Overdrive (25 page)

Wm. F. Buckley, Jr.

They continued to run the column for a while, sending the regular monthly check, which I instructed the syndicate not to cash. (It was on the order of twenty dollars a month.) After two or three months they dropped the column, sending along a letter to Harry Elmlark, the syndicate's president, to the effect that they would not accept it free of charge. Dear Harry. The idea of
not
cashing a check was theologically alien to him. And then to lose a customer—because his syndicate wouldn't take that customer's money! It was too much; but Harry decided to show fortitude, and decided also to tell me, three or four times a week, how strong and loyal he had shown himself to be during his tribulation.

So, years later, Mr. Wiseguy writes me. His references are to a form letter sent out over my signature by an organization known as Friends of Firing Line, whose executive secretary is Mrs. Norma Woodley. Her principal concern is to raise money for local sponsors of "Firing Line," and to send out occasional promotional bulletins. The
Eagle
gentleman writes:

Dear Mr. Buckley: In reply to your letter of October 22, thank you for your good wishes and for notifying me of the beginning of the 16th season of "Firing Line," whatever that is.

As for having Mrs. Woodley "help you in any way she can," thanks again but no thanks.

I am also pleased that you are helping Bell and Howell sell so much of whatever it is they sell. [The reference escapes me, but it isn't worth calling Norma.] Do I detect a little touch of Reaganomics there?

If you by chance run across Warren Steibel, please give him my regards and tell him it's been too long between drinks.

I am glad that you and I have become friends after all these years. It will give me an opportunity to find out if your dinner parties are really as much fun as all the columnists say.

With best wishes.

I decided the letter was tasteless enough to warrant a riposte.

"Dear Mr.—: Your answer to my form letter was unnecessary, though perhaps in a corner of the world so provincial as to deem it amusing to feign no knowledge of 'Firing Line,' you actually thought the letter personal, which if it had been, it would have been quite differently composed. Yours faithfully."

My notebook tells me that we decided at the last editorial conference that we could not continue to use as our economics editorial writer someone who had gone to the Treasury Department. I write to him to explain why, and I hope he understood, though I received no acknowledgment of the letter.

Ken Galbraith called me last night on a delicate matter. While he was serving as ambassador to India, his children became very close friends of the children of Ali Bhutto, at the time a high government official in Pakistan, whose fortunes subsequently declined, indeed so sharply that early in 1979 he swung on a noose, executed by General Zia. The objective is to effect a little relief for one of Bhutto's daughters, an activist whose detention has been in rather harsh circumstances. Ken is scrupulous in advising me that there is no imputation, explicit or implicit, of injustice in the detention, merely a request that it be done more clemently—perhaps house arrest? All this I convey to Under Secretary Jim. Jim is the State Department's overseer in Pakistan matters, and recently concluded some sort of an arms deal involving many millions of dollars, in return for which, echoing the left-wing press, his children began referring to their father as "The Merchant of Death," as in: "Ma, is the Merchant of Death home for dinner?" Perhaps it would have happened anyway, who knows, but five weeks later Bhutto's daughter was taken from prison into house arrest.

I write a memo to Rick Brookhiser. A dozen years ago we received a manuscript composed, or so the covering letter informed us, by a fourteen-year-old schoolboy in Rochester who protested to the authorities in his school that the other side of the story was not being presented on the scheduled Vietnam Day.

The piece was astonishingly literate—wry, even—and jaunty rather than merely cheeky. We published it. And kept an eye on the author, who went on to Yale where he experienced the single disappointment of getting one B plus (all his other grades were A's). He came to us for summer work, and then we offered him a job after he graduated. He took it, on the understanding that in one year he would leave to go to law school. Soon Priscilla and I conspired together; I lunched with Rick and told him that if he would give up law school, we would in one year promote him to senior editor, the youngest in
NR's
history, and labor to pay him a living wage. His productivity, efficiency, and versatility have become legendary. He has been temporarily assigned the job of executing long-range editorial projects, and I write him a memo: "Apropos the feature project business, I should think a massive piece on the Catholic Church and pacifism should be considered, in the light of the predicted result of the bishops' conference this coming week. See the Op-Ed page 'Jubilant Declaration' in the New York
Times
by the Catholic pacifist."

Mr. John Crane writes me from Washington, Virginia, to tell me that Dr. Franklin Littell is probably acting hypocritically in his capacity as Chairman of something called Christians United for American Security, which has just taken out a full-page ad objecting to the proposed sale of AWACS to Saudi Arabia. How so? Well, says the correspondent, Franklin Littell is a secret agent of Israel.

"Since I am familiar with Littell's past secret employment and Littell's strong anti-Arab views, it seems to me reasonable to suppose that this ad in the Washington
Post—
which must have cost many thousands—was financed by 'friends' of Littell, if not entirely, then at least in part. ... I don't object to a lobbyist lobbying if he does it openly, but I HATE hypocrisy—and wolves wearing sheeps' clothing."

Franklin Littell! Dear me. Dr. Littell is a jerko I ended up suing a few years ago, for comparing me with Ribbentrop, and saying, among other choice items, that I made my living by lying and cheating. The lawsuit was against him and the Macmillan Publishing Company, which had published the libels in a book called
Wild Tongues
. Littell, a church historian by profession, had previously headed an organization discreetly funded by the Democratic Party some time after Barry Goldwater ran for office, which organization did its best to depict many conservative activists as fascistic.

I had begun by asking Macmillan for an immediate retraction, and for reimbursement of my legal expenses, which at that moment could not have been greater than a few hundred dollars. .Macmillan replied by telling me that they themselves didn't believe a
word
of the unpleasant charges made by Dr. Littell, but that their devotion to the First Amendment made it impossible for them to apologize, or to remit lawyer's charges.

Mr. C. Dickerman Williams, my attorney and surely my most distinguished friend, told me his advice under the circumstances was to proceed with the suit—"It will only last a couple of days" was his guess, based on his familiarity with the defense and his general experience of libel law.

What happened was both painful and amusing. The district court judge before whom the case fell had, it happened, been nominated to his position by my brother Jim, then junior senator from New York. But Jim's modus operandi in the matter of court appointments had been impeccable. He had appointed a panel of distinguished lawyers (C. D. Williams was its chairman) who made nominations whenever there was a vacancy, nominations based on manifest qualifications. Without exception, Jim forwarded the panel's nominees to the President. The judge now volunteered to excuse himself, but Littell and Macmillan said: No, they trusted him, he should try the case (a jury had been waived).

The judge in question was a youngish man with a brilliant record. If memory serves, he had been first in his class at Harvard twenty years before. But such was the attention he had evidently given to learning the law, he did not have time to learn much about certain other things. For instance, when my attorney began by denouncing Littell's comparison of me with Ribbentrop, his honor asked who Joachim von Ribbentrop was? During the ensuing four or five days, at about two or three thousand dollars per day, we were conducting a seminar on recent European history for the benefit of the judge. On the afternoon of the fifth day I got a telephone call from the president and unmistakable boss of Macmillan, Mr. Raymond Hagel, who said he would like to see me, how about breakfast, before the trial resumed that day? Fine I said; and the next morning in my apartment I was face to face with one of the world's premier salesmen.

This is bloody ridiculous, he said; it's costing us both a goddamn fortune. Besides, you won't win, because
New York Times v. Sullivan
protects us.

I replied that
New York Times v. Sullivan
, while it shifted the burden of proof where public figures are concerned from the suee to the suer, hadn't in fact repealed the laws of libel, to which he repeated that it was ridiculous, that Macmillan would
clearly
win, and he didn't care about Littell, Littell was Littell's problem, and anyway Littell was probably judgment-proof.

Well, I said, we'll just have to see how it goes.

And so he said, Look, just to
prove
to you that Macmillan doesn't believe all those unpleasant things about you, we'll
publish
your next book!

That
statement marshaled every arrogant corpuscle in my system, so I said look, Mr. Hagel, your telling me that Macmillan would
consent
to publish my next book is like your telling me Macmillan will agree to accept a gift from me of fifty thousand dollars, since I figure that's what a publisher typically makes off one of my books. He stood up, strode over to within three inches of me and said: Okay, tell you what. We'll publish your next book and the first fifty thousand dollars we make off it, we'll
give
to you.

But—he added quickly—for the sake of our general reputation, we'll have to give it to you in a nonconspicuous way. So I said, well, you could buy fifty thousand dollars' worth of advertising in
National Review
. Yeah, he said, we could. He called his office to get some figures, and I mine to get some. Ten minutes later we had a deal, and a half-hour later my lawyer told the honorable court that the case against Macmillan had been settled; and one year later Macmillan published
Airborne;
and, for a lovely spell,
National Review
looked like a house organ of Macmillan, so heavy was our advertising schedule.

Littell was then defended, free of charge, by Macmillan's public-spirited lawyer, and found guilty by the judge on three counts; the lawyer appealed, two of the three charges were thrown out, the third sustained, and I got a check from him for a thousand dollars or so.

So now he's into AWACS. I told my correspondent that if indeed the government of Israel is paying Dr. Littell to argue their line, Dr. Littell is a crafty old bird, because the rest of us do it for nothing.

I acknowledged a witty letter from John Burton, professor at the School of Business at Columbia, who is president of the board of trustees of Millbrook School, about my Millbrook piece. "All of us," he writes ironically, "who had felt the gentle whimsy of Frank Trevor's tongue, the self-effacing modesty of Ed Pulling, and Xavier Prum's uncertainty about mathematics answers could relate to the characterizations which you drew so well."

For maybe five years in a row I found myself seated, by coincidence, at the annual A1 Smith Dinner on the dais next to Carlos Romero Barcelo, who was then the mayor of San Juan and is now Puerto Rico's governor. Fie was wonderfully obliging a couple of years ago when I went to Puerto Rico to do two "Firing Line" programs, and now he has written to ask me to draw attention to the anomalous impact the President's proposed tax reforms would have on Puerto Rico. I wrote a column based on his analysis which now I send him, thanking him.

Kevin Starr is a Harvard Ph.D. in American history, a man of great shyness who gives play to a romantic spirit in a column he writes for the San Francisco
Examiner
. Last week, dining at Trader Vic's in San Francisco with friends, I bumped into him, but in one of those awkward situations where, although both of us were seated in the same extended seat, as in a church pew, conversation was not possible. I wanted to make it clear that I regretted this. I wrote him so.

Jameson Campaigne, Jr., who heads up Caroline House, a small publisher, and who I've known for twenty years, reaching back to when he was fifty percent of the conservative student body at Williams College (the other one came to
National Review
to work), wants a blurb for a book which I simply haven't time to read, so I beg off. His letter contains also a proposal that at
National Review
we amass some of the apocalyptic statements being made about what's going to happen to the world under Reagan, and publish them a year later. "The feature might have a salutary effect on these fellows, in addition to being highly entertaining." His P.S. is, "Mightn't 'lagniappe' be a good substitute for 'exiguous token' in your next fundraising letter?" Actually, I don't think so. Because a lagniappe is not necessarily a token of
esteem
. It is simply a gratuity.

My watch tells me it is almost time for Mass, so I ring the kitchen and tell Gloria we must go in five minutes. I write to Cheever Tyler in New Haven, the chairman of the
Yale Daily News
a half-dozen years after I served, and the most active trustee of the Yale News fund and related activities, a charming and witty attorney. "Dear Cheever: My son Christopher is to be the featured speaker at the 4th of December
Yale Daily News
dinner, and under the circumstances I have decided to invite myself to that dinner. Question, could I have the pleasure of your company? The proceedings I am told will not be long. If that is agreeable, we might meet for drinks ahead of time. Advise." It turned out that he would be out of town. Moreover, Christopher subsequently confessed that my presence might make him a little (more) nervous, so I didn't go.