the problem. He hadn't; and soon we were speaking about that frankly, and inquisitively; such an exchange as is possible between close friends.

  At that moment the bell rang, and Sam and Jo Vaughan came in. Sam is incapable of arriving anywhere without great parcels of gifts, which he now distributed, including the first copy of my new novel, Marco Polo, If You Can. Pat had come down, and in the bustle we managed to hang the coats, and the lot of us went back, through the living room, to the sunroom. Sam is David's publisher as well as my own and, a description I used once in Cruising Speed about another friend, quite simply a bird of paradise. It is not known how anyone can manage to be as attentive as Sam is to his friends and authors, and not infrequently one qualifies as both. His notes are bright, cheerful, witty, inventive. He is, for his authors, a presence. There is nothing more important to an author; and David, who went from another publishing house to Doubleday in part on the strength of the liking he took to Sam, agrees. David hadn't before met Jo, petite, pretty, bright, easily amused, attentive in just that winning way that permits nuanced conversation. She has been suffering from a bad back. I have chronic sinusitis, Dupuytren's contracture, and skin cancer, so I suggest that we devote three minutes to our several physical complaints, and then shift to sublime subjects, like David's and my books. Pat celebrates this by distributing bloody marys, which she makes with one-half bloody mary mix, one-half beef broth (necessarily Campbell's beef broth, even when Jack Heinz is being served). And at just that
moment Van Galbraith comes in, apologizing that wife Bootsie can't come. Van and David and I have experienced years of each other's company in the Gstaad area, to which Van began bringing his family for skiing vacations over ten years ago, and so it is in the nature of a reunion. The company was already hearty, but the supplement of Van Galbraith raises it very nearly to the level of hilarity, and the conversation bubbles along.

  Van leaves tomorrow for Paris, where he will be the freshly invested United States ambassador. Three weeks ago he paid me a nice compliment and his expression of the favor was conveyed with marvelous obliqueness. He told me that the swearing-in ceremony at the State Department had now been fixed for November 13, that about one hundred friends and family were coming in for it, that the ceremony would take place in "one of those ornate places over there," that the procedure was that Bill Clark, Deputy Secretary of State, would preside (Al Haig would be out of town); Lee Annenberg, the chief of protocol, would administer the oath. "Then there's a speech given about me, a personal speech, and I wonder if you'd give it, although don't go out of your way, maybe the date's no good." I checked and it was okay. Ten minutes on Van Galbraith . . .

  A year ago I had sat through the three and one-half hours of raw film taken by Mark Dichter and his assistant, who had accompanied Van and me and four other friends on a sailboat. We sailed from the Virgin Islands to Bermuda, and then on to the Azores, and to Spain. But the cinematographers were with us only on the first leg (the idea was to produce a documentary). I dimly remembered that two or three minutes of the two hundred I had seen depicted Van in an argumentative mood with Dick Clurman on the matter of working for the government, Van going on about the sheer futility of the exercise. So I called Mark. Mark, would you do me a great favor . . .