Cruising Speed
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The 15th Anniversary issue was done on the theme; “After Liberalism, What?” We invited first a Marxist revolutionary, Professor Eugene Genovese, the same whose ouster from Rutgers University Nixon had joined in urging a few years back—unsuccessfully (i.e., the Democratic governor who said he would not fire him beat the Republican challenger who said that if elected he would fire him). Genovese is now head of the Department of History at the University of Rochester, and in this article, appearing in such alien surroundings, he poked about the corpse of liberalism with considerable fun, but went on to tell why he is not optimistic about a meaningful swing to the left in this country in this decade. Professor Charles Frankel agreed to uphold the viability of American liberalism, and asked some tough questions, among them whether conservatives are really disposed to do without the forms of liberalism, raising the question, Are the forms of liberalism exclusively inherent in liberalism: or are they detachable from it?
Jeffrey Hart argued that the adversary relationship that has developed between America’s culture and America’s intellectuals is altogether unique in the experience of modern civilization. He explored the roots of that antagonism, and drew pessimistic conclusions. James Burnham asked: Can self-government survive? What happens when the people, and in particular the thought-leaders of the people, fail to exhibit that self-denying restraint without which democratic government simply does not work? He put it that the problem is to achieve “authoritative government which is not authoritarian.” But how is that done in the absence of an appropriate set of attitudes, which are the vertebrae of functioning societies? His conclusion—no, it isn’t that exactly, the destination of his argument—leaves one peering into a dark and dense forest which, if we are to make it habitable, would require the recolonization of America.
My own summary was brief, “a very few words.” That the best of the troubled youth of today, who for instance most recently discovered Charles Reich in The Greening of America, ought to get around to discovering that for many years conservatives have been plugging for the best of what they, the Reichians, want, and have been holding up the torch they now gather around so excitedly from the time, permit the expression, they were babies.
It was obvious to the conservatives who grouped together after the Second World War that the centripetalization of power simply had to be arrested. Had to stop for one thing because it threatened to suck all social energy into Washington, leaving the individual in ineffective control over his own destiny. And had to stop as a practical matter, because of the limits of corporate efficiency. It was fourteen years after NR began that Peter Drucker would write in The Age of Discontinuity that the only thing government can do effectively is wage war and inflate the currency. The special idealism of the youth who went to college or completed college during the postwar years seized on collective fancies—the orthodox socialism of the Henry Wallace campaign, the satellization of which by the Communist Party brought widespread disillusion. And, for a brief season, the dreams of World Federalism. When these fell apart, they fell back to the paunchy liberalism of the fifties, dressed up by the belletristic politics of Adlai Stevenson. The end came in Dallas. It fell to Lyndon Johnson to be the personal victim of the end of that very long hallucination which John Kennedy was never exposed to: the jostling that would come when the highway turned to dirt and potholes, and the public began to realize that no free people could lead happy or full lives by buying one share each of common stock in—The State.
Along came the prophets of quite the other direction. The solipsists. Jack Kerouac, on the road, refusing even to read the daily newspapers. The hippies (whom he later reviled) adopted his life-style, without the motion motion motion that was the operative narcotic during Kerouac’s period—stressing instead an Adamite indifference to worldly things. And then once again the direct opposite, the total iconoclastic self-assertion of a Jimi Hendrix—of any columnist for The Village Voice; and now they have found the Greening of America through Charles Reich’s Consciousness III. But what Charles Reich says, if you boil it down, is what Robert Nisbet said quietly (and with style) when fifteen years ago he wrote about The Quest for Community. The kind of community Nisbet told us we all needed, and the kind that now Reich enjoins upon us, is inconceivable in the absence of individuation; and individuation is what happens when the state ceases to be taken for granted as the necessary instrument for human progress. The conservative who spoke to little audiences fifteen years ago about the necessity for arresting the growth of government was saying then what the followers of Reich have come upon, except that they are now condemning America, while what they ought to be condemning is what I once called the special effronteries of the twentieth century. One of these—Eastern seaboard liberalism—substituted ideology for metaphysics, causing that great void which the sensitive of whatever age feel so keenly. Those who are a little older, and expect less from an intractable world, come more readily to terms with their world, which is not to say that we accept it as it is, merely that we will not try to change it into something it cannot become, for no reason more complicated than that human hands are soiled.
I concluded that the continuing challenge of National Review is to argue the advantages to everyone of the rediscovery of America, the amiability of its people, the flexibility of its institutions, the great latitude that is still left to the individual, the delights of spontaneity and, above all, the need for superordinating the private vision over the public vision . . . Well now, there is a program for Mr. Nixon. Question. Reading this kind of stuff, how does it work into the practical consciousness of a Chief of State? Obviously he does not call in his staff and redraft a forthcoming State of the Union Address. Will Mr. Nixon, even at the urging of his staff, actually read a deeply exploring essay by Burnham, or Hart, in search of fresh and useful coordinates? Is there a rhetorical fallout? Or—can the President read? I do not mean here to distinguish between Nixon and other Presidents; I simply wonder. The super-worldly Ken Galbraith remarks in his diaries that when he went down to see the President-elect at Palm Beach, a few weeks before the inauguration, he gave Mr. Kennedy two or three books, intending not so much to instruct the President-elect as to divert him. Knowing Mr. Kennedy’s appetite for eclectic reading matter, he gave him J. H. Plumb’s Sir Robert Walpole and a volume of Betjeman’s poems; and, to Galbraith’s great surprise, he was informed by Jackie a day or so later that Mr. Kennedy had gone right through the books, late at night. Oh? How do they find the time? Where is the evidence that they have read it? Will the historians trained in a posteriori sleuthing say to us one day, “Kennedy obviously got this insight from the history of Walpole that Galbraith gave him to read.” Did JFK read it? Did RMN read the NR essays? Galbraith has had much experience with students who have developed the art of pretending to have read books assigned to them; yet even with students one is careful, because it can be as painful to the monitor, as to the student, to uncover dissimulation. With Presidents, and Presidents-elect, one proceeds more cautiously, because it is not the business of friends, let alone subordinates, to quiz the President on his understanding of matter he has been given to read. That is why, for instance, one would not have said, “Mr.
President, what do you think of Burnham’s thesis about the difference between the authoritarian and the authoritative state?” In the first place, one simply doesn’t—not to a President, and not, after his sophomore year, to anybody else. In the second, a skillful politician could turn away the question easily; and the interrogator gets no probative satisfaction. Meanwhile the grillee makes a mental note to spare himself, in the future, the presence of this drillmaster.
We pass, on the New England Thruway just west of Bridgeport, the bloated oil tanks that bear the single marking buckley. For a thousand years, beginning when I was at Yale, I have been asked by those few friends and acquaintances who have passed by those hulks and have not automatically assumed that these are outposts of the Buckley fortune whether they are indeed my family’s, and I have
said No, they are not, tee hee, would that they were. The suspicious questioner at this point assumes that the fabled Buckley Fortune is too vast to be thus vulgarly advertised, on mere tanks. I mean, upperclass-folkways-wise, you don’t go in for that kind of thing. If it happened that your great-grandfather was named, say, Hiram G. Coca-Cola, then there is no escaping the legacy. Otherwise, keep your name out of the commercial thing, particularly if you have a consumer product; much better. But when you endeavor to shake the conviction that the mastodonic oil deposits that guard growlingly the outskirts of Bridgeport reflect the size of your own financial resources, you receive the condescending smile that, soon now, I would receive from a student at the University of Bridgeport who would display amusement at my suggestion that it was neither factually nor symbolically correct that I was there to argue the case for the buckley oil interests in Bridgeport, uber alles.
I arrive, as requested, at noon, and shake hands with a vaguely disconcerted committee which passes along the rumor that bad weather might delay the flight of Dick Gregory, who is bound from Cleveland to Hartford, whence he will be driven to Bridgeport. I am whisked off to meet Dr. James Halsey, the Chancellor, who is recovering from a heart-attack, and is permitted only today, after sixteen days’ confinement, to receive a visitor—in the upstairs nursery at his home. He is proud of his Behemoth University (9,000 students, having at the close of World War II registered only a few hundred). I go off to lunch with fifty or so deans, sponsors, and alumni while reports file in, each of them gloomier than the last, concerning the movements of Dick Gregory; and then, before the dessert is served, the chairman tells me that it has been arranged for a helicopter to meet Gregory at the airport in Hartford, but that even so he could not be less than one hour late, leaving me with the burden of holding the attention of the crowd, which has come to witness a perfervid contest between a black revolutionary and an Ivy League conservative, and I experience the little ache that comes from knowing how infinitely disappointing it is to an audience to be deprived of the other member of a scheduled debate. (It has happened to me twice.) Would I undertake to deliver an address, about thirty minutes long, to be followed by questions from the floor until the arrival of Dick Gregory? The rule in such situations, which in variation often take place, is the obvious one: you agree—to do what you can. I specify two conditions, the first that I be instantly relieved (we have not yet been served the dessert course), given an office where I might put together a thirty-minute talk (I know that that will involve simply shortening one of my current speeches, but that it will take concentration); and— condition the second—that in the event the helicopter brings Dick Gregory in ahead of schedule, i.e., before I am done with my thirty-minute talk, he be kept away from the gymnasium until I am finished. I know that if half or three-quarters of the way through an analytical talk, Gregory were to stride in, I could not hope to hold the attention of the audience; and to extemporize an emergency ending, like the organist who suddenly interrupts the fugue to launch into the wedding march because she sees that the procession has started, would be psychologically incapacitating.
Agreed. And a half hour later I am taken from the study in which I have been isolated; but the chairman discovers that he is fifteen minutes early. (It is very very bad to arrive fifteen minutes early at the hall where you are to speak, because you are at that moment nervous, even irritable, and there isn’t anything that you can do or that can be done for you, to alleviate the tension; there isn’t ever, anywhere, a little off-stage study where you can simply sit, and fuss with your notes, or turn on the television, or telephone your secretary.) So we drive through the park, and I am shown several civic attractions, told, even, the ribald legend given, by the kids, to an upright statue of a local inventor (“He discovered how you can do it standing up”) and then to the gym, teeming with four thousand students and, outside, a long line waiting for standing room tickets. I walk in and there is the usual ripple of appreciation, diminished by the news, already in circulation, that Gregory will be late (somehow, by the workings of the public psychology, I am vaguely to blame, perhaps only because I will profiteer from his absence by making my points unchallenged); and, in due course, with the promise that my antagonist would soon arrive, I am turned on.
I try a truncated version of the talk I gave the night before, wondering whether I might just discover, in this new version, that it is better communicated short than long. Gymnasiums are tough. The acoustics are always bad, and vocal inflections are difficult. The real pro, sizing up the situation, will adjust his voice accordingly; I cannot do so, which is why years ago I instructed my agent to warn my hosts about the absolute necessity of providing me with a sensitive acoustical system; and they try, they always do, but it seldom works so as to make communicable, to all the corners of the auditorium, soft-stated rhetoric. We move on to the question period, everybody wondering anxiously, I foremost among them, when, when, will Gregory arrive. Suddenly the presence is made felt, before even he steps into the hall, and now there he is a hundred yards away, exciting the audience as though Winston Churchill had walked in to answer a three-hour tirade by Clement Attlee.
“In sharp contrast,” the Bridgeport Telegram wrote the next day, “and leaving no doubt where the students’ sympathy lay, a long and loud ovation accompanied the delayed entrance of Mr. Gregory, who wore a blue wide-lapelled, double-breasted blazer, dove-gray bell-bottom pants, a thick beard and close-cropped hair.” . . . The applause deafening, he reaches the dais, and leans over gracefully to greet me—our first meeting in four years, when he had been my guest-adversary on Firing Line. “How are you, brother,” he shakes my hand, vaulting over me in an uninterrupted motion, to occupy his seat, pending the hurried introduction of him; after which he bounds up to the microphone, holding it lovingly, professionally, to the indicated level...
“In perhaps intentional contrast to Mr. Buckley’s urban sophistication and aristocratic tones, Mr. Gregory came on with easy, tough assurance, using earthy humor and the artless language of the streets. ‘Black folks have put a lot of hope in the U.S. Constitution,’ he said, ‘but it never done’em any good. We never had a free society in America,’ he maintained, ‘and this was the one country where they laid foundations for a free society. Welfare? Don’t tell me about welfare. The tax breaks for rich people: that’s welfare in this country. I didn’t start being on relief until I started making big money and paying for nothing. Rich people can write off their meals. Poor people can’t,’ he said. Almost every remark Mr. Gregory made was followed by cheers, shouts of ‘Right On, Brother!’ from groups of blacks, and applause.” ...
The theme of the debate was “Revolution or Evolution?,” and concerning the depressing state of affairs in America Mr. Gregory was strictly non-partisan, indicting Republicans and Democrats alike . . .
“I hear a lot of people talking about revolution and repression these days [the (extraordinarily accurate) newspaper report went on]. They blame Nixon, Agnew, and Mitchell for the repression.
Well, you can blame those three for a lot of things, but repression is not one of them. If you want to find who to put the blame on for repression, it’s you,” he said, pointing a finger at the audience. “LBJ would have brought repression down on you, if you tried revolution; Kennedy would have brought repression down, too. You must understand that repression does more harm to the repressor than the repressed,” he added. He compared the problems of this society to a teakettle that has begun to boil and whistle while the people in the room who had put it on the stove are too engrossed in a conversation to notice it. “Well so it goes ‘Weeeeee!’ and Mitchell, he’s there in the corner, in the top bunk, and he don’t like coffee anyhow, so he sends a couple of aides to plug the teakettle up,” he went on, his features lighting up, the comedian now more to the fore than the activist. “And you don’t hear no noise. For a couple of minutes,” he pauses for a second. “That’s repression,” he concludes. . . . Using again another metaphor to illustrate the pl
ight of American minorities, he said the civil rights problem is like a pregnancy. “American’s pregnancy is just about over,” he warned, “and when this baby is going to drop, it’s going to drop, even if it means the death of the mother and the baby.”
The program now requires the emptying of the gym (almost two hours have gone by), and the resumption of hostilities in a lounge in which only a few hundred students can fit, and thither we repair, to answer questions addressed alternately one for Gregory, one for Buckley.
At exactly four I finish an answer by announcing that, as I have informed the chairman of the ceremonies, I simply have to leave. “Shortly after Mr. Buckley left,” the Bridgeport Telegram reported, “Mr. Gregory said of him, ‘A lot of people think that Buckley is putting them on, but I believe that the cat is so honest, so ethical, that he do believe none of that bad bullshit exist, but it exists.’ ”
Had I been too easy on Gregory? I taxed myself the next day, sitting down to write a column about him. I recalled my debate at the Cambridge Union (England) with James Baldwin, in 1965: God, that was a rough one. A debate only in the technical sense, because Baldwin rose and was greeted with an ovation even before he opened his mouth to speak. I remember sitting there thinking, Boy, tonight is a lost cause. And, after his 25-minute speech was over, during which he was not once interrupted by a single student, notwithstanding that interruptions are the practice at the Cambridge Union, he sat down, while the crowd roared its approval. I rose, half-resigned, half-angry, because Baldwin, arguing the affirmative of the motion, Resolved, That the American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro, had—I thought, and think—made the flimsiest case to an audience unacquainted with his spectacular essay The Fire Next Time, so that I found myself telling the students that their treatment of Baldwin was the clearest testimony of their racial condescension, inasmuch as they could not reasonably have applauded his factual distortions except insofar as they desired to establish that they were instantly available to encourage any anti-American intellectual provided he was a Negro; and that, unlike them, I was sufficiently lacking in racial prejudice to permit myself to become angry with a paranoid, notwithstanding that he was black-skinned. Oh dear. I lost the debate, by popular count, 3-1—or was it 30-1? I did not handle Gregory in that way, although what he said at Bridgeport—and says everywhere—is quite simply outrageous: and I found myself wondering whether I was slipping into that same condescension that I had accused the students of Cambridge of being animated by. Several days later I would receive two letters about the exchange, in exquisite contrast with each other; one of them taking off from the column I wrote. I said ...