Overdrive (5 page)

In any event, I walk back through the corridor, past the elevator to the opposite end of the building, where Bill's suite has been for lo these many years. In front of him, neatly labeled and stacked, are his files. They are where they are for a reason, and you must not on any account pull this-here file over to that-there end of the table. I sit, and we move instantly into the problem of our lease.

Our landlord, an elderly and attractive attorney named Fred Scholem, told Bill a week ago that he would be requiring an increase for a lease renewal in December. Both Bill and I knew that dread moment would come, and braced for it, but the news would have caused Shylock to raise his eyebrows: Mr. Scholem wanted a
three hundred
percent increase over the price we were paying under our current lease.

National Review
, like all journals of opinion, survives on charity. When we first got the news about the rent, we made inquiries—and learned that the square-foot rate Scholem was asking was in fact competitive for the area. Next I went to several brownstones and offices that had rentable space of ten thousand square feet, our requirement. The rental offices were asking about the same as Fred Scholem was asking, and the brownstones ranged in price from $750,000 to $1.2 million. Having established that the cheapest of these had enough space, I asked Rose Flynn, our accountant, bookkeeper, factotum, and Dutch uncle, to get the property vetted by a real estate inspector, and now Bill hands me the check sheet, which includes such items as:

 TERMITES: Evidence of

□ Not observable

□ [checked] Suspicion of

□ See "Remarks"

 I ask Bill to tell me simply whether the building passed muster, and the answer is Yes, but that to put it right for our company would cost about $100,000, or four fifths of a year's rent under Scholem. The next question is how to finance a hypothetical purchase. The only money we have access to is the Employees' Retirement Fund, which is under the supervision of three members of the board of directors, and a preliminary inquiry tells us that anything it invests in should yield a minimum dividend of fifteen percent. So the mathematics are quickly done, and we wind in and out of that one, calling in Rose for a half hour or so. Meanwhile, a telephone call from Bill establishes that Fred the Non-Red, as I now call him, will permit us the time to think the matter over: i.e., he will lease us our eighteen suites in the building on a monthly basis beginning when the rise goes into effect.

I muse with Bill that we are poorly situated to get mad at a capitalist who asks of us what the going price is of equivalent quarters, to which Bill quite properly responds that our rabbit warrens, adapted over twenty-five years to our particular requirements (what
other
tenant would need a dumbwaiter from the corner of my room, next to my desk, descending to Priscilla, into a cavity she can plumb from her desk chair, or Kevin Lynch from his?), are not all that easily rented to other parties, and that Fred rather likes getting a single check from one tenant, instead of (conceivably) eighteen separate ones; and that one other tenant just finished moving out rather than pay the increase.

I ponder the extraordinary hold on you that a property, and an area, can develop. We could move to Queens, or to New Jersey. . . . But this would also impose a burden on most of the (fifty) employees, who over the years have made their own arrangements with some reference to the fixity of their employer's. There is that, and also the psychic need of a journal of opinion for accessibility—to writers, visitors, foreign editors. "It isn't far, no further than downtown New York—and really, from the other end of George Washington Bridge you're practically there," a friend trying to coax me to lunch in his office in New Jersey once told me. It may be true—that you can reach some parts of New Jersey in about the same time it takes you to get downtown. But it
is
different, isn't it? That would appear to be the verdict of the marketplace, as witness the prices people are willing to pay to be housed in central New York. We decide to pursue the investigation of the brownstone, and to go once more to Fred Scholem, suggesting a compromise. . . .

Bill then goes through his stack, and by 4:15 I am back in my office, and Frances gives me the day's telephone messages. WNET wants me to act as host for the television series,
Brideshead Revisited
, whose huge success in England I have read about. They need to know, says Frances, whether I am even remotely interested—enough so to sit through the thirteen hours of videocassettes. I tell Frances I'll let them know within a day or two, and please to try to find Alistair Cooke's November telephone number (he has about twelve) since preeminently he would be in a position to advise me on what is involved in hosting a series. I am taken by the idea, since
Brideshead
is a haunting and controversial book. . . .

The New York
Times
called to ask who had taken the photograph of me and Pat on the Orient Express that they will use in the Travel section, as they will want to send him a check (for $75). I tell Frances that the picture in question was taken with my own camera by the waiter, and it would not be feasible to locate him. The spread will not be out until next Sunday and I haven't seen it, but the galleys, corrected over the weekend, amused me because I had privately gambled that one sentence I used would never see the light of day. On, learning that the
Times
had a strict limit of $500 for any travel piece, a sum that hardly returned me my costs, I had written: "Aboard the Orient Express, the consumption of [drinks from the bar] is encouraged, by the way, and they are cash-and-carry, and there is no nonsense about special rates. A gin and tonic is $4, a liqueur $6. These prices, weighed on the scales of the Old Testament, are not prohibitive, unless you are trying to make a living writing for the Travel section of the New York
Times."

I won—the third sentence did not survive. It's a funny thing about the
Times:
I don't know anybody who works for it who
doesn't
have a sense of humor (big exception: John Oakes. But then he retired as editorial page director several years ago, and is understandably melancholy about having to live in a world whose shape is substantially of his own making). Abe Rosenthal, the working head of the newspaper, is one of the funniest men living. Punch Sulzberger is wonderfully amusing, and easily amused. And so on. But there is some corporate something that keeps the
Times
from smiling at itself; don't quite know what.

Frances tells me that a reporter for the
Harvard Crimson
has called three times, that he is working on a deadline, and that he wishes from me a) a comment on the resolution to be argued against John Kenneth Galbraith in a televised debate at Harvard in January, and b) my ideas as to what I "hope to accomplish." The resolution is: "Resolved, That this House approves the economic initiatives of the Reagan Administration." I tell Frances to call the reporter back and say that my view of the resolution is that "it is satisfactory," and that my "hope" is that "my knowledge of economics should trickle down to Professor Galbraith and his colleagues."

I occasionally like to tease James Jackson Kilpatrick by calling him "Jim," because on "Meet the Press," candidate Ronald Reagan once referred to him as "Jim" (he is "Jack," or "Kilpo"). I mentioned this, in January of election year, to Reagan's then campaign manager, John Sears. Sears smiled. "That's nothing," he said, making reference to New York's principal Republican, "he calls Perry Duryea 'Da??'/" Kilpo has called to say he isn't sure he can make connections with us in Switzerland in January, we having postponed our departure by three days. . . .

Other calls I can delay, but not that of Bob Bauman. I hadn't spoken to Bob since the scandal over a year ago, in the fall of 1980, when it was revealed that, while drinking, he had solicited sex from a young male. The news came as a considerable blow, needless to say, to the Bauman family, but also to the conservative community, not least because in Congress Bob over the years had acquired a considerable reputation as a parliamentarian at the service of the right, but also as a heckler of others' moral weaknesses. The government dropped the charge, on the condition that Bauman promise to take part in a rehabilitation program.

Bob (whom I'd known, as also his wife Carol, since he helped to found the Young Americans for Freedom) had made an announcement of some dignity at a press conference, in which he made no attempt at self-justification, contenting himself to say that since the time of the offense, he had succeeded in curing himself entirely of alcoholism, and that any tendency to homosexuality had gone with the alcohol—and that under the circumstances, he would
not
retire from the race for re-election to Congress. I was in Seattle, lecturing, when I got the news, and I don't remember a column I ever wrestled with more than the one I wrote that night, calling on Bauman to resign from the race. Although he never wrote to me, he is said greatly to have resented my declaration; and now he was calling.

I greeted him. He answered amiably and told me that he had just come from a press conference at which he had announced that he was reentering politics and would be a candidate in 1982 for his old seat. "Someone asked me, 'What does Buckley think of this?' and I said 'I don't know, I'll call him and ask.' So this is that call." I told Bob that if he thought himself cured, by all means he should do what he wanted to do, and if it meant anything, I was with him all the way.

The phenomenon of the sometime homosexual, wholly cured, is not one with which most of us are familiar. I am not talking about men who had an experience as schoolboys, or even at college, of the kind intimated with such taste in
Brideshead
.

I remember being stunned when in 1976 I read that Professor Allen Weinstein, who was then preparing the definitive book on the Hiss case
(Perjury
, A. Knopf, 1978), had got hold of a handwritten letter to the FBI volunteered by Whittaker Chambers disclosing preemptively (lest Hiss's lawyers came up with it at the trial, which they never did) that Chambers had been an active homosexual during five years in the thirties. But that, since leaving the Party (he wrote), he had been cured, being a faithful husband, and father. My astonishment was at learning that the man I had known so well had ever been a homosexual. I have probably known ten people who knew Chambers extremely well, dating back many years before the year I met him (1954), and none of them had any intimation of this chapter in Chambers' history. It is fashionable nowadays to say that a person's sexual "preference" is not a datum of any consequence. That question is best saved for another exploration. My point here is the discrete one, that the assumption that homosexuality is an enduring condition (like alcoholism) is simply mistaken, by the evidence of anyone who knew Chambers; and, as of now, presumably by anyone who knows Bob Bauman.

Frances brought me the issue of
Time
magazine, just out. What they have done is as bad as could be.

Several years ago the Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation of the Catawba Corporation, founded by my father in the late forties, and owned by his ten children. The idea of Catawba was simple enough, namely to set up a service organization which by commanding top administrative, geological, financial, and legal talent could offer the best service to small exploratory companies which, dependent on their own resources, would not have been able to come up with quality service. For thirty years, Catawba in effect managed six exploratory oil companies founded by my father. What was wrong, though neither illegal nor immoral in the circumstances, was that the same people who decided, in their capacity as officers of Catawba, what Catawba should charge its client companies also approved, in their capacity as officials of the serviced companies, Catawba's charges. What made the relationship substantively defensible was the reasonable fees and royalties charged, the performance of Catawba over the years, and the disclosures regularly made in public documents of Catawba's role.