I go on to say that unless dissent is defined so as to exclude, for instance, the prescriptions of such as William Kunstler, dissent will itself be dishonored, and in the ensuing public confusion, tyranny will threaten. I offer an example of the current confusion. “I was asked, recently at Rochester University, what concrete steps I might propose to help the judicial system [along], and I said, ‘Disbar Kunstler.’ Mr. Kunstler, who shared the platform with me, was displeased. And I was, of course, roundly booed, and my response was, ‘Don’t—don’t boo me. Boo the rules of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York which admitted Mr. Kunstler to the practice of the law. Either disband those canons, or apply them.’ And then I read just two or three sentences from Mr. Kunstler’s interview in Playboy magazine, published the day before. He said, ‘It is the role of the American left to resist rather than merely protest: to resist illegitimate authority.’ ‘So,’ said the [Playboy] questioner, ‘how do you define illegitimate authority?’ He [Kunstler] named the authority that ordains the draft, the payment of taxes to support the war in Vietnam, ‘the domestic and foreign policies of a government that crushes people on every level’—all the things in this society that ‘tend to degrade and destroy people.’ Mr. Kunstler was then asked how, specifically, one should go about breaking the law. Well, take the college situation. The students can take over their college by occupying its buildings, counseled counselor Kunstler. Just plain occupying them? No. The students should occupy the buildings pending the administration’s capitulation. If the administration refuses to grant the student demands, they move one step further. ‘Another form resistance could take would be the burning down of a particular college building. [To be sure, after evacuating it.] ‘You condone arson?’ Kunstler was asked. ‘Yes,’ said Kunstler. ‘If a point has been reached in a given situation where the mechanisms of society are not responding to serious grievances,’ then arson is an appropriate response.
“Speaking for myself [I go on, leaving Kunstler], I can count sixty-eight times during the period since my twenty-fifth birthday when, applying the Kunstler code, I would have felt compelled, personally, to put a torch to the White House. And, of course, Mr. Sevareid is quite right when he says that the Vietnam war is hardly responsible for it all. Mr. Kunstler says, ‘I would hate to think the war in Vietnam could be the only catalyst for resistance . . . there is so much more that remains to be resisted: the oppression of black people . . . poverty, the unequal distribution of wealth,’ and so forth. And yet, the Bar of the City of New York [which proscribes the urging of extra-legal activity by its members] does nothing . . . And such indecisions reach down through the vibrations of public life and affect the whole structure of authority and the whole gravity of the legal and philosophical codes that are the understructure of the society. We are losing even the force of public sanction.”
Mr. Clark, in his rejoinder, says, “Well, there is some advantage in speaking second, isn’t there? I have no real rebuttal, really. I feel this way—that, if I am transparent, I want to be transparent. It’s very hard to see the truth. I enjoy the banter of engaging in personalities, but I really think this country has issues. If we are to solve them, we have to address ourselves to them. We can. But, if we only engage in personalities we won’t. [Polemically skillful. A form of paralepsis. “If we . . . only . . . engage in personalities”: very effective.] I think we are going to have to look at dissent for what it is, and try to understand it.” Applause
A few questions from the floor, and it is over. Well, not quite. A middle-aged lady is introduced by the master of ceremonies. She desires to ask the audience to consider, very briefly, her plan. She has been given five minutes to explain it, and she does, very sweetly, if just a bit coquettishly. It is this: why not everybody in the United States pause for one minute per day—the same minute, everywhere—to consider the problems of America, and the imperatives of love and compassion and charity? She wants us to try it ourselves, Right Now. And after we do so, to please fill out the questionnaire, which the ushers are already distributing, so that we can let her and her committee know what we think of the idea? Ready? silence. (I devote my minute to hoping that Harry Elm-lark will be loving, charitable, and compassionate when he sees me walk in, a few minutes from now, without my column.) The minute is up, we rise, I ask the lady if it is all right if I complete my questionnaire back at the office, and she smiles, extra-sweetly, after her minute’s nourishment. I shake hands with Mr. Clark, tell Eric to go to bed till he gets over his flu, and walk purposefully out; long steps, and always take the staircase when you can, lest you be detained. Important.
I leave the Waldorf and walk three blocks to the offices of the Washington Star Syndicate, in the Newsweek Building. I go there to write my column maybe six or seven times a year, when I a) am in New York, and b) recognize that I cannot postpone by even three minutes more the writing of my column. (The contract says something vague about delivering it in the morning. Actually, I can have it in as late as two in the afternoon, and there is still time to stencil, address, stuff it into the envelopes, and get to the post office by late afternoon; but today I have a one-fifteen lunch date.) I go there, too, because c) there is the further attraction of Harry Elmlark in his lair.
Harry is the nervous, extrovert president of the syndicate, who graduated from the University of Virginia many years ago and went during the depression years into the syndicate business, working for the late George Matthew Adams. It was a small operation, a few comic strips, household-aid columns, and—Harry’s most remunerative achievement—Father, then Monsignor, then Bishop, Fulton J. Sheen. Adams died in the early sixties. Lacking the capital to buy the syndicate himself, Harry approached the Washington Star, and sold it (and himself) to them. He grew up an avid New Dealer who rejected an invitation to join the Communist Party (whose representative apparently thought him nubile for the proposition), who tolerated Eisenhower, hated Nixon, loathed McCarthy, distrusted MacArthur.
One day in 1962 as I was preparing to leave for Switzerland, Gertrude Vogt, who seldom spoke sternly to me during the fifteen years she was my secretary, told me that if I did not take this call from a Mr. Elmlark, of the George Matthew Adams Syndicate, she had to assume, from his persistence, that he would be waiting to meet me at the Geneva airport, so I picked up the receiver. It was a most extraordinary performance. Salesmanship is nowadays derogated, the assumption being that A Salesman is somebody who persuades you to do something you do not want to do. What H. Elmlark wanted me to do was flat-plain, he wanted me to write a once-a-week newspaper column. What Buckley did not want to do was to write a newspaper column—except under circumstances that he did not believe any syndicate would agree to, namely, a guarantee of a reasonable sum of money per column, and a contract of at least two years’ duration. The terms were fresh in my mind when Harry called, because a representative of the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) had got from me a few weeks earlier, for year-end syndication, 1,500 words on the meaning of the American right wing, to run opposite 1,500 words from Gore Vidal on the same subject, for which 1,500 words we had been paid $150 apiece, as I remember. NANA had come back to me asking whether I would agree to do a weekly column, the proceeds of which they would share with me 50-50. They were quite certain that in no time at all I would arrive at $150 per week. I declined: Not unless you guarantee me the $150 per week, I said. And there the matter stood, I reported to Harry Elmlark. I remember somebody telling me that the trick in selling is never to stop talking. If that is the trick, Harry is the master of it, because without drawing a breath he told me that he would guarantee me $200 per week, beginning April 1—a couple of months away—which would give him time to start selling the column. I knew nothing about him, or about George Matthew Adams, and did not even have time to wonder whether Fulton Sheen was too other-worldly to know if he was associated with a competent syndicate. But I was greatly taken by the enthusiastic babble at the other end of the telephone, and so I said, that being my way,
Okay. I could hear the smile, as he wished me a safe trip, and told me that the contract would be along shortly after my arrival in Switzerland.
And indeed it was, and I read it with that glaze that comes over my eyes whenever I read contracts. The idea was that I would receive the first $200, the syndicate would receive the next $200, and after that we would split 50-50.1 will never forget the excitement that H. Elmlark generated over the next six weeks, during which I received a letter from him every two or three days, each one of them relating a conquest, and the price that said conquest had agreed to pay for my column beginning April 1. Harry asked me, in his first letter, to please send him off, fast, two or three sample columns. I categorically refused, most conveniently citing reasons of principle: Why, I asked, should I have to write more, having written so much?—I could send him bushels of books, articles, editorials. More important I declined because I was then 37 years old, had seen published everything I wrote since at age 211 became editor of the Yale Daily News, and had at that point contracted the conventional block of not being able to write except on the certainty that what I write will be published. Once again, Harry acquiesced, and I learned later that he did not send my old stuff to the editors, preferring to egg them on over the telephone, or in personal interviews, his sales pitch being that the Right Wing had become extremely important in American politics. (He was at least tactically prophetic: that fall, President Kennedy would denounce “right-wing extremists,” a Newsweek cover was devoted to “Thunder on the Right.” The Young Americans for Freedom would soon sponsor a gigantic rally for Senator Goldwater at Madison Square Garden.) By the end of March, Harry told me: we were off. He had sold a weekly gross of $340, leaving his syndicate comfortably in the profit margin, though short of its 50 per cent share. Much much later he confessed to me that the contract I signed in fact did not commit the syndicate to launching me, that he would not have launched me if he had met with a stone wall from the editors.
I remember the trepidation as I sat down, three days before leaving Switzerland, to write The First Column. I devoted it to an examination of an interview Malcolm Muggeridge had recently conducted with C. P. Snow, reprinted in Encounter, in which Snow had said, in answer to the question, “Where would you prefer to live, in the Soviet Union or in the United States?” that he, Snow, would find life in the two countries equally attractive. Or was it equally unattractive? Telephone call. Transatlantic, which isn’t Harry’s way. He thought the column a disaster (he used a euphemism), I must write a more timely one, etc., etc. So I wrote something about a quarrel between liberal and conservative Catholics, and though I could tell from the tone of his voice (7 telephoned him) that he thought it less than what he had hoped for, it went off to the newspapers, and the column was launched. A few weeks later I contrived to use the Snow column, by the simple device (I was lecturing in California) of instructing Gertrude to advise Mr. Elmlark that unfortunately I had not been able to meet my deadline, and that therefore the only solution I could think of was to send out the Snow column. He took it in good grace (he always does).
Still I had not met Harry—I was back in New York for only a few hectic days before beginning a long lecture tour. And then, finally, he came to my office one day for a sandwich lunch, and, lean, fifty-fivish, dressed like the leading man in The Boy Friend, buoyant, springy in gait and conversation, we became, instantly and inseparably, friends. He told me that the principal criticism of my columns was that they tended to deal with more than a single subject, bad; that otherwise they were okay. By this time Harry had 30-odd clients, which he raised to 75 quickly, and then the figure leveled out. In the fall of 1964 he proposed that I write three times a week, and that his syndicate join with the mastodon King Features, 25-25-50 (50 for the author), in order to be able to merchandise the column in the little cities and towns his own syndicate could not hope to reach except over a much longer period. That was a considerable proposal which would tie up a lot of my time and energy, and for once I hesitated, even after talking with my old friend Bill McLearn, the serene, courtly president of King Features, who was anxious to make the deal. Bill assured me that within a year the column might be expected to bring in a thousand dollars a week, to which argument he added that in the coin of influence, the thrice-weekly columnist has ten times the clout of the once-a-week columnist. He gave the reasons why, which are plausible enough. They are based on the assumption that the unguided reader responds to the cumulative effect of a commentator’s analyses; so that if you are not around, except once a week, he loses running touch with you. Since it is impossible to extrude the whole of your Weltanschauung in every column, the necessity is to inch it a little bit along, every couple of days, so that when you move in, say, on the Common Market, or the Vietnam War, the reticulations are still in focus, and the reader sits down with a comfortable sense of familiarity with what went before. And so on. And not unconvincing. The commitment seemed enormous, though, and I consulted with James Burnham. Jim had recently read the biography of Renoir by his son, in which he spoke of what JB called the “cork-theory” of human impulses, whether artistic or journalistic, the idea being that it sometimes pays to conceive of oneself as a cork, in contrast say to a mooring, the better to flow, as Renoir’s style did, with the currents that tease it along. Bad philosophy; but not-so-bad, Burnham pointed out, as a guide in personal, professional matters —to move along like the cork makes presumptive good sense, if you want to stay grooved in with the vibrations of modern life.
So, beginning the first of the year, 1964, I sat still for the supplementary harness, and by now I have written well over a thousand of the things, and Harry is always there, commenting on what I write, indispensable not merely to one’s vanity, but to one’s sense of motion. A year or two later, in one of the great syndicate raids in modern journalism, Harry won over a columnist who, after only a year on the market, was flourishing with his own syndicate. Though the material inducements Harry offered were significant, the operative reason for the columnist’s decision to go over to Harry was that he had not in the course of an entire year heard a single word from his syndicate manager, neither of praise nor of blame, and (the letters that come in from the readers are no substitute) the writer was going mad with loneliness; which doesn’t happen to friends of Harry.
I say hello to the small staff, the editor, the secretary, the typist, the mailboy. Harry takes me into his office, tells me I am the highest-paid typist in the world, asks me what I intend to write about, gives me Frances’s phone messages, produces a cup of coffee, describes triumphantly his morning’s renegotiation with the Indianapolis Star, and moves noisily out of his office, even though I repeat my usual offer to write elsewhere. I make the phone calls, look at my watch, calculate that I must write without interruption, and resolve to write about Dick Gregory. Harry comes in after ten minutes, and takes page one for the typist, and in a half hour it is over, there being no extra research that needs doing (when I go to Harry’s to write, I must write about something that has already been researched). Harry tells me an anecdote or two as I put on my overcoat, asks what are the prospects for the Starr Broadcasting Company in which he has invested, walks out with me to the elevator. We go down, stopping, it always seems, at a dozen Newsweek floors, the ladies and gentlemen of the staff, bound to and from their lunch, shuffling in and out. There is conversation, which I discourage, never having acquired the habit of treating an elevator like a City Room, where anybody is free to talk resonantly, never mind that others can overhear. But Harry is oblivious of the other passengers and is perfectly capable of revealing a corporate intimacy in matter-of-fact tones, at conversational level, even as the elevator stops to allow in the 18th rider, and we crush together nose-to-nose. Looking down, I grunt my astringent responses as Harry goes on, while the elevator, SRO, listens silently, intently; and then the doors open, Harry finishes his story as we walk to the revolving door, we say goodbye, I spot my car, a few yards away, and step into it, making a pass at Rowley, who
is sleeping in the front seat, and give Jerry the address of the restaurant where Sherry Lord is.
The restaurant is called Maxwell’s Plum, somebody had told me I must try it, it lay midway between Sherry and me, so here we are; Sherry as shy and endearing as when I met him freshman year at Yale, a suite-mate during sophomore year, whom I had lost touch with, and now he is hard at work painting, earning his keep at the Brooklyn Museum, separated from his second wife. We pass a pleasant hour and a half, during which I tell him the truth, that I could not imagine, assuming one were good at it, a more pleasurable way than painting to make one’s living, the difference from music being the obvious one—that there is a creation left over, after one’s labors, which hangs around, maybe for centuries. There is no time to go to his studio, but we fix a date a couple of weeks later, and I drive off to 73rd Street where, in one hour, the directors of the Starr Broadcasting group will assemble. Meanwhile, the mail.
A haunting letter from Maryland. One of those I do not feel like answering right away, preferring to think about it, so for the nonce, I merely acknowledge receiving it. It is from a young man named Herbert, a young teacher who also does graduate work ...
I first heard from him several months ago. In that letter he had recounted a quite extraordinary experience. He had, I gather, expressed doubt to one or two of his radical friends about the seriousness of the revolutionary movement in which they were engaged. A few days later one of his friends approached him. If he would consent to the terms as thereupon specified, Herbert would be vouchsafed concrete evidence of the seriousness of the endeavor he doubted. He agreed, submitted to a blindfold and was driven by automobile for an hour or two, in what direction he could not guess. The car stopped, and he was led out into a grotto, or a barn—I forget—and there he saw the most formidable accumulation of weapons he had ever seen: rifles, pistols, grenades, explosives, mortars, the lot of them tucked away against the day when the Movement would decisively assert itself. I remember concluding from the tone of the letter that I was not being tousled by a Minuteman, or teased by a Weatherman: and so I wrote to a friend well-lodged in the hierarchy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—for the second time in my life, when the purpose of my letter was a purely formal civic duty, the other time being when I relayed an anonymous warning that if Senator Ted Kennedy participated in the anti-Vietnam agitations of November 15, 1969, he would be assassinated. I did not tell Herbert what I had done, but a few weeks later he was visited by the FBI and questioned, to what avail I do not know, knowing only that it happened: not because the FBI told me but because Herbert wrote and told me, indignantly. Not altogether indignantly, in fact, because his mind is of the orderly kind that recognizes the probable consequences of so provocative a communication addressed, if not exactly to a member of the Establishment, at any rate to someone whose relations with the Establishment are formally correct.
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