It is sad to see Dick Gregory, the comedian turned evangelist, signing (along with Ossie Davis) a money-raising letter in behalf of the Black Panthers, so I was glad of the opportunity (recently, at the University of Bridgeport), to discover what exactly are his views on the Panthers, and for that matter on things in general, several years having gone by since I first came across him.
My attitude toward him may be colored by his having on one occasion leaned over and whispered to me [it was after the Firing Line taping] that he had advised his wife and friends that I was a “beautiful cat.” I have aspired to many things, but was never so ambitious as to dream that I would be called that by Dick Gregory. In turn I told him how moving I had found his book, an autobiography titled—unfortunately, I think—Nigger. And so we have proceeded to listen to one another: and what I hear is in one sense disheartening, in another sense not.
Mr. Gregory is a force in America. Particularly on the college campuses, where he comes on very strong, very strong indeed. He has spoken at 300 campuses during the last ten months, and is beginning now a tour of Canada, where he likes to begin by complimenting the audiences, which are so eager to think ill of America, on how well they treat their own Negroes. Big Applause. Then he says: “All 12 of them.” [Gregory had told me this during the chairman’s introduction, before we began the question period.] Gregory, as I say, is a professional comedian, with a comedian’s sense of timing, and although he nowadays does only one or two nightclub appearances per year he keeps in shape, he tells me, by waking up a good roll (as they say in vaudeville) for the first 15 minutes of his speeches. The jokes are highly political, tendentious, like the ones that made Mort Sahl famous. There are (generally speaking) three classes of enemies. The Southerner, the rich man, and the bureaucrat. It is Mr. Gregory’s contention that America is run for the benefit of the rich man, an interesting point and, if so, a large chapter in the history of masochism, inasmuch as the very rich are taxed at the rate of 77 cents on the dollar.
On the matter of the Black Panthers Mr. Gregory was very serious. What he said was that the Black Panthers had come along, even as at different times in recent American history other groups had come along, beginning with the NAACP, on through CORE, and then SNCC. That the Black Panthers give special solace to a large number of Negroes who, were it not for the Panthers, would engage in violence. He gave as an example an hysterical woman who, although a stranger, reached him by telephone insisting that a white policeman was seeking her out, intending to gun her down. Gregory gave her the number of Black Panther Hq., and the BP’s sent over a bodyguard. He stayed with the woman, who after two or three days quieted down.
I ventured that such a treatment of the Panthers is the current version of the cliché of the twenties, that after all Mussolini had made the trains run on time: that what is remarkable about the Panthers isn’t the machismo of their sense of concern for their people but the poisonous rhetoric with which they seek to infect the interracial dialogue: the racism which Mr. Gregory, in other contexts, deplores.
Undoubtedly there are Negroes who believe so strongly that America is racist that they deduce from that reality the necessity to hate the white race. Mr. Gregory informed the audience that two examples of our racism were 1) our incarceration of the Japanese population during the war, while leaving the Germans alone; and 2) our dropping of the atom bomb on the Japanese, while refraining from doing any such thing against the Germans. I pointed out that the California Japanese were removed because there was panic (unjustified) over the prospect of Japanese landings on the coast of California, and that after all the same man who superintended the operation, Earl Warren, twelve years later ordered the integration of the schools, and can hardly be thought of as a racist; and that we could hardly have used the atom bomb on Germany, inasmuch as we didn’t have one until after the Germans were licked; and that anyway, we had killed five times as many Germans in raids on Dresden as we did Japanese at Hiroshima. Mr. Gregory smiled and, who knows, listened: and if he reads these words, I wish him to know that they come from a well-wisher who, to be sure, wishes he’d get his facts straight, and give the BP’s a wide berth.
In reply to which, a tough answer from Marina, California. (Interestingly enough, the author of the letter typed in his telephone number. Interesting because the tone of the letter was not of the kind that encourages an instant-communication reply.) The letter suggests the special stiffness one runs into when pursuing trans-ideological understanding where on top of everything else, there is race to worry about.
Dear Mr. Buckley: Any nigger you would love, or who could call you “beautiful cat” and mean it, really is bound to be one.
It is “the worst form of niggerism to hook and jab, cut and stab at other blacks.” (George Jackson telling what his parents taught him long before Black Panthers came on the block.)
Seeing blacks cut up each other must please you mightily. [You wonder, what black did Gregory cut up? None. And you wonder further at the implications of such pressures as this, directed at proscribing any criticism by any black man of any other black man.] It keeps them apart, and the last thing a man like you could stand would be having black men all get together. Niggerism isn’t restricted to the black community. For whites in a position to harm blacks, and who cannot resist doing so, practice niggerism. The difference is: when whites do it it is called racism, and the ones who do it are called pigs. But why do I bother to enlighten you?
For Christ’s sake get away from blacks and let them alone to work out their own destiny. The best thing you can do, if you think you have a mission to help black people, is to direct your heavy artillery on the white community, where the racism is. To date the score is: you have amply demonstrated your ignorance of the Black Panther Party by calling them racists. I suggest you read Seale’s book, “Seize the Time.”
In one fashion or another, Buckley, you have to cure your own racism. It’s up to you. Nobody can do it for you. Farthest from doing it would be hanging out with a black man who thinks you are a “beautiful cat.” You could make a beginning with Charles Silberman’s “Crisis in Black and White,” John Hersey’s “The Algiers Motel Incident,” and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” After you think you have cut your milk teeth, try Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth,” and George Jackson’s “Soledad Brother.” You won’t believe your eyes, ears, or sixth sense. You might even begin to see black people for a change. And you will find it a welcome change from your present course.
Good God, Buckley!
And the other letter, from a girl.
Since I’m a student at the University of Bridgeport I waited until after the debate [to write]. Anyway, since there wasn’t any debate, which was a real disappointment, I was struck by the difference in tone between your speech and Mr. Gregory’s. Not the surface things, sass-the-mastah vs. gallant courtliness, but Mr. Gregory’s poorly concealed condescension and his perfectly beautiful tactical error. We college students are parvenu adults and, justly, sensitive about our ascribed status and questionable origins. Every time Mr. Gregory called us youngsters I snickered rudely—proving his point—and watched people deflate.
But you treated us far too well. You must remember that we are no better than we should be and certainly don’t deserve a speech as rich as yours and with the mutual respect for intellect that it implied. I am not condemning myself and my peers for no reason at all. As Haim Ginott [a baby doctor] would say, I am very angry. Recently the chairman of our Political Science department gave a luncheon lecture on “Pop Maoism.” Dr. Van der Kroef is a solid conservative and a rather difficult man to get along with. He was more or less retaliating for a series of lectures on Communist China, liberal slant. The publicity people for the lectures made the unfortunate mistake of dubbing the series “China Week” which made it sound like a promotional giveaway for a bank, but they were very popular. Anyway, several of my more liberal classmates were turned away from the [anti-Communist] lecture. Chagrined, they stomped o
ff and returned with a pig, which they proceeded to roast in front of the student center. As Dr. Van der Kroef left he was presented with the pig’s head. We Spock-spawn have limited and primitive ideas of self-control but we are terribly creative.
The point is, how do you deal with this kind of witlessness? Perhaps Mr. Gregory does have our number. Do you suppose liberalism is simply a stage of development, something eventually outgrown, or is it a pathological state that should be treated more with pity than with scorn? I harp on this not only because of the speech or the pig but something else that happened recently.
I went to a lecture in New Haven given by Tim Wohlforth of the Workers’ League, supposedly a more radical split with the American Communist Party. Granted that this speech was directed to people who know the subject and are involved in the Communist effort, people that were directly concerned with the Trotsky split and the problems of revisionism: granted too that the question of Dialectics is vital to the growth of the Communist movement in this country. Correcting for all this, Tim Wohlforth still comes across as ineffectively and pedantically as my most ineffective and pedantic English professor. Furthermore, as a conservative escorted by a young communist (I had picked him up on a street corner selling [Party] papers in the best Horatio Alger tradition), instead of being threatened or even ideologically roused by the lecture, I found myself not only totally unimpressed by the Red Menace, but, God help me, my maternal instincts raised by the kind of poor but honest idealism and the unquestionable reassurance that with communists such as these we need never tap another phone.
Their project for the next day was covering an auto plant, this was before the GM strike was resolved, and I knew then and know now that their objective of selling dialectical materialism to the auto workers in Framingham was doomed to failure by boredom, or, the All-American Huh?
What I am trying to say, I guess, is that I have despaired of selling anything at all intellectually. In fact, I find myself retreating to a kind of anti-intellectuality. The pig-roasters are a perfect example of over-education (as I am), but what do [you] suppose they would be doing if they weren’t in college? I don’t even want to think about it. And, if the Workers’ League chokes and gags on a surfeit of theory and none of our pragmatism, I am, naturally, more than pleased. But I can’t help wondering what would happen to conservatism if it were not for your considerable charisma. It’s a stinken word of course, but I wonder after a while if it is this instead of concepts that sell an ideology. And then, from this I make a kind of bewildering jump to wonder if education is all that it promised to be in this country. I don’t know if our wholesale educational process has done us any good at all.
Well, I wish I could say I was stoned the way all the other kids do when they write you, but, prices being what they are, it’s only a Laredo.
Her doubts are of course shared by many who are discouraged by the failure of general education to achieve eudaemonia. Others, whose expectations were never high, are if not less discouraged, less disillusioned. Very early—I suppose because I had set out to read all his books (primarily because he was a close friend of my father’s)—I read Albert Jay Nock’s Theory of Education in the United States, the Page-Barbour lectures he delivered at the University of Virginia in the early thirties. Nock predicted even then that the effort towards universal higher education would most certainly not succeed; that the question was, Would it ruin true education for the few whom nature created educable? The verdict isn’t in by any means, but the academic turbulence of the past few years suggests that the rationalists’ certitude that more education would bring a higher level of discourse is chimerical. What we don’t yet know—or at least what I don’t yet know—is whether Nock’s pessimistic prediction —that the truly educated few would begin to disappear —will prove to be the corollary reality. Those who cling to optimism should reflect that in 1850 there were ten times as many illiterates in America as in 1960, and during that period we traveled from the debates of Lincoln vs. Douglas, to those of Nixon vs. Kennedy. The anomalies are what always astound me.
I knew once, as a close friend, Professor Revilo Oliver, who was last heard from when the press noticed that he had written in some bizarre journal that the Pentagon, knowing ahead of time that John Kennedy would be assassinated, had secretly rehearsed his forthcoming funeral. Revilo Oliver being without any exception the single most erudite man I have ever known, I remember taking him aside ten or twelve years ago with considerable trepidation after getting a whiff of some of the rhetoric that was belching out of a right-wing committee he had joined. It was late at night, after all the speeches, at a bar, and I proffered my misgivings, insisting that in right-wing politics, too, distinctions must be made, and he replied with a twinkle, in his measured way, “Bill, before you got me interested in politics, I’d as soon have split the skull of anyone who split an infinitive, but in politics what matters is that you pull together.” I was talking with a man whose scholarly exactitude eventually brought him around to buying eight custom-made typewriters, severally reserved for the work he does in the eight languages he commands, a precisionist who decided, at age 17, that he would never misplace a letter on the typewriter, and never has—or at least not in any of the hundreds of reviews and communications I ever saw. A few months after our conversation at the bar, he would be talking about the “thousands” of registered Communist agents who work in the Department of Health Education and Welfare.
During two summers we cruised together for a fortnight with Peter, and Pat, and two or three of the crew I used to race with, and I never knew better company than Revilo’s. He is the size of Belloc, and his sense of humor and resources of wit are unmatched in my experience. But then in due course we had to drop him from the masthead of National Review after one spectacularly irresponsible speech, and when National Review went on to attack the John Birch Society, of which he was a director and its single literary light, there was silence, interrupted by a single visit. It was at his home, to which he had frequently invited me over the years. Now I redeemed the invitation, probably to his embarrassment. But he had only the alternative of explicitly rejecting me, because I was to speak at the University of Illinois, where he teaches and lives, and had to spend the night somewhere in Urbana. It was late, after the speech, and we were alone, but it was difficult sometimes to hear him because there were strange noises coming out of the kitchen, noises like a tape machine being run at fast speed with the volume left up; and indeed that was what it proved to be. I discovered that the scramble was the voice of General Edwin Walker. The general had recently been brought back from Europe for excessive and undifferentiated anti-Communism, and soon embarrassed the entire conservative community, which had presumptively backed him, when, interrogated by a Senate committee, he betrayed a Birchite ignorance of any distinctions, shored up by his indecipherably documented certainty that everyone in sight was an agent of the Communist Party. Well, General Walker was now running for governor of Texas, and the commotion in the kitchen was caused by the arrival at Revilo’s of a tape of Walker’s most recent speech, which the communicants of Urbana, Illinois, were coming in, one by one, to duplicate on their own tape recorders, like early Christians come to copy the latest tablet from St. Paul. And of course the way to record fast, in order to facilitate the traffic, is at super-high speed which, when you play it to listen to, you then switch back to normal speed. In due course I asked Revilo how did he account for National Review's turning against the John Birch Society, knowing what he did about the anti-Communist resolution of the editors of National Review. He replied that there were three possible explanations. The first, he said, was that I had been seduced into this insanity by the editors, whose judgment was tragically awry. The second, he said —a trace of apology in his voice—was that I reasoned that the ascendancy of Robert Welch jeopardized my own preeminence as a leader of the conservative movement, that I was motivated by reasons of personal vanity, and the appeal of power. Yes, I said; and the third? The third, sai
d Revilo (Revilo speaks very slowly and precisely)—the third explanation, he said, “is that you are an agent of the Communist Party.” I smiled, stretched out my legs, and asked: “Which of the three explanations do you lean to?” He replied, softly, but always precisely, “I lean toward the first two.”
A year or so later Revilo got into real trouble. The trustees of the University of Illinois having heard about the article in which he explained the causes of Kennedy’s assassination, entertained a motion to strip Revilo of tenure. I wrote a column hotly defending his rights and calling attention to his scholarly achievements, while dismissing his assassination treatise as moonshine, and found waiting for me a few days later, on returning from a trip, a small package with my name neatly lettered in Revilo’s inimitable script, inside it a tiny facsimile of a Florentine knife, and on the card: “To stab your next friend in the back with, if you have another friend.” . . . My question, Mr. Chairman, is: If it can happen to Revilo Oliver, are we surprised that it happened to Dick Gregory? He do believe that bullshit.
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