Getting It Right

by William F. Buckley

  But his letter was not there. On the fourth day, he walked to the offices of the paper. He asked to see the editor in charge of letters and was motioned to the desk of a junior whose feet were on the desk, a clipboard on his lap with an assortment of papers. Woodroe asked about his letter. The editor took his feet off the desk and said that the Princetonian didn’t make room for letters “simply endorsing a product. There has to be an angle. What’s yours?”

  Woodroe said he was concerned to get out the word on the Communist menace.

  “So’s Ike,” the young editor said.

  Woodroe was flushed. He had not spoken, except to family and close friends, about his experience in Austria, but now he told the editor that with his own eyes he had seen refugees from Hungary “and tried to help a couple of them out.”

  “Well, put that in your letter and we’ll run it.”

  Woodroe thought to tell the story of his letter to Professor Romney, whom he had befriended in his junior year. Theocritus Romney, a fellow Mormon from Utah, had retired from lecturing, but helped out in the overcrowded postwar scene at Princeton by teaching one seminar, “The Rise of the American West,” the same title he had given to his best-known book. He was now in Princeton winter and summer, having sold his summerhouse in Utah soon after his wife died, in 1952 (on election day). He lived a bachelor life in his comfortable apartment off Nassau Street.

  The quarters were everything he needed. Students who came in for his seminar, or went to him during office hours, were initially distracted by Mr. Romney’s pursuit of his hobby. Theo Romney was a historian of nineteenth-century America and loved best the snow-capped mountains he had been all but surrounded by when young, attending school in Provo. His major book had given the history of the Mormon Church. A later book, a handbook of sorts on the Rocky Mountains, he had illustrated with his own charcoal sketches, carefully collected in his days as a mountaineer and skier.

  He had resolved, as soon as his wife permitted it, to fulfill the ambition of painting the view of the Rockies as seen from the window of his parents’ house. Lucy never did authorize him to proceed, so he put it off until his retirement as lecturer in 1954. Setting up the platform on which, for two hours every day, he would lie on his back, palette and brushes in hand, was a delicate business, but he was pleased by his sketch, and then the dark blue-gray that rose to the snow level, and the first of the eleven peaks he had framed in memory. The painting would stretch over the entire ceiling. When moving from one mountain peak to another, he had to move his platform. Though the movements were not more than six or eight inches, this required, from time to time, moving the whole of the wooden scaffolding, which had to be done in such a way as to accommodate the sofas and chairs on which the twelve seminar students sat. Students who came in during office hours quickly got used to arrangements, and found they could easily converse with Romney while he lay on the platform above their heads.

  Professor Romney was the only member of the faculty to whom Woodroe had told the story of his missionary duty at Andau. Romney divulged his own passion on the subject of life under Communist rule. He revealed that when a very young man, he had broken with his Christian faith, joining the Young Communist League. In the 1930s, he had experienced the disillusion of so many others after the starvation of the kulaks, followed soon by the Moscow trials. But he had tried to make up for his delinquency, actively supporting anti-Communist political candidates and calling important books to the attention of his students. When Senator Joseph McCarthy died, Romney had worn a discreet black sliver on the lapel of his jacket.

  It had become routine, while Woodroe was enrolled in the seminar, for him to stay on after the Tuesday and Thursday 4 P.M. meetings to have a glass of sherry with Mr. Romney. When the semester was over, Romney had suggested that Woodroe continue with the late-afternoon conversation-with-sherry, never mind that he was no longer studying with him. Woodroe gladly agreed, and their friendship continued. In the fall of 1960, Romney had been very pleased to learn from his favorite student about the founding of the national student conservative organization, the Young Americans for Freedom, in Sharon, Connecticut.

  This afternoon they spoke of the rejected letter to the Princetonian. “I would counsel you to go ahead in the new draft of your letter. Tell the story of Austria and Andau—”

  “You don’t mean—not the whole of it?”

  Romney himself did not know the whole of it, but he knew about Woodroe’s wound, and about his hospitalization in Vienna.

  “No, I don’t think it’s necessary, to make your point, to say that you were visited in a hospital bed by Vice President Richard Nixon. But I see no reason to hide that you were hit by a Hungarian Communist bullet aimed at someone trying to get away from Communist tyranny.”

  Woodroe agreed. “I’ll make that part very brief. Otherwise it might look as though I was, well . . . exhibiting my Purple Heart.”

  Romney looked up at his beloved ceiling. “All we’re looking at here—everything we grew up with in Utah—would be red in our eyes, if we lived where those poor people live. And what did we manage to learn from the massacre of the freedom fighters in Budapest?”

  He drew breath, and looked up at his ceiling. “We have an obligation to remind the community of the—the ordeal of Eastern Europe, never mind what it’s like living within the Soviet Union.”

  Woodroe wrote the letter, and it was published. And he took other opportunities to call attention to the work of the John Birch Society. As a member, he received the full range of the Society’s publications. He was astonished by the prodigious output—the monthly magazine, American Opinion, with its opening letter from Mr. Welch, and then the bulletins, some of them thirty and forty pages long. Impetuously, he one day wrote personally to Mr. Welch, acclaiming his work. Welch answered in a long, friendly letter, inviting Woodroe to write an article for American Opinion.

  A second letter, unexpectedly personal, made mention of occasional intensive seminars conducted by Mr. Welch himself, inviting Woodroe to attend one. In the Easter vacation of his senior year, Woodroe traveled to Boston to attend the special two-day seminar. He was flattered on being told that he was the youngest person ever to be admitted to the august meeting, which was patterned after the historic seminar Robert Welch had held just over two years before in Indianapolis, where he had launched the John Birch Society. That seminar was ongoingly repeated, here and there in major cities, but not more often than once a month.

  Woodroe Raynor had then, in late March of 1961, the full measure of Mr. Welch’s extraordinary recall, organizational skill, and dedication. The seminar was nonstop. There had been a break for lunch on both days, and cocktails were given at the end of the second day for sixteen men and four women exhausted by the impact of two days’ analysis and exposition of the tightening threat to American freedom and sovereignty.

  One month later he was offered employment by the Society at the head office in Belmont, Massachusetts, to begin as soon as convenient after graduation from Princeton.

  12

  BELMONT, MASS.

  OCTOBER 22, 1961

  Dear Lee:

  Maybe I really do love you, because today I actually finished reading Atlas Shrugged. You’ll hit me over the head for saying this, but it took great effort. I can hear you saying, If it’s that bad, how do you account for . . . is it one million sales? You’re right, it doesn’t work to be condescending about it. So okay, it’s a hell of a yarn. It has to be, I guess, to eat up 1,168 pages. Lee, were you having me on in Sharon when you told me you had read it three times? That means you haven’t had time to read, oh, Sophocles, or The Making of the President, 1960. Or to practice your scales on the piano.

  But let’s get back to the point we’ve been arguing on and off since Sharon. We both think the Communists are edging us out in the Cold War. We agreed on that at Sharon. Since then, the Soviets have forged ahead in space exploration, they’ve put up the Berlin Wall and outmaneuvered us in Cuba.

  Ame
ricans Mr. Welch calls “Comsymps” gloat over what they did to Joe McCarthy, hounding him to death, and they make fun of any suggestion that there are actually people in the United States who pretend to be on our side but are actually on their side.

  Now, who contributes most seriously to the rectification of that problem? Your John Galt? Admit this about the big figure in Atlas Shrugged. He is . . . bear with me, Lee . . . the most improbable figure since King Kong. And what does John Galt do to rescue the entire country from paralysis? He goes to a radio station and delivers a three-hour speech.

  Does Ayn Rand think she’s really getting away with it? Stop the Communists by objectivist thought? What does she tell her gang, when she has her hair down and is sitting around with her Collective? She is so full of reason—she’s up to her arse in reason—so what’s reasonable about a situation in which 175 million Americans in her novel are at hell’s door until John Galt goes to the radio station and tells them what to do. In a speech that lasts sixty-five pages!

  I’m up on Atlas Shrugged, Lee, now that I’ve worked my way through it. But I have a hard time taking it seriously as a countermeasure to the Cold War we’re fighting, or trying to fight. We at the Birch Society are concerned about the survival of the United States in the last half of the twentieth century. Rand’s people are concerned only about . . . themselves. I give you what’s-his-name. I’ll be polite and come up with—Here it is, his full name. . . . What did Ayn Rand have in mind calling somebody “Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d’Anconia”? Why didn’t she add “Jr.”? We bump into him early in the novel, he’s still a kid, really, college-age. And we get this, Miss Rand’s cock-of-the-walk paean to youthful objectivism:“Don’t you ever think of anything but d’Anconia Copper?” Jim Larkin asked him once.

  “No.”

  “It seems to me that there are other things in the world.”

  “Let others think about them.”

  “Isn’t that a very selfish attitude?”

  “It is.”

  “What are you after?”

  “Money.”

  “Don’t you have enough?”

  “In his lifetime, every one of my ancestors raised the production of d’Anconia Copper by about 10%. I intend to raise it by one hundred.”

  And this is not just Ayn Rand passing wind. Anybody who thinks anything different is presented as caricature. Here that young prick—I mean, that young pr-ck—is being lectured by his friend Jim, a senior in college, who’s made to sound like a socialist vanilla malted. Listen:“I think that now that you’ve reached college age, you ought to learn something about ideals. It’s time to forget your selfish breed, and give some thought to your social responsibilities, because I think that all those millions you’re going to inherit are not for your personal pleasure, they are a trust for the benefit of the underprivileged and the poor, because I think that the person who doesn’t realize this is the most depraved type of human being.”

  I mean, cut it out. This is Ayn Rand making like St. Francis of Assisi.

  My concern is: What do we have going to hold the Communists back? For instance, we’ve got to get Castro out of Cuba. How’re we going to do that? Send John Galt over there? Yo soy John Galt. Yo explico todo. . . . We need an air force and a military and a CIA. We have to pay the cost of encounters in Berlin and Taiwan, in Cuba and—in Hungary; I know firsthand about that. And now we’ve got China in the hands of the Communists, and what do you know, they have an atom bomb. Are we prepared for sacrifice to contend with all that? Not according to objectivist dogma, we aren’t. “This country is the product of reason and could not survive on the morality of sacrifice,” Atlas Shrugged preaches.

  Well, nobody loathes socialism more than Robert Welch. Nobody. But he thinks it has to be fought by something more than a heady philosophy which begins by explaining that—in her language—“existence exists.” That’s the trouble, Lee. Existence does exist. Ask the 150 million people behind the Iron Curtain. They can feel its existence.

  Love,

  Woody

  P.S. I really look forward to the weekend you’re coming up for. You can reason your way to the incontestable conclusion that Princeton will beat Harvard.

  NYC

  OCTOBER 28, 1961

  Dear Woodroe:

  I don’t know why I take the trouble. You are in love with your ignorance. The exact words were found by Miss Rand to express my thoughts about your letter. Rearden was thinking about the despicable Larkin and what his presence provoked in him. Listen to Rand on the subject of hatred:It was not a thought, it was like the punch of a fist inside his skull. Then when he could think again, Rearden knew what the boy he had been would have felt: a desire to step on the obscene thing which was Larkin and grind every wet bit of it out of existence. He had never experienced an emotion of this kind. It took him a few moments to realize that this was what men called hatred.

  Which is pretty much what I felt after reading your desiccation of Atlas and your treatment of that genius woman I work for. Why didn’t you select, to ponder over, one of the mature, glowingly thoughtful passages? For instance, where Miss Rand describes her philosophy of the sexual experience:They had moved by the power of the thought that one remakes the earth for one’s enjoyment, that man’s spirit gives meaning to insentient matter by molding it to serve one’s chosen goal. The course led them to the moment when, in answer to the highest of one’s values, in an admiration not to be expressed by any other form of tribute, one’s spirit makes one’s body become the tribute, recasting it—as proof, as sanction, as reward—into a single sensation of such intensity of joy that no other sanction of one’s existence is necessary. He heard the moan of her breath, she felt the shudder of his body, in the same instant.

  Disgustedly,

  Lee

  BELMONT, MASS.

  NOVEMBER 2, 1961

  Lee:

  I’m sorry you took what I had to say the way you did. Let’s adjourn the quarrel. We’re looking at two phalanxes, and how they serve in the anti-Communist struggle. There is the objectivist philosophy, which seeks to teach us how to reason the case for freedom. Then there is the JBS, which is trying to mobilize the national will to confound the enemy, “foreign and domestic,” in the quaint words of the presidential oath of office.

  I have to concede it about your Miss Rand. When she isn’t engaging in caricature, she can draw beautiful pictures. Atlas Shrugged is a work of ideological fabulism. My favorite passage (though it’s hard to beat the sex scene you quote) is when she and lover-boy set out on the train ride to test whether his new steel alloy really works. Miss Rand was obviously swept away. Well, I was too: I am typing it out, as an oblation. I especially liked “the glass panes of their vault.” My boss has something called Xerox which makes copies. So I will make an extra copy of this and send it along and you can thumbtack it over your desk and remind yourself of . . . the other Ayn Rand.

  It was a succession of minutes, but it hit them as a single whole. First, they saw the lone shapes, which were factories, rolling across their windowpanes—then the shapes fused into the blur of streets—then a delta of rails spread out before them, like the mouth of a funnel sucking them into the Taggart station, with nothing to protect them but the small green beads of light that scattered over the ground—from the height of the cab, they saw boxcars on sidings streak past as flat ribbons of rooftops—the black hole of the train-shed flew at their faces—they hurtled through an explosion of sound, the beating of wheels against the glass panes of their vault, and the screams of cheering from a mass that swayed like a liquid in the darkness among steel columns—they flew toward a glowing arch and the green lights hanging in the open sky beyond, the green lights that were like the doorknobs of space, throwing door after door open before them. Then, vanishing behind them, went the streets, clotted with traffic, the open windows bulging with human figures, the screaming sirens, and—from the top of a distant skyscraper—a cloud of paper snowflakes shimmering on the air
, flung by someone who saw the passage of a silver bullet across a city stopped still to watch it.

  Unless you plan to cancel, I will be at the railroad station in Boston at 11:22 on Saturday.

  XXX

  Woodroe

  13

  THE HEAD OFFICE of the John Birch Society was just a few blocks from the home of Robert Welch. Visitors to the Belmont, Massachusetts, office entered into a large, bright room lined with bookcases.

  Woodroe’s main responsibility was to proofread the copious communications from Mr. Welch to the Society’s subscribers, sent out in American Opinion and in supplementary bulletins as often as twice a month.

  It was after he had been in Belmont more than a year that he was summoned to the office of principal Welch aide Jesse Andrews.

  “You understand, Woodroe, Mr. Welch has the highest opinion of General Walker. We’ve made the case for him ever since he was fired—”

  “That was in April 1961.”

  “Good for you. Of course, he wasn’t fired. He was silenced. That disreputable paper in Germany said that General Walker was calling some American leaders Communists. That’s wrong, and anyway, it’s ill-advised. We call them Comsymps.”

  “But General Walker wasn’t quoted exactly, I don’t think—”

  “No, but the Comsymp press does that kind of thing,” Andrews said. “Exaggerates and defames patriotic Americans. Like Ed Walker. What General Walker did was launch an educational program for the Twenty-fourth Infantry over there in Germany. It was no accident, by the way, that he—a superior combat commander— was put in charge of the Twenty-fourth, since that would be the front-line U.S. force in Europe if the Communists decided to move. Not that they’ll need to, at the rate we’re going. Easier just to wait for an American surrender.