In order to avoid huge inheritance taxes, Will Buckley had managed, over his final years, to distribute nearly all of his wealth among his wife and children. From their father’s actual estate, in fact, which was said to be well over $100 million, each Buckley child received exactly seventeen dollars. After his death in 1958, at the age of seventy-seven, the children got together and prepared a charming book called W.F.B.—An Appreciation, which was privately printed and distributed to some fifteen hundred of his friends and relatives and business associates. The book is full of warm anecdotes about his early adventures, but most of all it bears witness to his devotion to his family. His family came before anything else, and this was one of his strongest principles. The chapter on Father Buckley’s memos begins, “There was nothing complicated about Father’s theory of child rearing. He brought up his sons and daughters with the quite simple objective that they become absolutely perfect.”
The Buckley sons and daughters have been famously true to the principles which their father implanted within them, and to his right-of-center political beliefs. Most famous of all has been William F. Buckley, Jr., whose book God and Man at Yale caused a great flurry of controversy in the academic community when it was published in 1951. That book, as many recall, mounted an attack against the liberal politics and the all but socialist economics being propagandized, the author felt, and advocated at Yale a renewed emphasis on the virtues of the American free-enterprise system. William Buckley has gone on to become a controversial author, political essayist, lecturer, and television personality. Since 1955 he has edited the conservative-minded National Review, and his sister Priscilla Buckley serves as the magazine’s managing editor. Another sister, Carol Buckley Learsy, also works for National Review. Not long ago, at a family party honoring the joint birthdays of their mother and brother Reid, a two-decker London bus was hired to carry the guests to dinner at New York’s “21” restaurant, Carol looked at the vehicle and said, “There goes my year’s salary at N.R.”
With his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell—who, in turn, edits a right-wing Catholic publication in Virginia called Triumph—William F. Buckley, Jr. wrote a book called McCarthy and His Enemies, defending the ideas and tactics of the late Communisthunting Senator from Wisconsin. The younger Buckley has also inherited his share of the Buckley Irish temper, as was demonstrated dramatically in a celebrated exchange between himself and writer Gore Vidal before millions of television viewers in 1968. Vidal had called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi,” to which Buckley replied, “Shut up or I’ll smash you in the mouth, you queer!” This was followed by a vituperative and extended exchange of insults in Esquire, which in turn led to Buckley’s suing Vidal and Esquire magazine, and to Vidal’s filing a countersuit.
Equally hot-tempered is brother-in-law Brent Bozell, a zealous Catholic convert and the husband of Patricia Buckley, who is the managing editor of Triumph. In 1970, when a number of Buckleys—there were by then forty-nine grandchildren of old Will Buckley—were gathering at “Great Elm” for one of their periodic reunions, Bozell was arrested in Washington for his vehement role in a demonstration protesting abortions in a local clinic.
Bozell and Bill Buckley used to be the best of friends (they were classmates at Yale), but recently there has been a falling-out. Their differences have been political as well as religious. Bozell feels that Buckley’s National Review is, of all things, too liberal. Buckley feels that Bozell’s Catholicism is too strict. Family friends, while conceding the Buckleys’ charm and intelligence and wit, often get annoyed with all the Buckleys for their right-wing political attitudes and opinions. “They’re all right as long as they’re on Mozart,” says one friend.
Oddly enough, though James Buckley has become New York’s Conservative U. S. Senator, the only one of his sons whom William Buckley, Sr. encouraged to enter politics was Bill. “I have the feeling that you will inevitably be drawn into politics, or alternatively catapult yourself into this field,” the father wrote in one of his famous memos after God and Man at Yale was published. “What this country needs is a politician who has an education, and I don’t know of one. There hasn’t been an educated man in the Senate or House of Representatives since Sumner of Texas quit in disgust three or four years ago.”
Since his father’s death, his eldest son, John Buckley, has been president of Cawtawba (named after a river near the Buckley winter estate in Camden), the family corporation which runs the Buckley holdings. Cawtawba owns large blocks of stock in seven oil companies all over the world, and these companies lease drilling contracts to other companies. Cawtawba takes care of what the Buckleys call “what little we have,” and what little they have permits all the Buckleys to live in considerable comfort.
Aloise Buckley still divides her year between her two large places. When, in 1967, she and Rose Kennedy were honored by Harper’s Bazaar as America’s foremost Catholic matriarchs, Mrs. Kennedy commented, “My greatest accomplishment has been bringing up our children to make full use of their talents and resources for a notable purpose: benefiting the community, not themselves.” Aloise Buckley is reported to have said, “My great accomplishment is not having one single child who has been a failure.” Presumably she meant that her children had held fast to their Catholicism.
But, as with the Kennedys, there have been deeply disturbing personal problems in the Buckley family, none of which their father lived to see. Two of his daughters, Maureen and Aloise, died young of similar causes—an aneurysm—within two years of each other. When John Buckley’s wife died in 1966, he suffered a deep emotional crisis. “I underwent two years of the most severe unhappiness,” he told the New York Times. “I even lost my faith in God.” But, he says, “I finally realized if I was ever going to see Ann again, I had to make my peace with the Church, which I did.”
Carol has been divorced, and has since remarried Raymond Learsy—”He’s a broker, an operator”—who is Jewish. (His uncommon name is a variant backward spelling of “Israel.”) Her sister Jane has also been divorced, and lives alone just a mile down the road from “Great Elm” in Sharon. In 1972 the Reid Buckleys were divorced. Of the ten children, only the oldest daughter, Priscilla, has never married.
The three divorces and the two remarriages must have given the Buckleys almost as much pain, perhaps, as the deaths of the two girls, since, to a believing Catholic, death is not just a loss but a removal of the loved person to a more peaceful, ordered place. If William Buckley, Sr. had been able to live forever—as everyone had always taken for granted that he would—might the marriages have stuck? It is possible that if one has had an overpowering father like Will Buckley, who saw to it that the strands of family remained securely knotted, and if then one loses him abruptly, the whole family fabric begins to come apart.
Chapter 20
THE UPWARD CLIMB
One reason the emergent Irish families placed so much emphasis on their sons’ and daughters’ getting into society, asked to the best parties and dances, and invited into the best clubs was based on their special feelings about their faith. The “nice” people of Boston, by whom Rose Kennedy so desperately wanted to be accepted, might be Protestant, but in her opinion, and in the opinion of others like her, the Irish Catholic families were every bit as nice, or even nicer, because they were more pious and more strict about their religion. Their piety made them more moral, more stable and secure, and didn’t this add up to niceness? It was easy for the Irish Catholic rich to see that their Protestant counterparts were much more casual about their religion, going to church whenever they felt like it and, presumably, seldom receiving Communion. Nor were the wealthy Jews, on the whole, particularly observant. As the Jews became Americanized and affluent, they tended to abandon the strict orthodoxy of their parents and grandparents, and to visit their synagogues and temples only on certain High Holy Days.
Those who considered themselves the First Irish Families were determined to see to it that this sort of thing should not happen to them. Furthermore, the
tenacity with which the Irish clung to the letter of their faith set them, they believed, above all other Catholics. To be an Irish Catholic (or, as some preferred, “Catholic Irish”) was in itself a mark of social and religious superiority. Second in importance to the Irish Catholics came the German Catholics, and after the Germans came the English, though there were not too many of them. Much further down the ladder came the French, Italian, Belgian, Spanish, Portuguese, and all other kinds of Catholics—simply because the Catholics of these countries were not as conscientious about their religion. In the North Central states, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas, where so many Scandinavian families settled, the Swedish and Norwegian Catholics are regarded as decidedly lower-class. This is particularly apparent in the pronounced rivalry between Minnesota’s Twin Cities—Irish Catholic St. Paul and Scandinavian Minneapolis. F. Scott Fitzgerald (Irish Catholic) was always proud that his family had been from St. Paul, and not from socially inferior Minneapolis across the river.
It was considered “best” for an Irish Catholic to marry another Irish Catholic, but marriage to a German Catholic was acceptable and a number of such marriages took place. William F. Buckley, Sr.’s marriage to the former Aloise Steiner joined him with a German Catholic family from the south. Horace Flanigan’s son John, whose sister Peggy married Murray McDonnell, married Carlota Busch, of the long-prominent Anheuser-Busch brewing family in St. Louis, and Robert F. Kennedy married Ethel Skakel, German Catholic. Uncle Tom Murray might have been aghast when his niece Jeanne eloped and was married—not by a priest but by a justice of the peace—to a divorced Protestant. But he would have not been much happier if she had married an Italian Catholic, because the Italians were not “good Catholics.”
When Uncle Tom Murray instructed his family never to receive Jeanne Murray after her marriage to Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, it was simply because, to him, no marriage existed. Jeanne might call herself “Mrs. Vanderbilt,” but she was in fact living in sin. When young Bob Cuddihy married a divorced woman out of the Church, his sister Mary Jane MacGuire, who loved him more than any of her brothers, tearfully told him over the telephone that she could not invite him to a large family Thanksgiving gathering at her house in Rye. What kind of an example would it set for her children if, by including him, she appeared to approve of his sinful relationship? Bob, who had a famous temper, did not lose it, but merely said quietly, “I understand.”
Because of the purity of their faith, the wealthy Irish Catholics saw no reason why they should not be accepted by the highest of high Protestant society, particularly when they had no intention of going so far as to marry into it. And such social institutions as the Social Register seem to have agreed with them. Early in their rise to affluence, the little black and red book began listing such New York families as the Murrays, McDonnells, Cuddihys, and Graces, and, in San Francisco, the Mackays, Fairs, and Floods (though the first San Francisco Flood had been a bartender, and his wife a chambermaid). At the same time, there are very few Italian names in the Social Registers of American cities, and even fewer Jewish ones. But this may be because the Jewish upper crust has tended to regard non-Jewish society as frivolous and self-indulgent. Not so the Irish Catholics.
Perhaps another reason why the First Irish Families have cared so deeply about society is that, in the early days following their arrival in the United States, the Irish were so widely employed as servants in the households of the rich and well-placed. The Irish cook or parlor maid could observe and learn at firsthand the manners, inflections, and tastes of her mistress, and the Irish chauffeur, gardener, or valet could observe his master’s ways. The Irish were quick studies in these matters, and were determined that, if perhaps not they, then at least their children should acquire every attribute of the American upper classes. Even back home in Ireland, though they had not been able to rise, the poorest Irish tenant farmer and his wife could watch—and someday hope to imitate—the ways of the gentry and the manners of their English landlords. In Ireland today, the upper-class Irish accent (not a brogue) is considered the purest spoken English in the world. Hence Will Buckley’s preoccupation with his children’s diction (it had to be perfect), and Anna Murray McDonnell’s daily inspection of her children’s clothes before they set off to school. Hence James Francis McDonnell’s motto: “Always go First Class.” The map of the world that hung in the McDonnell dining room was not so much to teach the children geography as it was a reminder that travel is a social tool. When one traveled, one stayed at the best hotels. The grand manner, the children learned, got one wherever one wanted to go. The H. Lester Cuddihys, scheduled to travel to Europe on a North German Lloyd liner, discovered on their day of departure that labor trouble at the pier would mean that they would not be permitted to board the ship. Mr. Cuddihy drew himself up and announced to the passenger agent, “I am Mr. North German Lloyd.” The party was ushered aboard. Not that some of the Irish families weren’t naive when they traveled. Uncle Ennis McQuail, who was married to Auntie Katherine Murray, arrived in Paris for his first visit and exclaimed wonderingly, “Even the children here speak French!”
Clothes came from the best shops in Paris and London. If one bought antique furniture or silver, it had to be of the very best. China was Royal Crown Derby, Rockingham, or old Spode. There were George III tea sets and Meissen baskets, linen sheets with hand-embroidered monograms above insets of French lace.
Table manners had to be faultless. The McDonnells had the reputation of setting the most perfect table of all the families, even for a simple lunch. A McDonnell cousin, now married with children of her own, remembers vividly her first meal with the McDonnells as a child. She had been accustomed to taking meals in her family’s third-floor nursery dining room, the food sent up on a dumb-waiter, but this was to be a formal lunch with grownups. The first course was grapefruit, and, after spooning out the sections, she picked up the grapefruit and squeezed it. A deathly silence fell across the length of gleaming mahogany as her relatives gazed in horror at what she was doing. To this day, she teaches her children, “It’s all right to squeeze grapefruit when you are home, and to pick up a lamb chop with your fingers at the end—but never when you are out.”
Perfection was the constant rule. The Murray and McDonnell houses were decorated by McMillen because McMillen was the best society decorator in New York. John Murray Cuddihy’s portrait was painted by Robert Henri because he was the best society portraitist around. Cleanliness was stressed almost as much as godliness. Houses were kept scrubbed and polished, and so were bodies. Uncle Joe Murray had a constant fear of germs, and at family birthday parties a separate cake was used for blowing out the candles; then a fresh one was brought in to eat. Uncle Joe dosed himself with drops and pills and remedies so often to ward off colds that when, one winter, he actually came down with pneumonia, one of his sisters commented dryly, “It’s about time.”
The rather special social position that the First Irish Families have been able to achieve was demonstrated not long ago by an episode that occurred on the staff of that good gray lady of American publishing, the New York Times. The editor of the woman’s and society pages, Charlotte Curtis, a graduate of Vassar, had written in a story, “The McDonnells are like the Kennedys. They are rich Irish Catholics, and there are lots of them.” These sentences caught the eye of Theodore Bernstein, who, as editor of the “bullpen,” acts as the Times’s official watchdog and arbiter of taste, style, and decorum, and who is Jewish. Bernstein was offended by the sentences, and in his interoffice bulletin, “Winners & Sinners,” he cited them as an example of impropriety, and warned the staff:
Omit racial, religious, or national designations unless they have some relevance to the news or are part of the biographical aggregate, as in an obit or a “Man in the News.” Perhaps it is a tribute to the Irish that “Irish Catholic” does not seem offensive, but would you write “rich Russian Jews”?
A few days later, Bernstein received a memorandum from his superior, Clifton Daniel, the T
imes managing editor:
I agree with you that it is a tribute to the Irish that “Irish Catholic” does not seem offensive, and I also agree that “rich Russian Jew” might be offensive. But it seems to me that we can certainly say that a family is rich, that it is Russian, and that it is Jewish, if those things are relevant to the news. In fact, I myself have written about such families, and nobody ever questioned the relevance of doing so. But the trick is not to put these facts together in one bunch so that they have a cumulative pejorative aroma.
In a postscript Daniel added, “Since this note was dictated, we have published an obituary of Sean O’Casey, calling him a poor Irish Protestant.” In other words, “bunching” adjectives is vulgar when speaking or writing about Jews, but it is not in the case of the Irish.
Certainly, the McDonnells raised no objections to being called rich Irish Catholics. But what they do rather mind is the curious habit of society reporters on the Times and other newspapers of dwelling, to excess, on the size of their families. Reports of weddings, debuts, and other social activities of the rich Irish are given subtly different treatment in the press, it often seems. In covering a Protestant wedding, for example, it is customary to list the bride’s and bridegroom’s parents and perhaps grandparents—and, if there is a distinguished ancestor further back than that, perhaps his name as well. In writing up Catholic weddings, however, society editors seem to enjoy listing not only the couple’s direct antecedents, but their aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, and cousins by the dozens. This has been going on for some time, as in this 1938 report from the old New York World-Telegram on social doings in Southampton:
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