Overdrive

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  He did, but imperfectly. An evening spent with him yields no intimation that he is hindered. An evening which, however, the next day he will not predictably be able to remember. I turned the twenty-fifth-anniversary dinner of National Review, at which everyone was present except Reagan, into an impromptu (brief—I spoke about him for only three or four minutes) testimonial to Jim who, seated between Henry Kissinger and Clare Luce, rose—silver-white hair, glasses, shy appreciative smile, a wonderfully distinguished scholar and patriot—and acknowledged a standing ovation; and the next day he did not know that the affair had taken place. Although the following day it might re-enter his memory. Yet in conversation one does not notice anything awry. He became fifty-eight years old on the day John Kennedy was killed, and today he is seventy-six, and Marcia is celebrating the birthday in their Pavilion as they call it, an attractive stone one-story structure, separated from the New England rabbit warren where they live and suitable for parties and grandchildren; and there are a dozen old friends, including Priscilla, and champagne.

  The conversation is animated, and Jim accepts gracefully all the little presents, and fusses about a bit to make certain everyone is happy and comfortable; and I notice that everyone who addresses him does so at the outset with deliberation, until satisfied that the speed of the conversation doesn't in the least distract him. The dinner is served buffet style, and we chat away, and Marcia—still blond and Scandinavian and trim—makes a toast to her husband in her characteristic reserved public style ("Nobody was ever loved the way I was loved by Jim," she wept over the telephone the day after the stroke, when she thought Jim would not survive) and Priscilla, always shy on her feet, gives a marvelously eloquent, brief, aphoristic tribute to the man who shared her office at National Review for almost twenty-five years. Others are heard from, but it is important in such situations to guard against valedictory inflections. Soon after dinner I tell Marcia that Priscilla and I simply must go, because we must travel two hours to New York. In two cars, because Pitts needs her own in the city. I say goodbye, and make my way down the flagstones to Jerry. The night is very dark, but the occasion was very happy, Pitts and I agreed in whispers.

  We are only eight miles from the house I grew up in, in Sharon, but the route does not take us by, and in any event I'll see it next week, because although it is substantially gutted, we are meeting there for Thanksgiving, preserving the family tradition. Gutted because five condominiums will exist where once a single family (to be sure, of ten children) was housed. Priscilla and (sister) Jane will each have one, and the large Spanish patio is intact, the colonial facade untouched. I wonder whether I will have to fight sleep, but the briefcase is full and I go back to it.

  Sam McCracken is assistant to the prickly and brilliant president of Boston University. When Sam was a professor of Literature and Humanities at Reed College we corresponded, and en route to his new assignment several years ago he stopped by, a tall imposing blond man, married to a beautiful oriental. The evening was slightly distracted by Sam's having just then gone off a regimen to which he had stuck for something like eighty days—no food, no wine. Objective: forty pounds. This was the night to celebrate, and accordingly he drank innocently huge glasses of Jack Daniels which my wife kept bringing him, and which he consumed as casually as if they were Dr Pepper. I looked with progressive astonishment at this Rabelaisian prodigy, who spoke, although there is a slight stutter, in such lucid and rhythmic language, and wondered how it was all biologically possible.

  I had, before dinner, bathed one of our dogs, whose collar was now lying on Pat's beloved black slate coffee table, and Sam, punctuating a point about the irresponsibility of those who drive without attaching their safety belts, snuffed out his cigar conclusively—inside the dog collar, rubbing the cigar zestfully into the slate. Just for old times' sake, I sneaked a look at Pat (Mrs. McCracken was out of the room), whose first instinct was to scream; whose second instinct was to rise and go fetch a large ashtray; but who with habitual speed recognized that to place an ashtray alongside the dog collar would betray the hallucination, and embarrass Sam. A couple of days later, he wrote that he had had a strange sensation upon breaking his diet—that his wife told him he had had too much to drink, but that he felt just fine. I have felt fine about him for years, and read with admiration his frequent essays, mostly in Commentary, but occasionally in National Review.

  Sam writes, "The author of the devastating send-up of Kennan in the current New Yorker is aut WFB aut diabolus. Marvelous! Your hand has not lost its cunning. If you publish it in your next collection, please take care to spell the name K+nn+n. Juries are likely to come down hard on rich men they think have abridged the rights of simple retired diplomats."

  I read George Kennan's piece, and I must admit Sam has a point. "I have never been an advocate of unilateral disarmament," Mr. Kennan writes, "and I see no necessity for anything of that sort today." But having said that, K goes on to say that the mere existence of nuclear weapons is the important datum, more significant by far than the question of who has dominion over such weapons. We should do away with ours. "I would feel the future of my children and grandchildren to be far safer than I do at this moment;

  for if there is any incentive for the Russians to use such weapons against us, it surely comes in overwhelming degree—probably, in fact, entirely—from our own enormous deployment of them."

  Uh-huh. And the use of bacteriological and chemical weapons by the Russians against Cambodians and Afghans came because of the enormous deployment by Cambodians and Afghans of bacteriological and chemical weapons; built with chopsticks. Oh dear, and George Kennan is such an intelligent man, and such a nice man. Well, let's hope he's right, that the Soviet Union will never use its weapons. "I suppose we can only pray that he is correct," I write Sam, "and giggle, just a little—as you authorize us to do—at his pretty little simplifications." An odd word to use to describe Kennan, but what's the right one in the circumstances?

  I acknowledge with thanks lawyer Del Fuller's update on the appeals motion against the idiot commission in California that, overturning its own examiner, has ruled that the Bohemian Club in its summer encampment has to hire women. To the end of establishing that the non-hiring of women during the two-week encampment has nothing to do with sexual bias, I and (former) Governor Pat Brown were asked to go to San Francisco to serve as witnesses, and we were subsequently pleased by the thoughtful verdict of the examiner, handed down in due course, that men's highly private clubs can, without committing unlawful sexual discrimination, employ only men where the sex of the employee is relevant, as clearly it is in situations where, among other things, men wander about six hundred acres without much attention to dress. I congratulate Del on his brief, though frankly it has gotten so technical (like so much of the law) that it has become difficult for mere laymen even to follow the arguments.

  I have it down to thank Professor Tom Sowell for his extraordinary performance on "Firing Line," defending the principal discoveries of his book, Ethnic America. Harriet Pilpel, so marvelously talented, riding the crest of so distinguished a career, is a love, and bright as a whip, but so frozen by liberal ideology that sometimes she simply ceases to think! As when, examining Sowell, she said: "Are you telling us that labor unions impede the progress of blacks and that you are therefore against labor unions?" To which he answered coolly that he had not been asked whether he was in favor of labor unions, he had been asked what were some of the impediments to black upward mobility. Sowell (himself black) radiates the most naturally aristocratic hauteur of anyone I've had on "Firing Line" since Giscard d'Estaing, ten years ago. Sowell suffers socially from his apparent apostasy from the black movement, as does the black economist Walter Williams, who having analyzed the minimum wage laws pronounces them an important factor in black teenage unemployment. The slightly underground crack these days is that Tom Sowell and Walter Williams have a private covenant, never both to ride in the same airplane.

  Will I write a plug
for Espygrams? "You are probably wondering what an Espygram is." Well, yes. "An Espygram is a verse or limerick written by Mr. Espy." Now if only the lady from Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., Publisher, had left it at that, the meaning of Espygram would be instantly communicable. But she goes on. "The reader figures out the missing words by using the context of the verse, the rhymes, and the number of letters in the words as clues. Espygrams are entertaining and challenging, and we've found that once people get the hang of doing them they can't stop."

  I looked, and had no trouble whatever in stopping. One of them did, however, catch the eye, to wit:

  In sleep, salacious Incubus

  And Succubus make _______________with us.

  Now I suggest they wouldn't bother

  If in our __________they ____'__ each other.

  Perhaps they're mutually _________.

  Or, odder still, have never mated.

  Your job would be to come up with respective fillers, all using the same letters: dates; stead; teas'd; sated.

  A first-year student at the graduate school of business in Cornell has thought deeply about a career in business—and wants out. He wishes to become a journalist. There are so very many of these who come to us. And our responses are always so dismayingly discouraging. National Review is a tiny editorial operation, and its actors are technicians of highly developed skills. Besides, young people coming to NR get very little experience in writing, because the stuff that's published is, almost all of it, written either by the resident pros, or by outside pros. There are of course exceptions, Brookhiser the most recent. For a while I thought we were running a finishing school for apostates (Garry Wills, John Leonard, Arlene Croce); but somehow the impression persists that all magazines have a half-dozen post-college-age positions available to anyone with a little talent. The same old story.

  Norma Cox Woodley, who as I have said runs the Friends of Firing Line, is trying to raise the money from the Chase Bank to pay for the big upcoming Harvard debate on Reaganomics, but there is a problem here. The Chase people insist that Milton Friedman must be one of the actors. No Friedman, no grant.

  I think it's probably true to say that no one in the world knows both Ken Galbraith and Milton Friedman better than I do (read carefully: both), and I should therefore be ideally situated to bring them together. But Galbraith says no: "Milton is a better debater than I am and I'm a better writer than he is." Well, that's a good answer.

  Would Milton have agreed? Well, no. Because he's mad at Ken, because he says Ken deliberately misrepresents him —e.g., by continuing references to Milton's antagonism to the poor, such characterizations as make Milton really quite angry, because Ken knows goddamn well Milton's not unfriendly to the poor and Milton knows goddamn well that Ken Galbraith doesn't really think he's unfriendly to the poor. ... I try to explain that that's just the way Ken is— I mean, he's perfectly capable of saying on network TV that Buckley is in favor of plague, poverty, and atomic war; and what if / adopted Milton's sensitivity, how then would I get along with Galbraith? That, Milton tells me, is my problem.

  I know when things just aren't going to happen, and I'm not going to get Galbraith and Friedman on the same program up at Harvard, and I'm not going to ask them to do it as a personal favor to me, which maybe would, maybe wouldn't, move them. So I write to Norma: Couldn't she possibly talk the Chase people out of their insistence on Milton? I rattle off other names she might hold out: Laffer, Bleiberg, Baker, Dole—right down the list. (The answer would be: No.)

  Mr. W. M. Woods of Oak Ridge is a man given above all other things to precision of thought, language, and calculation, and he is greatly upset by a letter writer to National Review who has defended the Post Office's insistence that it needs a nine-digit code. Because that gentleman miscalculated the number of discrete zip codes that this would permit, Bill Woods undertakes to set us all straight. . . .

  "Mr. Fifield is guilty of applying a perfectly good formula for permutations to the wrong problem. His formula gives the number of permutations of ten things taken nine at a time where none of the things is repeated. In the context of nine-digit zips, it is of course permissible to repeat any of the decimal digits as many times as desired, up to nine.

  "In that context, Prn = n1' precisely.

  "There is a way of calculating the number of distinct nine-digit zips that a child can understand. (I tried the problem on a bright third-grader. He had the correct answer in a few minutes.) In any sequence of consecutive integers, the number of terms is equal to the largest term minus the smallest term, plus one:

  "999,999,999 — 000,000,000 + 1 = 1,000,000,000 (that's 1 billion).

  "To put this in perspective, there are about 222 million people in the U.S. With a nine-digit zip, each person could have his own unique number, and so could each cat, dog, and pet canary. Mr. Fifield, what are those lines by Pope? The ones about that Pierian spring?"

  You can bet your bottom dollar that Mr. W. M. Woods knows what are those lines by Pope. (The ones about that Pierian spring.) I thank Bill Woods, as I have so often over the years, for one thing for teaching me how to use "exponentially" exactly right, and also "parameters."

  Happily, we are in New York. Jerry knows exactly what approach to take, depending on the hour. It is only just after midnight, and five minutes later we pull up. I tell Jerry 9:30 tomorrow morning, and thank him.

  Pat is still up, working at her desk. Come, she says, and have a look at the dining room. I follow her, and she walks in and turns on the lights.

  It is really quite beautiful. Everything is set for the Vice-President and the twenty diners. The flowers, the china, the wineglasses, place settings. The picture lights give the tables a wonderful radiance. I reproach myself that men tend not to focus on the amount of time these things take. A cliché, mostly because it's used in sly discharge of an obligation never taken up, which would be to remind oneself of the amount of time these things all take.

  We go up, wearily, to bed.

  Eight

  MONDAY

  I must write my column early, because National Review's editorial conference is at 9:45. Ordinarily it would be on Tuesday, but this being Thanksgiving week it is, in the idiom of the shop, a "short week," because the printers take Thursday off. Pat is already awake when the alarm rings, so my breakfast is brought in, and she yields me the Times. Already I have decided on the subject matter for the column. I can use the notes on the sermon yesterday at church, so I read the paper without that search-and-destroy feeling that so often propels me. I leave for my little study just when the telephone rings for Pat's first morning call. I am privately convinced that Pat is a kind of social electronic ganglion, through whom half the people in New York transmit to the other half. Maybe she is a human microchip? I must dilate on that.

  I discuss the bishop, and sermons in general. Sermons are really more a Protestant than a Catholic cultural staple. "It was not until Vatican II that a general scolding was given on the subject, the homily being prescribed as integral to the Mass (I wrote). Daily Masses habitually omitted it altogether, and many churches suspended the sermon entirely during the summer. It was thought rather an accretion, and it does not really surprise that the greatest homilist of the nineteenth century, Newman, came in from the Anglican Church; and of the twentieth century, Sheen, Sheed, the first achieved his reputation speaking not in church but over the radio, the second as a street-corner evangelist."

  I am halfway through my column when the office phone rings and Helen (our switchboard operator) tells me it's the Vice-President.

  "Let me tell it to you fast, Bill, I can't come."

  I try to absorb the shock as he speaks. But, come to think of it, he is actually telling me what I just finished reading in the huge headlines this morning, for some reason without thinking that it hazarded in any way the movements of the Vice-President of the United States. It was the President himself who gave the order: No travel. What is happening is a shoot-out between Congress and the Executive over m
oney. Technically, as of 12:01 a.m. on November 21, 1981, it became illegal for the federal government to spend any money, so that travel, when government funds are involved, is—proscribed.

  George is telling me how awful he feels, what stratagems he has considered in order to be able to get here, how one after another he had to discard, them. George's voice is always relaxed, but there is no doubting the authenticity of his concern. He asks, How would it be if he got Jeane Kirkpatrick to take his place? He had no idea whether the UN ambassador could disengage from whatever she was undoubtedly up to, but he'd certainly give it a try.

  Yes yes, I said; and then he eased over to the subject of my son.

  We had never spoken about Christopher before, and what he said, which left me purring with pride and gratitude, easily made up for the crisis. George told me he would be in New York two and a half weeks from today, on December 11, and had reserved the entire afternoon, from lunch on, during which, in expiation of our convulsion at today's lunch, he would do anything we asked of him. I told him that was swell of him, but that such a thing as we had got together for today takes a couple of months to arrange, and could not be put together again in a fortnight. He would keep the afternoon anyway, he said, just in case; and would ring me back as soon as he reached Kirkpatrick.

  So I called Bill Rusher, and Helen located Rob Sennott, our advertising director, and we patched together a summit. There are three alternatives, I said. One is to cancel the lunch altogether. A second is to call all the guests and tell them George Bush isn't going to be there, but they're welcome anyway. The third is to call nobody, to hope for Jeane Kirkpatrick, and to put on a show of our own if she doesn't come—and rely on the presumed good nature of busy people who understand that such things do happen. Even though the New York Times says such things (the United States government running out of money) don't as a matter of fact routinely happen. (This, the reasons apart, is the first time in history. Never mind.)