Getting It Right

by William F. Buckley

  “You haven’t done much losing in your life, Ed.”

  “That’s right. Not until I ran into—the contemporary Washington. The Washington of postwar America. There’s a better way to put that: the Washington created by the postwar situation, where our leaders gave away Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, Berlin, and Cuba. I’m going to have a drink. How about you, Woodroe?”

  “Yes. Could I help?”

  “You can not only help, you can make your drink and mine. Graciela will give us dinner, but she can’t mix any drink that doesn’t have tequila in it. I want a bourbon on the rocks with a little bitters. You’ll find all that stuff over there.” He paused for a moment and Woodroe walked to the bar.

  “But Graciela will give us a good Mexican dinner. Good idea, I thought, eating at home. In a restaurant, you never know who’s going to come by, use up a lot of time. Did you visit at all with Helena?”

  Woodroe shook his head and began to explain, but the general interposed.

  “I like Helena. She’s a good American. But she doesn’t really understand the, well, the seriousness of the whole situation. She really wasn’t much use after the Oxford business. In fact, I think she retreated a little on account of it.” Woodroe was mixing the drinks. “I get around and a lot of people get messages to me, and I think the word was, Let’s cool it a bit on General Walker. And you know she has a husband. Jerry. He’s a cynical rich-guy kind of Texan. I’ve been to his house. Reminds me a little of General—I won’t mention his name. He was in Germany with me, a stand-by, don’t-ruffle-any-feathers type, and he got really heated up on the whole business of my indoctrination course.”

  He was standing upright now, his drink in his left hand, the wooden pointer, retrieved from the side of the door to the kitchen, in the other hand. “When I began to really notice what was going on was just after that”—he pointed to one medal. “That’s the Hyères. H-Y-E-R-E-S. We had to provide cover for the invasion, north Italy. . . .”

  Graciela, at the door, made him stop before he had completed his second drink and his account of the Little Rock military intervention. “It was ordered by the same General Eisenhower who was in command of the battle of Europe, if you can believe it, ordering me to lead troops to invade, that’s the right word for it, to invade Little Rock, Arkansas, U.S.A. But let’s sit down for chow.” He walked through the door.

  At supper—Bohemia beer, tacos, enchiladas, tamales, fried beans, tortillas, chicken, and a candied pear with ice cream—General Walker continued the narrative about the encroachment of Communist pressures on the country. “The Supreme Court—above all, the Court, think Earl Warren—but also the executive, the Congress, though there are some good Americans there, and even”—he sighed heavily—“the military. Let’s take our beer back to the living room. Graciela likes to clean up and get out of here. Muy buena la cena, Graciela. Hasta mañana.”

  An hour later, Woodroe was wondering at what point the subject of youth and the John Birch Society and the conservative movement and Mr. Daugherty would come up. The general was working on his third beer, sitting at his desk. Perhaps, Woodroe thought, he should interrupt him at some point and get on with the business of the next day.

  But the general stopped his own talk suddenly, stretching out the collar ends of his sports shirt. “You know what, Woodroe, I have a sauna downstairs, like so many Texans. It gets hot? They take a sauna. I was thinking, why don’t we go down and take one together? We can—”

  The shot pierced the window and burrowed into the wall, an inch to one side of his head.

  The general froze for the briefest moment. And then went instantly into action.

  “Turn off your light!” The general reached up for his own overhead light. Woodroe snapped off the lamp by the sofa. “I’m going upstairs for my pistol.”

  Walker bounded up the staircase. Woodroe felt his way through the dark room and hallway to the front door, opened it, and saw the taillights of a car speeding up Turtle Creek Boulevard. The general was downstairs, pistol in hand. He groped his way to the door and peered about.

  “They’ve gone. Bloodsucker! He’s gone. We got to decide what to do about this. Come on inside.”

  The lights turned on, he sat again at his desk. He turned to examine the bullet hole. “Looks like maybe a .30. I’ve had a lot of them fired at me in my day.” He looked over at his unfinished beer on the desk. He carried it over to the sink at the bar and poured out what was left of it.

  “Tell you what. I’m going to call Bob Morris. He’s my lawyer. He’s also the president of the University of Dallas.”

  He dialed the number. “Bob, this is a real emergency. I need you like right now.... Right. At home.” He hung up.

  “He’ll be here in less than fifteen minutes.”

  Woodroe said nothing, nor did the general. They’d wait for Bob Morris.

  General Walker cleaned and oiled his pistol.

  32

  THE HEADLIGHTS BROKE the silence.

  General Walker was at the door and let Robert Morris in, ruddy face, crew-cut hair, a man-in-charge.

  Walker introduced him curtly to Woodroe, they sat down, and General Walker told what had happened.

  Morris’s questions and instructions were fired out.

  “What’s the young man doing here?”

  “Raynor is going to lunch with me tomorrow with Russell Daugherty, who’s ready to make a big contribution to the John Birch Society. I wanted a young man there to enter the case for young people. Raynor was at Oxford.”

  “Rhodes scholar?”

  “No. Oxford, Mississippi.”

  “All right. Now, Ed, the reason you didn’t call the police right away—put this in your mind—is the denial of your civil rights at Oxford. You thought it best to tell the whole story to your lawyer, so you called me up for advice, since I’m handling the Mississippi picture. Calling the police—remember this—wouldn’t have been of immediate help because the killer car had gone. That’s all you have to say. Now we got to get him”—he pointed to Woodroe—“out of here.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s past eleven o’clock at night. Let me handle this, Ed. Now. . . .” He paused, putting one hand on his brow. He spoke quietly, as if to himself. “How in the hell do we get him home?”

  “We can call a cab, can’t we?”

  “We don’t want any traceable traffic coming to this address. Cabs keep records. They have a record of somebody leaving after the shooting. Who? Why? We want to avoid all that.”

  “He can have my station wagon,” Walker said.

  “What do you do for a car tomorrow?”

  “I got my other car, my Buick.”

  “Okay. Let’s get it right. Raynor was here and left after dinner. You were alone when the killer fired. Let’s move. Let’s get Raynor out of here, then we’ll talk some more. After that I’ll call the police.”

  General Walker led Woodroe outdoors and into the two-door garage. He turned on the overhead lights and fished out the right key from a drawer.

  “We meet with Daugherty at 1215 at the Petroleum Club. Drive the car to the door. They’ll park it for you. You can give me the parking slip at lunchtime.”

  “Okay. Okay, Ed. That was a hell of a thing you went through tonight. Good luck with the police.”

  They waited for the police.

  Bob Morris had deliberated, driving to Turtle Creek—whether to divulge the information he had gotten that afternoon from his old friend in the FBI. It was not something Ed Walker, on this night, would welcome hearing. But Walker was his client and also his friend.

  “Ed, you’ve been traveling around with Billy James Hargis—”

  “The Reverend Billy James Hargis, Bob.”

  “Yes. Let me shoot it to you. I won’t tell you where I got it and you’re not to ask. Billy James—”

  “Dr. Hargis?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Dr. Hargis performed the marriage of a couple of the students from his college—”

 
; “Why not? He can marry, a reverend.”

  “Ed, quiet a minute. Two students he married have testified about how he took the bride and the groom in his car and went on the honeymoon with them.”

  “Shared a car?”

  “The testimony is that he slept with the girl during the honey-moon—”

  Walker looked up, traces of a frown on his face.

  Morris continued: “—and the next day he . . . he screwed the guy.”

  General Walker’s eyes widened, illuminated by the strokes of flashing red from the police car arrived outside. A detective, with three policemen, pounded on the door.

  33

  THE TELEPHONE IN HIS HOTEL room rang just after eight in the morning.

  “It’s Mr. Welch, Woody.” The phone operator at Belmont put him through.

  Robert Welch’s voice was strained and he spoke rapidly. “The shooting made the late edition of the Globe. They didn’t have much detail, just that the police found nothing that could help in tracking down the killer. The attempted killer. Did you hear about it from the Dallas press? What are they saying? Probably a mouthful.”

  Woodroe was uncomfortable with deception, but he was not going to tell Welch a story that conflicted with what Mr. Morris and General Walker had told the police. So he answered indirectly.

  “Yes, the television is full of it. They’ve got cameras posted outside the general’s house.”

  “Did he get from you the briefing he wanted? For the Daugherty lunch?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Yes, Bob. I think we’re all squared away on that. I’ll talk to Daugherty about, you know, young people, and what we have to do to wake them up.”

  “Good. I wonder who in the hell shot at him last night. You can bet your bottom dollar it wasn’t an American patriot.”

  “I guess we’ll have to wait to find out, Bob.”

  “Yes—if the police and the feds can be persuaded to look hard enough. Well, good luck with Daugherty. I’m glad you’ll be meeting with Revilo Oliver later in the day. He is quite a man, and his contributions to American Opinion are vital stuff. He’s probably the leading expert on Communist terrorism. Only he doesn’t think that’s the right word for it, and he’s probably right: Communists don’t act spontaneously, the way terrorists do. It’s always, always a part of the big picture for them. You can bet it was one of their people did it last night. Call me when you get to New York.”

  It was a fairly long haul, Dallas to Chicago on Eastern, two hours and twenty minutes. Then an hour’s wait for the American commuter flight to Urbana, forty minutes. Coming down the ramp of the plane, Woodroe delighted in the spring air. In Dallas it had already been hot. In New York it was still cold. In central Illinois, the inside lights were coming on, but there was daylight enough to make out the trees at either end of the hangar, the topmost leaves golden in the setting light. He walked with his briefcase the considerable distance to the hangar and looked about for the baggage claim area.

  “Are you Mr. Raynor?”

  A huge man was there. His black hair was parted in the middle, his mustache, showing a trace of gray, trimmed down above the corners of his mouth. He was dressed in a gray suit; his blue tie, with white polka dots, was tidily knotted about his neck, just below the prominent Adam’s apple.

  “Professor Oliver?”

  He smiled, genuine cheer in his expression.

  “Grace—that’s my wife—heard that you were booked into the Urbana Hotel and vetoed that.” They spoke while walking toward the baggage claim. “Women have the right to exercise certain prerogatives. She decreed that you were to use the spare bedroom in our house.”

  Driving off, Woodroe’s bag in the trunk, Revilo Oliver said that it had been quite a night on Turtle Creek Boulevard in Dallas, as, of course, Woodroe knew.

  “Yes, sir.” Woodroe assumed Oliver knew nothing about Woodroe’s whereabouts when the pistol was shot. “I had lunch with the general today. Perhaps Mr. Welch told you. We were trying to make the case for JBS with an oilman.”

  “Daugherty. Russell H. Daugherty. Founder of Principio Oil Company in Venezuela. Mr. Daugherty is one-half part—no, one-third part—instructed in the matters that concern us. I hope you succeeded with him. But did the general reveal anything interesting? I have not spoken with him today, and not with Mr. Welch since late this morning.”

  “No. No, sir—”

  “Call me Revilo.”

  “Well, that’s a tall order. But okay, Revilo.”

  “Do you know what a palindrome is? Probably not, since you went to school in Princeton, where they know nothing. Perhaps more than at Harvard or Yale, but that’s not very much.”

  “Actually, I don’t.”

  “A palindrome is a word or phrase whose letters can be written out in reverse sequence, replicating the original. The most recognized example is, ‘Able was I ere I saw Elba.’ If you trouble to reverse the order, you have the same idiotic phrase. My name, ‘Revilo Oliver,’ forms a palindrome. My father was delighted by wordplay. He was not a scholar, but I was able to amuse him, in his last years, with any number of palindromes in Greek and Latin and Persian.”

  “How many languages do you . . . have you studied?”

  “I have a preternatural ability in language.” They had pulled into his driveway. He opened the trunk and let Woodroe pull out his own bag, beckoning him into the hallway. “Come here, into my work study. I will show you what I mean about languages.”

  Woodroe was surprised that Revilo needed a key to enter his own study.

  His desk surface formed a long U, stretching the length of the room, rounding, and coming back, parallel. There were three chairs on casters, and twelve typewriters, each with its dustcover, evenly spaced on the surface, with room for papers and books in between.

  “I can readily slide a chair over to whichever keyboard I am working on.”

  “They are all different?”

  “The typefaces are different. Different symbols and accent marks and hieroglyphs. We have”—he pointed to the first—“English. Next to it, Middle English . . . Latin . . . Classical Greek... Modern Greek... Aramaic . . . Egyptian . . . Arabic . . . and, of course, Italian, French, German, and Spanish.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “It is unusual, of course, but then my field is classical philology. Yes, many disciplines. I am very careful with the typewriters. And I make it a point never to make a mistake.”

  “Uh—” Woodroe’s protest was interrupted.

  “I assume you type, Woodroe?”

  “Of course.”

  “I had an experience as a very... young man, I guess you’d call a twenty-year-old. I went to see Vladimir Horowitz perform, and, as an encore, he played ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee.’ You know it? Rimsky-Korsakov?”

  Woodroe nodded.

  “It is a piece that requires total precision of the fingers, as the notes are all thirty-second notes. I thought it extraordinary that he hit no wrong notes. In consequence, that evening I made a resolution. If Horowitz could play ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee’ without making any mistakes, I should be able to type my work out without making any mistakes. After all, I am free to pause, if I wish to deliberate on the next word or phrase. Horowitz—pianists—do not have that option.”

  “So you have made no typing mistakes?”

  “I did once, ten years or so back. My old friend and contemporary at the graduate school, Willmoore Kendall, was remarried. I was best man. Kendall’s friend William Buckley was the other usher. The three of us had a bachelor dinner. Buckley brought out, at the room in the club, a bottle of cognac, some extravagantly old and rare brand, and Willmoore led in many toasts to his next-day bride and other matters. I came home that night and sat down to write out the toast I would myself give the next day at the wedding lunch. I could not believe it when I found that I had typed T-S-O-A-T.”

  “For ‘toast’?”

  “Yes. Imagine! I went straight to bed, and renewed my oath the next morning. But we wi
ll talk over a glass of wine, you and I. Follow me and you will meet Grace, and be taken to your room.”

  They sat in the ample living room and Grace fussed over both men, bringing in from the kitchen a variety of crackers and celery and nuts. But then the doorbell rang. She went rapidly to the door and led the caller, who could not be seen from where Woodroe and Revilo were seated, to a room adjacent.

  Grace returned, but after a few minutes was back at the door, admitting a second caller.

  There was a third, a fourth, and a fifth.

  “Grace, you just attend to them. We’ll be all right, Woodroe and I. We have a lot of ground to cover.”

  Mrs. Oliver left, and now Woodroe could hear a steady, soft whine. Revilo explained. “We have in a fresh speech delivered by General Walker, and another by Billy James Hargis. The tape was sent to us from Dallas. Our friends here in Urbana were alerted, and we are making copies of that tape for them, but can do only one at a time.”

  They were called to dinner, served spaghetti and Italian bread, a tomato salad, red wine, canned peaches, and brownies.

  “There’s coffee for you in the living room, Revilo,” Grace said. “I must go out now to my JBS meeting. Can I do anything for you, Woodroe?”

  He said no and thanked her.

  Revilo Oliver leaned back in his chair. “One thing we can absolutely exclude. It is that the man who tried to kill General Walker last night was simply a killer-opportunist. From what happened, it is clear that this was not a case of robbery. In the first place, General Walker hasn’t very much to rob. In the second place, the isolated target—the shot through the window, aimed directly at his head—cannot have been, in any relevant sense of the word, random. It had to be someone who sought to kill Edwin Walker.”

  “Who would wish to do that?”

  “You mean, does he have personal enemies? I exclude that. His enemies are ideological enemies. They are those who saw, in recent months, a man of danger to the Left. A man of action. In point of fact they have seen this in him in recent years. It was in April 1961, two years ago, that Edwin Walker was detected in the treacherous act”—Revilo beamed his appreciation of the language—“of teaching his troops about the Communist conspiracy. Now we are in April 1963, and someone decided all of this had gone far enough.”