Bill then goes through his stack, and by 4:15 I am back in my office, and Frances gives me the day's telephone messages. WNET wants me to act as host for the television series, Brideshead Revisited, whose huge success in England I have read about. They need to know, says Frances, whether I am even remotely interested—enough so to sit through the thirteen hours of videocassettes. I tell Frances I'll let them know within a day or two, and please to try to find Alistair Cooke's November telephone number (he has about twelve) since preeminently he would be in a position to advise me on what is involved in hosting a series. I am taken by the idea, since Brideshead is a haunting and controversial book. . . .
The New York Times called to ask who had taken the photograph of me and Pat on the Orient Express that they will use in the Travel section, as they will want to send him a check (for $75). I tell Frances that the picture in question was taken with my own camera by the waiter, and it would not be feasible to locate him. The spread will not be out until next Sunday and I haven't seen it, but the galleys, corrected over the weekend, amused me because I had privately gambled that one sentence I used would never see the light of day. On, learning that the Times had a strict limit of $500 for any travel piece, a sum that hardly returned me my costs, I had written: "Aboard the Orient Express, the consumption of [drinks from the bar] is encouraged, by the way, and they are cash-and-carry, and there is no nonsense about special rates. A gin and tonic is $4, a liqueur $6. These prices, weighed on the scales of the Old Testament, are not prohibitive, unless you are trying to make a living writing for the Travel section of the New York Times."
I won—the third sentence did not survive. It's a funny thing about the Times: I don't know anybody who works for it who doesn't have a sense of humor (big exception: John Oakes. But then he retired as editorial page director several years ago, and is understandably melancholy about having to live in a world whose shape is substantially of his own making). Abe Rosenthal, the working head of the newspaper, is one of the funniest men living. Punch Sulzberger is wonderfully amusing, and easily amused. And so on. But there is some corporate something that keeps the Times from smiling at itself; don't quite know what.
Frances tells me that a reporter for the Harvard Crimson has called three times, that he is working on a deadline, and that he wishes from me a) a comment on the resolution to be argued against John Kenneth Galbraith in a televised debate at Harvard in January, and b) my ideas as to what I "hope to accomplish." The resolution is: "Resolved, That this House approves the economic initiatives of the Reagan Administration." I tell Frances to call the reporter back and say that my view of the resolution is that "it is satisfactory," and that my "hope" is that "my knowledge of economics should trickle down to Professor Galbraith and his colleagues."
I occasionally like to tease James Jackson Kilpatrick by calling him "Jim," because on "Meet the Press," candidate Ronald Reagan once referred to him as "Jim" (he is "Jack," or "Kilpo"). I mentioned this, in January of election year, to Reagan's then campaign manager, John Sears. Sears smiled. "That's nothing," he said, making reference to New York's principal Republican, "he calls Perry Duryea 'Da??'/" Kilpo has called to say he isn't sure he can make connections with us in Switzerland in January, we having postponed our departure by three days. . . .
Other calls I can delay, but not that of Bob Bauman. I hadn't spoken to Bob since the scandal over a year ago, in the fall of 1980, when it was revealed that, while drinking, he had solicited sex from a young male. The news came as a considerable blow, needless to say, to the Bauman family, but also to the conservative community, not least because in Congress Bob over the years had acquired a considerable reputation as a parliamentarian at the service of the right, but also as a heckler of others' moral weaknesses. The government dropped the charge, on the condition that Bauman promise to take part in a rehabilitation program.
Bob (whom I'd known, as also his wife Carol, since he helped to found the Young Americans for Freedom) had made an announcement of some dignity at a press conference, in which he made no attempt at self-justification, contenting himself to say that since the time of the offense, he had succeeded in curing himself entirely of alcoholism, and that any tendency to homosexuality had gone with the alcohol—and that under the circumstances, he would not retire from the race for re-election to Congress. I was in Seattle, lecturing, when I got the news, and I don't remember a column I ever wrestled with more than the one I wrote that night, calling on Bauman to resign from the race. Although he never wrote to me, he is said greatly to have resented my declaration; and now he was calling.
I greeted him. He answered amiably and told me that he had just come from a press conference at which he had announced that he was reentering politics and would be a candidate in 1982 for his old seat. "Someone asked me, 'What does Buckley think of this?' and I said 'I don't know, I'll call him and ask.' So this is that call." I told Bob that if he thought himself cured, by all means he should do what he wanted to do, and if it meant anything, I was with him all the way.
The phenomenon of the sometime homosexual, wholly cured, is not one with which most of us are familiar. I am not talking about men who had an experience as schoolboys, or even at college, of the kind intimated with such taste in Brideshead.
I remember being stunned when in 1976 I read that Professor Allen Weinstein, who was then preparing the definitive book on the Hiss case (Perjury, A. Knopf, 1978), had got hold of a handwritten letter to the FBI volunteered by Whittaker Chambers disclosing preemptively (lest Hiss's lawyers came up with it at the trial, which they never did) that Chambers had been an active homosexual during five years in the thirties. But that, since leaving the Party (he wrote), he had been cured, being a faithful husband, and father. My astonishment was at learning that the man I had known so well had ever been a homosexual. I have probably known ten people who knew Chambers extremely well, dating back many years before the year I met him (1954), and none of them had any intimation of this chapter in Chambers' history. It is fashionable nowadays to say that a person's sexual "preference" is not a datum of any consequence. That question is best saved for another exploration. My point here is the discrete one, that the assumption that homosexuality is an enduring condition (like alcoholism) is simply mistaken, by the evidence of anyone who knew Chambers; and, as of now, presumably by anyone who knows Bob Bauman.
Frances brought me the issue of Time magazine, just out. What they have done is as bad as could be.
Several years ago the Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation of the Catawba Corporation, founded by my father in the late forties, and owned by his ten children. The idea of Catawba was simple enough, namely to set up a service organization which by commanding top administrative, geological, financial, and legal talent could offer the best service to small exploratory companies which, dependent on their own resources, would not have been able to come up with quality service. For thirty years, Catawba in effect managed six exploratory oil companies founded by my father. What was wrong, though neither illegal nor immoral in the circumstances, was that the same people who decided, in their capacity as officers of Catawba, what Catawba should charge its client companies also approved, in their capacity as officials of the serviced companies, Catawba's charges. What made the relationship substantively defensible was the reasonable fees and royalties charged, the performance of Catawba over the years, and the disclosures regularly made in public documents of Catawba's role.
Still, as anyone who has dealt with the SEC or become involved with it (as I protractedly was during 1977-79) knows, ethical criteria for conducting publicly owned companies are an evolving moral art, and that which was altogether okay in 1950 would not necessarily get by in 1980.
When it files its complaints under Rule iob-5, its most infamous weapon, the SEC Enforcement Division can elect to allege a violation of clause 1, or 2, or 3—or all of said regulations that fall under Rule iob-5. But only the first and third clauses speak of "fraud." Now "fraud," as used
by intelligent and cosmopolitan men and women, has a pretty nasty connotation. The SEC in recent years has tended to use the word with abandon, cunningly calculating that although a securities "fraud" is very different from garden variety fraud, the use of the word has considerable intimidating power if the people against whom it is used are prominent other than in the securities business, as of course was the case with Catawba.
Steve Umin, the learned family attorney in Washington, was greatly gratified that the SEC, when finally it framed its complaint against Catawba, did not use the first or third clauses. In not doing so, it acted conspicuously—i.e., it said in effect: Although certain practices followed by Catawba we allege to be in violation of the Securities and Exchange Act and the regulations promulgated under its authority, we specifically do not include, as among those violations, any intent to defraud.
When the complaint was issued, together with the consent decree signed by my brother John (the only Buckley directly concerned with the litigation), what one might call the professional business press, most conspicuously The Wall Street Journal, gave it a routine story (the Journal ran it on page 17). But because my brother Jim and I are public figures and are stockholders of Catawba, notwithstanding that Jim has been essentially unaffiliated with Catawba since he was elected to the Senate in 1970, and that I hadn't had anything to do with Catawba since a brief spell in 1954, the New York Times gave the consent decree front-page treatment. It was hard, reading the story, to understand why it rated such prominent attention. (A headline accurately communicating its news might have said: "COMPANY OF WHICH JAMES AND WILLIAM BUCKLEY ARE STOCKHOLDERS/SIGNS THROUGH BROTHER WHO ONCE WAS COMPANY'S PRESIDENT/CONSENT DECREE WITH SEC AGREEING TO KEEP SEVERED/CATAWBA TIES WHICH WERE SEVERED IN 1978.")
But a young reporter for Time mag, hoping for much much more, had devoted a great deal of effort to the whole complicated business, and when the SEC declined to move in a more stentorian mode, he undertook to do so himself, and persuaded his superiors to go along. Accordingly, two weeks ago Time devoted an entire page—not even in the business section, but under National News—to Catawba. The story said:
. . . the Securities and Exchange Commission, after a 3-1/2 -year investigation of Buckley-controlled oil and gas companies, last week portrayed the family's own business practices as unethical and even unlawful. In effect, it accused the companies of having defrauded stockholders to feather the family's nest.
Now that story had an extraordinary effect on the new director of the Enforcement Division of the SEC. John M. Fedders had been for a number of years a securities lawyer, and had clients who had suffered from the arbitrariness of Fedders' predecessor, Stanley Sporkin—gone now, after Reagan's election, to the CIA, as chief counsel, where, one hopes, he will be instrumental in doing as much damage to the Soviet enterprise as he did to American enterprise. John Fedders, shown by Umin the article in Time magazine, joined in Umin's indignation and undertook to do something absolutely unprecedented in the history of the SEC. Fie wrote a letter and addressed it "To the members of the Buckley family." (It is perhaps prudent to add here that Mr. Fedders, unknown to me, is also unknown to my brothers and sisters—i.e., his spontaneous action was not motivated by particular attachments.) Fedders' letter read: "Your counsel have expressed to me their displeasure with the article in the November 16 issue of Time magazine. I am concerned with the impression left by the article that the Commission's complaint alleges that the Buckley family 'defrauded stockholders to feather the family's nest.'
"Although the Commission's complaint alleges violations of Rule 10b-5 (2) under the 1934 Act and Section 17 (a) (2) of the 1933 Act, it does not allege that the described transactions were 'fraudulent.'
"It is important that the results of the Commission's work not be misunderstood."
What then happened is in part reconstruction, in part narrative contributed by participants. Time magazine, confronted with this challenge, told the young reporter to justify what he had done, by God, or — . . . John Fedders was thereupon approached by the reporter.
Informants do not reveal whether the reporter wept at that meeting. But either Fedders authorized the researcher to report back to New York that Fedders had changed his mind; or, more likely, the researcher improvised a retraction by Fedders. At any rate, the issue this morning, its unpleasantness for my brother John aside, makes an absolute fool of poor Fedders. FI ere we all had, over his signature, the flat statement that the SEC did not allege fraud. And now Time prints, "Mr. Fedders told Time his letter was not intended to address the question of whether Time's, interpretation of the transactions was accurate." What then was it intended to address? Why had Fedders written that he was "concerned" with the "impression" left by the article that the SEC's complaint "alleges" fraud?
I was angered by what Time had done, the more so on learning from Steve Umin over the telephone that three times the reporter, having first asked for the opportunity to hear the case against concluding "fraud," had not availed himself of that opportunity, presumably to guard against seeing evidence that might cripple his beloved story, which was no story at all in the absence of fraud, the story's vertebral column. I wrote a violent letter to the managing editor of Time (whom I have never met, and about whom I hear only pleasant things; and in the interval that has gone by I concede that, after all, one should understand ... If the director of the Enforcement Division of the SEC can be made to look contortionate by the writhings of a reporter, why not also Time's managing editor? Editors necessarily rely on staff).
Dear Sirs [I wrote to Time]:
Having surveyed not a few of the nests provided by the stockholders of Time Inc. to executives of Time, my comment is that that which my father created, ex nihilo, he was modestly compensated for. You hide behind the term "in effect"; your use of the word "defraud" was explicitly declined by the SEC, whose standards are severe. In effect, you have demeaned your responsibility to weigh the evidence and speak the truth with verbal precision. That calling is higher than any dumb loyalty to subordinates whose demonstrated misjudgment you are evidently too insecure to disavow.
A mutual friend subsequently wrote me:
I dissuaded [the managing editor of Time] from sending a rather scathing two-page reply to your very trenchant note. [His] draft said in part, and I quote for your amusement and with his permission: "I cannot comment on the living standards of Time executives or the Buckley family. This Time executive lives in a 2-1/2-room Manhattan apartment which you have not had an opportunity to survey because I fear the appointments would strike you as distasteful and the company boring."
I cannot say what would be my reaction to the former, but I doubt the latter. I replied to my friend:
I have a book-length manuscript describing the outrages attendant on my own brush with the SEC three years ago. I haven't published the book because my friends tell me it is too goddamn boring, and that part of me which is an editor agrees. But I don't really understand why [Time's managing editor] should want to send me a scathing reply. After all, the SEC did not allege fraud, [Time's] writer did; the SEC dissociated itself from [Time's] interpretation, and then [Time's] writer, having told the SEC his job was on the line, reported verbally that the SEC had contradicted itself, and Time —again without consulting the Buckley lawyer, or the language used by the SEC—went on to reaffirm a charge. You and I and, I expect [the managing editor], know that civil fraud [as the term is used by the SEC] . . . needn't be all that grave. That is the[ir] technical use of the word, but the layman's use is different, and it is the burden of my unpublished book that a) no one appears to care; but b) people should care. And when Time suggests my brother committed fraud, I care enough to risk receiving a scathing letter from the managing editor to set the record straight. So there we are, my friend. . . . There was a day, and I genuinely regret its passing, when people genuinely guilty of fraud were ostracized. The dissipation of the social sanction has its convenience but I doubt that it is altogether healthy.
I tease her sometimes, because it's fun to do so when two people absolutely agree on the same proposition, in this case that she is the best piano interpreter of J. S. Bach at large. She likes to hear a compliment, but is never quite surprised by it. I suppose in this respect she is like many artists. I remember returning from our honeymoon in 1950 and finding that my father's graduation present, a Challis clavichord, was—I feared fatally—constipated by the moisture in northwest Connecticut where I had left it. In desperation I took it to the house of the legendary harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, off neighboring Lakeville Lake. I had never met her, but assumed she would share my distress and give me counsel. She palmed off the instrument on Denise Restout, her musician-assistant, and proceeded to chat with me, her very first question being, Had I heard her new recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier? I was able truthfully to reply, Yes. She closed her eyes, and said: "Magnificent, no?" I agreed.
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