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NR Turns 70: A Different Perspective
Thanks to all of you for supporting our sometimes lonely cause.
Thanks to my editors for inviting me to write for National Review — Bill Buckley for 25 years, John O’Sullivan for another nine, and Rich Lowry these past 28 years.
You all know Rich, and most of you remember Bill. Let me say just a word about John. John O’Sullivan had one hellaciously tough act to follow. Following Bill Buckley at National Review was, in the British context, the equivalent of following Addison at the Spectator or Chesterton at the Weekly. Yet, John managed to carry it all off with his customary aplomb. Thank you, John.
As some of you may know, John is the only Commander of the British Empire — so designated by Queen Elizabeth herself — to have served as editor of an American political magazine. Some of my colleagues at NR worried about John’s divided loyalties. I never did. From day one, it seemed clear that John‘s stewardship of the magazine was far superior to his stewardship of the empire. Sorry, John. As you know better than most, no Buckley event could be considered complete without at least one mildly Anglophobic jape.
Thanks also to the governor and the first lady of my home state of Florida. I met them when they were dating. You could warm your hands by their love for each other — and by their love for our country.
Your name came up in a conversation last week, Ron, with one of the Buckley Fellows at Yale. He’s doing a book on conservatives at Yale. When I asked him how his research was going, he said that he had identified three students who were more conservative the day they graduated than they had been the day they arrived — Brent Bozell in the ‘40s, me in the ‘60s, and you in the ‘90s. I wished my young friend well, but I fear that his book will soon take its place on that shelf reserved for the World’s Thinnest Books. Great British Chefs. Hilarious Mormon Gags. Famous Italian War Heroes. And the like.
It is my privilege tonight to offer a personal tribute to our man Buckley, born 100 years ago this month. I will speak, as Bill would have described it, synecdochically. I will speak of two days in his long and astonishingly productive life — the day I met him, and the day, 44 years later, when I said goodbye. (RELATED: Buckley at 100)
I met him in 1963.
I was sitting at my desk at Doubleday and Company, one of the junior-most executives at what was then the largest book publisher in the country. The phone rang, and the caller identified himself as Bill Buckley. I drew a blank. Bill Buckley had not yet become Bill Buckley. He said, “I’ve just finished reading your piece on Governor Rockefeller and found it to be, ughhhhh, arresting. I wonder if you could join me for dinner to discuss it.”
Sure.
I showed up at the appointed hour to find that there would be four of us for dinner. Bill and I, Bill’s wife Patsy, and the young publisher of National Review magazine, William A. Rusher.
Patsy made a strong first impression. She was six feet tall. Supermodel photogenic. Vassar-educated with a wit that carried the sting of an angry hornet. An improbably good cook. A chauvinistic Canadian girl from the real Canada, where they drill for oil and dig for coal. Patsy migrated across our northern border and became the doyenne of New York society.
Bill Rusher had worked a stakhanovite schedule through high school, which got him into Princeton, where he excelled, which got him into Harvard Law School, where he excelled again. When he landed a partner-track job at a big New York firm, his single mom, possibly for the first time in 25 years, was able to exhale. Her only child, Billy, was going to be all right. Which he was. Until the day he quit the white-shoe law firm to join Buckley’s ragtag band at National Review. Rusher moved to the 35th Street office and seized control of the provisional wing of National Review.
As I was soon to learn, William A. Rusher signed incendiary interoffice memoranda with his initials, leaving recipients with the impression that they had been issued by the War Department.
How did that evening go? We spoke of books and boats and ballistic missiles. We took on the Oxford trilogy of PP and E — philosophy, politics, and economics. We spoke without pause. We became four peas, one pod.
At ten o’clock sharp, Bill Rusher, a man of iron habit, excused himself and went home. Along about one o’clock, Patsy, a young mother with things to do in the morning, excused herself and went upstairs to bed. I don’t know how long I stayed, but I do remember this. When I left Bill’s place, I walked down Fifth Avenue to the Doubleday Building, I went to the men’s room and shaved. And I marched into Nelson Doubleday’s office and resigned. I was going to work for National Review.
Why did I leave a promising career? Why did Bill Rusher? Why did the rest of the NR Irregulars? Because Bill Buckley proposed to change the world. Some of us thought he might just do it. And we wanted to help.
The shocking twist to this tale of impetuous youth is that — in the event — it happened in exactly that way. Bill changed the world, and some of us like to think we helped.
Bill changed our politics. When he entered the public arena in 1951, America’s two great political parties were competing feverishly to give their presidential nominations to the same man. The ideologically androgynous Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bill got to work. From 1964, when he was still in his 30s, until 2012, four years after his death at the age of 82, every Republican nominee for president was either a Buckley conservative or somebody who pretended to be one. My lingering image of the 2012 primary was that iconic photo of Mitt Romney lugging around his go-to campaign prop — a three-legged stool.
Bill changed our economics. With Bill in his protégé’s ear at every step along the way, Ronald Reagan cut the personal tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent. That was a victory for the enterprising individual, long overdue. That was a victory for the economically marginalized, for whom growth is the only way up and out. That was a victory for the cause of freedom, which never has enough friends.
And Bill changed our place in the world. There has been lively debate as to who was most responsible for America’s victory in the Cold War — that by-now almost forgotten, century-long, close-run, blood-soaked struggle for the world. Some said that it had been George Kennan, the architect of the West’s containment policy. I believe it was George Kennan who said that. Some said that it had been John Paul II. But we have the testimony of Frank Shakespeare, my longtime colleague on the National Review board, that the great Giovanni Paulo had dismissed that notion with a wave of the papal hand. Some said that it had been Ronald Reagan. But not Ronald Reagan. Twice in my presence, Reagan deflected credit to his own mentor, to a man 14 years younger than himself. In Reagan’s judgment, it had been Bill Buckley who, decade after decade, had reified the hard spiritual case against communism.
Let me add a personal note. It was my good fortune to be the guy standing next to Bill Buckley when he became Bill Buckley. He changed my place in the world. Early on, he introduced me to the girl who would become my bride, the irresistible Jane Freeman. (That news prompted one of my leftwing cousins to call ours an arranged Taliban marriage. As we approach our 60th anniversary, Jane and I have come to regard the Taliban marriage as an underrated social institution.) Over the course of many years, it was Bill’s generosity of spirit that allowed me to prosper in his friendship. He was, at first, my intimidating boss, and then my professional colleague, and then my valued partner and, soon enough, my close friend. Ask yourself. Were you ever lucky enough to have a boss with that kind of emotional range?
Bill Buckley was a good man, a godly man. But of course, he was not a perfect man. One example — and I mention it only because it has grated on me for years. I have now read in nine books — most recently in the deeply researched volume from Sam Tanenhaus — that Bill Buckley was a great sailor. It would not have required deep research to learn two things about Bill Buckley the sailor. First, that his skills were of a surprisingly low order, and second, that he was utterly fearless. That was not always a happy combination for ocean racing. Bill was not a great sailor. He was to the ketch and the sloop as he was to the piano and the harpsichord. An aspirant. Bill was a great writer about sailing.
There. We have concluded the fair-and-balanced section of my remarks.
In late 2007, Bill missed our regular catch-up session. I called to check on him, inviting him to visit us in Maine. After what seemed like a very long pause, he said, “Mon vieux, I have terminal emphysema.” Bill Buckley did not use words imprecisely. I thought a bit and said, “Okay, we’ll bring Maine to you. Hold lunch for us Thursday.” Jane and I pulled some lobsters, scavenged a few bottles of his favorite Alsatian white, and barreled down the road to Stamford, Connecticut. It was a chilly day, but sunny, and we sat out on his lanai overlooking Long Island Sound. We drank some wine and laughed and talked about the good days, of which there had been a great many.
Toward mid-afternoon, he tired. He said he needed a “snort of oxygen.” He started to rise from his chair, but then slumped back down, a look of distress crossing his face. He was mortified, as he put it, to learn that a book he had given me actually belonged to a British friend. Could I be sure to get it to him? He mentioned a woman with whom we both had worked for many years. He regretted that cross words had passed between them. Would I please remember to tell her he loved her? He had promised a mutual friend that he would write a letter for a grandson seeking admission to Yale. Bill, mortified again, had forgotten the boy’s name. Might I be willing to fill in?
One by one, this man who had known popes and presidents, this man who had bent the arc of so much history, worked his way through a list of slights unattended and courtesies unreturned, not one of them rising to the level of a social misdemeanor. These were the most important people in the world. These were his friends.
He died a few weeks later. His caretaker told me that Bill had been out in the drafty old garage he used as a makeshift office. Preparing, no doubt, to meet one last, unreasonably self-imposed deadline.
Two days later, I received a letter from National Review’s office in New York. It was Bill, thanking me for some forgettable favor and, more generally, for a lifetime of friendship. It was apposite, perfectly so, that Bill Buckley should have expended some of his last breaths dictating expressions of gratitude. His life with words had been long and promiscuous, but he remained steadfast in his attachment to the word “gratitude.” It became the title of his favorite book, which took the form of a love letter to the land of his birth. He was grateful to his friends, to his family, to his church, to the United States of America.
My suggestion tonight is that we — all of us — should return that gratitude in equal measure.
Thank you.
Neal B. Freeman was associated for many years with his friend, William F. Buckley Jr. Freeman served as an editor and columnist for National Review, edited and syndicated the Buckley newspaper column, managed the Buckley for Mayor campaign in New York City, was the founding producer of the Firing Line television series, and served for 38 years as a Director of National Review, Inc.
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