A Torch Kept Lit Read online

  Barry Goldwater occupies a special place in the heart of modern conservatism and did in Bill Buckley’s heart as well: The Arizona senator and 1964 Republican presidential nominee was one of only three friends—alongside Whittaker Chambers and Ronald Reagan—whom WFB treated, in nonfiction, at book length (in the posthumously published Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater [2008]). In addition to admiring Goldwater as a man and loving him as a friend, WFB understood that their advancement of conservative principles across the sixties—which laid the groundwork for the subsequent triumphs of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan—had been a collegial, even filial, effort, one in which he himself had played the seminal role. In October 2000, I asked Buckley if it was fair to say that he had been the first “telegenic” conservative. WFB demurred, citing Goldwater, but then acknowledged the impact he had had on the nominee:

  WFB: On the national scene, Goldwater was instantly and enormously appealing—obviously not to the majority of the voters, but to a lot of them….If you’re asking the question, “Could Goldwater have been fielded if it hadn’t been for the background work done by National Review?” I would say, no, probably he wouldn’t have. The deep analytical reserves on which he relied—well, his book was written by a National Review editor [L. Brent Bozell, Jr., WFB’s brother-in-law] and that was the book that catapulted him into fame, The Conscience of a Conservative [1960].

  Goldwater’s contributions to American life extended beyond his monumental impact on electoral politics. To cite but two examples: The senator’s personal intervention after the release of the “smoking gun” tape in Watergate, in August 1974, is widely credited with having persuaded President Nixon to resign from office, and Goldwater sponsored the legislation, signed into law by President Reagan in 1986, that restructured the Defense Department, including the removal of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from the chain of command. Goldwater appeared on Firing Line three times between 1966 and 1989, the last for a two-hour retrospective after his retirement from the Senate. He remained every inch the stubbornly independent-minded champion of liberty, freedom, and decentralized government he had been in 1964: “I voted against federal aid to education…because I don’t believe that some jackass sitting in Washington can tell my teachers in Arizona how to teach our children….You’d be amazed, sitting in that body, if you listen to the amendments that are being offered that just mean: Move a little more power, move a little more power.”

  “Barry Goldwater, RIP”

  National Review, June 22, 1998.

  In 1964 the fear & loathing of Barry Goldwater was startling. Martin Luther King, Jr., detected “dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign.” Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress, warned that “a Jewish vote for Goldwater is a vote for Jewish suicide.” And George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, saw power falling into “the hands of union-hating extremists, racial bigots, woolly-minded seekers after visions of times long past.” On Election Day Goldwater suffered a devastating defeat, winning only 41 electoral votes.

  It was the judgment of the establishment that Goldwater’s critique of American liberalism had been given its final exposure on the national political scene. Conservatives could now go back to their little lairs and sing to themselves their songs of nostalgia and fancy, and maybe gather together every few years to hold testimonial dinners in honor of Barry Goldwater, repatriated by Lyndon Johnson to the parched earth of Phoenix, where dwell only millionaires seeking dry air to breathe and the Indians Barry Goldwater could now resume photographing. But then of course 16 years later the world was made to stand on its head when Ronald Reagan was swept into office on a platform indistinguishable from what Barry had been preaching.

  During the campaign of 1964, Goldwater was our incorruptible standard-bearer, disdainful of any inducements to bloc voting. He even gave the impression that his design was to alienate bloc voters. He didn’t mean to do that; he was simply engaging in acts of full political disclosure in an attempt to display the architectural integrity of his views, at once simple in basic design, and individualistic and artful in ornamentation.

  But by the end of last month the cumulus clouds had all gone. On the weekend of his death it was clear from the public commentary that Barry Goldwater was now the object of nostalgic curiosity and—even—of affection, here and there self-reproachful. When someone about whom such dire things had been said turns out to be as dangerous as your local postman, no meaner than a summer shower, the conscience is pricked.

  —

  What finally lodged in the memory of most Americans, to be sure, wasn’t so much Goldwater the Conservative as Goldwater the individualist. He was never entirely imprisoned by ideology. In the last dozen years he had disappointed friends by declining to support constitutional amendments that would have reversed some of the decisions taken by the Supreme Court, decisions he once vigorously opposed. The public’s final impression was of a thinker—or, better, a commentator—given primarily to home-grown attachments and individualized formulations. He said what he said because he was what he was. And then too there was his personal way of living and acting. He was venturesome, proud, determined, a bit of a daredevil.

  In 1969 he flew me, my wife, and a friend from Phoenix for a tour of the Grand Canyon, acting as pilot and tour guide, moseying high in the air over territory he knew so well, Indian country, mining country. Over there—“See?” he pointed—is where he once crash-landed an Air coupe. Bits and pieces of the airplane are still cherished by the Navajos as amulets, and as eternal proof that flying over their territory is forbidden by their earth god, a reverence for whom prevents them even now from permitting wells to be drilled. “They need to go three miles for water,” he explained. Seated on his right in the copilot’s seat was a tiny old woman right out of Grandma Moses, wearing a shawl, and working on a piece of crochet. What was she doing there? She was (we learned) one of the important women fliers of the past forty years, a test pilot and instructor of legendary reputation. She was there that day—and every day thenceforth that Goldwater would fly—because the insurance company, now that Goldwater was sixty years old, required a qualified copilot when he flew his Bonanza. So he had picked out “Miss Ruth,” who seemed about a hundred years old. She kept an eye on the instrument panel, even though the crocheting never stopped.

  We were getting close to the airport and Captain Goldwater radioed ahead that he would be landing “in seven minutes.” I stared out over the horizon: there was no airport in sight. I told him I thought his exact 7-minute estimate pure conceit. He gritted his famous jaw and ostentatiously activated the stopwatch. Six minutes and 45 seconds later we are within a few hundred feet of the runway. He throttles way down to stretch out those 15 seconds. But Miss Ruth calls his game. Without turning her head she says: “You want to reach the field or you want to stall?” (“Shut up, Ruth! Your job is to tell me when we are on the ground.”) She parts her lips, a grandmotherly smile, and resumes her crocheting—she has made her point. Goldwater applies a little more throttle but arcs the airplane right and then left to consume the obtrusive seconds. At exactly seven minutes on the stopwatch the tires touch down. Miss Ruth continues with her crocheting as we taxi in. Goldwater looks back at his challenger, arches his brow, and says, “I told you seven minutes, didn’t I?”

  He would rise early, at Be-nun-i-kin, the Navajo name given to his home. That morning he had spent two hours, as he regularly did when at home in Phoenix, patching calls from Vietnam soldiers to family and friends via ham radio, a lifelong avocational interest. After that he went to his desk and greeted his houseguest. Though it was only 8 A.M. the doorbell rang—it often rang, tourists cruising by to take a picture of the home and grounds of the defeated presidential candidate and, with any luck, of its owner. Goldwater ignored the bell, continuing his conversation, but instinctively sliding his chair back, out of the line of sight from the door. That way when Mrs. Goldwater or the maid opened it, the tourist wouldn’t spot Goldwater behind the desk.
But this morning the large lady had her camera in hand and called out. “Senator Goldwater? Are you there? I want just one picture.”

  “Okay,” Goldwater called out. “Just give me a minute so I can put on my pyjamas.”

  From that desk, his secretary told me, he had dictated 24,000 letters the year before. The voluminous correspondence went on year after year until his first stroke, three years ago. It didn’t matter that he was no longer in the Senate, or contending for one more election. That, simply, was the way he lived, the way he reacted to people. The day after he died a stranger reached me. Did I know what charity Senator Goldwater had designated to receive gifts in his name? She wanted to do something, to give something, because thirty years ago, when she was desperate to hear from her husband in Vietnam, her phone rang early one morning. It was Senator Goldwater, patching in a call from her husband.

  He was that way. He was the national figure, Mr. Conservative; but his private renown derived from his character, which even strangers coming to his door with a camera could instantly experience. He never changed, friendly but firm, a very grown-up man with a boyish streak. The guest who asked a provocative question could expect a very direct response, very different from weaving about in the air to postpone touching down.

  He alarmed less and less, drew benevolent attention more and more. Even twenty years ago an old antagonist said it, with a nice turn—100 percent ADA liberal Senator Hubert Humphrey to 100 percent ACU conservative Senator Barry Goldwater: “Barry, you’re one of the handsomest men in America. You ought to be in the movies. In fact, I’ve made just that proposal to Eighteenth Century Fox.” I can guess Goldwater just smiled at the lovable, loquacious populist. But others, looking on, would venture that, back in the eighteenth century, Barry Goldwater would have been more at home at the Convention in Philadelphia than most modern liberals.

  In the spy novels of the Cold War, the men of the executive ranks invariably resembled Richard Helms, director of central intelligence during the contentious period from 1966 to 1973. Helms epitomized the debonair spymaster: Tall, dapper, dry-witted, and patrician, he was educated abroad and spoke fluent French and German. The latter skill proved invaluable when, as a United Press reporter in Germany before World War II, Helms scored an interview with Adolf Hitler. A stint with the OSS led to a career at the top echelons of the Agency in Langley. Richard Nixon, who bristled at patricians, had disliked Helms since the early 1960s and could be heard on the so-called smoking gun tape in Watergate saying cryptically: “We protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things.” Helms’s refusal to involve CIA in the Watergate cover-up led Nixon to banish him by naming him ambassador to Iran. Returning to Washington amid a frenzy of revelations about past CIA misconduct, Helms wound up pleading guilty to two misdemeanor counts stemming from charges that he had improperly withheld information from Congress relating to CIA assassination plots and other matters. The opprobrium that attached to the Agency, and to Helms, in the post-Watergate era bothered Buckley both because WFB had briefly worked for the Agency in the 1950s and because he regarded a robust intelligence apparatus as essential to the preservation of American sovereignty and freedoms. When Helms’s biographer Thomas Powers visited Firing Line in March 1980, WFB looked back with dismay on “the hang-it-all-out delirium of the mid-Seventies, when it became chic to reveal national secrets and criminal to conceal them.”

  “Richard Helms, R.I.P.”

  National Review, November 25, 2002.

  Some time after my first novel (Saving the Queen [1976]) was published, I had a handwritten note from Richard Helms. He had read the book, he said, and enjoyed it. I replied and, subsequently, we had one or two visits at lunch.

  I was especially pleased inasmuch as he had been Director of Central Intelligence and would have been put off by any spy-time solecisms he’d bumped into. And he might have found a number of these, inasmuch as my protagonist, Blackford Oakes, was inducted into the CIA as an undergraduate, trained, and deployed in Great Britain where—as one might put it, in a trade in which one divulges nothing more than necessary—Oakes took on more than the CIA gave him to chew.

  But what obviously caught the Director’s eye was the predicament my protagonist was caught up in: He was asked to testify before a congressional committee about activity he had engaged in, and declined to answer questions.

  The Senate committee asked Helms, in 1973, to disclose what he knew about the derailment of the Salvador Allende regime in Chile. Helms dissimulated. He had already left the CIA, Richard Nixon having replaced him when Helms refused to block the FBI’s inquiry into Watergate. Nixon sent him off as ambassador to Iran, which was a shelter of sorts, but in 1976 he came home to Washington to face the music, pleading no contest to charges that he had lied to a congressional committee. He tried to explain his problem to the judge, as Blackford Oakes had tried to explain his silence to his own senatorial inquisitors. “I found myself,” Helms told the court, “in a position of conflict. I had sworn my oath to protect certain secrets. I didn’t want to lie, I didn’t want to mislead the Senate. I was simply trying to find my way through a very difficult situation in which I found myself.”

  The judge had zero understanding of any such difficult situation. “You now stand before this court in disgrace and shame,” he pronounced on this singular man of honor, sentencing Helms to two years in prison (suspended) and a $2,000 fine. An important book was generated. Thomas Powers’s The Man Who Kept the Secrets [1979] told something of the unresolved conflict of the intelligence agent who promises to keep a secret, yet is questioned by an authorized investigator of government.

  Richard Helms was impenitent, and at lunch spoke of the quandary, branching off to other of his encounters as DCI. As director of the CIA he attended, ex officio, the cabinet meetings of President Lyndon Johnson. “There was only one way to get the president’s ear,” he recalled. “It was to be the first to speak, and as CIA director I had this assignment, and to make the very first thing I said—interesting. The president gave you no second hearing.”

  He was relaxed, authoritative, a prominent figure in Washington, composed but not indifferent to damaging vicissitudes-of-state. He indulged a bitterness. “There are two men in the history of the time I served whom I truly despise. One was Frank Church, the other was William Colby.” It was Senator Church who presided over the investigating committee that sought out the secrets, and it was William Colby, the incumbent director of the CIA, who gave away the secrets.

  Dick Helms had a very full life, president of his class at Williams College, and editor of its newspaper; before that, two years of preparatory school in Switzerland, rendering him fluent in French and German, which helped when as a young journalist he had an exclusive interview with Adolf Hitler (Sieg Heil, Herr Shitface). He will need no evasive tactics where, R.I.P., we trust he finds himself. —WFB

  “This fellow Hunt,” President Nixon murmured in the Oval Office on June 23, 1972—on the “smoking gun” Watergate tape whose disclosure two years later would force Nixon’s resignation—“he knows too damn much.” A career spy and spy novelist, E. Howard Hunt appeared to many as the walking embodiment of all the exploits, secrets, and scandals of America’s postwar intelligence community. Educated at Brown and the U.S. Naval Academy, Hunt served the OSS in wartime China and later joined the CIA. His Cold War clandestine career was less Ian Fleming than Hannah Arendt: He specialized in political and psychological warfare in the subversion of foreign leaders, such as the overthrow in 1954 of Guatemala’s government. But Hunt’s career was ruined by the failure of the Agency’s next great effort at regime change: the Bay of Pigs, in which Hunt had played a planning role. In the Nixon White House, it was Hunt, partnering with G. Gordon Liddy, who recruited the Cuban Bay of Pigs veterans to commit the most consequential crimes of the 1970s: the break-ins at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. Although history records that the Watergate cover-
up collapsed and a president of the United States resigned because the White House never fully met Hunt’s demands for “blackmail,” or “hush money,” Hunt always regarded the sums demanded as the traditional remuneration due to spies caught red-handed. Punished excessively by a publicity-seeking judge, Hunt served close to three years in prison, often in harsh conditions. Compounding his misfortunes was the plane crash that killed his wife, Dorothy, a covert operator who had couriered Watergate “hush money.” WFB’s view on the great scandal, and the sorrows of the Hunts, was personal: He had worked for Hunt in Mexico City in the early 1950s during a brief stint in the CIA and had become godfather to Hunt’s children. During Watergate, Hunt confessed undisclosed aspects of the affair exclusively to Buckley. As late as 1977, lobbying for Hunt’s release from prison, WFB pronounced his old friend, in a syndicated column, guilty of simple “foolishness”—but Buckley’s judgment hardened over time. Outside of Ronald Reagan, no friend of Buckley’s stood so squarely at the center of momentous events—and EHH, in Buckley’s estimation, had sinned gravely. WFB’s gift for friendship was universally recorded, but the arc of his friendship with Hunt was unique: a pitiable role reversal, set amid the moral vagaries of Watergate, that tested Buckley’s reserves of faith, loyalty, and patience. The eulogy below shows how WFB struggled, where Christian morality did not compel otherwise, to err on the side of Christian mercy. [Note: WFB errs below in ascribing responsibility for the Ellsberg break-in to Attorney General John Mitchell; it was John Ehrlichman who gave the order, in writing, and was convicted at trial for it.]