A Torch Kept Lit

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Wm. F. Buckley Jr. * 215 Lexington Avenue

  New York, NY 10016

  March 10, 2004

  Dear Alistair:

  I brooded over the news you gave me, trying to think how I might express myself. I decided on a device I have never used before, and will never use again: I have written the short obituary I will publish in NATIONAL REVIEW at the appropriate time. I confide it to you. And look forward to our visit on Monday. XB

  Alistair Cooke was, in England, the best-known living American except for the president. That meant, during his career, excepting Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter—correction! Cooke was probably better known than Carter—Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and…Bush. He coexisted with all these chiefs of state over all those years in several capacities, most prominently as author of a weekly BBC “letter” in which he recounted what was going on in his adopted country with a poise and understanding unequaled by any other expatriate, and unsurpassed by any native-born observer. He called an end to his Letter from America in March; his last letter was Number 2,869. One commentator in London said that news of Cooke’s ending his broadcasts to England was on the order of news that the Queen had died.

  He did everything with that wry, amiable, but firm-handed assurance that made him the ideal host on large-scale television enterprises. He was master of ceremonies for Masterpiece Theater, and proved irreplaceable when he gave up that commission. His book on America was a startling bestseller. When published it sold out almost immediately, reaching #1 on the New York Times’s list. He was dismayed to learn that the intricately designed volume would take three months to reproduce in a second printing. Three months later it reappeared in the bookstores and leaped once more to the #1 spot.

  My experience of his friendship was, if not unique, at least ever so unusual. The narrative of it goes back to 1974, when he reviewed one of my collections for the Washington Post. I was unsurprised by its acuity, but moved by its courtesy and indeed geniality. (AC was a political liberal.) I wrote to him and he proposed that we lunch, which we proceeded to do in what became a lunch every quarter for nearly thirty years. His copious memory and Scots background always supplied, at the end of lunch, the answer to the question, Is it your turn to pay the bill, or mine?

  A few years ago the doctors told him he would need to stay home, so that our quarterly lunches became fortnightly glasses of wine, with his beautiful ninety-year-old wife, the artist. These visits were at his apartment on the eleventh floor overlooking Central Park. Eight floors closer to the ground was the apartment of New Yorker legend William Shawn, who declined to visit at the penthouse because he was afraid of heights.

  No visitor was ever afraid that conversation would flag, or that niches of American history or English literature would be ignored, let alone that listlessness would creep into the room. Cooke’s animation was boundless, his pointed memory infinite. He remembered everything, including the history of the world and amusing encounters with kings and writers and his true heroes, the great golfers. He would sit, his head slightly bent, and observe his lifelong rule, which was to entertain and to charm and to inform.

  He called me the week after he announced the end of his BBC program to give me a confidence. His doctor, after examining his lungs, had pronounced a death sentence. When that is told you by someone aged ninety-five, expressions of hope are limited. What can one say, except to curse the necessary ending even of lives of such singular men, after so many years of enchanting the public and his friends? Nothing, beyond expressing quiet gratitude for the promise of eternal life in the hereafter. —WFB

  “Alistair Cooke, R.I.P.”

  National Review, April 19, 2004.

  We met, as we habitually did, on the Monday afternoon, at six. He was seated in the usual chair, in a dressing gown, and didn’t take my hand—“Nobody is permitted to touch me! Infection, they say.” And he was off, touching in the hour on a hundred points of interest, if not of concern, including the career of the German whose King Lear he had so much admired, and who had fled Hitler for America, ending his career playing butler parts in Hollywood. “I received yesterday,” Cooke said, an impish grin on his face, “a letter from Churchill College in Cambridge. It read, ‘Mr. Cooke, now that you have ended your BBC broadcasts, you will have time to relax and put your feet on the desk. This will, we hope, give you time to act as a trustee of Churchill College.’ ” He laughed. “I wrote back: ‘Thank you for your invitation. In about two months, I will put my feet up on the desk permanently.’ ” Cooke thought this very funny, which indeed it was, very nearly, though not quite, dispelling the gloom in his visitor’s heart. His animation was at par, and I told him good night and said I’d be with him the following Monday.

  That next Monday—yesterday—I called and learned that he was not feeling well; I’d best postpone my visit. This morning the news came to me that he had died at midnight. I called his secretary, who I knew from prolonged contact was so intelligently and affectionately involved in his life. She told me that on reading my covering letter, he had instructed her to reinsert my obituary into the envelope: He declined to read it.

  He would certainly have corrected my mistaken reference to him as a Scotsman—he was raised in Manchester. And he might have suggested that I give the name of the beautiful lady he was married to, Jane White Hawkes. His declining a look at the obituary was understandable, though I regret he did not have from me this record of my affection and admiration for him. —WFB

  Excerpted from “10 Friends,” Forbes FYI, September 2000.

  The first time was lunch.

  Nothing pleases the author more than a fine book review, especially from an unexpected source. My book was a collection, and I stared with dumb gratitude at a marvelously hospitable review by the great, discerning Alistair Cooke in the Washington Post. I characterize as “discerning” any complimentary book reviewer! But it was welcome, from so august a figure, more widely known in his native England than any American with the exception of the president. Moreover, Cooke—I had gathered, from his writing, and from certain intimations in his famous introductions on Masterpiece Theater—was something of a liberal, so that the surprise was especially great. I expressed my gratitude in a letter. He wrote back immediately and said let’s lunch.

  That was in 1971, and the wonder of it is that at the end of the lunch we made another lunch date for three months later. There was the usual reaching-for-the-check, but soon we agreed to alternate. And then that was followed by a date for another lunch—three months later. The schedule is unbroken, though interrupted by his recent illness.

  What’s it like, lunching with Alistair Cooke?

  For one thing, there’s his memory. He’s 91 and I’d be surprised if he has forgotten anything. I amuse myself every now and then by asking, when the check comes: “I forget, Alistair, is it your turn to pay or mine?” He remembers instantly. He is a resolute Scot [sic].

  His memory extends to improvisational powers. He doesn’t tell of his accomplishments, but by probing I learned how he did his famous introductions of Masterpiece Theater on PBS. He would concentrate on the play or the drama and its author and the circumstances of its writing, then he would arrive at the studio, sit down in his armchair, and the perfectly phrased 90-second introductions would flow from his lips. He’d speak the improvised lines as confidently as if called upon to give the Lord’s Prayer—which I’ve never asked him to do. Next lunch I’ll try to remember.

  His cachet, beginning many years before PBS, has been his weekly 15-minute report on America for the BBC. In America, we know him for his television work; among the cognoscenti, he is celebrated for his fine writing style and memorable portraits. His friends know him for his humor and geniality.

  “Is there anybody you haven’t known?” He pauses, his white hair framing the famous face, the eyebrows that lift for a moment, the smile. He is thinking.

  “Not really, I guess I’d have to say.” I make it a po
int not to ask him who out there among the thousand public figures he didn’t like. He’ll get to that, if he wants to; one doesn’t press.

  Though I did nag him about his legs. For Cooke, golf comes in just after good reading and writing. But the anxiety ended. At one memorable lunch (we meet at the Carlyle Hotel) he surprised me on arrival by saying: “Ask me to dance around the buffet.”

  “To what?”

  “Watch.” He did a jig around the collection of trays and sat down with a triumphant smile. “That’s what the operation has done for me.” He had had two knee replacements, and now could go back to his golf without pain.

  Alistair Cooke has never sounded old-fashioned, let alone out of date, but certain ways of doing things are unalterable, including his love of jazz (he was a fine pianist) and his devotion to an old typewriter, with its distinctive, falling-apart-old font. “A young grandson came to see me the other day. He’s 17. He said, ‘Grandfather, is it true you have a typewriter?’ Yes, I said. ‘Could I see it?’ ”

  He loved that: genuine innocence. It had better be genuine, because Alistair Cooke sees through everything and everybody. His geniality and bounce are always there, but his light blue eyes are penetrating. What a piece of luck, lunching with Alistair Cooke for 30 years.

  Upon his death at the age of ninety-four, the New York Times hailed Milton Friedman as “the grandmaster of free-market economic theory in the postwar era and a prime force in the movement of nations toward less government and greater reliance on individual responsibility.” Ranked among the greatest intellectuals of his era, Friedman received every honor that can be bestowed on an economist, including the Nobel Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His best-selling 1978 book Freedom to Choose, coauthored with his wife, Rose, receives an early nod in WFB’s eulogy, which begins with meditations on the propriety of lamenting the death of nonagenarians and on the different ways in which personal friends and the nation at large will mourn an individual. Buckley’s friendship with Friedman spanned five decades. It extended—once annually for nearly twenty years—to the ski slopes and, of course, to the set of Firing Line. Their most memorable televised encounter came in December 1990, two months after the publication of WFB’s Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe to Our Country, in which the founder of National Review argued that government incentives—and sanctions—should be deployed to encourage young people to devote a year of service to America. “You, of all people,” Friedman scolded, “somebody who’s spent his life trying to fight the overgrown government, who’s spent his life defending the virtues of individual freedom, of the free market—and here you come up with a program that’s the opposite of everything you’ve stood for all your life.” “We live in a society in which young people and older people don’t give any evidence of gratitude for what it is that we inherit,” Buckley countered, “and I’m looking for the redevelopment of an ethos that causes people to show that they are willing to reciprocate.” Friedman was not persuaded: “The question is: Why is it that we have had so much of a reduction in the sense of gratitude? In my opinion it’s primarily because we’ve been doing so much through government…and as a result we have destroyed a sense of individual responsibility and responsibility to one another.”

  “Milton Friedman, R.I.P.”

  National Review, December 18, 2006.

  It isn’t right to rail against fortune when death comes to a friend, or a hero—in this case, both—at the high age of 94. Still, we are free to choose, and there was grief when word came to us of the death of Milton Friedman. We were on board a large ship, where a week of seminars at sea was being guided by a dozen celebrants of conservative doctrine. One was to have been Friedman himself, but when the boat pulled away from San Diego, bound for Mexico, Friedman was in a hospital in San Francisco.

  What struck the band of brothers who came together last Friday afternoon to devise an impromptu tribute to our missing seminarist was in fact exactly that—grief, never mind that he had lived 94 years. Although Professor Friedman engaged himself to the end, in tandem with his brilliant wife, Rose, in academic and philosophical work, it was not the discontinuation of this that caused the pang aboard the S.S. Oosterdam. If the word had come that Friedman would never again write an academic paper, or a book or column, we’d have tightened our belts, and perhaps reminded ourselves of the million words that are there in print, and will always be there, to reread and to ponder. But what we felt was not so much the discontinuation of that great wellspring of liberal and penetrating thought. It was grief for the loss of a person.

  It is inevitably so that the end of life of a central intellectual or political or indeed theatrical figure can be felt personally only by a comparative few, because only a few can have known any historical figure. The legion of admirers at a remove—those who felt for him, without ever having met him, admiration, devotion, even love—is something different, more detached. But there was also the impact of his person on individual students and friends and coadjutors, and on Thursday, November 16, we felt a wholly personal loss.

  The next day we put together an afternoon seminar at the hands of confederates on board. John O’Sullivan spoke of the international impact Friedman had had during five decades, from the Sixties until the end. Robert Conquest, the scholar of Russia, poet, and, along with Friedman, fellow at the Hoover Institution, remarked the cultural impact of the great economist. Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru spoke of his influence on undergraduates. Arnold Beichman, also a fellow at the Hoover Institution, an author and public intellectual—and nonagenarian—had known the deceased as long as anyone present, and did not attempt to hide his tears. Jay Nordlinger presided, weaving together, for the benefit of the 400 guests, the highlights of the life so mourned.

  This author and friend had been struck down by an overnight illness. Had I spoken, I’d have stressed Milton’s capacity for friendship and fine company. We met, along with another friend, every year for nineteen years for a long weekend of skiing and conviviality, interrupted, finally, by illness. “When I undertook the operation,” he wrote me in 1994, “I did it very much in the hope that it would enable me to go skiing in January, but I am afraid the recovery isn’t going to be fast enough for me to do so. I have already told Lawry [Chickering] about it. I cannot tell you how much I regret having to do this. With all my love, Milton.” A year later: “I do not believe in miracles, and that is what I believe it would take to enable me to be on skis in six months’ time.” A year later: “Those many years we spent three days together at Alta are among my happiest memories.” And after I published a piece about our skiing life, “You captured beautifully our joint satisfaction with our sessions at Alta. The fluency and sensitivity of your writing always astound me. Your generosity of spirit is remarkable and I am most grateful for having been a major beneficiary.”

  That is how true friends can address each other, and it was the impact of an end to the expression of such sentiments that struck me so hard on learning of the death of this Nobel Prize winner, the dominant economic and libertarian voice of the 20th century, my sometime skiing buddy. —WFB

  WFB’s eulogy for Jerry Garcia, lead singer and guitarist for the Grateful Dead, offers insight into the way Buckley processed news events about individuals with whose work or legacy he enjoyed only passing familiarity—or, as he admits here, none at all. Still, Buckley’s commentary on the hippie mentality and its outward expressions was earnest and cultivated in the sense that he engaged the subject for decades; one thinks of the scene, recounted in Cruising Speed (1971), in which WFB and Pat, joined by Peter Glenville and a friend, ducked into a Manhattan theater to see the Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter. (Pat objected: “I saw Woodstock and hated it!”) In polemical terms, WFB’s critique of the Deadheads is strictly inductive—perhaps inductio ad absurdum.

  “Jerry Garcia, RIP”

  Syndicated column, August 18, 1995; published in National Review, September 25, 1995.

  If I ever heard a song play
ed by the Grateful Dead I wasn’t aware of it. If I had been, I’d have pricked up my ears and listened real hard because I have a memory. It is of a young man who came to work at my shop. He had just graduated from Harvard, wanted to do some opinion journalism, and qualified for a summer internship that stretched into two or three years.

  It was toward the end of the decade of the Sixties that he drew me aside one day, after we had gone to press. He said that he had been to a concert by the Grateful Dead and that it was a wonderful experience, and that he would go again whenever the group was in reach, and he invited me to join him at one of the concerts, which I wish I had done.

  I have to suppose that, like so many others, I would have survived the experience without such harm as finally came to Jerry Garcia and, 25 years before Garcia, to our young intern. He did his work, but with progressive listlessness. His editorial paragraphs had never been razor sharp but they had been trenchant and readable, and now they were murky.

  Things got worse, and now came the trappings, which were conventional. It began with sandals, then went in the usual direction, though I don’t remember that he ran a ring through his ear. When an anniversary issue was planned for the magazine he suddenly demanded that his “generation” be represented, so I told him to go ahead and write what he thought would be a useful essay.