It’s another question altogether why do the worldly of this community, as distinguished from the fanatics, countenance it? The Community moved against Revilo, all right, right-wing lunacy being unendearing; but the Community does not impartially deplore extremism. It appears that the intellectual and moral tension between two different worlds, the sane and the insane, isn’t one our thought-leaders wish to eliminate by effecting an unconditional surrender of the infirm world. The co-existence of the two worlds, the Tedious Lunatic right, and the Interesting Tortured left, the intelligentsia are not so much reconciled to, as delighted by.
I was told a few years ago by a student at Princeton University of his having heard Estes Kefauver, who was campaigning in the New Jersey Presidential primary in 1956, deliver a speech to the graduate students. Kefauver was about an hour late, had delivered seven speeches during the day, and now he began his eighth, and after a moment or two the listeners, to a man, were seized by an agonized embarrassment; then, just as suddenly, as though the main switch were turned off, they relaxed. These young scholars all realized that the Senator was too dazed to focus on the nature of his audience, and was giving them the identical speech he had given during the day to the crowds in New Jersey, and you sensed their appreciation at knowing what are the necessarily demagogic habits of Real Life. Not at all, according to the witness, any residual sense of frustration; of disillusion, of disgust, of hostility, engendered by the low quality of the analysis or of the emotions. “American society is dedicated to death,” Professor Howard Zinn would say in debate with me at Tufts a few weeks after the meeting with Gregory: and there was not an intonation of protest from any one of the four thousand students there. And yet if the professor was using the words rigorously, as the context seemed to suggest—to condemn the Vietnam War as an expression of our society’s sadism, or necrophilia— then he was saying something outrageously untrue and dishonorable. If he intended to mint a metaphorical use for the phrase “dedicated to death,” its meaning was inscrutable, and the audience might at least have registered its confusion. Is the only response to the continuing phenomenon of selective indiscrimination, such a philosophical condescension as Albert Jay Nock developed into art? Perhaps. But such condescension is—well, Un-American.
We reach 37th Street, my brothers’ offices; Jim is there, wrapping things up (or maybe he is dictating political matter, I don’t think to ask), but my appointment is with Dean Reasoner, a partner in the family company, and its principal lawyer, whom I had asked to meet with Peter Starr and me, in anticipation of a board meeting of the Starr Broadcasting Company the next day.
Peter is the president and I am the chairman of the board. Peter was born on Pearl Harbor day, came to work for me at age 12 as cabin boy and crew on my sailboat, and worked for me every summer thereafter until, on graduating from Georgetown, he took a job as assistant salesman for the little radio station National Review had bought in Omaha, Nebraska, on which we managed to lose money, even though we had intended that it should make up the losses incurred by the magazine. Within five months, Peter persuaded me with a battery of letters analyzing the operation of the station to make him manager, the youngest, it transpired, in the country. A few months later he announced (at age 23) that he intended to buy a station in South Dakota, on his own, in the event that National Review did not want to buy it. The directors voted there and then, in the light of their unhappy experience with Omaha, to divest themselves of Omaha; and Peter and I together borrowed the money to buy it, and South Dakota. Two years later, our corporation went public, at which point we also owned stations in Kansas City, Houston, New Orleans, and Memphis.
Dean Reasoner happily combines legal rectitude with superhuman ingenuity, and we give him now what to others would be a circle-squaring problem—namely how to accomplish X, without diminishing the rights of Y. In his measured way, he nudges us in the right direction. He has the faculty, where legal problems are concerned, of releasing, say every fifteen minutes or so, a gossamer blanket over your impetuosities. You wrestle under it, finally poking your head through, at which point he lets drop the next one; and you repeat the process. Four or five layers later, you have reached the surface. The technique is to face the one complexity at a time, and he is skilled at withholding the incremental complexity, so that by the time it comes you are refreshed, and ready to crack it; an hour or two of this kind of thing and you are airborne, by contrast with the quicksand into which so many lawyers solemnly and exultantly plunge you when you approach them with your problems.
I can’t leave Dean now, and need therefore to cancel an appointment at the Harvard Club with Henry Regnery, founder of Henry Regnery Co., publishers of God and Man at Yale, an old friend who comes to town only infrequently from Chicago. He is an enthusiastic conservative, a Germanophile who studied in Bonn before the war, and started his publishing company shortly after it, setting out to prove that a non-New York based publishing company can make it; but who has yet to prove it. Now he has passed along the principal executive responsibilities to his son-in-law, who is apolitical and (it is rumored) resists, as financially unproductive, the penchant of his father-in-law for conservative-oriented books. Henry is not a Catholic, although his family was, but his staple, during the fifties, was Catholic, or Catholic-oriented books: he rejoiced in producing books of scholastic philosophy, while attempting to run his publishing house on a budget most straitened, which resulted in the estrangement of many of his original modern-conservative authors. “If Henry Regnery alienates one more conservative author,” Willi Schlamm said to me in 1955, with the pointed zest that made him beloved and hated in the Luce empire, “pretty soon he will have only Thomas Aquinas writing for him.” I related the quip to Whittaker Chambers, a good friend of both Willi and Henry, who enjoyed it hugely, as I still do, regretting that Henry’s house did not prosper, and reflecting that neither has any publishing house done so, in my time in America, merely by specializing in conservative-oriented books. It wasn’t until Neil McCaffrey thought to begin first a Conservative Book Club, and then to found a publishing house (which is, at least to a certain extent, a gathering system for the book club), that the operation became commercially viable. A year ago Neil called me in Switzerland to tell me that his publishing complex, owned at that moment by a faltering computer firm, was up for sale, and proposed that the Starr Broadcasting Company buy it. I called Peter, in due course the deal was made, and now the enterprise goes along nicely.
We have covered the subject, so Peter and I leave 37th Street, and move with palindromic assurance to 73rd Street, where we have dinner with Pat, in the lovely little red-orange library she created, where we hang the irresistible oil-and-crayon portrait of Carmen de Lavallade by her husband, Geoffrey Holder, her mulatto-made-primitive face cocked slightly, poignantly, eyes glancing down, a bouquet of flowers nestling in her hands; flanked on the right by Calliyannis’s striking portrait of his 14-year-old son, in broad diagonal brush-strokes, Goya-colors; and, opposite, a peaceful, endearing Cerbellini, a dozen children watching a puppet show, inquisitively, shyly, suspensefully. In between, three by de Botton (my favorite): a guitar-player, his chord-hand in skeletal reds blues and oranges, as if his fingers had fused with the vibrant strings; an impression of Good Friday, with eerie browns and yellows; and an impression of the city of Toledo, seen at night, the orange shell small and central, a yellow, sullen moon, dark, mysterious browns—of all of my paintings, my favorite. We ate, and talked, the record played harpsichord music, the portable table is covered with lace and candles (Pat does not Compromise), and Peter reverted to the joys and sorrows of the Starr Broadcasting Company. My family apart, I am as fond of Peter as of any human being. Indeed I feel for him that special affection I reserve for anyone who has made me a million dollars. He is still in his twenties, and I can experience the excitement he feels at having created what he has created, and I envy him the convenient standard by which he can judge his successes: the balance sheet, so miserably unavailable to
the influence-merchants.
After dinner I make a determined move to my little study upstairs. I must spend a few hours reading over the material Aggie has got together for me, because tomorrow morning, at nine, I am to be at the Waldorf-Astoria in order to debate with Ramsey Clark before the annual convention of the National Association of Manufacturers; poor manufacturers, what a day: Clark and me in the morning, Goldwater at lunch, Nixon at dinner. At one a.m., I tread softly into the bedroom and turn off Pat’s television set, and she mumbles reproachfully that she is carefully listening to the eleven o’clock news, which terminated one hour and thirty-five minutes ago, thank God, I wish the news was always over.
Friday. At first it was ten o’clock, then nine o’clock, then would I be there for breakfast at eight? Frances told them I would be writing my column at eight, which is what I should have been doing at eight. Instead I was reading the New York Times, by which I am enslaved, and so I get there at nine exactly, only to find, as so often is the case, that I could have got there at nine-thirty just as well. It is the fashion, after one definitely and firmly gives up lecturing—and only then—to write a valedictory essay of practical advice to lecture-hosts. It was done (hilariously) twenty years ago by Bernard DeVoto, and later by Dylan Thomas (also hilariously, except that he was not able to avoid, or else did not try to do so, the usual anti-American business). When I do mine, I shall suggest that a little room be set aside in which a host or a host’s representative will padlock the speaker—to dispose of any anxiety about his whereabouts—and that ten seconds before he is required onstage, the room be unlocked. As it stands this morning, I am deposited in a public antechamber by a kind and attentive gentleman, and in due course Mr. Ramsey Clark is brought in, and I greet him. I had never met him—or even seen him on television—but last night I read reviews of his book, Crime in America, and one or two chapters from it. He is, currently, the principal human political enthusiasm of Dr. Robert Hutchins, who, it is reported, wants Clark to run for President, to be elected, and, one supposes, thereupon to enact Mr. Hutchins’ new Constitution. Eric Sevareid comes in—he will be the moderator—and he is looking awful. He tells us he is suffering from the flu. Ushers, usherettes, and dignitaries flow back and forth, and eventually the hour strikes, and we are led out into the Grand Ballroom.
. . . The last time I was onstage there was three weeks ago, walking in behind Jim and his elated staff, the ballroom a madhouse which finally quieted down for long enough to hear his short victory statement. Then I knew he was dazed, because I heard my shy, modest brother uttering the words, “I am the voice of the new politics.” I teased him later by sending him, framed, the headline in the New York Post the day after the election, “buckley: ‘i am the new politics,’ ” getting back from him a winced note of pain at this lapidary record of what looked like a lapse into rodomontade. (“Who does Jimmy think he is?” I had scrawled over the headline, to my sister Priscilla. “La nouvelle politique, c’est goddam well moi!” Thus showing that Jim must never trade vainglories with me.) . . .
We sit down, and Eric Sevareid delivers introductory remarks, lengthy, wise, moderate, elegant—he is a very good writer—on the theme “Dissent Within a Lawful Society.” He introduces Ramsey Clark, who begins his twenty-minute statement. One observes very intently an unknown speaker with whom one is debating, not unlike —I cannot resist the analogy—the matador observing the bull: his approach to the subject of course, his command of the subject, the character of his appeal to the audience, or to one part of the audience; and, very closely, one looks for his particular querencia, which is the Spanish word, so useful, for the area, quite arbitrary, that every bull chooses, towards which, when wounded, he returns, to make his last stand. Clark’s is: the epistemological liberalism of John Stuart Mill, the notion that so long as any dissent exists, it is unsafe to assume that a society has got to the truth of a question. I have fought in that querencia often enough, and am familiar with defensive and offensive techniques. Clark is at once homespun and mellifluous; and every now and then just a little grandiose, e.g., “Dissent has been the principal catalyst in the alchemy of truth,” which sentence, substituting as it does “in the alchemy of” for the simpler “of,” suffers not only from straitened grandiloquence, but from an edgy syntactical ineptitude, because if he was determined to use “in the alchemy of,” he should have said “in the alchemy of truth-seeking,” right?
On the homespun front he asks, “Why was Roger Bacon called the ‘father of science’? We remember the story. [That is good oratorical practice, flattering the ignorant, and admitting the learned into one’s company.] Bacon was in the monastery; they were writing a new encyclopaedia. The question was the number of teeth in a horse’s mouth; a bitter debate went on for several days, and there were three theories—thirty-two, thirty-four, and thirty-seven. Everybody had firm documentation for his position. Some went back to St. Augustine, some to various papal encyclicals. Roger Bacon, not a particularly energetic person and somewhat of a dreamer, was looking out the window and he saw a horse, and had the temerity to suggest that they go count the number of teeth in the horse’s mouth—and that, of course, is the day that he was excommunicated from the church, and that is why he is called the ‘father of science,’ because he would seek the truth.”
I did not recall that Bacon had ever been in a monastery, doubted strongly that he was ever a Catholic, was under the impression that no encyclopaedia was ventured until the century after his death, and knew very well that he was the greatest establishmentarian toady of his time: but wasn’t sure enough of myself, so I didn’t note down to challenge Clark on the point; and anyway, he who lives off the exposure of sciolism will die from the exposure of sciolism. (I was never in my life luckier for having indulged my prudent instincts. I engaged family and friends with the hilarious biographical solecism of Ramsey Clark while writing these notes; and then—and I simply cannot account for the cause—suddenly, at about four o’clock one morning, I woke up, and the only reason I did so was that Mother Providence was knocking insistently on my door. And the message was: He said Roger Bacon, ass, not Francis Bacon. Great God! How close I came!)
Clark’s general approach harmonizes with the Greening Impulse of Charles Reich (“Do you really understand how taxi drivers feel?”). And again, the formal democratic epistemology of J. S. Mill: “If the idea is wrong, is there any better way to demonstrate it than to really expose it? Is there any better way to make it more dangerous than to repress it?” And the people-to-people peroration. “If we give people the opportunity to speak, then their emotions cannot overflow. If we listen, if we try to learn, if we point out the error of their ways, if there is such error, if we aren’t afraid to hear another point of view—and, if we are, we will never meet the challenge of today and tomorrow. To me, the First Amendment is more than a thing that talks about free speech, saying you’ve got to tolerate the point of view of others; it speaks of the spirit of humanity, the right to think, to be let alone, to breathe, to speak and assemble and to pray. And, if we don’t insist on that for all of our people, we won’t have it for any. And, in the vastness of the changes with which we are confronted, we should never forget the words of John Kennedy: ‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.’ Thank you.” Applause.
As he sits down, I decide to begin by poking a little fun, drawing on the public feud between Clark and J. Edgar Hoover, ventilated last week in connection with the publication of Clark’s book. What the hell, why not? “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen; thank you, Mr. ‘Jellyfish’ Clark, as he is called down in Washington . ..” Most of the crowd recalls that last week Hoover said of Clark that as Attorney General he had been a “jellyfish.” They are mildly amused, though a little nervous at this sudden rending of the petit-point sweetness. Important to pay Clark, therefore—and right away—his due, lest I needlessly estrange the audience, which I often do. “I do think that the most engaging thing about Mr. Clark is his
transparent sincerity; the most difficult thing about Mr. Clark is his utter confusion. It is a rather beguiling confusion, because it issues not out of bad but out of very pure motives. He desires an improvement in the lot of man, and we must assume that the discussion today will not tend to divide those who desire such an improvement and those who desire to impede it.” And, with a few preliminaries, on into the point. “In his book Mr. Clark seems always to be saying that that which would happen, were we to open up our ears and permit it to happen, would bring us into a kind of paradise the only alternative to which is the violent revolution with which, in his peroration, Mr. Clark threatened us. There are a lot of things wrong with that analysis. For one thing (and I don’t think this is any clearer to Mr. Clark than it was to Oliver Wendell Holmes), what are the consequences of his own epistemology? He says that the principal catalyst —that dissent is the principal catalyst in the alchemy of truth. But I think he would find it very embarrassing if asked to define what ‘truth’ is, or what are the consequences of happening upon it. Surely, if alchemy is an appropriate metaphor to use when you talk about truth, it means that, after you have experienced this dissent, after you have worked your way towards the discovery of truth, you’ve [finally] got hold of something. What is the point of discovering truth unless you face the logical consequences of branding its opposite as ‘error’? And if, in fact, you are permitted to acknowledge that something is ‘error,’ what do you do about the voices that proclaim error? What is the purpose of seeking truth, if not acting on it? It would be preposterous for America to suggest we have discovered all truths. But it would be ungrateful to suggest we have not discovered some of them. People have died for those truths that we have happened upon in the American experience, and [others] are prepared to die for them once again.”
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