A Torch Kept Lit

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Churchill suggested, in his autobiography, that after all he could not be held responsible for the incomplete peacemaking inasmuch as power was suddenly taken from him in the surprise election of 1945. But Churchill had been in power, was almost omnipotent, at Yalta, and at Teheran, where the great statesmen of the West took some steps, and failed to take others, that insured the consolidation of Stalin’s power in the territories he had overrun during the war, and insured also the expansion of the Communist system over whole continents. During those days Churchill the diplomat overwhelmed Churchill the statesman, the practitioner of justice. During those days Churchill found himself in the House of Commons delivering eulogies on the person of the abominable Stalin—a man whose evil he had years before remarked, representative of an evil whom no one had better analyzed than Churchill in the twenties. During those days he stood still for such disastrous fatuities as Franklin Roosevelt’s impetuous call for unconditional surrender, a rhetorical fillip which in the analysis of some military experts may have cost us the unnecessary death of several hundred thousand men, and which most certainly was responsible for the supine condition of much of Europe at the moment when Stalin’s legions took the nations over.

  Is Winston Churchill a hero to the Polish people who were betrayed by the West? To the Yugoslavs? To the Hungarians and Rumanians and Czechs, whose plight under Nazism Churchill had so effectively dramatized as to mobilize all the forces of moral concern the world over into a war that began as a war for their liberation from the evil Nazis, and ended as a war for their perpetual imprisonment by the evil Communists?

  It is true that at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946, Churchill focused the attention of the world, as again only he had the power to do, on the deteriorating situation. But he seemed thereafter to have lost the great engine that fired him ten years earlier to force the recognition of reality. Thenceforward he seemed only concerned to complete his literary and historical masterpieces, to regain power from the Labor Party almost only for the sake of regaining power.

  He turned over the leadership of the world to the faltering hands of Americans who were manifestly his inferiors in the understanding of history and the management of human affairs, and contented himself to write dramatically about decisive battles won for freedom on the soil of England centuries ago, battles whose victory he celebrated vicariously, having no appetite left to fight real enemies, enemies whose health he had, God save him, nourished by that fateful shortage of vision that, in the end, left him, and the world, incapable of seeing that everything he had said and fought for applied alike to the Russian, as well as the German, virus. May he sleep more peacefully than some of those who depended on him.

  There was no worse time to become director of central intelligence than when William Colby took the reins of the agency in the summer of 1973. With the daily metastasizing of the Watergate scandal, so many of whose key players were past or current CIA operatives, Langley suddenly found itself besieged as never before by explosive newspaper headlines, congressional investigations, subpoenas, Freedom of Information Act requests, all aimed at extracting the secrets of a spy service that, up to then, Colby, a mild-mannered child of the Midwest with a New England lineage, had served as director of covert operations. Amid that frenzied season of disclosure, during which calls for the abolition of CIA were common, Colby sought to stem the tide by compiling and sharing with lawmakers a previously unthinkable document: the so-called “family jewels,” 700 pages recording illegal agency operations over the preceding two decades. Some in the intelligence community regarded Colby’s triage as a monumental act of betrayal; from the sound of the eulogy below, WFB seems, belatedly, to have joined in that view. For when Gerald Ford announced Colby’s dismissal at the end of 1975, to be succeeded by George H. W. Bush, Buckley wrote that the outgoing CIA director “has carried himself through these humiliating months with exemplary virtue and taste.” Note: The eulogy below, which Buckley termed an “obituary,” is unique for its playful ending, in which the author incorporated his signature ending, the use of his initials, into the closing sentence.

  “William E. Colby, RIP”

  National Review, June 3, 1996.

  William Colby, who suffered a heart attack and, falling into the water from his canoe, drowned, served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1973 until 1975 [sic; Colby’s term ended in January 1976]. Mr. Colby, a graduate of Princeton and of the Columbia Law School, was a war hero who had volunteered for the parachute corps, hiding the fact that he had one defective eye. He deserved the decorations he won.

  His big mark on history was the testimony he gave in 1975, and arranged for others to give, to the Senate committee (headed by Frank Church) investigating the CIA. A sanguinary description of the CIA’s activity, as given in the New York Times: “…The public learned of the agency’s role in tapping the telephones and opening the mail of Americans, and compiling dossiers on them; plotting coups in foreign lands and planning to assassinate foreign leaders like Fidel Castro; using human guinea pigs for mind-control experiments involving LSD; and committing other offenses against its charter, the law, and common sense.” Mr. Colby explained his disclosures by rudimentary democratic arithmetic: Congress and the people have a right to know.

  Very different conclusions were reached by his predecessor, Richard Helms, memorialized in Thomas Powers’s book as The Man Who Kept the Secrets. Which man behaved better?

  I interrupt this obituary in deference to the protocol of full disclosure. In my first cold-war novel (Saving the Queen) and in my tenth (and last—A Very Private Plot) Blackford Oakes declines to testify to Senate committees, in the first instance, the Church committee. His grounds are that he gave his word to people who collaborated with him in sundry CIA enterprises. That’s all.

  To be sure, Blackford Oakes was a subordinate; but so was Richard Helms, a subordinate to the President. Democratic rectitude and abiding trust can and do conflict. Mr. Helms’s reading (like that of Blackford Oakes) of the quandary is that an oath to secrecy having been given, it is not cast aside, not under any circumstances. What the division of opinion reminds us is that espionage is a moral art, not subject to schematic arrangements. It is understandable, under the aspect of the heavens, that a president in very special circumstances might order a particular action executed, and deny that he had done so.

  We learn that Mr. Colby had most recently embarked on a marketing enterprise, “a computer CD-ROM game about espionage and counter-terrorism.” For some people, never mind their own record of personal bravery, espionage is, after all, a game. Ask Le Carré [sic; le Carré]. Don’t ask

  WFB

  Diana, Princess of Wales, strode the world as no figure of the British monarchy before her, mixing glamour and high fashion with an extraordinary compassion and commitment to charity. Her untimely death in a car crash in Paris while being stalked by paparazzi who lived parasitically off her fame and beauty seemed to epitomize the vulgarity of our times. Writing in his syndicated column two days later, WFB recalled having met Princess Di at the Reagan White House—in the company of John Travolta!—and mourned the passing of “the most beautiful woman alive.”

  “Princess Di, RIP”

  National Review, September 29, 1997; originally published as WFB’s syndicated column of September 2, 1997.

  People who get about bump into kings and queens here and there. A problem (in my limited experience) is that the subject royalty is really most interesting on, in brief encounters, is—royalty. If you have five minutes with the king, you are not really interested in his views on the Common Market or even on Star Wars, but you wonder about such things as, How many times in the course of a year does your majesty have to talk about the weather? During my own encounter with Princess Di (at the Reagan White House, with John Travolta), for all her reputation for informality, I took the precaution, in seeking an inanimate subject of common interest, to speak to her about jet lag (she had crossed the Atlantic that day). I gave her my son’s prescriptio
n. On hearing it she choked up with wonderfully expressive disgust and drifted off, perhaps to talk about the weather.

  My friend Bruce, working at the computer, spoke his sorrow over the news. “It’s like Cinderella in reverse.” The point is nicely made. Cinderella began poor and lonely in shabby dress, was touched by the magic wand, and fell into the royal ball, the prince enchanted by her youth and beauty. At midnight she would flash back to indigence and the torment of her stepmother and stepsisters, but the princely levitation took over, and she lived happily ever after.

  In her celebrated interview, Diana spoke of her loneliness in the royal household. She told of her problems with her health, admitted to an act of adultery, and spoke of her passionate desire to regain her privacy and live happily, superintending the education of her two sons. The divorce was quick and, because it had been publicly discounted, noiseless. The only rasp left in the proceedings was the quiet but adamantine word: She would no longer be Her Royal Highness. Indeed, even though she was no longer, as a technical matter, the Princess of Wales, she was able to continue to use that title. She spent much conspicuous time in good civic enterprise, and was inevitably the belle of the balls she attended with some regularity.

  Her overnight dalliance with Dodi Fayed was accepted by most as an entirely extemporaneous romantic attraction by a lovelorn ex-princess. Others saw it as a personal act of irreverence—nice blonde princesses don’t wander off with dark Muslim tycoons, not since Othello and Desdemona. Still others thought they were seeing strategic commercial planning. The union of Jackie Kennedy and Ari Onassis thirty years ago legitimized what in the public view would once have been thought of as on the order of miscegenation. But let it be, most people seemed to be saying.

  The event itself is saturated with mythogenic detail. Was the driver really speeding into an underpass in the heart of Paris at over one hundred miles per hour? Did one or more of the paparazzi—was it possible?—touch off camera flashes that blinded the driver? Was he, at three times the legal alcohol limit, actually out of control? Why was the car speeding so? Had Dodi or the Princess called out to the driver to accelerate and escape the pursuing journalists? Will the bodyguard, when he wakes, shed light on these questions? Tell us what he heard said, saw done?

  The Queen, we were reminded, is the final authority in specifying the shape of the funeral service. But within 36 hours we learned that just as the Supreme Court follows the election returns, so the Crown is guided by public opinion. It is known that the Queen loathed Diana (which doesn’t challenge the sincerity of her grief and shock), assigning most of the blame for the marriage’s break-up to her. There was reciprocal blame assigned—How could anyone young and tender live with someone brought up without that love of family that Charles’s austere father deprived him of?

  Yet we are reminded that the royal mandate stresses things other than fun living. The new biography of Prince Albert reminds us how successful an arranged marriage can be. The point is reinforced by the flood of books and movies featuring Jane Austen’s young ladies and their methodical search for appropriate husbands. Princess Di charmed the whole world, but also reminded us, as the lives of her aunt and her brother-in-law and sister-in-law did, that the marriage bond is frailer even in royal circles than it used to be. It is an ironic masterstroke that the descendant of Henry VIII has been freed of an encumbrance by a midnight accident in an automobile.

  How different it would have been if she had been ugly. The marriage, contracted under such circumstances, would probably have lasted, and the grief over a mortal accident would have been formalistic. We grieve the loss of a delicate fairy-tale princess, perhaps the most beautiful woman alive until that terrible moment on Saturday night.

  As the grandson of a secretary of state, the nephew-in-law to another, and the brother of a third, Allen Dulles knew his way around the corridors of power. Educated at Princeton, a trained diplomat and lawyer, Dulles had met Hitler and Mussolini personally before joining the ranks of the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. By 1953, with his brother John Foster Dulles serving as America’s top diplomat, Allen Dulles was named by President Eisenhower as the first civilian director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Dulles would run the Agency for the next nine years—longer than any director since—and preside over a period of expansion and crisis for American intelligence. During Dulles’s tenure, the Agency played a critical role in U.S.-backed coups in Iran and Guatemala and in the catastrophe at the Bay of Pigs. By late 1961, President Kennedy, displeased with his performance, pinned the National Security Medal to Dulles’s chest in a ceremony at the Agency’s Langley headquarters and then, the next day, announced Dulles’s retirement. Two years later, President Johnson appointed him to the Warren Commission that investigated Kennedy’s assassination. In his eulogy—which notably did not carry the “R.I.P.” heading—WFB struggles to find a kind word for an accomplished and patriotic man, one whose enemies WFB shared but whose legacy he regarded as injurious to national security.

  “Thoughts on the Decease of Mr. Dulles”

  National Review, February 25, 1969; originally published, with minor variations, as WFB’s syndicated column of February 14, 1969.

  During the last years of his life Mr. Allen Dulles was under relentless attack as the symbol of James Bond diplomacy, so gruesomely inappropriate, it is held, to the realities of modern politics, to such higher sophistication it makes heroes out of traitors, gods out of Kim Philby and the Rosenbergs. Ramparts magazine—it would be heartening to refer to the late Ramparts, except that it will no doubt be succeeded by something worse, the human imagination being capable nowadays of even that—made such reputation as it fleetingly had from exposing that the CIA under Mr. Dulles had done such outrageous things as subsidize Encounter magazine in London, the National Students Association in the United States, and a training program at a middlewestern university for area specialists headed for service in the CIA. For all of this, obloquy for Mr. Dulles. I do believe that he’d have been better treated in his late years by some of the press if it had transpired that he had been in collusion with the Communists, in pursuit of détente.

  All of this left Mr. Dulles on the defensive, and the general clamor subdued a criticism of his strategy which sounds faintly perverse, but which is naggingly relevant now that we have, once again, a Republican Administration with critical decisions to make concerning such issues as faced Mr. Dulles. True, there were those who make the whole right-centered criticism of Mr. Dulles awkward by such surrealisms as that Mr. Dulles was a Communist agent (yes, that is among the contributions of Mr. Robert Welch). But the sane voices from the right wondered not that Mr. Dulles was involved in subsidizing social-political movements and journals around the globe, but that he selected for patronage the left-minded organizations, on the assumption that only people who occupy a position contiguous to that of the people you worry about are likely to be effective. Thus in Italy you deal with the Social Democrats in preference to the Christian Democrats. Or, if you deal with the latter, you deal with that branch within it which tends left. Ditto elsewhere.

  The analogies abound. You deal with liberal Republicans in America, in order to try to satisfy Democrats. Rockefeller yes, Goldwater no. When time comes to send around subsidies, you send them around to journals of opinion like the New Leader, not to those like the National Review. I know one person who did service in Mexico for the CIA who happens to believe profoundly that what would most benefit the Mexican people would be a stiff dose of capitalism, so as to free the poor from the sclerosis of years and years of supergovernment. He found himself a dozen years ago serving as a paymaster, with a wad of money in an envelope destined for an organization whose principal slogan was “Ni Comunismo, Ni Capitalismo,” that is to say: neither Communism nor Capitalism—leaving: well, leaving what Mexico has got.

  The reasoning, as I say, is psychologically obvious. The mischief of it lay in the hesitation of Mr. Dulles an
d his superiors to adopt radical strategy, radical strategy being the defense of conservative institutions and ideas on the altogether reassuring assumption that they would result in radical relief for the wretched of this world. Shortly before he died, Henry Luce thought to formulate a similar position in addressing the National Council of Churches: Look (he intended to say) if you are genuinely concerned with the starving peoples of the world, which you no doubt are, are you not obliged to investigate the apparent corollary between agricultural plenty and the free marketplace, as also agricultural privation and socialism? In other words, could you not, even in the name of Christianity, bring yourself to say a good word for capitalism?

  During the Dulles years, conservatives starved to death. Precisely those people who reasoned that you could not deal with the Soviet Union, that the politics of détente were doomed to suffer such deaths as Dubcek suffered last summer. It was a period during which the resoluteness of our anti-Communism was never in doubt, but a period during which the enemy gained vast continents, established themselves in power, developed their hydrogen bombs and missiles, and continued to hold us at missile-point.

  It seems mean to observe at this point that Mr. Dulles should have been spared the criticisms of the Left, so as to expose himself to the criticisms of the Right. Let it be recorded, at least, that he sought to maneuver with the realpolitik of the postwar era, and that although he may have made bad strategic miscalculations, he was made to suffer at the hands of the wrong people. Because even if he did not know how finally to cope with the enemy, he knew at least who the enemy was, and that, these days, is practically a virtuoso performance.