A Torch Kept Lit

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  One year later he won the presidency. During those ill-fated years he lost the Vietnam War, pulled out of the Bretton Woods alliance, declared wage and price controls, and traveled to China, where he toasted the achievements of Mao Tse-tung. Not exactly a majestic roll for a right-wing American president. For all the talk about the triumphant resumption of diplomatic relations with China, it has never been clear just what was achieved by going to Peking in 1972, instead of waiting another few years until Mao, and the Cultural Revolution, had run their course. Indeed, one more remarkable achievement of Richard Nixon is how he earned the special affection and admiration of U.S. conservatives without ever significantly advancing their cause.

  In the final analysis, he was a heroic, intensely personal figure, whose life was lived on the public stage. He was at once the weakest of men, and the strongest; a master of self-abuse, and of self-recovery. Stained by worldliness, and driven by the hunger to serve. For Americans under seventy, there never was a world without Richard Nixon. Not many people can pitch whole generations into loneliness, as he has now done, R.I.P. —WFB

  “The Watergate Moment”

  New York Times, August 8, 1994.

  To look back on it: On Feb. 1, 1974, I urged President Richard Nixon to invoke the 25th Amendment and declare Gerald Ford to be acting President, on the explicit understanding that Mr. Nixon would resume the office if the impeachment proceedings came to rest without expelling him.

  That became, in the nature of things, the position of National Review, and early in March my brother, Senator James Buckley, publicly called on the President to resign. This rank-breaking severely rattled the White House, but Mr. Nixon’s strategists remained confident that the President would survive. It wasn’t until April 29 that Mr. Nixon finally succumbed to pressures from all sides and released the transcripts of the tapes. That was the moment, as I reflect on it, when one knew that the king must die.

  In April 1974, the mind of America hadn’t closed on a script for the last act of Watergate. Moral and legal conclusions were everywhere being peddled. The smoking gun transcript sat ticking away, three months off.

  Though the publication of other tape transcripts had seeded a moral consensus, deliberative men and women hadn’t all concluded, by April, that a legal offense had been committed on a scale that justified overturning the emphatic decision of the people, given in November 1972, to keep Richard Nixon in the White House.

  And the moralists (those of them who stayed sober) were asking sophisticated questions—among them, can we opine convincingly on the matter at hand when dealing with the king? Are not a President’s temptations and extravagances reasonably measured by standards different from those that apply to others?

  On July 27, 1974, Mr. Nixon lost the special House committee, which voted to impeach him on three counts. It could now be predicted that the whole House would vote to impeach—but not yet that the Senate would vote to convict. That certainty was still a week off. But by the time the smoking gunshot was heard, confirming that Mr. Nixon had conspired to obstruct justice and that he had lied about doing so, the tapes had reached into the consciousness of America. Their effect was devastating.

  P[resident]: You’ve got to have something where it doesn’t appear that I am doing this in, you know, just in a—saying to hell with the Congress and to hell with the people, we are not going to tell you anything because of executive privilege. That, they don’t understand. But if you say, “No, we are willing to cooperate,” and you’ve made a complete statement, but make it very incomplete. See, that is what I mean. I don’t want a, too much in chapter and verse as you did in your letter. I just want just a general——

  Dean: An all-around statement.

  P.: That’s right….

  Toward the end, Mr. Nixon brought in a Jesuit priest who, from the White House steps, pronounced the President to be “the greatest moral leader of the last third of this century.” For those who would not take the priest’s word for it, he asked merely that they show charity. One reaction at the time (my own):

  “Charity has nothing to do with keeping us from giving to the transcripts the kind of attention that Mr. Nixon asked us to give to them—from dwelling on the contradictions, remarking the selfishness of their concern, expressing a not uncosmopolitan dismay at the quality of the discourse. The only thing that charity absolutely requires is that no further analysis be made of the remarks of Father McLaughlin.” (This is the John McLaughlin who now presides over The McLaughlin Group on television.) It would have been stirring if on first learning that their existence had been detected, Richard Nixon had piled the tapes onto the Rose Garden grill and set a match to them. He’d have reaffirmed by concrete act the Presidential stakes he had described so apocalyptically—that the office of the President would be destroyed if ever the tapes of Presidential conversations were released. He might then with some dignity have invited Congress and the courts to do with him as they willed; he was prepared to go to the stake to protect the office.

  But he could do nothing effective. It crept into the mind of America that Richard Nixon had lost political savoir faire. He had begun by denouncing Watergate as insignificant. Soon after, he declared the need to probe Watergate fully and to expose all who were guilty. Dismayed observers were beginning to wonder whether his mind was misfiring: in one speech (April 30, 1973), he declared John Ehrlichman and Bob Haldeman the two greatest civil servants in American history and, in the same speech, fired them.

  The ongoing assertions of innocence galvanized a painful dilemma. Either his words had directly to be doubted or it was necessary to construct a scaffolding that supported both those words and the developing data—pleas of guilt by Mr. Nixon’s associates, revelations of incriminating tapes, missing portions of individual tapes. But such a structure would no longer stand up. The mind of America was closing on the question.

  I recall a visit to the Oval Office in 1970. “Bring along any one person you wish,” the President’s aide had said, so I invited James Burnham, the renowned political philosopher and my colleague at National Review. The other two in the room with the President were Attorney General John Mitchell and the chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman. The President came quickly to the point, informing me that he intended, notwithstanding that James Buckley was running against a Republican incumbent, obliquely to support my brother for the Senate in the election six weeks down the road.

  He then thought to give me some political advice to pass along to Candidate Buckley. “Tell him when he is being heckled at one of his speeches to go right up to spitting distance of the protester. The television cameras will catch that face-to-face encounter and that means votes for the law and order candidate.”

  Mr. Haldeman took it from there. “Bill, get a couple of guys from Young Americans for Freedom. Tell them to dress up like Woodstock protesters and have them throw an egg or some ketchup at your brother. That will make it into the evening television news.”

  The President leaned over to me, a Madame Tussaud smile on his face: “I didn’t hear that, Bill.”

  During those final months, he lost his capacity not to hear bad counsel, lost any capacity to listen to whatever angels struggled in his nature. When on Aug. 9 the helicopter flew him off the White House lawn to exile, there were only two policemen patrolling the street outside against the possibility of mob protests. No more were needed. The mind of America had set on the Watergate drama.

  “I was way behind in apprehending his potential,” WFB admitted of Ronald Reagan. Chatting with Nelson Rockefeller in 1967, Buckley declared, “There’s no way a former actor could go for president.” “Anybody who wins the California election with 1 million votes,” replied Rockefeller, “is presidential material.” In Reagan, WFB ultimately came to see heroic qualities: a man of intellectual and physical rigor in whose character Buckley located the central factor in the West’s triumph over communism. WFB also experienced RR as a charming friend who credited WFB, and National Review, as singularly inf
luential in the president’s intellectual development. Still, for Bill, the best part of the whole deal, secretly, was Nancy Reagan, with whom the Buckleys would carry on a deep friendship beyond Ronnie’s death. The saddest moment in The Reagan I Knew (2008), WFB’s posthumously published memoir, recounted their final meeting, in 1990, in which an afternoon taping of Firing Line (his ninth, depending on how one counts them, designed to promote Reagan’s memoir) preceded a private dinner with Nancy and Ron, Jr., at the Reagans’ Bel Air home.

  After a few minutes it became plain that the conversation was not expected at a pitch high enough to guarantee [the former president’s] hearing of it and participation in it. From time to time he would initiate a talking point, and the conversation would be general. But soon his voice quivered, and his attention was paid to the food, not to whatever was on the mind of his wife, son, and old friend.

  Of the mystery surrounding Reagan—the emotional distance he kept even from close companions—Buckley got an early glimpse. In November 1967, Governor Reagan, freshly named the Chubb Fellow at Yale, shook hands on a receiving line with WFB at his side. “I would have the same experience with Reagan two or three times again,” Buckley noted.

  What happened was that at a certain moment a faintly detectable glaze fell over his eyes. Nothing else was noticeable. His pleasantries were spontaneous, his head often bowed slightly to catch every word. But when the glaze set in, whatever faculty it is that informs you on the matter of who it is you’re talking to, in Reagan, simply cut out….About the twenty-third guest came by, and I knew that Reagan was no longer distinguishing them. Then an electric moment. A particular guest had grabbed Reagan’s hand firmly and was leaning just slightly toward him, a summons to that extra little intimacy often seen on receiving lines. But while Reagan’s smile was warm, his hand actively engaged in the guest’s hand, suddenly the guest withdrew his hand. “Ronnie,” he said, in a voice just a little strained. “This is me, George Bush.” The glaze lifted, and there was some lively patter between the Chubb Fellow who thirteen years later would become president and the man who would become his vice president and successor.

  The remarks below originally were delivered at Reagan’s eighty-eighth birthday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library celebration in Simi Valley in February 1999.

  “Ronald Reagan: 1911–2004, the Keynote Address”

  National Review, June 28, 2004.

  [originally delivered at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on February 4, 1999]

  I recall that Henry Mencken described an introduction to him on a celebratory occasion as having evoked “a full moon, the setting sun, and the aurora borealis.” In this perspective, if all the things Mark Burson has said really belong to me, how am I expected even to intimate the achievements of Ronald Reagan? Well, I can do that, really, in one sentence.

  He succeeded in getting Nancy Reagan to marry him.

  The country is familiar with the legend of Nancy, familiar with her accomplishments as companion, aide, monitor, wife, and lover. There was never anyone who more devotedly served a husband. She has renewed for us all the meaning of the pledge to stand by in sickness and in health.

  This being a convocation of friends and admirers, in celebration of his birthday, I propose as keynoter to dwell a while on a longtime friendship. It began in the spring of 1961. Ronald and Nancy Reagan, whom I hadn’t met, were seated at one end of the restaurant, my sister-in-law and I at the other end. We were out of sight of one another. Both parties were headed, after dinner, across the street to an auditorium in a public high school. There I would be introduced as the evening’s speaker, addressing an assembly of doctors and their wives, by Ronald Reagan, a well-known actor and currently the host of a television series sponsored by General Electric; moreover, a public figure who had taken an interest in conservatives and conservative writings.

  We bumped into each other going out the door. Ronald Reagan introduced himself and Nancy, and said he had just finished reading my book Up from Liberalism. He quoted a crack from it, done at the expense of Mrs. Roosevelt, which he relished. I requited his courtesy by relishing him and Nancy for life.

  He distinguished himself that night—and dismayed Mrs. Reagan—by what he proceeded to do after discovering that the microphone hadn’t been turned on. He had tried, raising his voice, to tell a few stories. But the audience was progressively impatient. Waiting in vain for the superintendent to unlock the door to the tight little office at the other end of the hall, in which the control box lay, he sized up the problem and, having surveyed all possible avenues of approach, climbed out the window at stage level and, one story above the busy traffic below, cat-walked, Cary Grant style, twenty or thirty yards to the window of the control room. This he penetrated by breaking the window with a thrust of his elbow; he climbed in, turned on the light, flipped on the microphone, unlocked the office door, and emerged with that competent relaxed smile of his, which we came to know after Grenada, Libya, Reykjavik, and Moscow; proceeding with the introduction of the speaker. And all that was thirty years before bringing peace in our time!

  In later years I thought his movements that night a nifty allegory of his approach to foreign policy, the calm appraisal of a situation, the willingness to take risks, and then the decisive moment: leading to lights and sound—and music, the music of the spheres.

  We stayed friends.

  Twenty years later he was running for President of the United States. Early that winter the Soviet military had charged into Afghanistan, beginning a long, costly, brutal exercise. A week or two after he was nominated in Detroit, I wrote him. I told him I thought he would be elected. And told him then that, on the assumption that on reaching the White House he might wish to tender me an office, I wished him to know that I aspired to no government job of any kind.

  He wrote back that he was disappointed. “I had in mind,” he said, “to appoint you ambassador to Afghanistan.” Over the next eight years, in all my communications with him, I would report fleetingly on my secret mission in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, where, in our fiction, I lived and worked. In his letters to me he would always address me as Mr. Ambassador. The show must go on, where Ronald Reagan was involved.

  Soon after his election I was asked by the Philadelphia Society to speak on the theme, “Is President Reagan doing all that can be done?” It was a coincidence that my wife, Pat, and I had spent the weekend before the Philadelphia speech as guests of the President and Mrs. Reagan in Barbados. I recalled with delight an exchange I had with my host on the presidential helicopter. We were flying to our villa the first evening, before the two days on Easter weekend reserved for bacchanalian sunning and swimming on the beach in front of Claudette Colbert’s house. I leaned over and told him I had heard the rumor that the Secret Service was going to deny him permission to swim on that beach on the grounds that it was insufficiently secure. I asked him whether that were so, that he wouldn’t be allowed in the water.

  Helicopters, even Air Force One helicopters, are pretty noisy, but I was able to make out what he said. It was, “Well, Bill, Nancy here tells me I’m the most powerful man in the Free World. If she’s right, then I will swim tomorrow with you.”

  Which indeed he did.

  I recall also that during one of our swims I said to him, “Mr. President, would you like to earn the National Review Medal of Freedom?” He confessed to being curious as to how he would qualify to do this. I explained: “I will proceed to almost drown, and you will rescue me.” We went through the motions, and that evening I conferred that medal on him, in pectore.

  —

  I remember telling the Philadelphia Society that the most powerful man in the Free World is not powerful enough to do everything that needs to be done. Retrospectively, I have speculated on what I continue to believe was the conclusive factor in the matter of American security against any threat of Soviet aggression. It was the character of the occupant of the White House; the character of Ronald Reagan
. The reason this is so, I have argued, is that the Soviet Union, for all that from time to time it miscalculated tactically, never miscalculated in respect of matters apocalyptic in dimension. And the policymakers of the Soviet Union knew that the ambiguists with whom they so dearly loved to deal were not in power during those critical years. So that if ever the Soviet leaders were tempted to such suicidal foolishness as to launch a strike against us, suicidal is exactly what it would have proven to be. The primary obstacle to the ultimate act of Soviet imperialism was the resolute U.S. determination to value what we have, over against what they, under Soviet dominion, had; value it sufficiently to defend it with all our resources.

  Ronald Reagan, in my judgment, animated his foreign policy by his occasional diplomatic indiscretions: because of course it was a diplomatic indiscretion to label the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” But then, quite correctly, he would switch gears when wearing diplomatic top hat and tails. He did not on those occasions talk the language of John Wayne—or of Thomas Aquinas.

  But how reassuring it was for us, you remember, every now and then (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”), to vibrate to the music of the very heartstrings of the Leader of the Free World who, to qualify convincingly as such, had after all to feel a total commitment to the Free World. When in formal circumstances the President ventured out to exercise conviviality with the leaders of the Soviet Union, the scene was by its nature wonderful, piquant: What would he say that was agreeable, congenial, to the head of the evil empire? The summit conferences brought to mind the Russian who, on discovering that his pet parrot was missing, rushed out to the KGB office to report that his parrot’s political opinions were entirely unrelated to his own.