Overdrive (9 page)

In his letter, Perry had been quite specific. "In these clippings [Prentice enclosed several] I think you might find it most interesting to note that Governor Graham [of Florida] and all but one of his cabinet members are big land owners who owe their personal fortunes to the way nearly 95% of all the land in Florida is almost tax exempt! And in the story headlined '70% of Pinellas' Property Taxes Are Borne by Residential Owners' I think you may find it worth your while to note that we 'rewarded' the Bank of Clearwater for giving us our finest buildings by piling a $335,000 land assessment increase on top of the $3,659,150 assessment on the new structure and we 'rewarded' the developers of Clearwater's finest shopping center by multiplying their land assessment from $960 an acre to $55,000 an acre, thereby piling a $2,720,000 land assessment on top of the $12,244,500 assessment for the new store buildings! . . . The President does not seem to realize that by far the biggest element in our overall inflation is the way land prices have soared far faster than any others to a total estimated at the census bureau at well over two trillion dollars, imposing twice as big a burden on our economy as the Federal debt." I agree, I agree. But I have discovered no way of interesting the general public in the subject.

Most speeches, at least in my case, are prewritten. One can't write forty-eight different speeches in a year—and if one did, they wouldn't be very good. I learned in conversation with my son of the harrowing schedule maintained by the Vice-President. George Bush has accepted as many as eight or ten speaking engagements in a week, and half of these may call for major speeches—e.g., before the American Bar Association, or the American Enterprise Institute. Christopher has to set out, day after day, and come up with a fresh speech. A pity. It isn't as if the Vice-President's speeches were reported in the daily press in such detail as to preclude his giving them more than once. A not entirely explicable imperative is at work here, in sharp distinction from the well-known, and universally accepted, tradition of campaign speeches that are sometimes given, unchanged, eight times per day by the candidates; seven days per week; thirty days per month.

My own feeling is that a prepared speech should be polished, to which end I tend to write mine out. For that reason the question period is useful, to demonstrate to the audience that you can also think extemporaneously. A useful combination—not applicable, obviously, to special occasions, of which there will be one the day after tomorrow, when what is said has to be prepared
ad hoc
.

St. Petersburg is a substantial drive from the airport, and I am greeted by several old friends, but having arrived a little late I have missed the bloody mary and so, seated at lunch, I petition the waitress for a glass of wine, which she tells me is only available at the bar, a statement the residual meaning of which is that she is too busy to go to the bar, but obviously the guest isn't. At any rate, the wine is fetched up by a kindly volunteer, and I listen to George Roche speak with some excitement about the progress of his beloved Hillsdale, and the January launching of the institute at Shavano in Colorado. George's new director of development is John K. Andrews, Jr., whose name flickered briefly in the news in 1973 when he resigned his job as a presidential speechwriter with an unprovocative statement in which he nevertheless hinted at his discontent with regnant moral practices. John is highly literate, deeply religious, and a profoundly convinced conservative. He contracts to send me material on the forthcoming conference in Shavano for
National Review
. I am led to a press conference before the speech, where most of the questions have to do with David Stockman and his exchanges with the assistant managing editor of the Washington
Post
for the
Atlantic Monthly;
that and the huge size of the projected federal deficit. The local paper handled it all as follows:

St. Petersburg Beach—A
. vintage William F. Buckley Jr. wowed business, educational and political leaders with an hour of biting political anecdotes and hard-line conservative economic philosophy here Tuesday. . . .

The 55-year-old New Yorker tossed five-syllable invectives [animadversions?] and rhetorical subtleties to the pinstriped crowd, interspersing his anti-government theme between appropriate rounds of laughter and applause.

 Well, it does sound rather gooey, doesn't it? On the other hand it
was
, really. In my life, on the average, perhaps fifteen percent of the public appearances I've made have been before audiences that profoundly agree with me (mostly I have spoken at colleges). But such time isn't, I think, wasted; not for the lecturer, certainly not for those lectured to. The lecturer can detect, by the inflections of the audience's behavior, what it is that works, what doesn't particularly work; what is readily communicable, what isn't. And the audience can hear arguments, analyses, and adornments by someone who believes pretty much as they do and is presumably worth listening to. What isn't so easy to forgive is the adapting of one's views to the inclinations of the audience. I spoke early in the year at a Friends of Israel fund-raising banquet in Toronto, having been asked to address general themes of foreign policy, which I did. The first questioner asked how was it he had paid one thousand dollars to listen to a speaker who only spent a few minutes on Israel? I answered that I hadn't contracted to speak only on Israel, that if I had been asked to, I'd have declined, inasmuch as being myself a friend of Israel, I didn't think myself equipped publicly to devote an entire hour to the subject without first giving the subject more time in preparation than I had; I wouldn't want to damage Israel by making less than the best case out for it. So it goes.

Today the questions were pretty much as expected, with, as noted, special emphasis on the huge looming deficit. One tries to make clear that in economics all matters are not necessarily weighed on the same scale. That is to say, although one dislikes large deficits, one doesn't therefore necessarily reason to the desirability of higher taxes. Better, I said, a rise in productivity and a relative decline in the public sector, though the symbol of the high deficit would hang heavy on Mr. Reagan's neck.

Mr. Eckerd asked that I be permitted to leave without social interruption, as I had to drive to Tampa in time to catch the flight to New York; which I did, uneventfully.

Tonight Pat and I (and others) are guests of Joe and Estee Lauder at a benefit for the New York City Ballet at the New York State Theater.

My feelings about ballet have been ambivalent over the years. On the one hand I find dance beautiful as vision, discipline, and exercise. On the other hand, my mind doesn't readily integrate the dance and the music, so that I find I am primarily viewing the dance—or listening to the music —when of course the idea is to do both. I have the same land of problem with popular music, having for inexplicable reasons no idea at all what are the lyrics being sung, until someone, someday—maybe—sticks them in written form in front of me, without music to distract me. This is why I experience less than the satisfaction I should from the dance, though I am swept up by the beauty of what I see (Balanchine's Apollo, Robbins' Piano Pieces, Peter Martins' Symphony No. 1), and awed by the natural and developed talents required to make it all possible.

Arlene Croce, who reviews ballet for
The New Yorker
, worked for
National Review
for a number of years, and we experienced with this awesomely sensitive human being a clerical difficulty, the kind of thing
National Review
seldom encounters, in part because we are permissive, in part because in response to that permissiveness the staff is extra conscientious. But Arlene's problem was late rising; and this was substantially owing to a hunger for the ballet which was fanatical in its hold on her. No religious order ever held more tenacious sway over a postulant than the ballet did over Arlene who, pressed on the subject, once revealed that that particular year she had attended 260 ballets. The excitement of seeing it, I assumed at the time, kept her up into the morning, which made it difficult for her to get to work at noon, let alone at nine in the morning. That kind of hunger for the ballet I confess not to share; and indeed, a ballet in prospect, I find myself fugitively thinking about the exclusively musical event I might have gone to instead; so it is.

As we sit down, I feel the end of a newspaper tickling my ear, look back and it is Arthur Gelb, deputy managing editor of the New York
Times
. I greet him warmly (we are old friends) and he hands me the Travel section of next Sunday's edition of the New York
Times
, which features our trip on the Orient Express. I thank Arthur, wave at his author-wife Barbara, and take a peek, showing it to Pat. I am dismayed that the picture on the cover page, of Pat and me dining in the railroad car, dressed in black tie, excludes Jack and Drue Heinz, our traveling companions, because I had told them that was the picture the
Times
was planning to use; and now I see they have been cropped.

Arthur had called me a month or so ago to say that the Travel section of the
Times
was being re-geared, and would I do a sailing piece for the first issue? I told him that
The New Yorker
, at just about that same time, would be publishing a 25,000-word piece by me on sailing across the Atlantic and I doubted
The New Yorker
would be pleased if another piece on sailing appeared simultaneously; but that I
had
promised to ride on the Orient Express with the Heinzes, two weeks hence, whereupon Arthur (who is very decisive) said fine, four issues after the grand opening the
Times
would still be promoting its revised Travel section, but please I must write it as soon as possible after taking the trip. I told him we would leave Turkey on Saturday, spend the night in England, and return to New York on Sunday. "You'll have it Monday," I promised.

The circumstances of that Sunday proved amusing. We had reservations on Pan Am business class, but as I reflected on my promise to Arthur, I thought I had better change that to first class, to permit me to retreat to the top section of the 747 to use my typewriter. Accordingly, at the airport, I asked the woman at the counter if there were two first-class seats available; she punched the computer and said, "No . . .
Wait a minute!
Yes! Somebody just canceled." While she made out the boarding pass, I was to go to the cashier, pay the differential, then come back to pick up the tickets. So I went to the cashier, who made the calculations and presented me with a bill for eight hundred and eighty odd dollars. I stared at her and said that surely she had made a mistake? She looked down and said no, first class is S440 more than business class. So I said, Thanks very much, but never mind. I put the original tickets back in the envelope, and walked back to the ticket counter.

I try to make it a point not to say or even think anything unpleasant about Pan Am that insinuates extortion on its part, since poor Pan Am has lately been losing an awful lot of money; on the other hand, it isn't my personal responsibility to redress their budget balance. So I returned to the patient lady and said, "I'm terribly sorry, I've changed my mind. Can I have my two business-class seats back, please?" Again she pushed the computer. Goodness! she said. They're gone! Business class is sold out. Under the circumstances you'll have to take the first-class seats. "At the same cost as business class, of course." I thought that most awfully sporting of her, and wondered at the providence of getting $880 worth of extra space at no cost. Was
this
supply-side economics?

But on arriving in first class and mounting the staircase, I discovered that the whole of an area once reserved for business and social use was now given over to regular first-class seats, for those who didn't particularly want to see the movie. All the seats were taken. So, descending to my own seat, I realized the article would not get written. It simply isn't socially possible to type while everyone around you is trying to see a movie, and I cannot compose in longhand.

So it was that I arrived at JFK with Arthur's article unwritten. We drove to the country, had some dinner, and then I went to the garage to write the piece. It was after midnight, or 5 a.m. London time, when I came to the final paragraph: "The reconstituted Orient Express may end up in Disney World, chugging its way around Orlando, but I hope not. It is good to travel to the ancient capital of the world aboard a train built two years after Lenin died (and 54 years after one wishes he had died) and one year before Lindbergh flew the ocean, and know that it still works. It is also good to know that traveling through Europe by rail, in circumstances almost stagily comfortable, can still be done—up to a point. At the Bosporus, Asia begins, and many things end, among them the journey." And thank God, I thought, this article.

 I remember describing to Pat a complementary experience aboard another train, the longest journey I ever took. It was the early summer, 1945, pre-Hiroshima. I was a second lieutenant in the Infantry, stationed at Fort Gordon, Georgia, engaged in training recruits, when one of those Army dice-rolls spelled out my name, and I was handed orders to escort 160 enlisted men and noncommissioned officers, who had reenlisted in the regular Army, from Augusta, Georgia, to San Luis Obispo, California. I was nineteen years old and had been commissioned for about two and a half months. I was put in charge of veterans in their twenties and thirties who had seen combat in Europe, had returned home on furlough, and were now, as reenlistees, to be attached to a new outfit preparing for action in the Pacific.

My commanding officer, given to verbal economy, told me only 1) that I had the authority, as commanding officer, to conduct summary courts-martial if required to maintain discipline; 2) that I would need personally to sign for the eleven-car train, and was therefore technically responsible for anything missing when it arrived in San Luis Obispo, whether a fork or a sleeping car; 3) that the train had a low priority, so that the trip might last as many as six or seven days, depending on how many times it was shunted aside to give precedence to other trains carrying hotter cargo; and 4) that the conductor would confide to me the probable length of time the train would remain at a siding or station, but when asked by the troops "How long?" I was always to answer, "Just a few minutes"— because, explained my major, if the troops discovered that the delay would be for an hour or more, they would leave the train, get drunk, and contract a venereal disease. My success in administering this assignment, he told me, would be based substantially on the number of soldiers who, arrived at San Luis Obispo, didn't have to report to the infirmary.