Cruising Speed

by Cruising Speed- A Documentary (epub)

  No answer would ever come to my answer; that often happens. The kids are, a lot of them, first-rate at turning on the charm when they want something. And then, win or lose, they deploy their charm elsewhere. I believe in thank-you letters, and I have a tickler-system that reminds me when a delinquent institution writes to me for a speech, or article. The all-time offenders are the graduate students, who manage to get free speeches from you as you succumb to their sycophantic embraces, and then you never hear from them again, like the girl in any de Maupassant story. Ah, but I have learned, have I learned. The Dean of the Graduate School at Princeton, an irresistible liberal of charming habits, now calls in the student lecture head, or that is my impression, and dictates to him the thank-you letter he is to send me after my dutiful appearances there, free gratis, every couple of years, a murderous habit I fell into in the fifties, before I got around to composing my super-form letters. I am waiting to be asked back by a certain organization at Harvard...

  We pull into 73rd Street, and squirm out. Jerry, the driver, will drop Peter off at his apartment, then take my column and the tape with my correspondence to Frances, and be back in time to take me to the studio. I go quickly upstairs to read as fast as I can the inexhaustible dockets of information Aggie has put together for me. I must write notes to consult during the programs, and I must write four-hundred-word introductions—one for the two Catholic college presidents, one for the Assistant U.S. Attorney General, which I read out as the program begins. I have a sandwich, a half bottle of wine, and pop a Ritalin into my mouth—a mini-stimulant prescribed for me as among the low-blood-pressured after a haunting experience in the fall of 1965 when I fainted (first and only time) at a restaurant, and was dragged off in an ambulance to Bellevue, with two or three friends who did what they could to conceal my identity (I was running for mayor of New York City), where a series of young night-doctors poked about dispiritedly, the first of them having been disappointed to learn, on examining my eyes with a laser beam, that my trouble was not an ulcer.

  Off to 1481 Broadway for the taping. Jerris Leonard is bright, cunning, has ready for you the answers to the questions he expects to hear (“Why is the Nixon Administration determined to enforce integration?” “The Nixon Administration is determined to enforce the law.”), and stumbles only when you say to him, Is it fair to generalize that the North is being spared the pains of massive educational integration, only because it had the foresight to insist on residential segregation years ago? Well, he said, that is to be sure how it works out, the South being where forced school integration follows from the fact of there being no residential segregation. But it does not sound very good. He is very able. .. . The priest and the nun spar, but it is only after the program is over that Father Baker accosts me to whisper, “How can Sister say that it makes no difference to the curriculum that hers is a Catholic college? What about the natural law? Metaphysics? Epistemology? How can you divorce a Catholic college from Catholicism? I mean how can you, even if you try?” I had asked the Sister whether, twenty or fifty years hence, they might say of Manhattanville that it was a Catholic college even as Yale was once a Congregationalist college? I had thought that this would sorely inconvenience her, in the light of her dilemma, which is at once to please the Catholic alumnae, and the anti-denominationalist Board of Regents of the State of New York.

  She smiled sweetly, and said that who knows, that perhaps is precisely what would be said about Manhattanville; and I wondered, so ready was her response, whether she had time to invoke the help of the Holy Ghost in formulating it . . . The panelists were rather restrained. Jeff Greenfield, for whom I have a furtive fondness, is the searing radic-lib, the senior member. That was the 226th program of Firing Line, and I think he came on at approximately show 127. He went from Yale Law School (where he wrote an extravagant denunciation of me for the Alumni Magazine, and promptly got offers from N.Y. publishers to do articles, books, and encyclopaedias) to Bobby Kennedy, for whom he wrote speeches; then to John Lindsay, for whom he did the same thing (same speeches?), and now he is on his own, free-lancing and book-writing. Very quick on the draw, now and then a trace of callowness, which is quite right in someone who is his age, that bright, and that irrepressible. I reproached him only once, when he called a guest stupid; and he saw the point, and was contrite. He is very stern, ideology-wise; but he missed by a whisker the total immersion in the religion of dissent of the radicals who are two or three years younger, who believe that to smile in the company of the enemy is already to make irretrievable concessions. Jeff will smile, and I do not mean the kind of smile that you would wrest out of Molotov. He was easy on Leonard, perhaps in part for tactical reasons, Greenfield being foremost among the anti-Nixonites. It is hardly helpful to his cause to pick on young Leonard, the villain of the South which he has worked, under Nixon, so industriously to integrate.

  I go directly to Al Dinegar, for the unhappiest hour of my week, the Mortification of the Flesh, freshman division. Forty-five minutes of body exercises, fifteen minutes of self-defense. A1 is an enormous, kindly, cunning man who teaches physical training at the Police Academy, and somehow manages to remember, without having taken notes, exactly how many pushups you managed last week. He is big on weightlifting, but he specifies that you must lie on your back, to do what he calls a benchpress, to avoid strain. “All right, Bill, let’s have ten of these if you can, otherwise eight.” He agrees to wait until The Beatles strike a galvanizing upbeat on the tape recorder I have installed in a corner of the tiny gym to help take my mind off the pain and tedium of it all. Unfortunately, A1 has no sense of rhythm whatsoever—he admits this and I take it that his wife, on the dance floor, is eloquent on the subject—so he has to watch me very carefully to accent the cue, inasmuch as I consider it a part of our contract that I need not begin hoisting the one hundred and five pound weight until I and the music are synchronized. I make it to eight, not to ten, and I am truly distressed because I have never failed to make my quota before. A1 tells me that there are variations in an individual’s physical condition from day to day which would easily account for the discrepancy, but he is unable to tell me why I should not have come upon this variation before, and he says perhaps I have a low-grade germ or something that is eating up a little of my strength. In due course he shows me a technique for dislodging a man who is lying across my torso. It is very simple, requiring only that you remember not to use your neck muscles, else strain can result. My son, Christopher, took an hour a day from A1 a fortnight ago, before leaving as a deck hand on a steamer going around the world, and during the fourth session, he inadvertently disregarded Al’s advice, but, as is Christopher’s way—as is the way of every 18-year-old—he reassured A1 that the consequences of disobeying him were clearly exaggerated; the trouble being that the next day he was not able to raise his head. The boxing comes at a moment of maximum exhaustion, one’s muscles having had a total workout, so that merely to keep up one’s arms is painful, though we manage a little sparring, and I am obliged to admit it, that for the few seconds that my stamina would last, A1 has made me a most dangerous instrument, should anyone try to push me onto a subway track, or gouge out my eyes, or toss me off the Empire State Building (nobody should ever try to force me over the top of the Empire State Building. I would be the last person he ever tried to force over the top of the Empire State Building), it being however important to remember not to use the techniques that A1 teaches you, merely, say, to punctuate a point during a political discussion.

  Then to 73rd. We are going to hear the last of the three concerts organized by Rosalyn Tureck, the first two having featured her on the harpsichord and the piano, tonight’s featuring twenty-three string instrumentalists whom she will conduct in The Art of Fugue. I love Rosalyn. I never thought I would ever be referring to her as “Rosalyn,” having worshipped her from afar for many years. But I thought two months ago to do a television program called “Why Are They Afraid of Bach?” They meaning the kids, the principal point I w
anted to furrow being that much of the music they do listen to is as exacting as much of Bach’s music. I can understand people who cannot listen to Bach because they cannot go beyond Kostelanetz; but some of the stuff that nowadays engrosses many of the young people I myself find extremely difficult to understand, and that is the point I wanted to talk about. When first the idea of having her on the program came up, we didn’t commit ourselves to having her on alone, not knowing whether she was articulate; so I asked her for lunch one day, and she quite bowled me over. She is utterly articulate, and also warm and radiant, and has a superb sense of fun. I raised the point as we sat, before lunch, that there are those who believe that Bach is lacking in emotion, and she rose haughtily and sat down on the piano bench striking off a passage from an English Suite—slow chords, a heart-tearingly poignant theme—and then turned, demanding to know how could anybody without the deepest springs of emotion compose what she had just played? We agreed on the format, and that she would play a total of four times—for a cumulative period of seven and a half minutes, as it turned out; and when, without rehearsal, two weeks later, the program was over, and I handed her the wilted bundle of flowers Warren had hidden behind my chair, the great Tureck, whose artistic restraint has been so much commended, responded by throwing her arms about me and giving me a kiss. “I really think you would leave me in a minute for that woman,” my wife remarked later, and I grinned sheepishly, which is the way to handle Pat when she is being outrageous.

  Warren Steibel was there at 73rd, and his friend the composer Leonard Kastle; Sophie Wilkins, an editor of Alfred Knopf, whom I came to know (and love) when she wrote a few years ago asking if she could help Edgar Smith, my friend who is in the Death House at Trenton; Frances Bronson, Aggie Schmidt, and C. Dickerman Williams and his wife, Virginia. Dick is my lawyer on most matters. He is seventy and, technically, retired, though no one knows the difference between the habits of pre-and post-retired Williams. He and I could have got a great deal more accomplished over the years, except that we always laugh together, about one half the time. I have referred to him publicly as “the greatest lawyer in the world,” as matter-of-factly as if he had won that title unequivocally, like Joe Louis, and although he is an aristocrat of impeccable manner, sometime editor of the Yale Law School journal, clerk to Chief Justice William Howard Taft, general counsel to the Department of Commerce, a lawyer’s lawyer, who has in him that little touch of elfin abandon which if Herbert Hoover had it, he’d have been President of the United States on the day he died. We have champagne and sandwiches, planning to eat supper after the concert, at the Russian Tea Room. Dick raises his glass and proposes a toast to his wife, whose birthday it turns out to be. I had invited them to join us for the concert only at noon, just before the TV, and if I had known I’d have baked a cake, I said, and we went off happily into the car, after the usual struggle with Rowley, who thought he would be getting his sixth car trip of the day. The performance of The Art of Fugue was, simply, perfect. I enjoyed it less than I hoped I would, because I arrived grumpy at the prospect of an evening with Rosalyn Tureck during which she would not strike a note on the piano; and because I thought the ensemble over-full, a point I made the mistake of telling Rosalyn a few nights later. The Williamses would not join us at the Tea Room, since his regimen is tightly controlled and calls for him to be in bed by eleven. We parted on the street, and I said to Virginia that next time, she should give me a little warning when her birthday is coming up, as it had been all I was able to do, this time on such short notice, to hire Carnegie Hall, and prevail on Rosalyn Tureck to assemble a concert. She hesitated for just a second’s confusion, then laughed, and went off with the greatest lawyer in the world, while we went in to have blinis and vodka. And then a cab, a little reading, and to sleep.

  Tuesday. A couple of hours with the correspondence Frances sent up late yesterday. I have a reply from General McPherson of The National War College. He had written asking me to participate in “one of the most popular and stimulating features of the annual course of instruction at The National War College,” to wit their “evening lecture program” which “is attended not only by our faculty and students and their wives, but also by other guests from the Washington area. Therefore, we give particular attention to selection of the speaker for each of these occasions. ... It has been more than a decade since you addressed a National War College audience. We do hope that we shall have the opportunity of welcoming you back.” I had been waiting for such a letter, I have to confess it, for several years. I replied: “Dear General McPherson: I must suppose that you did not find it easy to write me the letter you did, observing that it has been a decade since I addressed The National WarCollege. It prompts me to ask, Where has The War College been during the decade? I recognize that you were not (presumably) personally responsible for choking off invitations to conservative anti-Communist speakers during the early sixties, but although I am a child in military strategy, I recognize an operation when I see one. I have heard it variously ascribed to Drew Pearson, William Fulbright, and Arthur Schlesinger—the ban by The National War College on invitations to a certain class of dissenting lecturers. Although we all recognize the supremacy of the civil arm, it would be reassuring to learn that, at The National War College, they also teach the virtue of valor, and I continue to hope that future historians will discover that the Commandant of The National War College did not surrender without a fight . . . Under the circumstances, I am not inclined, after the long banishment, to perform at an affair primarily social, for a fee which is a very small fraction of the fee I command. If you desire me to speak as I did before, at a working session of The War College, I shall accept that invitation as in the line of duty.”

  To that letter he has replied, “As Commandant I have full autonomy in speaker selection, and with the advice of the senior faculty, endeavor to maintain the vital ‘balanced’ expression of views. Actually I only came to the College last July, but have found no evidence of the ‘ban’ you mentioned.” He then lists some “conservative anti-Communist” speakers who appeared during the sixties, among them Senator Goldwater and Hans Morgenthau, and renews the invitation, only this time to address a working session. I now reply that I “do not seek a confrontation, nor would I go so far as to suggest that every anti-Communist in America disappeared from your speaking program—that would be preposterous. It is a fact that five of the six people mentioned by Drew Pearson in that particular column [I was mistaken about the author—it was a Madison Capital Times writer, not Drew Pearson], who had lectured regularly, year after year, were not invited again.” I agree to go, and I congratulate myself on the delicacy with which I desist from giving the names of the people I have in mind—what is the point of embarrassing the general?

  . . . Lawrence Fertig had reminded me a while back that Earle Holsapple is resigning as Treasurer of the Historical Research Foundation—a tiny organization that operates on one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in capital allotted to it by the late Alfred Kohlberg, who was much publicized during the fifties by The Reporter magazine, and others, as “The China Lobby”—and asked that I compose a tribute to the man who resisted all efforts to make him invest The Foundation’s funds in the market. “whereas,” I wrote, “the said Mr. Holsapple, resisting all temptations to imprudence, did manage the funds of the Historical Research Foundation with maximum effect in a conservative but wonderfully durable portfolio; and whereas by so doing, he did make an ass out of our beloved former colleague Alex Hillman, who presumed to instruct our Treasurer in the uses of the stock market; and whereas our Treasurer Mr. Holsapple has on the occasion of his 84th birthday elected to relinquish his duties” then therefore, etc., etc. Now Larry Fertig says he has taken the liberty of slightly modifying a particular phrase, “following the old conservative maxim de mortuis nil nisi bonum.” (Alex Hillman is dead.) Sure. I remember how it enraged Alfred Kohlberg when Dean Acheson quoted the maxim as a reason for not commenting on the death of Joe McCarthy. I always
thought it a devilish rhetorical device. In order to mean anything at all, the maxim should say, De mortuis nil nisi bonum, ergo. . . . Otherwise, you have paralepsis, pure and simple. I assume Dean Acheson understood that, but I am not absolutely sure. What would he have said good about Joe McCarthy at that point? Other than that he had been obliging enough to die? . . . And a letter from Edgar Eisenhower, concerning another foundation, my all-time favorite. A gentleman called Gaty, who lived and worked in Wichita, Kansas, as an independent oil operator and executive for Beech Aircraft Corporation, died a few years ago, a bachelor, and a philanthropist. He gave the bulk of his estate to nephews cousins retainers, and to several charities. Then he spun off about a million and a half dollars into a self-liquidating ten-year trust, to be devoted to helping tax-exempt organizations preferably of the kind that engaged in conservative educational activity, and then he named the trustees. J. Edgar Hoover; Senators Frank Lausche, Strom Thurmond, John Tower, Barry Goldwater; Clarence Manion, former Dean of the Notre Dame Law School; George Benson, President of Harding College; Edgar Eisenhower and myself. On reaching this point in the letter from the executor I remember wondering why Mr. Gaty had not also named the Pope, and Lord Salisbury, for all the chance there was of convening such a group anywhere, let alone in Wichita, on any single day. But wait. The old gentleman had not flourished in Wichita by witlessness. There would be one annual meeting, the executor explained, in Wichita; each trustee would receive a one thousand dollar fee for attending it, and would have the absolute right, unquestioned, to allocate ten thousand dollars to any tax deductible organization of his choice. The balance of the money that matured over the years would be distributed according to majority vote. Result? On a Saturday, in the late fall, in Wichita, Kansas, at eight-thirty in the morning, nine men cross the street from their hotel to the Fourth National Bank Building, and anyone who happens to look up at them would guess that here indeed was the seventh day of May. Mr. Hoover never came, and an alternate was selected, who votes his ten thou to the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation. But all the rest come, indeed have never missed. Sometimes they will come in five minutes before the meeting begins, dropping out of the sky in a Lear jet. John Tower usually arrives ten minutes late, and I secretly suspect that his motive is to miss the invocation with which Chairman Thurmond opens the meeting. It wasn’t until this year that there was an absentee—Edgar Eisenhower, the world’s single most charming man. He had a cold, and his absence, under the rigorous rules of the Trust, left him without a vote. I moved that in consideration of his illness, we vote to allocate ten thousand dollars to the same causes to which Mr. Eisenhower had allocated his ten thousand at the previous meeting, and the proposal was carried unanimously. Cast thy bread upon the waters. Mr. Eisenhower writes to say thanks, and to add, “I wish the bank would hold its meeting earlier in the year because November is becoming a little cold for my tender flesh.” Actually, that won’t do, because “a little earlier in the year” means election season, and that would not suit the convenience of the senators. . . .