A Torch Kept Lit Read online

Anyone married to Martha Mitchell had to be, in hidden life, one true gay blade. At his request, received by radio from my office while I was on a sailing vacation, I stopped at a little village in Maine and telephoned his home number. Mrs. Mitchell answered the phone: “Naaargh, operator, whoever is calling CANNOT speak to John Mitchell and I don’t care if it’s the man who is running for President. John Mitchell needs to relax. And that’s MY business.”

  There were those who doubted his professional talents as a campaign manager, given that Richard Nixon, after Chicago, 1968, was ahead of Hubert Humphrey by 15 points; ten weeks later, on election day, he won by less than a single point. But John Mitchell was always imperturbable, always certain (in the company of others, anyway) that things would work out. Six years after this triumph—the return of a Republican President after the long winter 1960–1968—John Mitchell had stepped down as attorney general, had been divorced by Martha, and was in jail.

  The daemon prevailed, and we know that John Mitchell authorized the Watergate burglary and then lied about it. We take these matters very seriously in the United States, and we should. But we should also be aware that there are other cultures commonly thought of as civilized in which what Mitchell did would be laughed at as nothing more than the games pols play. I remember especially the French intellectual who during the months just before Mr. Nixon’s resignation commented that if it was absolutely proved that Mr. Nixon did not authorize Watergate, he should then be impeached as incompetent.

  Beyond denying, while he could, what he had done, Mitchell clammed up. One needs to go back to George Marshall to find anyone whose memoirs—in Mitchell’s case so greatly relevant to a political understanding of exactly what had happened—were so sought after. But he lived quietly in Washington, with a companion. And, it is said, spoke discreetly from time to time with his old comrade-in-arms, who had been spared jail, but not the humiliation of having to resign, for the first time in American history, the Presidency.

  John Mitchell’s stoicism can be admired quite apart from the weakness that seized him on that fatal day, when his anxiety to know everything the Democrats were up to led him to authorize a little caper that became the greatest political crime in U.S. history. As Jesse Jackson would say, From Watergate to Pearly-gate. We wish him safe passage. —WFB

  “I think more of her now than ever,” WFB wrote of Jacqueline Onassis in July 1969, after publication of a tell-all book by Jackie’s secretary. “The most sensational revelations about Mrs. Kennedy,” Buckley noted happily, “are utterly unsensational.” Buckley had earlier befriended the widowed first lady in the company of John Kenneth Galbraith, who had taken Jackie to Gstaad for a weeklong skiing vacation in 1967. “Galbraith had undertaken her protection, and looked out, too, for her social life. Did I want to join them for dinner at the chalet of David Niven and his wife Hjordis?…[Niven] was a radiant host, attentive to every need….What Jackie most needed, during that extended period of shock, was to laugh. Making people laugh was a specialty of his.” WFB’s eulogy for Jackie offers a glimpse into a society world long gone in which manners still prevailed and the two could happily encounter each other in the usual settings—one memorable fire drill aside—with mutual admiration, good cheer, and care not to impose.

  “Jacqueline Onassis, RIP”

  National Review, June 13, 1994.

  Whenever I think back on it, as I am now forced to do, it is with utter dread & horror. It was late in the afternoon of a very full day in the Sixties. I stumbled into the receiving line, made up of four lovely ladies, self-evidently the sponsors of the charity affair. The first in line was my wife, the other three all very familiar faces—no doubt I had been in their company dozens of times. But in that harassed moment I could not instantly remember their first names, so I did what one generally does in these situations. After kissing my own wife, I went on to buss Lady B (whom indeed I did know), then Lady C (whom indeed I did know), then Jackie Kennedy—whom I had never laid eyes on in my life. It was only after I had treated her like one of my old lady-buddies that recognition set in. I felt exactly as I’d have felt if I had accidentally kissed the Queen of England. Not because Jackie was Untouchable; but because the national mania to touch her made her correspondingly vulnerable. For a while, a long while, I felt like that awful paparazzo she finally took to court [Ron Galella] because he was following her about with his camera day after day, week after week, month after month.

  In the years ahead, we became moderate friends, and once during a fire drill at Doubleday I shared a concrete stair with her for the duration. Our contacts were infrequent, and I rather liked that about her. She had a set of friends, and as the years went by, she gave more time to consolidating friendships that especially appealed to her than to quick-processing fresh friends. If it had happened that, a month ago we had been seated together, whether in a staircase during a fire drill or at a fancy dinner party, the conversation would have been fresh and lively and spontaneous, utterly lacking in strain; in part, I must suppose, because she knew that notwithstanding the first awful misadventure, I was not engaged in cultivating Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. I did once ask her to engage in an enterprise that would have required her to spend ten minutes at the Sistine Chapel, reflecting on the continuing relevance of one of the parables in the New Testament. Her negative was charmingly delivered over the telephone. “Bill, the only time I ever appeared on television was when I took the camera around the White House after the renovations. I was so awful I decided never to do it again.”

  It seems, on reflection, that her life, for all its vicissitudes, was about as perfectly conducted as anyone with her beauty, skills, and glamour could hope to manage. She did what she wanted to do. If her second marriage was emotionally impulsive, it was strategically prudent. Books could be written (probably have been written) on the skills she showed in bringing up her two exemplary children in that magnetic field she moved in. She worked not as a dilettante but as a truly engaged editor, an average of three days every week. She exhibited only as much of herself as she thought she owed as reciprocity to a country that loved her and was fascinated by her.

  And she was true to her Christian faith, which in the final ceremony irradiated Jackie’s class, a creature of God. —WFB

  It was fitting that Lieutenant General Vernon M. Walters, a soldier, spy, linguist, translator, and diplomat, should have titled his 1978 memoir Silent Missions. In more than fifty years of public service, he remained to the end the model of the discreet public servant. An army veteran of allied campaigns in North Africa and Italy in World War II, Walters mastered at least seven foreign languages. He was the official note taker present when President Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur. As a staff aide to President Eisenhower, he made an impression on Vice President Nixon, particularly when he served as Nixon’s interpreter during the latter’s famous trip to Caracas in 1958 (when anti-American mobs violently attacked Nixon’s motorcade). As the military attaché in Paris during Nixon’s first term as president, Walters helped smuggle Henry Kissinger to and from secret talks with the North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho. In 1972, Nixon appointed Walters deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a position in which the taciturn general played a critical early role in frustrating, and documenting, efforts by White House aides to enmesh the Agency in the Watergate cover-up. Later, President Reagan tapped Walters to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and President George H. W. Bush made him ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany. Never married, he died alone at a hospital in Florida at the age of eighty-five. Between 1978 and 1993, WFB welcomed Walters to the set of Firing Line five times, reveling always in the older man’s singular gift for language—both the spoken word and those best left unsaid.

  “Vernon Walters, R.I.P.”

  National Review, March 11, 2002.

  The Quiet Man departed this world at Good Samaritan Medical Center, the cause of death, as he’d have wished, unstated. On hearing of his unobtrusive death in P
alm Beach, friends and admirers took it for granted that the Good Samaritan hospital took the very best care of the good Samaritan dying in its hands. If Vernon Walters was conscious, he’d have received the last rites of the Catholic Church, whose God he thought himself as having committed his life work to, although what he did was work for the United States, an ungodly nation much of the time Walters was active, but reasonably adjudged the best-intentioned country of the 20th century.

  Walters was at once the invisible man, and the man, asked to speak out, utterly plainspoken, wittily dogmatic, searchingly thoughtful. He was a consummate craftsman: You had to be out of sight when you were interpreting for Eisenhower and de Gaulle, Kissinger and Pompidou, note-taking for Truman when he fired Douglas MacArthur, sneaking Kissinger into Paris to meet secretly with the Vietnamese, serving as deputy chief, then acting director, of the CIA. But when his views were asked, on questions he thought himself entitled to speak out about, the words, thoughts, reflections, history, and witticisms poured forth, ingenuous questions corrected, sarcasm and cynicism handled, the questioner left barely alive to tell the tale.

  It happens that I saw him often, because he spent many days on passenger liners participating in seminars we both engaged in. He was getting creaky, at 85, and needed his nephew to get him about, but he omitted nothing that was going on, in part a preternatural disposition to do his duty, in part an appetite to see and hear everything. The intelligence officer off-duty is sometimes governed by the habits of an intelligence officer on-duty. In his company one found oneself supposing, on hearing Walters handle German and Spanish, French and Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Russian, that his mind traveled from any one language to any other seriatim, because his mind worked that way, taking it all in.

  Although his business in later years was diplomacy, his craft was intelligence, and the two blended in his hands. His mien was grouchy, the corners of his lips turned down, his arms crossed, as he might have looked receiving a tirade from Khrushchev with duties to pass the ordure on to Jack Kennedy. I asked him, on a television program at a time when the CIA was under especially heavy pressure, about his calling. He replied in one breath, “We have a great ambivalence toward intelligence. The average American thinks it’s something that isn’t very clean, it isn’t very American, and the Founding Fathers wouldn’t like it. Well, I have news for them. George Washington was one of the most prolific readers of other people’s mail. Benjamin Franklin was assistant postmaster of British North America before the Revolution when we were all loyal subjects of George III. He was busy opening all the British mail. They caught him. They sent him to London to stand trial before the Privy Council. They found him guilty. Before they could sentence him, he skipped off to France to conduct the covert operation that was to bring France into the war on the side of the Revolution. Now this was a remarkable achievement, seeing that Anthony Eden’s great-great-great-grandfather had fully penetrated Benjamin Franklin’s office. Franklin’s valet was a British agent, his secretary was a British agent, and we have some doubts about one of the three commissioners.”

  That was a mouthful, and he spoke in mouthfuls. But he was, in spite of it, a man of great diffidence. My most memorable encounter with him was at the steps of the White House. He was passing through the usual checkpoint at the west gate and had his sister with him.

  The Secret Service would not let them in: They had no data on his sister, and for all the Secret Service knew, this septuagenarian lady was really Mata Hari. I was behind in line, and behind me was Ted Williams, conversing with the chancellor of the University of Chicago. Ours was a line of people invited to the White House that day in January 1991 to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom; and there the former head of the CIA was holding up the line. He just stood there, waiting for something to happen, so that he could have a family member at hand when the president of the United States hung a medal about his neck. —WFB

  “The contest between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss was a gripping judicial Armageddon,” WFB wrote in 1978. “But to deposit Chambers, as has been done in most references to him, as the man who got Hiss is on the order of remembering Ezra Pound as the man who broadcast for Mussolini.”

  The main event…is the political and literary art of Whittaker Chambers….His genius lay in an analytical and descriptive intensity that touched even the most awful concerns with a kind of transporting lyricism.

  Gripped by the Hiss–Chambers case, enraptured by Witness (1952), WFB saw Chambers in heroic terms. But he also counted the rumpled ex-communist and Time editor a colleague and pal. Twenty years after recruiting the older man to National Review, Buckley would write of Chambers’s “closest friends (I was one of them).” Sometimes WFB found his friend’s writing obscure, his reasons for leaving the magazine, after two years, even more so, but he remained awed by Chambers’s epiphany and its consequence. “The Hiss Case is a permanent war,” Chambers wrote in his first letter to WFB, in 1954. When WFB published their correspondence—in Odyssey of a Friend (1969)—no letter provided greater insight into Chambers’s innate contradictions than the 1957 missive in which he remarked with “sadness” on how much he had come to “enjoy” writing for NR: “I have been grateful to you in a way that I could not express without courting extravagance.” Buckley’s original 1962 eulogy, “The End of Whittaker Chambers,” quoting at length from the letters, consumed 10,000 words in Esquire (and was republished in Rumbles Left and Right [1963]). Here we present WFB’s remarks, adapted from the longer piece, at a White House event commemorating Chambers’s centenary.

  “Witness and Friend”

  National Review, August 6, 2001.

  [originally delivered July 9, 2001, at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Washington, D.C.; adapted from “The End of Whittaker Chambers,” Esquire, September 1962]

  We were to meet at the National Gallery here in Washington, and I had been waiting for him at the specified corner. I spotted him far down the corridor. It could only have been he, or Alfred Hitchcock. The Sunday before, he had asked me to come down that day, the 8th of June. We had lunch. He had asked me to keep the evening free. “You’ve guessed what’s up, haven’t you?” he asked, his face wreathed in smiles.

  “I haven’t the least idea.”

  “John!” he said proudly. His son would be married that afternoon, and I was to go to the wedding and the reception.

  As he stepped into the elevator that evening, after the ceremony, I saw him framed by the door, his hand and Esther’s clutched together, posing while his son-in-law popped a camera in his face—a grim reminder of all those flashbulbs ten years before. I never saw him again. He died a month later, on July 9, 1961, forty years ago, exactly. Free at last.

  I first met Chambers in 1954. An almost total silence had closed in on him. Two years earlier he had published Witness. When the preface of Witness appeared as a feature in The Saturday Evening Post, that issue of the magazine sold a startling half million extra copies on the newsstand. The book came out with a great flurry. The bitterness of the Hiss trial had not subsided. For some of the reviewers, Hiss’s innocence had once been a fixed rational conviction, then blind faith; and now, after the publication of that overwhelming book, rank superstition.

  But the nature of the author was not grasped by the reviewers. I am a heavy man, Chambers once wrote me, apologizing for staying two days at my home. There is a sense in which that was true. But he never appreciated, as others could do, the true gaiety of his nature, the appeal of his mysterious humor, the instant communicability of an overwhelming personal tenderness; his friends—I think especially of Ralph de Toledano—took endless and articulate pleasure from his company.

  Witness was off to a great start. But, surprisingly, it did not continue to sell in keeping with its spectacular send-off. The length of the book was forbidding; and the trial, in any case, was three years old, and the cold sweat had dried. Alger Hiss was in prison, and now the political furor centered about Senator McCarthy. Those
who did not know the book, and who were not emotionally committed either to Chambers’s guilt or to his innocence, seemed to shrink even from a vicarious involvement in the controversy, to a considerable extent because of the dark emanations that came from Chambers; depressing when reproduced, as was widely done, in bits and snatches torn from the narrative. “Until reading Witness it had been my impression,” Hugh Kenner, the author and critic, had written me, “that his mind moved, or wallowed, in a setting of continuous apocalypse from which he derived gloomy satisfactions, of an immobilizing sort. The large scale of Witness makes things much clearer. It is surprisingly free from rhetoric, and it makes clear the genuine magnitude of the action which was his life; a Sophoclean tragedy in slow motion, years not hours.”

  In 1954 I asked if I might visit him. He had written to a long-standing friend, Henry Regnery, the publisher of my book on Senator McCarthy, to praise the book while making clear his critical differences with its subject. Chambers had been struck down by a heart attack and it was vaguely known that he spent his days in and out of a sickbed, from which the likelihood was that he would never again emerge physically whole. I had every reason to believe that I would be visiting Jeremiah lying alongside a beckoning tomb.

  I was taken to his bedroom. The doctor had forbidden him even to raise his head. And yet he seemed the liveliest man I had ever met. I could not imagine such good humor from a very sick man, let alone anyone possessed by the conviction that night was closing in all over the world, privately tortured by his continuing fear that the forces aligned against him would contrive to reorder history, impose upon the world the ghastly lie that he had testified falsely against Alger Hiss, and so erase his witness, his expiation for more than ten years’ complicity with Communism.