The Rake

by William F. Buckley

  By the spring of 1990 Reuben Castle could see, however in-distinctly, little sparklers in his own solar system. He was hardly ready for a Secret Service detail. Yet it was an observable fact that when he traveled, when he went to colleges and assemblies to speak, his hosts felt an imperative to look after details of the engagement that reflected an unspoken sense of entitlement. Senator Castle had become a national political figure. Granted, the leadership of the Democratic Party was in the hands, if by no means securely, of a political community in which Reuben Castle, sometime youthful activist, was alien. There were plenty of reasons, in the great political derby of 1992 coming up, to skip over Senator Castle. He was young, relatively inexperienced, and the representative of a state the mention of which brought on such comments as, “Isn’t that where Senator McGovern came from?” The answer to that was no—Castle was from the other Dakota, North Dakota. But the mere mention of the remote plains state hemmed in by Minnesota and Montana had slightly derisive overtones.

  There were ever so many challenges lying ahead, but every now and then Reuben felt the guidance of his mysterious angel, Kaltenbach. Sometimes the directives were forthright. These would come to him through Susan.

  “Senator”—she always addressed him so if there was anyone else within hearing—“you’ll be getting a request to take part in a symposium with General Westmoreland. The University of Illinois, in October. The subject is ‘Vietnam—Was It Worth It?’”

  Bill Rode picked up his mail and withdrew to his own office, leaving Susan alone with Reuben in the main office.

  “Harold wants to know what you think about it. He’s not wild for you to do it. He said to tell you it’s tough to share a platform with a general arguing on the other side, especially if the general is a national hero. But he says that if you feel you want to put something on the record about Vietnam, your consolidated view on the war, this would be a good forum.”

  “Sit down, Susan. Let’s think together about this one. Everybody knows I was a protester.”

  “But everybody also knows you went on to service in Vietnam.”

  “Yes. And General Westmoreland isn’t going to say anything about my not being assigned to combat duty in Vietnam—I was under his direct command, after all.”

  “The University of Illinois is also where you didn’t finish law school.”

  “Yeah. But they—the anti-Castle types—wouldn’t be looking for 1973 law-school grades, and wouldn’t be able to find them if they tried. There’d be a wisecrack maybe, by the guy who introduces me, nothing more.

  “No, it’s the Vietnam thing. My position would be: (1) It was the wrong war. (2) The way we got into it challenges the constitutional separation of powers. (3) We can’t ever forget the sacrifices or the patriotism of those who answered a call to duty.

  “Sound good?”

  “You have a way of making things sound good, Senator. That’s why you’re—why we’re here.”

  “OK. Let’s go with it.”

  He decided to make a full day of it, as he often did at important ports of call. He arrived in Urbana at nine o’clock the night before, and was met at the airport by the vice president of the Student Forum, Jane Sander. She drove him to his hotel and got out of the car with him. “Just thought I’d check tomorrow’s schedule with you, Senator.”

  His day began with a seven A.M. interview on the student radio station. It was scheduled to last fifteen minutes, but at the end of the quarter hour Senator Castle said he would be happy to continue for another fifteen minutes—“since you’re so well prepared and so well informed.” The student interviewer gratefully kept him on the air.

  Breakfast was with Forum committee members. He answered questions for a half hour.

  A car met him and shuttled him to an old Romanesque-style brick structure, outnumbered, on this campus, by buildings of puckered gray concrete. He was led down a dark hallway, his shoes clopping on red tiles, past bulletin boards bursting with notices on colored paper—Earn $1,000 from home…Spring break in Cancún…MCAT prep service. He was handed over to an old professor dressed in tweed who shook his hand loosely and introduced him to the history seminar as a special guest. For today, the class had been turned into a question-and-answer session with “the widely respected junior senator from North Dakota.”

  At eleven he held a press conference at the student union. General Westmoreland, waiting in the wings, would come in at eleven-thirty to conduct his own press conference. Both were asked if they would consent to a joint press conference at the end of the hour. Senator Castle smiled at General Westmoreland and said, “I’ll do whatever my hosts and hostesses want me to do.”

  The general said it would be preferable to postpone a joint appearance until the time of their scheduled engagement at seven o’clock.

  Lunch was in the student dining hall, at a table reserved for twenty students majoring in political science. The hall hadn’t changed much since Reuben’s time in Urbana, his single year in law school, for which his grades were now expunged from the record. He had passed through this linoleum-and-concrete palace dozens of times, but never, to his recollection, had he been aware of the special parking lot nearby, made available to visiting VIPs, and certainly he had never been greeted by such a gaggle of fresh-faced nascent politicians. They were hunched forward, the boys’ ties dangling precariously close to their bowls of Jell-O, nodding and smiling before he even spoke a word.

  In the afternoon, Reuben attended an ROTC class. He declined to answer questions on whether such courses as the one he was participating in should be formally affiliated with a college or figure in its curriculum. “But as a veteran, I’d be glad to attend your drill, and proud to salute the flag.” He did both, and gave an impromptu speech about the need to take diplomatic initiatives in dealing with the Soviet Union.

  A tea was given by the university president, and Reuben listened with manifest concern to talk about the increasing costs of higher education. He agreed that the federal government would need to extend a more abundant hand.

  General Westmoreland had greeted Senator Castle with the deference habitually paid by the military to money-disbursing members of Congress. But he said nothing more than was needed, remarking only that an uncle of his had attended the University of Illinois just after the First World War, and had left a part of his tiny estate to the university. Reuben Castle nodded, along with the others, his appreciation of that deed. “I wish Uncle Sam was as generous as your uncle, General.”

  The general nodded, and one could discern a smile, at half mast. The president said how glad the university always was to receive in Urbana such important guests, who had so much to say about common concerns.

  After the tea, time had been put aside to permit the visitors to rest or shower before dinner. Returned to his room, Reuben went to the telephone. “Anything happening, Susan?”

  “Yes. The president’s going on the air tonight. Apparently to stick it to Saddam Hussein and call on him to honor the UN resolution.”

  “Remind me, which one is that?”

  “It’s 667. Condemns Iraq’s violation of Kuwait’s borders.”

  “I’ll blame it all on Westy.”

  “How’s it going otherwise?”

  “Okay. Nice kids. They keep you busy.”

  “And they all vote.”

  Assembly Hall was full. There were placards, but not like the old days, Reuben remarked to Jane Sander, who had stayed with him all day, escorting him to his engagements. “Well, that’s an improvement, I guess, Senator.”

  “I don’t know, Jane. Remember, I did my share of protesting. I was one of them!”

  Jane blushed for giving the impression that she was unaware of this important biographical detail. She made up for it quickly and easily: “You made for a better world, Senator.”

  The two principals had individual waiting rooms backstage. The vibrancy of the audience reached them through the stage curtain. A student technician adjusted the loudspeakers. “Testing
one two three.” Silence followed. Finally a voice from the rear of the hall rang out: “Try four five six.” There was a ripple of laughter, and another student onstage tested the mikes at the lecterns, left and right, by ticking them with a ballpoint pen.

  Seated in his waiting room, Reuben was idling over a notepad on his lap when consternation struck. General Westmoreland was not well.

  Alex Wholley, the Forum president, came in, wide-eyed. “He’s sick, Senator. Oh, my God!” He wheeled around. “Be right back.”

  He was gone five minutes, then reappeared with Jane Sander. “Senator, I don’t know what we’re going to do. We’ve sent for an ambulance to take the general to the infirmary. We haven’t made any announcements out there. Oh, gee. Oh, shit!”

  “Listen.” Reuben rose from his chair and addressed the two students.

  “Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll play the role of the general, affirming Vietnam. And then I’ll play my role, critical of the whole thing. There isn’t a word General Westmoreland has spoken or written in the last twenty years that I haven’t heard, studied, and thought about.

  “Alex, you go out center stage. Tell them that there’s been a little emergency, but that the views of General Westmoreland will be fully and persuasively presented. I’ll come in from backstage, I’ll go to his lectern, the general’s lectern, and I’ll speak for ten minutes. Then you get up and say, ‘Now let’s hear a different point of view, from our other guest, Senator Reuben Castle.’ I’ll go to the other lectern and speak for ten minutes. Then I’ll ask a couple of questions. And answer them, as he would have answered them. Then he will ask me a couple of questions and I’ll answer. Then you can take the show to the audience.”

  It was a striking success. Nobody, in the excited discussions later in the evening, could fault the pleading done on behalf of Westmoreland’s position that the war had been just, and justified, a failure at last only because support for it declined.

  Senator Castle, bobbing over to the other side of the stage, concluded by saying that the decline in support for the war was a historic demonstration of the viability of the democratic process.

  At this the crowd went wild. There was a standing ovation. The chairman reminded the audience that the evening was not over, there would be questions from the floor. The questioner should announce whether his question was intended for Senator Castle or for…“his opponent.”

  The students all but carried Senator Castle away on their shoulders. The student paper’s coverage of the event was widely quoted.

  Back in Washington, the senator’s whole staff assembled to greet him. He smiled his appreciation. “When I run for reelection, I intend to save my honorable opponent the nuisance of appearing at any of our debates.”

  CHAPTER 30

  South Bend, May 1991

  Days before final exams, Justin got word that Professor Lejeune wanted to see him. About what? Justin had submitted a junior thesis on three major philological events in the French language in the twentieth century, a subject to which his grandfather had devoted a substantial part of his academic life. Justin was pleased with his work and sent a Xerox copy to his mother, who would read it with professional care. He could not imagine that the reclusive M. Lejeune would call him in to chat about Justin Durban’s ideas on French word changes. He was keenly curious when he stepped into the crowded but orderly little office in the Decio building.

  Armand Lejeune was a scholar of solitary, even antisocial, habits (“Professor of Aloofness,” one graduate student had labeled him). His interests were in the great, mesmerizing language he taught and reveled in. Lejeune had been born in France and raised there, until midway through World War II. In 1942 his father was martyred when the Nazis got onto the code by which he was transmitting information to the British. No one had ever communicated to his widow the details of his last days. Four weeks after she and twelve-year-old Armand were smuggled out to safety in England, a letter arrived from her husband via Sweden, carefully composed to avoid attracting the attention of the censors. There was a frugal reference to a local celebration of the French national holiday, so he was certainly alive on July 14. But nothing more was ever heard from him, or about him. Madame Lejeune, teaching French and working nights in the French army hospital, raised her boy in London.

  Justin had had an earlier experience of the Professor of Aloofness. As a competitor for a place on The Observer, he had been randomly assigned to write a profile of the august new chairman of the French department, hired away from Cornell. Justin called on M. Lejeune, hoping for a conversation that would yield readable copy. Lejeune wasn’t mute, but he didn’t divulge any features of his personal life that might have made Justin’s story more interesting. Personal details occasionally emerged, but mostly they served simply as background for the academic accomplishments noted in his curriculum vitae, which the department had sent out.

  Lejeune had been hired to head up Notre Dame’s French department and hold the Masterson Chair. The French department had been deemed laggard by the proud standards of the humanities division. The dean had available, for distribution to the alumni magazine and to the student and local papers, only the barest curriculum vitae for the bachelor newcomer, which included excerpts from reviews of Lejeune’s acclaimed work on French drama. The two volumes on Molière and Corneille were already published. The third, on Racine, was scheduled for 1990. The press release told of the author’s six years of schooling in Great Britain, of the master’s degree in French literature from Cambridge, followed by eight years as an instructor at the London School of Economics. After that, associate professor at Cambridge, then full professor at Cornell, where he had written his academic volumes on the French dramatists. It surprised some of his colleagues at Cornell that, given his known aversion to social intercourse, Armand Lejeune had accepted the job of department chairman at Notre Dame. “He’s going to have to talk to somebody,” one colleague remarked at coffee after a faculty meeting.

  “Yes. Though maybe Armand will figure out a way to do it by mail.”

  But he had become the active head of a department that offered no fewer than twenty-four courses. A half dozen of these were what Lejeune had been heard to refer to as “delicatessen courses in instrumental French.” And in fact they were attended by almost 200 students, many of them bent only on satisfying the undergraduate foreign-language requirements of Notre Dame. These academic conscripts had signed up for first-year and second-year French and would be satisfied if, later in life, they could negotiate a French menu or direct a Paris taxi. That was not the case with Justin Durban and Allard de Minveille. They were both taking courses in French literature, and Allard was especially attracted to French poetry.

  What the harried department chairman wanted from young Justin that May afternoon came as an awesome and flattering surprise. He asked Justin to take on, in senior year, the teaching of one section of the first-year course in the French language, French 10ab.

  Lejeune spoke to Justin in French, confirming what he had observed upon arriving in South Bend and being pressed for an interview, in fluent French, by the freshman student. Justin’s knowledge of the language was that of a native, as one would expect. But the young man had a manner of speaking that attracted attention and conveyed authority.

  Justin was eager to answer any questions put to him, but there weren’t many. Lejeune was struggling with a very tight budget and an unanticipated student demand for beginning French. He had been left hard up for qualified teachers. Yes, it was unusual to hire an undergraduate as a member of the faculty, but the circumstances were unusual, and here he found himself with access to a twenty-one-year-old with native schooling in the language. Lejeune had established that Durban was a serious student, and that he had earned the esteem of faculty members who had taught and dealt with him.

  After a half hour’s conversation, Lejeune gave Justin the details: fifty-minute classes, five times a week, fourteen students.

  Faculty rank: assistant in instruction
. Compensation: $4,200 for the academic year. Justin left Lejeune’s office wild with anticipation and delight.

  CHAPTER 31

  En route to Tallahassee, Florida, January 1991

  “Have you evah met this…mayah?” Priscilla Castle still had in her voice the light southern lilt acquired during her Alabama childhood.

  “No. I haven’t actually met him,” Reuben said. “But in that line of work—I mean, being a mayor—he is in category number one, and the award he’s giving us is much sought after.”

  “By whom?”

  “Well, by whom do you think, Priscilla? Not by people who want to start animal hospitals.”

  “Are you against animals today, Reuben? What happened? You discovered they don’ vote?”

  “Oh, come on, Priscilla.” He beckoned to the stewardess for more coffee.

  “And I’ll have more wine,” Priscilla said, motioning with her empty glass.

  “So, at the big banquet we are hailed by the mayah as Couple of the Year, and he makes a speech about us. What are we supposed to do? Fuck for him? What happened to the other competitors for Couple of the Year? The losers? Didn’ fuck to the satisfaction of the mayah?”

  “Priscilla, for God’s sake. And…keep your voice down. Four jet engines can’t compete when you get riled up.” The wine and coffee were served.

  “Well, okay.” She stretched out her legs and tilted back her head, a head that was once famously beautiful. “So I was exaggerating.”