A Torch Kept Lit

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  It came to me last Thursday when just after midnight my son reached me at the hotel, that I have always subconsciously looked out for the total Christian, and when I found him, he turned out to be a nonpracticing Jew. It will require the balance of my own lifetime to requite what he gave to me. —WFB

  Evan G. (“Van”) Galbraith was almost a lifelong friend of WFB’s and probably his closest. They met at Yale on Election Day 1948. A graduate also of Harvard Law School and a Wall Street banker, Galbraith would go on to serve as chairman of the NR board of trustees, as President Reagan’s ambassador to France, and as president of Moët & Chandon. Like Buckley, Galbraith also served a brief stint as a CIA officer. He was a frequent skiing and sailing companion of WFB’s, and his journal entries, bursting with salty wit, enlivened Buckley’s books about their adventures at sea. Christopher Buckley, who accompanied WFB and Van on their three transoceanic voyages, recalled that Galbraith, “handsome, blond, brawny, broken-nosed,” possessed “the rare gift of being able to make almost any unpleasant situation funny.” Case in point: After wrapping up his watch duty, Galbraith would startle awake the next passenger slated for that duty, in the dead of night, with absurd cheerfulness: “Good news—you don’t have to sleep anymore!” Given the length and depth of their bond—Galbraith was one of two friends who celebrated WFB’s eighty-second, and final, birthday with him, at a moment when Galbraith had just completed his thirtieth radiation treatment for cancer and himself had only months to live—it is fitting that Galbraith should have been the subject of the last eulogy Buckley ever wrote, published about two weeks before his own death. Its brevity, however—fewer than 350 words—probably reflects WFB’s rapidly declining health, for in more vigorous times he had been in the habit of remembering even more distant friendships at greater length and almost surely would have done that for this accomplished man he so loved and admired.

  “Evan Galbraith, R.I.P.”

  National Review, February 11, 2008.

  Van Galbraith’s credentials were pretty impressive. We were classmates at Yale and then he went to Harvard Law School. After that came service as a naval officer, in the folds of the CIA. Then a top law firm in New York City, and on to London, where he represented his firm and did private business. But his interest in public affairs was irresistible, and when Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president, Galbraith was sworn in as ambassador to France, abandoning even his post as chairman of the board of trustees of National Review. After Paris, back to the law and to business, but soon he was in Europe again, this time in Brussels as defense adviser to the U.S. mission at NATO. He pulled away from that in November, and died January 21 in New York of problems that traced to a cancer discovered, but not arrested, years ago.

  A deskbound life? Hardly. He made four transoceanic passages with me on sailboats, performing duties at sea without ever learning, quite, how to sail. We skied together every winter and his proficiency there was that of an expert. He wrote and published two books and loved to give advice, oracular in tone, shrewd in conception—underestimated only by those of invincible ignorance who set his advice aside. They included an illustrious if wrong-headed company of presidents and kings and commissars.

  In one enterprise he was unfailing. Everyone he knew came up upon his brightness of spirit. The acuity of his wit was always inflected through his personal generosity. When you add the hours at sea and the snows traversed together to the classroom work taken jointly, I must have spent more time with Evan Galbraith than with any other human being outside my family. The loss to his own family is awful to contemplate, while the pleasures he gave, in his seven decades, to all he brushed up against are as incalculable as the depths of his laughter and the joy he gave to the world.

  The first words John Kenneth Galbraith spoke to WFB were “I regret that.” The setting, in November 1966, was an elevator in New York’s Plaza Hotel, where the two men and their wives were arriving for Truman Capote’s masked ball; Buckley had asked JKG to explain why he had warned a colleague not to publish in National Review. Thus commenced one of the deepest, most affectionate friendships of Buckley’s adult life, played out on the ski slopes of Gstaad and countless TV news sets and debate stages. At six-foot-eight, Galbraith cut an imposing figure, but the Harvard economist, who served as President Kennedy’s ambassador to India, never intimidated WFB: The conservative godfather delighted in mocking his friend’s liberal theories. Galbraith’s works were widely read—several of his coinages entered the national lexicon, from “the conventional wisdom” to “the affluent society,” the title of his 1958 book—and Buckley considered his friend, however misguided, as influential as Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes. Their differences remained acute: Not long after their elevator encounter, Buckley accused JKG, in a column, of “seem[ing] to want most of all a military defeat and the psychological humiliation of this country.” Still, Galbraith’s eleven appearances on Firing Line set the standard for elevated, witty debate. In a 1969 show, Galbraith suggested that Buckley knew all too well the feelings associated with recantation. “I may be guilty of heresies,” WFB said, “but I don’t remember deserting any of my heresies.” “Oh, yes, yes, Bill,” JKG shot back. “I remember that very good book of yours, The Unmaking of a Mayor, where you deserted your whole conservative doctrine.” And on the special occasion in July 1972 when Firing Line welcomed JKG and two of his sons, distinguished academics both, WFB began: “I regret to report that there is no generation gap between father and sons.” On a Mideast trip in February 2013, I asked Secretary of State John Kerry if he had ever met WFB; Kerry replied that he had once appeared on Firing Line and added, “I loved Bill Buckley.” Asked why, he cited WFB’s abiding friendship with J. K. Galbraith: “That’s what’s missing from politics today.”

  “John Kenneth Galbraith, R.I.P.”

  National Review, May 22, 2006.

  I file this story, remarking the death of John Kenneth Galbraith, only with the forbearance of the editors of National Review. I draw deep into the forbearing capital I have accumulated in this journal by writing so personal an account of his life. It pleases me that he knew the value I placed on his friendship, which here impels something of a corruption of my duties.

  The public Galbraith I knew and contended with for many years is captured in the first paragraph of my review of his 1992 book, The Culture of Contentment. I wrote then: “It is fortunate for Professor Galbraith that he was born with singular gifts as a writer. It is a pity he hasn’t used these skills in other ways than to try year after year to bail out his sinking ships. Granted, one can take satisfaction from his antihistorical exertions, and wholesome pleasure from his yeomanry as a sump-pumper. Indeed, his rhythm and grace recall the skills we remember having been developed by Ben-Hur, the model galley slave, whose only request of the quartermaster was that he be allowed every month to move to the other side of the boat, to ensure a parallel development in the musculature of his arms and legs. I for one hope that the next time a nation experimenting with socialism or Communism fails, which will happen the next time a nation experiments with socialism or Communism, Ken Galbraith will feel the need to explain what happened. It’s great fun to read. It helps, of course, to suppress wistful thought about those who endured, or died trying, the passage toward collective living to which Professor Galbraith has beckoned us for over forty years, beguiling the subliterate world, here defined as those whose knowledge of what makes the world work is undeveloped, never mind that many of them have Ph.Ds.”

  So it is said, for the record; and yet we grieve, those of us who knew him. We looked to his writings not for his social indenture to a progressive state, but for the work of a penetrating mind who turned his talent to the service of his ideals. This involved waging war against men and women who had, under capitalism, made strides in the practice of industry and in promoting the common good. Galbraith denied them the tribute to which they were entitled. It was bad enough, for him, that some Americans contributed to the commonweal the fruit of
their industry. When they went further and offered their intellectual insights, Galbraith was unforgiving. Prof. Arthur Laffer, the idiomatic godfather of supply-side economics, Galbraith dismissed as if his work were of zero interest. His appraisal of such intellectual dissenters from his ideas of the common good derived from the psaltery of his moral catechism, cataloguing the persistence of poverty, the awful taste of the successful classes, and the wastefulness of the corporate and military establishments.

  He dismisses conflicting notions with a wonderful contempt. “It is not clear that anyone of sober mentality took Professor Laffer’s curve and conclusions seriously,” Galbraith writes. Watch now the mortal dig: “He must have credit, nonetheless, for showing that justifying contrivance, however transparent, could be of high practical service.” Where Mr. Galbraith is not easily excusable is in his search for disingenuousness in such as Charles Murray, a meticulous scholar of liberal background, whose Losing Ground is among the social landmarks of the postwar era. “In the mid 1980s,” Galbraith writes, “the requisite doctrine needed by the culture of contentment to justify their policies became available. Dr. Charles A. Murray provided the nearly perfect prescription….Its essence was that the poor are impoverished and are kept in poverty by the public measures, particularly the welfare payments, that are meant to rescue them from their plight.” Whatever Murray’s modifications, “the basic purpose of his argument would be served. The poor would be off the conscience of the comfortable, and, a point of greater importance, off the federal budget and tax system.”

  One needs to brush this aside and dwell on the private life of John Kenneth Galbraith. I know something of that life, and of the lengths to which he went in utter privacy to help those in need. He was a truly generous friend. The mighty engine of his intelligence could be marshaled to serve the needs of individual students, students manqué, people who had a problem. Where he would not yield was in intellectual and social perspective. I had a letter from him a week before he died, pressing a point he had made orally when we last visited a few weeks ago. He added: “Nothing, of course, gives me more pleasure than lecturing on the nature of true conservatism.”

  Two or three weeks ago he sent me a copy of a poll in which he and his accomplishments were rated by the academic economics profession. He was voted the third most influential economist of the 20th century, after Keynes and Schumpeter. I think that ranking tells us more about the economics profession than we have any grounds to celebrate, but that isn’t the point I made in acknowledging his letter. I had received, only a day or two before, a book about the new prime minister of Canada, Mr. Stephen Harper, in which National Review and its founder are cited as the primary influences in his own development as a conservative leader. But I did not mention this to Galbraith either. He was ailing, and this old adversary kept from him loose combative data which would have vexed him.

  I was one of the speakers at his huge 85th-birthday party at the Boston Public Library. My four-minute talk was interrupted halfway through by the master of ceremonies. “Is there a doctor in the house?” The acoustics at the library were bad, and the next day I sent Galbraith the text of my talk. A week later I had his acknowledgment. It read: “Dear Bill: That was a very pleasant talk you gave about me. If I had known it would be so, I would not have instructed my friend to pretend, in the middle of your speech, to need the attention of a doctor.”

  Forget the whole thing, the getting and spending, and the Nobel Prize nominations, and the economists’ tributes. What cannot be forgotten by those exposed to it is the amiable, generous, witty interventions of this man, with his singular wife and three remarkable sons, and that is why there are among his friends those who weep that he is now gone. —WFB

  Tom Hume was an architect, sailor—part of the crew aboard the 1966 winner of the Mallory Cup—and father of six in a family with long roots in Connecticut. He and Buckley graduated from Yale together and remained sailing buddies until a stroke incapacitated Hume, in 1981, at the age of fifty-three. He would live, trapped within himself but still able to communicate in a limited fashion to those who knew him best, for another twenty-two years. In this eulogy, delivered at Hume’s funeral service, WFB remembers his friend, whom Pat Buckley, more than a half century earlier, had declared “the most handsome man I have ever laid eyes on.”

  Remarks at the funeral service for Thomas Hume, St. Clement’s Church, Stamford, Connecticut, November 6, 2003; published in National Review, December 8, 2003.

  We were all of us, in the Yale Class of 1950, asked to give a few sentences of biographical information for the 50th anniversary yearbook. Tom Hume wrote: “My life changed on November 16, 1981, when I suffered a stroke at age 53. After a difficult recovery, stretching over two years, I have limited ability to read, write, or converse.” But he did manage, with appropriate contrivances, to drive a car, and to captain a Dyer 29 frequenting Long Island Sound, which, as he put it, “I know well and find endlessly fascinating.” And he cruised in the waterways of Europe, and spent happy days with his ten grandchildren. He cultivated, also, his artistic skills and painted in watercolor.

  When in 1949 I introduced Tom, at Yale, to my fiancée, Pat Taylor, she turned to me after he had left the room and said, “That is the most handsome man I have ever laid eyes on.” I suppressed my jealousy, and concurred. He was, also, a brilliant student. As an architect, years later, he did wonderfully imaginative work for me, including a subterranean swimming pool which I cheerfully hailed in one of my books as the most beautiful this side of the mosaic pool in Pompeii, which caused my critics to croak forth that I was advertising my own artistic talents, requiring me to rebuke them publicly by saying that I had nothing to do with the pool, except to pay for it: The artistry of it was Tom Hume’s, and Robert Goodnough’s.

  One evening in October 1981, we set out on my sloop at 6 P.M., headed for Newport. We arrived just after 10 the next morning, a heady propulsion. Stamford to Newport, 135 miles in 16 hours. All of nature, wind and tides, colluded to get us there at maximum speed, with a southerly wind, in bright autumn weather. Tom, the expert sailor, had sailed and raced with me from time to time, including one trip to Bermuda. He was always calm, decisive, inquisitive, companionable. But six weeks later he was lying on his back in a hospital bed.

  I wrote about that visit in one of my books back then. “The omnicompetent Tulita, having brought up six children,” I reported, “had now been working for Channel 13 in New York, but substantially she has become a therapist, wholly confident of Tom’s recovery. Tom can’t talk, though one has the feeling that he can understand. His eyes are luminous with intelligence, and every now and again he attempts a phrase, but it usually reduces, smiling through his effort, merely to ‘shit,’ a word, in his frustration, he seems to utter with abandon and security. His right arm is lifeless, and he has been practicing pencil strokes with his left hand. I dumped on him last week a supply of oils, brushes, and crayons. He has not broken them out—probably he is having trouble concentrating. His ambition, Tulita tells me, is to leave the hospital and go directly to the therapeutic center; and from there right back to his desk at the office, say in six months. Let us pray. I told him I had done just that at church, and he didn’t say shit, perhaps because he is himself a believer. His uncle founded Canterbury School, his cousin is head of St. David’s in New York.”

  Those hopes were denied. What never altered was the devoted care Tulita gave him. In my lifetime, I have known two women about whom I could say that their pledges to stand by, in sickness and in health, were wholly tested, Tulita Hume and Nancy Reagan.

  My wife and I saw the Humes from time to time, and although by now there was no substantial relief in store for Tom, he was always cheerful. He loved to laugh, and he had help from the Lord, whose temple he frequented almost daily, one final time this morning, when we mourn his death, while reaffirming the joy we took from his friendship, commending him to eternal rest, and resolved always to remember him as a most handsome man, in our
eyes, and, surely, in the eyes of the Lord. —WFB

  Nan Kempner was one of Manhattan’s most prominent socialites: a leading hostess and philanthropist, patron of the arts, and unabashed diva of the fashion world. Considered by many to have been the model for the “social X-rays” Tom Wolfe anatomized in Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)—the too-rich, too-thin women whose Park Avenue parties marked the epicenter of high society—Kempner proudly acknowledged having been one of the first Americans to undergo plastic surgery. Blessed with a slim figure she maintained through rigorous daily exercise, Kempner was a fixture at the premier fashion shows in New York and the capitals of Europe. Yves Saint Laurent proclaimed her “la plus chic du monde”; Vanity Fair crowned her “the world’s most famous clotheshorse.” Asked once to define her “look,” she replied with characteristic guilelessness: “Artificially relaxed.” WFB had known her “rather aloof” husband, the investment banker Thomas Kempner, since 1946, when they had entered Yale as freshmen; Pat Buckley—no slouch in the elite precincts of entertaining, philanthropy, and haute couture—considered Nan, a frequent visitor to the Buckleys’ Gstaad chalet, her best friend. “She has,” WFB writes here, “no successor.”

  “Notes & Asides”

  National Review, October 24, 2005.

  [reprinting WFB’s remarks at a memorial service held at Christie’s auction house in Manhattan, September 23, 2005]