Cruising Speed

by Cruising Speed- A Documentary (epub)

  Nor is Buckley, to a generation reared on a diet of television images, very entertaining. William F. Buckley isn’t a politician, although he has run for office; he isn’t a political philosopher, although he writes political philosophy; he isn’t really a journalist, although he has spent his whole adult life editing a journal. He is essentially an artist of language practicing his art for its own sake. His speeches are not really speeches but tours de force of workmanship, labored over with a gem-cutter’s skill and patience and then fastidiously laid before a dazzled audience.

  The theme of Buckley’s exercise Wednesday night was essentially simple: each man’s freedom extends only so far as it can extend without impinging on another man’s; hence no rights can be absolute; hence there are occasions when, for the sake of freedom, government must repress certain actions that tend to destroy freedom.

  The audience seized on the word “repression,” the campus trigger-word that, by a simple mention, starts the liberal saliva dripping in the best Pavlovian manner.

  Buckley was talking about the rule of law. What most of his listeners thought he was talking about was law-’n-order. The difference between the concepts is the difference between Aristotle and his fellow-countryman who presently is in possession of the vice-presidency. The blame for the audience’s confusion lay with Buckley. He is an anachronism. In an era when television images are comfortingly soft-edged, his language is disturbingly precise, hard and crystalline. Television demands that you sit back and let your mind be massaged; Buckley demands that you lean forward and listen and think.

  He makes no concessions to weaknesses of his hearers. He read through his speech at a rapid, steady pace despite all distractions—dogs wandering in front of the podium, applause, hisses, cheers. [Wrong. The crowd was silent.] In the middle of his conclusion the microphone went dead but Buckley went implacably on [what was the alternative?] although the last two minutes of the speech were inaudible to anyone more than BO feet away. The young people in Dillon Gym, when they realized the speech was over, seemed momentarily bewildered. They knew Buckley had done something dazzling and unusual, but they seemed not sure how they were to react to it. Finally most of them faked it by simultaneously clapping loudly and looking thoughtful.

  The Daily Princetonian’s story by contrast referred to my “ ‘gloomy’ and complex examination of historical attitudes towards repression,” and said of the address that it was “received with respect and restraint.”

  ... The question period is lively, but when it is over, I have the feeling that it is over to almost everyone’s relief; and I speed away to a small reception at Eric Goldman’s house, to which he permitted me to invite a nephew-godson-sophomore—a graceful young man who however says not a word—and the assistant headmaster of my old preparatory school (and his wife), retired now and working for the Board of Admissions at Princeton. Brock Brower, the journalist, is there, and there is animated conversation for almost an hour, after which I leave, get into the car, and fuss again with correspondence. Pat is asleep when I get to 73rd, the television on; I turn it off quietly, which always wakes her up, and causes her to demand to know why I thought she was asleep, when in fact she was listening intensely. But before the tirade is half done, she is back asleep, consummating an exercise that begins when she turns on the television, which she does when she is ready to go to sleep.

  Thursday. I am on the road early, because I must be at the University of Bridgeport by 11 a.m., for a debate with Dick Gregory. I am concerned that Rowley’s walker won’t return him in time; but she does, and he goes straightaway, excitedly, into the car. Bill (the driver who alternates with Jerry) has brought the mail from the office, and I resolve to work on it until we reach Westport, which will give me fifteen minutes to think about Dick Gregory.

  I wrote last week that there might well be imperative military reasons for the bombing strike in North Vietnam, and that certainly there had been no breach in our truce terms, inasmuch as the enemy’s going to the negotiating table at Paris had not amounted, after thirty months, to anything more than their going to the negotiating table at Paris. “Dear Sir: You’re not only a word-monger but a warmonger as well. Only a totally insane person would recommend a continuation of the bombing and murdering of the N. Vietnamese, and I know you’re not insane because you can use multi-syllable words. Why do you want to kill humans??? Sincerely, ...” I should hope sincerely. I scratch “na” on the letter, which means “not answered,” and happens to only about 10 per cent of my mail. That was from Detroit. . . From Riverdale, New York, “Dear Sir: That people even bother listening to you only proves that what most politicians use as a credo, ‘The Masses are the Asses’ is well founded. To me—every time you open your mouth it seems only shit comes out of it which confirms what one of our teachers said, ‘You mean Buckley, he is full of shit!’ Judging from your eye movements we are certain you must be a ‘Psycho.’ Good reason Yale didn’t want you on their board. And now, your brother, the phoney is also in the act.” And the signature, no closing, na . . . Then there is someone who oscillates from sarcasm to dissimulation. You would think he had tipped his hand conclusively by beginning his letter, “Dear Mr. Pukeley.” But no, he switches mood right away: “I do so agree with you; brains aren’t everything; those intellectuals always turn out to be no-good, socialist types. I like red-blooded Americans like you who”—now, back we go into the first mode—“work for a living with their hands, not their brains. The Republican party needs men like you and Spirew [thus] Agnew, who calls a spade a spade. And Mrs. Mitchell is great, too.” He cannot think how to weave a crack into these two references, and is apparently satisfied that the mere mention of their names is enough. “We hate the Right things: Spies, jews, Commie Spies, and dirty niggers. I read every word you write; God bless you. God bless you, and Nixon. Your friend,” a signature, but no address. He probably saw the movie Joe, and thought the letter a reenactment.

  But then an altogether anonymous letter, no name or address, but overflowing with gutsy solidarity with me. “Dear Bill: On behalf of your brother and in regard to Mr. Pete Hamill the following message was shot off ... It could be captioned ‘The Wearing o’ the Green.’ ‘Dear Pete: Read your charming article about Jim Buckley, the Castle Irishman. The next time you see an Irish-looking guy with grass stains around his mouth, I want you to know he’s not starving to death because of Buckley and the Castle Irishmen; he’s working up a load so that he can projectile it into your lousy, Irish face, (s) Erin Go Bragh.’ ” God. Pete Hamill wrote vigorously against Jim during the campaign, cranking up the explanation that the Buckleys were “Castle Irishmen,” a term I had not heard before except when it was used by Hamill to describe me, after I wrote, for Esquire, a piece on Truman Capote’s famous party a few years ago.

  “Pete Hamill [I had written] reviewed the affair most awfully sociologically, from his desk at the New York Post (from where else?). The device was to contrive wisps of frivolous conversation, a la The Women, and juxtapose them with horror stories from the Vietnamese battlefront (get it?), so as to effect a Stendhalian contrast that would Arouse the Conscience of Versailles. [I gave examples.] . . . The demonstration was on the order of subtlety of (Carl Foreman’s) The Victors’, in which, just in case you are under the impression that war is a game of soccer at Eton, he sets up an execution of an American deserter (must have been Private Slovik, since he was the only one) during the Second World War, with music blaring out of an adjacent PX, ‘Have yourself a merry little Christmas/Through the years we all will be together . . The implicit point . . . being that one shouldn’t enjoy oneself publicly while there is a war on, and of course such advice would be easier to accept from an evangelist of continence who less visibly than Mr. Hamill enjoys weaving the luridities of Vietnam through his editorial loom. But it is true that certain functionaries intimately involved in the Vietnam War deemed it inappropriate to frug-with-Kay [Graham] at Truman’s blast; indeed, that was just the reason why Secretary McNamara
did not come; at least, that is the reason he gave to Truman Capote for, regretfully, declining his kind invitation. But he was one of few who did decline and the only one on record to have given that reason for declining, and he did not, Mr. Capote informs us, make that point censoriously. After all, one of the reasons why there is fighting in Vietnam is so that people can have fun together back home. And besides, if society accepted the dictum that so long as some people are suffering, others may not party together, there would never be any partying at all, especially not on the evening of Mr. Capote’s ball, when the agony experienced by some of the uninvited almost certainly exceeded that of the calm and resolute young men in Vietnam, who, if polled, would, almost surely, produce much more contempt for Pete Hamill than for Truman Capote.”

  I have gradually come to know that when you write that way about people you make very tenacious enemies, and sure enough, during the campaign Hamill was saying things on the order of, “Buckley [J., though one must suppose, a fortiori, W.] is against everything that has made life in this country an acceptable condition for working people.” And, “Buckley is a patronizing agent of the upper class, slumming with the common folk, and if they elect him, they will get the betrayal they deserve.” And on and on about the Castle Irish, which if we take Hamill’s word for it, is what they called the quisling-types who, siding with the English, were pleased to betray their freedom-seeking countrymen, in order to gobble the social scraps vouchsafed them from the Castle whence the English tyrannized the Irish people. I dropped Hamill a note several years ago, I remember, praising a column he had written on the books he had read during the year. What is the point in denying his talent? I was not engaged in guile. I have never understood the point in disparaging the skills of your adversaries. That sort of thing shouldn’t go beyond Virginia Kirkus and the Donald Duck School of literary criticism, or at the other end, John Birch. I wonder. If I hadn’t hit him so hard about the Capote ball (he resented the attack in print, at the time), would he have weighed in as hysterically against Jim? On the other hand, it wasn’t Hamill, but the New York Times, that said (in an editorial) that Goodell’s was “the voice of a public official determined to keep freedom from being assassinated by the ruthless nightriders of the political right.” (What an embarrassment the Times’ editorials are to so many of the Times’ reporters, and executives: I described them once as Cotton Mather rewriting Eleanor Roosevelt, and the appreciation from a Times writer, on the road with my brother, was very nearly hysterical with released pleasure, like the nun who cannot contain herself on hearing a ribald truth spoken about the mother superior.)

  And then, too, I never did anything to Harriet Van Horne (pure neglect), and she said, “If this election goes as President Nixon would like it to go, the long trail will soon be entering a dark tunnel . . .” (At the pre-election rally in Queens, I “appealed” to the “higher intelligence of Harriet Van Horne: How can nightriders live in tunnels? Really, the voices of moderation ought to concert their metaphors. If you think it’s easy to have one foot in the tunnel, and the other foot in the stirrup of a horse ...” The crowds love that sort of thing. So do I.) . . . But the best would come the day after Jim’s election, by Robert Mayer, in Newsday: “It crept in during the night. It was hanging over the city when we awoke yesterday, gray and imponderable, like the fog. Morning became afternoon and still it would not go away, the shame, the burden, the thorny crown of collective guilt. We sat in darkened apartments, Dostoyevskyan, vaguely aware of gray light filtering in through the windows, unable to stir outside, unwilling to face our neighbors, eyes cast down, unseeing. New York! New York had come to this ..

  At the 15th Anniversary party for National Review, held three weeks ago at the Tavern on the Green, I amused myself by quoting this passage to the guests, in the presence of my lamb-like brother, who had brought on the shame of New York. A week later I heard from the author’s publisher, William Attwood, who had been ambassador to Guinea (as published in NR, slightly edited at his request):

  Dear Bill:

  Many thanks for not including me in your Central Park celebration of national review’s Fifteenth Anniversary. Your public readings from Newsday etc. on the doleful meaning to the Republic of the election of your brother, as reported by Israel Shenker of the T imes, might have compelled me to stalk out with whatever dignity I could muster —something I have not done since the opening of a Mongolian cultural exhibition in Conakry in 1963. After the usual expressions of eternal friendship (based on long-standing cultural cooperation) between the Guinean and Mongolian peoples, the orators digressed into a denunciation of genocide and other international torts and misdeeds being committed by your ambassador’s then employers. Since the only refreshments available were Mainland Chinese brandy and local (nationalized) soda pop, I had been hoping for a pretext to get away—which I’m sure would not have been the case at your party.

  My invitation to you to visit your major Long Island outlet at any time of your choosing still stands. Parts of our building look as if they had been designed by a family of moles, but I will have a bar and dining room in operation by January, with a private entrance for controversial personalities. Yours,

  The party itself was a great, relaxed success, the tone of it having been set by invitations which were austerely formal on the front side, requesting the pleasure of the recipient’s “presence at a”—and then on the overside, “perfectly smashingly absolutely wild knock-down drag-out no holds barred great big noisy uninhibited brawl of a p*a*r*t*y.” The Dixieland music was by Wild Bill Davison, the rock by Peter McCann’s group, The Repairs, most of them students at Fairfield and Yale. I had arranged for a surprise: the great Rosalyn Tureck had agreed to come and play for six or seven minutes. We agreed that that was about as much serious music as 500 party-goers could take in in total appreciative concentration. She would do the Chromatic Fantasia, the 29th Variation from the Goldberg, and finally the Gigue from the B-flat Partita. At 6 p.m. on the evening of the party, I received word that Rosalyn was in bed with stomach flu. I called my television producer, Warren Steibel, who knows the musical agencies, and he called Columbia Artists who told him that the big-name pianists were out of town, but recommended a young man, Samuel Lipman. It was agreed that Mr. Lipman would telephone me, which he did five minutes later. He sounded wonderfully amiable. I felt it prudent to describe carefully the circumstances, and was happy to learn that he was a reader of National Review, less happy to learn that he had an advanced degree in political science from Berkeley. He did not have in his repertory the music I particularly wanted, but, strong on Rachmaninoff, he proposed that I listen to a couple of little-known preludes and, putting his telephone receiver down, he proceeded to play bits and pieces from them. I thought them neither familiar enough for the purpose nor attention-getting enough, and asked him if he had any Bach ready to go; he said yes, the E-minor Toccata, the theme of which, to remind me, he quickly rattled off on the piano, and we agreed he would finish with the supreme chestnut, the C-sharp-minor Prelude of Rachmaninoff. He reminded me that it ends very quietly, whereas a bang-bang ending is preferable in this kind of situation, but he agreed that familiarity with the music would make up for the down-beat ending; and it came off very well, without any mutinous noises at all, and no Virgil-Fox hamming up, either.

  I have a distinct feeling, reconstructing it all, that Richard Nixon intended to come to the party. I had perfunctorily invited him, as one would expect, and he had not replied, as one would not expect. Then, a week or so before the party, someone from the White House called to confirm the exact place and time. We deduced that it was for the purposes of sending directly there a congratulatory message, and were therefore somewhat surprised to receive such a message the next day, several days ahead of the party, addressed to me not at the Tavern on the Green, but at National Review. The following day de Gaulle died, and Nixon sped off to Paris for the funeral, which was held the morning of our party. At about noon, on the day of the party, another call f
rom the White House, asking whether I would like it if the President were to telephone his greetings to the gathering from Air Force One, en route back from Paris, assuming it proved practicable. Of course, I said, we should like that very much, and the White House took on the job of instructing the New York Telephone Company (I assume that telephone call was assigned to a Democratic civil servant) on how to wire the Tavern on the Green in such a way as to make it absolutely certain that the Presidential voice would come in loud and clear. Then, at about seven, the WH called again, this time to advise that Air Force One had left Orly too late, but that a telegraphed greeting would be delivered in time for the festivities—which made the second Presidential greeting, but we didn’t reveal that. The message was once again warm, and non-perfunctory, and included the tantalizing phrase “I regret that my unforeseen absence from the country prevents me from taking a more personal part in your celebration . . .” A second telegram came in, from Mr. Agnew, and we felt terribly official and appreciated.

  A surprise of a different order came a week or two later. The Advisory Commission was meeting with Mr. Nixon in the Oval Office, and the President told the chairman, Dr. Frank Stanton, the president of CBS, that he might find it amusing to hear a couple of sentences from the morning’s compilation of news as specially prepared for him every day by his staff; and Mr. Nixon proceeded to read a favorable account of CBS’s favorable handling of the Presidential message on inflation. Then, turning to me, Mr. Nixon said I might be interested to know that the entire feature section of that morning’s report was devoted to the 15th Anniversary issue of National Review, whose importance the staff judged sufficient to warrant appending the full texts of its major articles directly after the paraphrase done for busy Presidents. Mr. Nixon, expansive, asked us if we would like copies of the material he had cited. He pushed a button causing the instant materialization of an aide, whom he directed to have xeroxed and sent the whole of that morning’s report to each of the five commissioners. I was greatly surprised, because much can be made of the explicit and inexplicit mannerisms of an eyes-only report prepared for the President, and on the way out Frank Stanton and I predicted to each other that the staff would later prevail on Mr. Nixon to simply forget to send on the briefs; but they did arrive.