by Garry Wills
NOTES
1 Hope Dies Last (2003), And They All Sang (2005), Touch and Go (2007), P.S. (2008). He wrote six books after his eighty-sixth birthday—add The Spectator (1999) and Will the Circle Be Unbroken? (2001) to the last four.
13
Bill
Hour by hour, day by day, Bill Buckley was just an exciting person to be around, especially when he was exhilarated by his love of sailing. He could turn any event into an adventure, a joke, a showdown. He loved risk. I saw him time after time rush his boat toward a harbor, sails flying, only to swerve and drop sail at the last moment. For some on the pier, looking up to see this large yacht bearing down on them, it was a heart-stopping moment. To add to the excitement, Bill was often standing on the helmsman’s seat, his hands hanging from the backstays, steering the wheel with his foot, in a swashbuckling pose. (He claimed he saw the berth better from up there.)
I saw once how important were his swift reflexes on the boat. We had set out for a night sail on the ocean, and Bill’s Yale friend Van Galbraith—later President Reagan’s ambassador to France—had got tipsy from repeated Tia Marias in his coffee after dinner. He fell overboard while the boat was under full sail. In a flash Bill threw out the life preserver with a bright light on it, and called for us to bring the boat about. We circled back toward Galbraith, found him in the darkness, and fished him up. It was a scary moment, one that only Bill’s cool rapidity kept from being a tragic one.
Bill liked to sail so much that he kept a little two-person Sun-fish boat at his home in Stamford, to take out for an hour or two on a nice day. He taught me the rudiments of sailing on it. On his big boats—the Panic, the Suzy Wong, the Cyrano—he let me take the helm, instructing me to watch the nylon “telltale” on the shroud, even letting me come about (I tell you he loved risk). I got to like sailing so much I bought my own small boat (a Snipe) to sail on Lake Lansing—my son later sailed it on Lake Michigan. Once, sailing out with Bill from Miami, when we were hit by a storm, he congratulated me on the skills I had learned from him.
Bill wrote the way he sailed, taking chances. Once he called me up to ask about some new papal pronouncement. He had got into trouble with fellow Catholics by criticizing papal encyclicals, and I had become a kind of informal adviser on Catholic matters. The statement at issue that day was obscure in its immediate sense. He wanted to launch an instant attack on it. I asked why he did not wait to see what impact it would have. “Why not wait? Because I don’t have falsos testes.” He was referring to an earlier discussion, when he asked whether even papal defenders admit the pontiff can err. I said that medieval commentators claimed this could happen if the pope was given imperfect evidence (propter falsos testes). He asked, “Isn’t testis [testifier] the same word in Latin as testicle?” Yes. That was all the warrant he needed.
He was always ready to plunge in. Another time he called me and asked, “Have you ever heard of Joe Nuh-math?” This was when everybody had heard of the way Joe Nay-math won the 1969 Super Bowl as quarterback for the New York Jets. Bill had never heard the name pronounced, he just read it in an editor’s letter asking him to write about the man. I told him how Namath had beat my hero, John Unitas, in the Super Bowl. There were large gaps in Bill’s knowledge of popular culture, especially of popular sports. His father once wrote to Bill’s future father-in-law, complaining that he had tried for years, without success, to interest his son in ordinary games—golf or tennis or team sports. But Bill had a relish only for solo performances—sailing, skiing, horseback riding, or flying an airplane. I asked if Bill was going to write about Namath. Yes. “That should be an interesting interview.” He said, “Oh, I don’t have time to learn enough about football to interview him.” He wrote the piece by comparing Namath to something he did know: the record of a famous bullfighter.
Another time I was on Bill’s boat racing to Bermuda. We saw on the horizon a huge shape like an island—it was a World War II battleship taken out of mothballs and put on a shake-down cruise before being sent to the Vietnam War, a breathtaking sight from our lower vantage point on the water. Bill could not resist hailing it on the radio, though it was against racing rules to radio except in an emergency. When we reached Bermuda, Bill was disqualified. One of the other boats had heard his conversation with the battleship and reported him. He said it was worth it. He reminded me of one of Wodehouse’s blithe young men—Psmith, say, or Piccadilly Jim—who act forever on impulse.
He took risks even in routine and mundane ways. One night, after dinner at his town house in Manhattan, he wanted to continue our conversation, so instead of calling me a cab to take me back to my hotel, he gave me a ride on his motorbike. It was the law in New York that bikers wear a helmet, so we were stopped by a policeman—neither of us was helmeted. When the cop recognized him, he let us go with just a warning, since Bill was popular with cops for opposing police review boards. Needless to say, the next time he gave me a ride, there were still no helmets.
It is amazing that Bill’s risks did not end his life. At Yale he secretly learned to fly, and bought a small plane with some classmates, not letting his father know about it. He landed the plane at his sister Maureen’s prep school in a spectacular visit. Then, on the day when he passed some college tests, he took the plane out for a celebratory spin, all by himself. He had been up the night before cramming for his exams, and he fell asleep at the controls. Luckily he woke in time to bring the plane down. A great career might have ended before it began.
For a while I was Bill’s designated biographer. A shared friend of ours, Neil McCaffrey, commissioned the book for his new publishing venture, Arlington House. Bill approved the idea because, like many celebrities, he was constantly pestered by people wanting to interview him for books or magazines. With me as his chosen scribe, he could turn them down by saying he was already committed. I recorded many hours of tapes with him, his wife, his siblings, his friends, for the project, before giving it up over political disagreements and returning the advance to Neil.
Bill was stunningly candid on these tapes, so much so that I, like many people close to him, came to feel I should protect him from his own reckless truthfulness. He was too trusting of people he liked. He set up a former boat boy in a partnership to buy radio stations, and afterward found that his young partner had bilked him. He argued for the innocence of a prisoner who wrote him winning letters, and worked to have Edgar Smith released, only to see the man be convicted again of kidnapping and attempted murder.
Some of the things Bill told me at the time I have never repeated except to my wife. One thing I can partly tell now that he is dead. When he entered the CIA, he beat the polygraph test that all prospective agents have to take. (Always willing to take a risk.) He was determined to protect a family member from an embarrassing disclosure, and he did. I asked him how he accomplished that. “I guess that if you think you have a right to tell a lie, it will not register as one.” At least it did not with him. He told me what he lied about, though I promised then to keep the secret, and I have.
From what I have said so far, it might be thought that Bill was self-centered. That was far from the case. He was thoughtful of others, almost to a fault. When he found that a summer intern at National Review was a promising young pianist who missed his practice hours back in the Midwest, he gave him the key to his town house (which had been UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld’s) and told him he could use it, while his wife was away, to play on his splendid Bösendorfer piano.
His generosity was unfailing. He liked to do things for people, surprising them with unexpected gifts. When the writer Wilfrid Sheed was ill, Bill, who knew he was a deep student of popular song, sent him the latest books on the subject. One day in the early sixties, a large package was brought to my front door. It was the twenty-four volumes of a new edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Another time I got a package with framed copies of two charcoal portraits by the famous British newspaper artist David Low. These were studies of Gilbert Chesterton and
Hilaire Belloc, and Bill knew I admired them. I asked where he had got the pictures. They were a gift to him from British broadcaster Alistair Cooke. Bill said, “They will mean more to you than to me.”
He spent a lot of time thinking of what he could do for friends. When he heard that I needed a passport in a hurry, he pulled strings at the State Department to get it for me. On another occasion, when my newly wed Natalie and I could not find a cheap sea liner to England for our honeymoon, he found a ship for us leaving from Canada. Bill ingeniously invented a way to institutionalize his love for giving special gifts. Because his family was so prolific, he had forty-nine of what he called “N and Ns” (nieces and nephews). He took care of the education of many of these. But supplying necessities was not enough for him. He set up a fund he called the Dear Uncle Bill Trust (DUBT, soon pronounced “Doubt”), whose administrators gave surprise treats to N and Ns—a valuable guitar to an aspiring musician, a vacation in a favorite spot—on a rotating basis.
His desire to do things for people made him an inveterate matchmaker. He did all he could to encourage his Yale friend Brent Bozell to marry his favorite sister, Patricia (Trish). He hinted that another Yale undergraduate, Bill Coffin, should date another of his sisters. When I went to National Review in the summer of 1957, to talk about writing for him, I was just two months out of a Jesuit seminary, where I had been starved for opera music, and I soon found the Sam Goody music store. But I was staying in the Park Avenue apartment of Bill’s father, which had no phonograph. When I mentioned this to Bill’s young sister Maureen, who was working part-time at National Review that summer, she gave me the key to her apartment and said I could use the phonograph there any afternoon while she was at the office. Bill noticed that Maureen and I got along well, and when we would all go out to dinner at the end of the day, he put us together in one cab and took another with the rest of the party. We laughed at his matchmaking attempts. It was a family trait. Bill’s sister Trish had met Pat Taylor in her freshman year at Vassar and decided Bill should marry her—as he did.
Perhaps it was his matchmaking urge that made Bill want to connect people with his church. When he learned as a child that any Christian can baptize a person in need of salvation, he and his sister Trish unobtrusively rubbed water on young visitors to their home while whispering the baptism formula.1 In National Review circles, those who were not Catholics to begin with tended to enter the fold as converts: Brent Bozell, Russell Kirk, Willmoore Kendall, Frank Meyer, William Rusher, Jeffrey Hart, Joseph Sobran, Marvin Liebman, Robert Novak, Richard John Neuhaus. The major holdouts were James Burnham, a born Catholic who left the Church and never went back, and Whittaker Chambers, who was drawn to Richard Nixon’s Quakerism. It was always easiest to be a Catholic around Bill, who became friendly with Malcolm Muggeridge when the British writer became a Catholic fellow traveler and Mother Teresa fan. I believe Bill was so nice to me in part because I am “incurably Catholic.” There were different concentrations of people in the National Review circle—Yale alumni, ex-Communists (Burnham, Meyer, Chambers, Willi Schlamm, Will Herburg, Freda Utley), ex—CIA members (Bill, his sister Priscilla, Burnham, Kendall)—but the Catholic contingent outnumbered all others.
Bill went to church on Sunday with the many Spanish-speaking house servants he had over the years. That did not fit his reputation as a snob. He was accused, at times, of being a social snob, an ideological snob, and an intellectual snob. None of these was the case in any but the most superficial sense.
Social Snob?
Bill could hardly have been a social snob when he was playing matchmaker for his sister and me. I was a penniless nobody. For that matter, Brent Bozell had no significant money or social standing when (with Bill’s encouragement) he married Bill’s sister Trish. Brent had gone to Yale on a double scholarship, from the GI Bill and from an American Legion oratory award. Where his family was concerned, Bill always cared more about a person’s being Catholic and conservative than about his or her being rich. I passed the Catholic test, and came close enough on the conservative point, in 1957, for him to hint that Maureen and I might be made for each other.
Despite his religious and ideological preferences, Bill was basically egalitarian. Though he always used proper titles for guests on his TV show, he was “Bill” to everyone from the moment one met him. He treated all ranks at the magazine with equal dignity, and all called him Bill. When confusion arose because Bill Rusher was in the magazine’s office as its publisher, younger people on the staff referred to Big Bill (Buckley) and Little Bill (Rusher) when a distinction had to be made. Needless to say, Little Bill was not fond of the nickname.
There was never any “side” to Bill. In this he was unlike his wife. He always dressed like a rumpled undergraduate, while she had Bill Blass and other designers dancing attendance on her. Bill and Pat were deeply in love—each called the other “Ducky,” as Spencer Tracy’s and Katharine Hepburn’s characters call each other “Pinky” in the movie Adam’s Rib. But the Tracy and Hepburn characters had their differences, and so did the Buckleys. They had different (though overlapping) social circles. Bill was amused by her friends (including Truman Capote), and he dutifully went to some of her charity events, where he was often bored. She dutifully went on his short sailing jaunts, but some of his intellectual friends—like the literary critic Hugh Kenner—she treated as a nuisance.
Pat had left Vassar after only two years, and her son wrote: “Her cap-and-gownless departure from Poughkeepsie left her, for the rest of her life, with a deep-seated insecurity that manifested itself aggressively, especially after the supernumerary glass of wine. . . . Pup remarked to me after she died that he had not once, in fifty-seven years of marriage, seen her read a nonfiction book”—an exaggeration, no doubt, but a telling one.2 Since Bill was often away on lecture tours or sailing trips or foreign interviews, Pat was often escorted to fashionable events, like other socialites with busy husbands, by the gay men known as “walkers”—the type Woody Harrelson played in Paul Schrader’s movie The Walker (2007). Her son, Christopher, notes some of Pat’s many walkers: Jerry Zipkin, Christopher Hewett, Bill Blass, Peter Glenville, Valentino, John Richardson, Truman Capote, “and others.”3
Bill’s style was rather plainer, though he was ridiculed for describing in great detail the limousine he had specially redesigned as a kind of traveling office. He was accused of snobbishly showing off his fancy car. But he had only realized the advantage of having a chauffeur when he ran for mayor of New York in 1965. Then he needed a car to get him to events when there was no time or place for parking it himself. He saw that he could do his endless dictating of letters and columns on the move, and he kept the Irish Catholic driver who had seen him through the campaign. Before that race, he regularly rode around New York on his motorbike. And he was driving his own (modest) car when I met him in 1957. After I arrived from Michigan at his office in New York, where he had asked me to come talk about writing for National Review, he asked where I had left my suitcase. I said, “At the airport.” I thought I might be heading right back to Michigan at the end of that day.
He told me to wait while he finished his editing, then drove me to LaGuardia. After I picked up my bag, he drove us out to his home in Stamford, Connecticut, where we talked, swam, and ate dinner. Then he drove me back into New York, put me up in his father’s apartment at 80 Park Avenue, and turned around to drive back to Stamford. He was my chauffeur that day. It was the kind of thoughtfulness many people experienced from him.
Ideological Snob?
There was a better case for thinking Bill had ideological prejudices. But when he established National Review, he observed no ideological test for all those he hired or tried to hire. He wanted good writing and intellectual stimulation. That is why he printed non-right-wingers like Murray Kempton, John Leonard, Joan Didion, Renata Adler, and Arlene Croce. Later, he sailed or skied with John Kenneth Galbraith and Walter Cronkite (I sailed with both), not because they were celebrities but because he li
ked them and admired their minds.
The real measure of Bill was the extent to which he overcame the prejudices he began with because of his family. His delightful mother was a southern belle from New Orleans whose grandfather had been a Confederate officer at Shiloh. She had the attitude toward blacks of her upbringing. One time, when we were sailing and stopped at Charleston, South Carolina, Bill took me to his father’s winter home. When we arrived, we were greeted by a black retainer who had known Bill from his childhood—he called him “Master Billy.” It was not surprising that Bill and I would initially disagree about the civil rights movement. In a notorious 1957 editorial called “Why the South Must Prevail,” Bill defended segregation because whites were “the advanced race,” and “the claims of civilization superseded those of universal suffrage.”4 We argued over this, and his biographer says that my views gradually had some effect: “Under the influence of conservative proponents of civil rights like Wills and the heated debate about civil rights taking place in the country, Buckley began to distinguish National Review’s and the conservative positions from that of Southern racists.”5
Another burden from Bill’s early days was his father’s anti-Semitism, a harder thing for him to conquer, since he honored his father so profoundly. A close friend of Bill’s on the Yale Daily News was Tom Guinzberg, later the publisher of Viking Press. Guinzberg and Bill’s sister Jane were on the verge of being engaged, and Bill’s father said that Bill, using his friendship with Guinzberg, should prevent a Jew from joining the family. To his later regret, he intervened without telling his sister. For once, he was a match breaker rather than a matchmaker. I was with him the night he finally confessed to Jane what he had done behind her back. She said it did not matter—the marriage would not have worked. Bill said, “I wish I had known that earlier—I have been reproaching myself all these years.” Bill not only broke National Review away from right-wing journals that harbored anti-Semites. When he found that a book reviewer (Revilo Oliver) or one of his editors (M. Joseph Sobran) was writing anti-Semitic stuff in other venues, he banned those writers’ further appearance in the magazine. Bill had become so sensitive to the problem that he wrote a book on the anti-Semitic tendencies of right-wingers like Sobran and Patrick Buchanan.6
