A Torch Kept Lit Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by The National Review and James Rosen

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Forum, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

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  Crown Forum with colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Buckley, William F., Jr., 1925–2008, author. | Rosen, James, 1968– editor.

  Title: A torch kept lit : great lives of the twentieth century / William F. Buckley, Jr. ; edited by James Rosen.

  Description: New York : Crown Forum, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016017488| ISBN 9781101906217 (hardback) | ISBN 9781101906224 (electronic)

  Subjects: LCSH: United States—History—20th century—Biography. | Biography—20th century. | Eulogies—United States. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Editors, Journalists, Publishers. | HISTORY / United States / 20th Century. | HISTORY / Social History.

  Classification: LCC E747 .B95 2016 | DDC 973.91—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016017488

  ISBN 9781101906217

  Ebook ISBN 9781101906224

  Book design by Maria Elias

  Frontispiece photograph: Ron Galella/Getty Images

  Cover design by Alison Forner

  Cover photograph: Jerry Engel/New York Post Archives/© NYP Holdings, Inc. (via Getty Images)

  v4.1_r1

  ep

  To Aaron and Gray,

  joys of my life

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Presidents

  Dwight Eisenhower

  John F. Kennedy

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Richard Nixon

  Ronald Reagan

  Family

  Patricia Taylor Buckley

  William F. Buckley, Sr.

  Aloise Steiner Buckley

  L. Brent Bozell, Jr.

  Arts and Letters

  Truman Capote

  Johnny Carson

  Alistair Cooke

  Milton Friedman

  Jerry Garcia

  Vladimir Horowitz

  Russell Kirk

  John Lennon

  Norman Mailer

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Elvis Presley

  A. M. Rosenthal

  William Shawn

  Rosalyn Tureck

  Generals, Spies, and Statesmen

  Winston Churchill

  William Colby

  Princess Diana

  Allen Dulles

  Barry Goldwater

  Richard Helms

  E. Howard Hunt

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Golda Meir

  John Mitchell

  Jacqueline Onassis

  Vernon Walters

  Friends

  Whittaker Chambers

  Richard Clurman

  Evan Galbraith

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Tom Hume

  Nan Kempner

  Hugh Kenner

  Allard Lowenstein

  David Niven

  Warren Steibel

  Charles Wallen

  Nemeses

  Alger Hiss

  John V. Lindsay

  Ayn Rand

  Nelson Rockefeller

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  “I’m tired of life,” William F. Buckley, Jr., declared to Charlie Rose in March 2006. “I really am. I’m utterly prepared to stop living on. You know, there are no enticements to me that justify the weariness, the repetition—”

  Suddenly it dawned on Buckley how morose he sounded. Still possessed of the showman’s instincts, he hastened to add “my hours of exercise” to his list of laments. Rose, a close friend, got the joke: Though he had been an avid sailor and splendidly fit most of his life, Bill Buckley hated exercising. He used to refer to it, borrowing from Scripture, as “the unhappiest hour of my week, the Mortification of the Flesh.” But the quip hardly masked the underlying sentiment.

  Not long after the Rose interview, addled by diabetes, emphysema, and hearing loss, Buckley suffered a fatal heart attack at his home in Stamford, Connecticut, at the age of eighty-two.*1

  Buckley’s weariness with life, so in contrast with the zest with which he had always lived it, became acute after the death eight months earlier of Pat Buckley, his wife of fifty-seven years. To close students of Buckley and his works, however, the stealthy onset of a certain fatalism that was hard to fathom in a life so charmed had been in evidence for some time. As Fox News cameras rolled, I interviewed Buckley at his East 73rd Street maisonette in October 2000. The occasion was his seventy-fifth birthday, which was then a month away. I was startled by how disaffected the great man seemed. “You’re celebrating a milestone birthday soon,” I began the interview. “How do you feel?”

  “Who said I was celebrating it?” he shot back with a chuckle. “You’re celebrating it.”

  —

  In more than a half century on the national stage, William F. Buckley, Jr., achieved unique stature as the architect of modern American conservatism. He founded National Review and, from 1966 to 1999, welcomed viewers to Firing Line, the longest-running television talk show with a single host. For nearly fifty years, he produced a syndicated column that was read in hundreds of newspapers across the country and republished in best-selling anthologies year after year; wrote a dozen best-selling spy novels; sailed the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and wrote best-selling books about that; and played the harpsichord with professional orchestras. Handsome and witty, he was a forerunner, in his seeming omnipresence, to today’s multimedia celebrities. Bill Buckley met everybody, knew everybody, hosted everybody you ever wanted to meet, skewered everybody who needed skewering, carried on lengthy and amusing correspondence with everybody worth writing to, and in general lived life on a grand scale in a way that inspired countless young conservatives and delighted even many who rejected his politics.

  One of Buckley’s greatest strengths, however, remains neglected in his vast catalogue of published works: his mastery of that elusive art form the eulogy. Outside of WFB’s explicit writings on Catholicism—a frequent subject over the course of his career, capped by the publication of Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith (1997)—none of WFB’s enterprises so closely fused his religious faith and literary gift.

  A keen observer of people and mannerisms, Buckley used his eulogies both to mourn and as a kind of conjuring act: a final chance to savor the deceased as he had. Often drawing on his own experiences or private correspondence, WFB recalled memorable moments spent with The Departed, revealed their hidden sides, heralded their greatness—or, as occasion warranted, reminded the living why certain individuals, notwithstanding the grace that death can bestow, should be remembered as abject failures or, worse still, evil.

  Part of what readies a man for death, of course, is his steady exposure to it. First comes the passing of elders: one’s parents, aunts and uncles, teachers; later one suffers the loss of one’s contemporaries, friends and cousins, classmates and colleagues, acquaintances and antagonists, spouses. Buckley never imagined himself immune to or estranged from the immutable laws of mortality. Death is a part of life, and WFB understood the fortifying effect that death, even when tragic, can visit upon those who survive and bear witness. More deeply, WFB thought that we are all inheritors of what he liked to call The Patrimony, the corpus of objective truths, earthly and celes
tial, established by humankind over the millennia and handed down by our elders, the first among which is: People die, God endures.

  At all points, these remembrances bring us Buckley’s distinct voice: the greatest pleasure of this volume. As a literary stylist, WFB was renowned for elegant prose and a light comic touch, ironic formalism married to an addiction to obscure words. Buckley also imbibed the New Journalism as practiced by his friend Tom Wolfe and other contemporaries, taking full advantage, as the conventions of “literary journalism” evolved, of all the techniques suddenly available to the writer of nonfiction: dialogue, shifting point of view, sentence fragments, sound effects, made-up words, Ironic Capitalization, and subtle rhetorical devices such as antonomasia (the practice, usually derisive, of describing an individual by a certain characteristic and then using that as the individual’s name). WFB’s embrace of the New Journalism sprang from the revolutionary precincts of his personality, marking the rare terrain on which he did not venerate the patrimony—and we are the richer for it.

  Each of these essays bequeaths to the legacies of the deceased a fitting tribute, or unsparing verdict, consistent with the lives, careers, accomplishments, mercies, and misdeeds that Buckley, with his oceanic view of the world, deemed worthy of final summation. In 1993, C-SPAN host Brian Lamb asked how often WFB wrote such pieces.

  WFB: I do a fair amount. I’ve been doing it for National Review for years and years and years. I mean, I don’t know how many I’ve done. Maybe five hundred [sic]. I don’t know.

  LAMB: […] But is there some way to describe what it takes to get you to write somebody’s obituary? I mean, do you have to like them?

  WFB: Or dislike them, one or the other, or they have to have been a friend of the National Review or of mine or have had some historical importance.

  Known for dashing off his columns in twenty minutes, a chore cheerfully disposed of on a portable typewriter as his limousine navigated Midtown traffic and a King Charles Cavalier panted beside him, Buckley appears to have devoted especial care to his eulogies. The solemnity of these occasions, their emotional impact, summoned him to greatness, demanded he use his gifts fully, and he answered the charge.

  We have many anthologies of Buckley’s syndicated columns; a thick volume of annotated Firing Line transcripts; a reader of excerpts from the Blackford Oakes spy novels; even a volume, published in tandem with the documentary film Best of Enemies (2015), collecting the transcripts of Buckley’s epic TV debates against his nemesis of nemeses, Gore Vidal (who outlived Buckley and thus is not included here). Yet until now no one has collected Buckley’s eulogies—consistently brilliant, sometimes shattering works—in one place.

  Using the restricted online archives of National Review and the resources of Hillsdale College, whose website contains original PDF images for almost the entire canon of Buckley’s works—an invaluable resource for students of WFB and his times—I identified some 250 eulogies he penned across his career: an average, roughly, of two per year, although weighted, naturally, toward the end of his life, and steady enough an exposure to death to make even the most joyful and energetic soul ready, at ripe age, to receive it himself.

  —

  A Torch Kept Lit collects the best of WFB’s eulogies, more than fifty in all, a far-ranging survey of the famous and obscure, the heroic and villainous, the charmed and doomed.

  Inevitably, and happily, these writings shed as much light on Buckley—his personality and extraordinary life—as on the tumultuous times in which he flourished and on the subjects themselves. We see Buckley shuttling between his multiple selves, a son, husband, and father, editor, writer, and TV celebrity, sailor, skier, harpsichordist, and controversialist. We travel back in time to an era when men of affluence smoked cigars after dinner and proposed to women within a week of meeting them. We find Buckley swimming in the ocean outside Claudette Colbert’s house with Ronald Reagan, tricking Vladimir Horowitz into performing a private recital, buying a King Charles puppy for a friend who has lapsed into melancholy.

  We observe up close the rituals WFB observed: lunch or dinner, once a year in Switzerland, with Nabokov and his dour, watchful Vera; midday meals, once a quarter, with his erudite English-born friend (“What a piece of luck, lunching with Alistair Cooke for 30 years”); participation in “a little club” of New Yorkers, “some of them decisive voices in American journalism,” including New York Times editor A. M. Rosenthal, who lunched with Buckley “five or six times every year.”

  We learn that Buckley’s father, usually described as being upright to the point of sternness, was “inept in manual pursuits” and enjoyed his first taste of alcohol at the age of forty. We frolic on the grounds of Great Elm, the idyllic Buckley family compound in Sharon, Connecticut, as the young WFB and his nine brothers and sisters grow up, privileged and driven, engaged with great issues yet isolated from the corrupting influences of the impious world around them.

  Last but not least, we witness up close the postwar ascendancy of National Review and the broader conservative movement that lives on to this day.

  —

  Thematic organization readily suggested itself over strict chronological order, and so I have grouped the eulogies into the categories, distinct and self-explanatory, listed in the Contents. However, a warning is necessary up front: namely, that between the categories I devised, a certain blurring of the lines was inescapable. Case in point: Whittaker Chambers was surely a man of arts and letters, but WFB’s anthology of their correspondence was, after all, titled Odyssey of a Friend (1969), so in which category does Chambers belong? Guessing at what Bill would have preferred, I chose Friend.

  In that category the reader is introduced to some obscure names: stricken Yale classmates, longtime pen pals, and other nonfamous people, their time often come too soon and for whom, no less than with presidents or Pulitzer winners, Buckley was determined to bear witness. To pay tribute to these “ordinary” men and women, record their unsung workaday heroics and private suffering, and chronicle their impact on the world and WFB himself, Buckley deployed all his gifts, ensuring that the reader experiences emotion as profoundly as when the subject is a household name. Indeed, in these pieces—the eulogy for Charles Wallen is an example—Buckley summons extraordinary tenderness. The gentility is all the more impressive when we remember that in many cases, the writer was wracked by grief and working on deadline.

  For each eulogy I have crafted a prefatory note designed to acquaint Buckley fans and more casual readers with the nature and background of his relationship to The Departed and to present facets of those relationships that the eulogies sometimes omit. Often I’ve used these notes to show how Buckley’s relationship with an individual, or an epoch, evolved, producing the eulogy that follows. In this endeavor I’ve drawn on the online resources referenced above as well as the archive of Firing Line synopses and transcripts maintained on the website of the Hoover Institution.

  Some of the eulogies were actually delivered at memorial services or are remarks that sometimes were republished in National Review. Elsewhere Buckley might have used his column to remember the freshly deceased, and he sometimes republished the work in NR; in these cases, they often appeared in varied form, reflecting space needs. I have sought here always to provide the fullest version of a particular eulogy. In a few instances (e.g., John F. Kennedy, Truman Capote), Buckley produced two eulogies, featuring different observations, perhaps tailored for different audiences—and I have presented both, in chronological order, to give Buckley’s fullest measure of a man.

  Only sparingly have I ranged beyond the corpus of eulogies to include a piece of writing not explicitly prepared to commemorate a death. In these cases (e.g., Lyndon Johnson, Elvis Presley) the essay was written with such attentiveness to the overall legacy of the individual—either very close to the end of the subject’s life or career or maybe decades afterward—that it constituted Buckley’s Final Word on a renowned figure.

  Inevitably, space constraints man
dated the exclusion of many fine pieces, including tributes to individuals who figured prominently in Buckley’s intellectual development, helped launch National Review, and so on.

  Yet the roll call in these pages presents a panoramic view of the twentieth century, from the stylish sublimity of Jacqueline Onassis to the moral blackness of Alger Hiss. One of the hallmarks of the sixties and seventies was a newfound taste for eclecticism, a Warholian conflation of high and low, that brought celebrities from different walks of life—athletes, politicians, novelists—to the same TV couch. Buckley himself had guested on Woody Allen’s TV shows in the sixties, and his appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in the seventies found the conservative commentator paired with the likes of the impersonator Rich Little and the psychic Jeane Dixon.

  The elite salons of the Upper East Side were no exception. How much fun it must have been to arrive at the Buckleys’ at night and find Truman Capote talking to George Plimpton or Henry Kissinger…or to take in a Firing Line taping, the air thick with electricity as WFB matched wits with Allen Ginsberg or Muhammad Ali….Anything was possible! So it is here, in A Torch Kept Lit: Where else but the shimmering orbit of Bill Buckley will we find Milton Friedman rubbing elbows with Jerry Garcia?

  In his review of Execution Eve and Other Contemporary Ballads (1975), WFB’s collection of Watergate-era columns, the learned scholar Ernest van den Haag noted the “cheerfulness” that intruded even upon the most “mournful” of WFB’s writings. Many colleagues remarked, during Buckley’s time, on his gift for eulogy—but van den Haag paid the ultimate compliment: “Buckley has re-elevated the art of eulogy to the high standard from which it had long ago fallen. So much so, that I am firmly resolved to leave this world before he does, for his eulogy is bound to be much better than mine.”*2