A few days after writing the column, I heard Mr. Nixon’s explanation (to the Advisory Commission) of what had happened: a sleepy State Department type, answering the Coast Guard’s question, had consulted the book and replied that it was not the United States Government’s policy to “encourage” defectors; which was interpreted by the wretched Coast Guard official in Boston as translatable into permitting the Soviet Navy to seize, torture, shackle, and impound Simas.
I wonder whether, if the transgressing Administration had been Democratic, I and others would have dropped the matter, as indeed it was dropped in a matter of days. There is of course an explanation for that. If you are prepared to believe that the in-guys are presumptively on your side, then you bemoan their delinquencies as you would aberrations, rather than as delinquencies that issue out of their flawed understanding of reality. Thus a Democratic Administration that signs a conciliatory agreement affecting Laos is presumed to be weakminded, critically short of anti-Communist corpuscles, while a Republican Administration that signs a peace with North Korea is assumed to have got the best deal one can hope to get. National Review is increasingly criticized for our softness towards the Nixon Administration, which is sharply contrasted to the unrelenting criticism we leveled against the Eisenhower Administration. The explanation is that with the defeat of Goldwater in 1964 Nixon was the only feasible alternative to a liberal Democrat, and it is the job of conservatives to back what they can reasonably hope to get, even as they continue to burnish the paradigm for us all to keep constantly in mind. The thing about Ike, we explain, is that he took the Republican Party away from Taft, who was strong and knowledgeable and would surely have won the Presidency if he had been nominated. And that he had the power to have done things differently. We could not have said as much, after the Goldwater experience, about a right-wing alternative to Richard Nixon, however enthusiastic we are about Ronald Reagan.
We grind through editorial day, the copy riding up on the dumbwaiter, and down again. Three rings on my buzzer, answered by Priscilla, who rings once, the signal that means she is at her desk, and that the tray is floating down, and that she will distribute the copy to the typists, or to the writers if corrections or amplifications are suggested. On Wednesdays we lunch on sandwiches, briefly, and twenty minutes later are back at work, and the afternoon goes by. Somehow we always manage just to make it in time to take the final line-count, select the paragraphs and editorials that will run, and then at five almost exactly, we have drinks. I say almost at five, because somebody thought to hide the key to the liquor closet in the Encyclopaedia, and nobody can remember whether the decision was to stick it in the Booze page of the EB, or the Drink page. We are joined by whatever friends of NR happen to be in town. The sessions are sometimes routine and uneventful, but sometimes take off, not unusually when catalyzed by Jim McFadden, who is the assistant publisher, in charge of practically everything non-editorial, who is often on, and rouses us from our post-dead-line daze with the special vigor of his bonhomie.
Tonight I cannot join them because I must speak at Princeton, so I go off with Rowley. Jerry pulls out, and I raise the glass partition because I will be answering correspondence for the first hour or so of the drive.
There is a two-sentence note from Pat Moynihan, the news being that he has declined Mr. Nixon’s invitation to become his ambassador to the United Nations, electing instead, for complicated reasons, to return to Harvard-M.I.T. I had written last week about his proposed appointment. The column was killed in Washington, because a few hours before the release date Moynihan had announced that he wouldn’t take the job. But other papers ran it anyway, and Moynihan evidently saw it. I had enjoyed writing the column, knowing Moynihan, however slightly.
I remember insinuating myself down the aisle at Manhattan Center a few days before the election in 1968. It was a great Humphrey-Muskie rally, memorable if only because that was when Ken Galbraith, the ultimate attraction, was stopped dead, as he began to speak, by a young couple who bounded onstage, shed their clothes, and danced about him—or rather the male did, a pig’s head in hand, the spectators having just-in-time detained the girl, draping her in a raincoat. The fuzz reached the man a few seconds later, but poor Ken, although he plowed a straight furrow through his hortatory address to the effect that the earth would open up and swallow us all if Nixon was elected, was not able to engage the distracted audience.
But that episode was much later, a dozen speeches featuring the illuminati of the Americans for Democratic Action later. I had arrived as Moynihan was speaking. The audience spotted me, slithering towards the press section, and began to boo. Moynihan paused to reprimand the crowd. “Remember,” he said mock-solemnly, “the Church has always made way for late vocations.”
A few weeks later, Moynihan’s acceptance of a critical position on President-elect Nixon’s staff was announced, and a few months after that he telephoned me to say that he wanted personally to explain to National Review’s editors the reasons why we should think carefully before rejecting the Family Assistance Plan the President would soon be springing on Congress. He arrived, with two or three aides, for dinner at 73rd, and he spoke evangelistically about a plan he assured us would simultaneously effect humanitarian visions, and satisfy conservative dissatisfactions. Before he left, Tony Dolan and his friend Peter McCann came in. Tony is the right-wing folk singer, a senior at Yale. He had just now taped an exchange on television with SDSer Jim Kunen, author of The Strawberry Statement. The two young musicians played for us, Peter McCann sang “Danny Boy” in his special bel canto, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his staff left to return to Washington on their military jet, happy with music and wine, if not absolutely reassured about the editors’ response to the forthcoming proposal, even though we did promise to take meticulous account of the points he made.
It seemed obvious, with the defeat of the Plan, that Moynihan had either to return to teaching or take a quite different job for Nixon. I felt sorry for Nixon, losing Moynihan as a presence at the White House. Blithe spirits are rare. There was the occasion someone recounted to me, when the formidable Arthur Burns and Patrick, in the Oval Room with the President, were obstinately waiting, one for the other to divulge his version of the proposed welfare budget, whereupon, the impasse being obvious, Moynihan finally said: “All right, Arthur, I’ll tell you what. You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.” Who will do that kind of thing in the Oval Room, now that Patrick’s gone?
To the UN? Not [I wrote] that Mr. Moynihan isn’t “qualified” to serve as Ambassador to the UN. He is “qualified” to serve as anything. I remember the old Truth or Consequences game they used to play over the radio, which towards the end was coming up with consequences so extravagant as to satisfy Rabelaisian appetites for the absurd. On one occasion the loser, a mild-mannered middle-aged man, was quickly stripped and dressed in white tie and tails, taken under escort to the stage of Town Hall, a violin stuck in his hand, and catapulted onstage to receive a tumultuous welcome from an overflow house of music lovers who had been tantalized for months in the press about the forthcoming visit of a heretofore reclusive musical genius from the Thuringian Forest. The poor man lifted his bow to his violin, wooden side to the strings, and the joke was exposed. A practical joke in the grand tradition. If the contestant had been Daniel Patrick Moynihan, I am altogether convinced that even if he had not previously played a single note on the violin, he’d have taken bow to instrument and delivered a perfect concert.
Was Nixon intending a practical joke? I asked. Moynihan has the lowest threshold of crap-tolerance in the civilized world, and the spectacle of Ambassador Moynihan being made to sit in the General Assembly of the United Nations listening to the world’s greatest concentration of drivel in four languages is the spectacle of a man who, in the Orwellian situation, is sent to be tortured by just exactly those means that researchers have discovered most acutely pain him. On the other hand, could it be that Mr. Nixon has decided to bust up the joint? Because if
so, he has selected just the right man; absolutely no one is better qualified. Moynihan might very well, after the first sentence about colonialism from, say, the Czechoslovakian ambassador, stand up and in a very few minutes make Khrushchev’s shoe-pounding episode look like a milestone of decorum. Maybe those are his instructions? They would not need to be very explicit, unless possibly they were that Moynihan, having been appointed, should set a new precedent by never even appearing at the UN, even as Queen Victoria, after Albert’s death, managed to govern for so many years without being seen by anyone except her Prime Minister. But that would be a theatrical waste. Probably the best ambassador we could send to the UN, for so long as we adopt a passive role towards it, would be a deaf-mute. Second best, intending a quite contrary attitude, is Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Let us all pray that between now and his investiture he is not given any crash courses in diplomacy. That would ruin his perfect pitch.
Patrick writes me, simply, “Alas, it is not to be. But you certainly made it sound attractive.”
The Musical Heritage Society has sent me thirty long-playing records, most of them the cantatas of Bach, with a note expressing thanks for my devotion to music—a euphemism for writing a column advising music lovers of the Beethoven-bargain the Society was offering. I acknowledge the gift most gratefully, and guilt-free, since I cannot believe that any words of mine commending the work of Bach would constitute payola ... I most strongly urge a dispirited Massachusetts Republican against founding a Conservative Party, never mind his complaint that the gentleman who ran against Teddy Kennedy— Josiah Spaulding—was more liberal than Kennedy. And never mind, I reminisce, that Si Spaulding is an old friend. I met him at Yale, as an undergraduate, and he and Jim, freshmen at the Law School, organized a fresh-cider delivery service, one dollar per gallon, and would personally deliver the stuff to your room, carrying a gallon on each finger, eight per person, Horatio Algers IV. Jim was Si’s best man, and the maid of honor was Jackie Bouvier . . . irrelevant. I stress to my correspondent that the situation in New York State is unique, that the fact that Massachusetts Republicans came so close to knocking Si out in the primary suggests that the Republican Party remains a viable vehicle for Republican conservatives. (I must write a column on the subject.) David Keene, the bright young lawyer and chairman of Young Americans for Freedom who resigned a few weeks ago in order to go to work for Agnew, has already called to urge that I pour cold water on those who, intoxicated by Jim’s extraordinary victory, are dreaming about Conservative Parties in their own states.
I have a very complimentary and therefore very pleasant letter from a professor at the University of Massachusetts, which however I read eagerly for reasons that supplement vanity. “I very much enjoyed your article on Russia in December playboy. I frequently enjoy your extravagant prose and good humor, fantastical asides and abrupt, serious, Chestertonian decencies. Your pieces are wise and witty. However, very specifically this article intrigued me because of my own visit to Russia. I lived in Finland (your comment on young Finns was uproarious and true) for a year on scholarship to Helsinki University and took advantage of geography to have a Red Christmas, in Leningrad and Moscow. Many of your comments vibrated strings within my own experience and articulated clearly some things I had felt more vaguely.”
I have been brooding about the article, which appeared on the newsstands a month ago. It was a long piece, almost ten thousand words, and I had on finishing it a sense of satisfaction I can only remember having taken on the completion of two other pieces I wrote (and one book). I was tempted to Playboy because I have become friends with David Butler, the young man who did the endless interview with me published during the spring, and he urged me to write more extensively about my Russian trip than I could do in my columns. So I did, the piece ran absolutely unchanged, and I sat back in anticipation of the considerable reaction I would get from Playboy’s five and one-half million purchasers, which (we publishers make it a point of stressing) means as an absolute minimum, double that number of readers. Ten million readers of my views on Russia! Five per cent of the population of America, 10 per cent of the reading population of America.
The response? This is the only letter I received. I get (someone on the staff once counted) about 600 letters a week, which sounds like a lot, but I suppose isn’t, when you take into account that people write me a) who are interested in the cause, b) who think I might prove useful, in some connection or other, c) who read National Review, which has a circulation of about 110,000, d) who read my newspaper column, which appears in over BOO newspapers, e) who read my occasional articles here and there, and f) who see my television program, which runs weekly in a hundred “markets,” as we are taught to say. Still, only one letter from Playboy readers. David Butler, who is a gentleman, keeps consoling me by sending on the few letters that come in from big shots to whom Playboy has sent offprints of the article, soliciting reactions, from which they will distill a letters section. Even these are not all that numerous, and it begins to dawn on me that all that talent at Playboy that is engaged in producing the non-sex part of the magazine—what Garry Wills calls the “magazine within a magazine”—simply is not read. That does not mean that it doesn’t serve a purpose. It does: one purpose being psychological, the other commercial.
It helps to persuade the editor-publisher, Mr. Hugh Hefner, that he is engaged in a serious enterprise, whose success depends on other things than breasts exposed, and pudenda limned (though I note in the December issue that they are no longer veiled). Commercially? It is obviously easier for such advertisers as General Motors to answer complaints against their patronage by citing all the Harvard theologians who have written for Playboy during the past year. Like keeping the Bible on the bookshelf of the whorehouse: it is after all there, for those who want it. (Who to write for nowadays, among the big magazines, Esquire being out because I have a lawsuit pending against it?) . . . Poor Hefner. There are two stories about him I cherish. He was asked at a press conference a while back: Mr. Hefner, you have a very pretty 17-year-old daughter. Do you intend to make her a Playmate? Stunned silence. Then he speaks, with what I consider the most resourceful answer in the history of people-on-the-spot. No, he says, because it happens that, notwithstanding all my efforts to do something about it, a strain of Puritan blood continues to reside within my system. I hate that strain; but I am powerless to neutralize it, though I shall devote my life to the attempt to do so. That is a tough answer, as the kids used to put it until thank God that verbal corruption was spent.
The other episode involves me. It was a 5th Avenue apartment, and the local editor of Paris-Match was entertaining the boss from Paris and one or two friends. After dinner the host said, Look, if you don’t mind, I’d like to watch a television program that’s about to go on, pitting Buckley against Hefner, because it ought to be quite a show [it wasn’t], and he explained to his acquiescent guests who I was, and they turned on the set. Inexplicably, the picture came on but the sound did not, until after four or five minutes, when finally the marginal twiddle with the dial brought it on, and the Frenchmen after a second or two winced with surprise because, studying the speechless visages of the principals, they had all tacitly come to the conclusion that I was Hefner, and Hefner was I; he being, in their reading of our faces, clearly the conservative ascetic, I the freeliver ...
Hefner is known to be an eccentric, and he is of course. Also, when you are in his company, he is a man of extraordinary courtesy, who once took me painstakingly room-after-room through his exhaustingly depressing palace in Chicago, Pepsi-Cola in hand (we were panelists for an NBC program on vice, waiting for the crew to set up), and later on sent me to the airport in his quite extraordinary limousine, after carefully instructing me on how to use the car’s telephone . . . How much harm does Playboy do in fact, I have often asked myself, never getting much further than the presumptive disapproval of it, which I extend to any publication,—or person—that declines to accept extra-personal or extra-positivist norms. The
n too the pathetic tastelessness. Like at Christmastime I receive a letter. It is obviously a form letter, with the “Dear Bill” typed in with typeface that almost but not quite looks like the rest of the letter. And it is signed not with a signature, faked or otherwise, but by the printed-typed names,
Hugh M. Hefner A. C. Spectorsky and The Editors of PLAYBOY.
A Christmas check!
How to reply, and not hurt his feelings. I can understand the occasional necessity to execute people, but never to hurt their feelings, which by the way I consider to be the principal reason why many husbands and wives do not separate. I wrote, finally, “Dear Hugh: You are very generous and very thoughtful, but you see, I precisely do not desire to be a ‘member of the Playboy family.’ I write for you, occasionally, because I wish to reach your audience, and I do so in spite of my foreboding that there are, inevitably, those who will believe I have become a natural son of Playboy. Pray do not misunderstand me. I am happy to be your friend, if you desire me to be, and extremely happy to have become the friend of your associate David Butler. But friendly to your enterprise, by no means. I return the check, again with my thanks. Keep it, or turn it over to any local organization engaged in comstockery. Yours cordially.” ... I do not think there is any obvious reason to write again for Playboy, but I do not doubt that Hugh (those who know him well call him Hef) will ask me to do so, because he accepts misunderstanding, and even abuse, as a part of his tribulation, and who knows it may provide him with a sense of mission; who knows? We are nearing Princeton.
My habit is to read my portfolio, containing the correspondence that led to my speech, as late as possible. The advantages are negative and positive. It means that you are not reminded, say at the beginning of a week during which you must speak four or five times, of the awful gauntlet you will need to run before reaching Stamford for the weekend. And it means that you will remember more easily what are the special circumstances of the immediate engagement—in Princeton’s case, that the principal character is a young man, obviously of great entrepreneurial resourcefulness, who is not affiliated with student government, or with the formal lecture series, who has his own organization (Undergraduates for a Stable America, this one is called) and who actually went out and raised the money to pay the fee, and that isn’t easy. The great majority of the colleges that invite you have no trouble with the money. It is there, taken from the student fees that are exacted at the beginning of every year. It is at places like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton that lecturers run into difficulty, because these colleges are not accustomed to paying their speakers the commercial rate; and speakers tend to indulge them, in part out of tradition, in part out of a curiosity to have a look at what used to be the redoubts of social and intellectual patricians. (They aren’t that any longer, we all know, but they are getting as long a run as possible from their reputation.) I have spoken, I reflect, six times at Princeton: once to the Whig-Clio Association, for a perfunctory fee; four times to the Graduate School, for no fee at all; and once for a slightly better than perfunctory fee, at a great brawl, a panel at which Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Rovere also spoke, Eric Goldman presiding: an unhappy memory, because we did not get anywhere.
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