A Torch Kept Lit Read online

  Memorandum to the Buckley Children:

  I have been much concerned of late with the apparent inability of any of you, at any time to go anywhere on foot, although I am sure your Mother would have informed me if any of you had been born without the walking capacity of a normal human being. […]

  Affectionately,

  Father

  From Will’s writings and Senate testimony, one can discern traces of the rhetorical style—marked by circumlocution and sarcasm—that Bill later would make famous. Sister Jane recognized that of all the Buckley children, Billy emerged as “the apple of his father’s eye.” “Father had a very special love of Bill,” agreed brother Reid. When WFB Jr. was fifteen, a sophomore at Millbrook, Will wrote him:

  My dear Billy,

  In thinking over my letter to you it may have appeared very critical and I hope you did not take it that way. Your mother and I like very much your attitude of having strong convictions and of not being too bashful to express them. What I meant was that you would have to learn to be more moderate in the expression of your views and try to express them in a way that would give as little offense as possible to your friends.

  Bill’s veneration for his father was total. When a professor suggested the study of metaphysics, Bill replied: “I have God and my father. That’s all I need.” “I don’t know if you were aware of this while I was in Millbrook,” Bill wrote Will at twenty, “but I was not very popular with boys.”

  After a good deal of self-analysis, I determined that the principal reason for this revolved around my extreme dogmatism—principally in matters involving politics and the Catholic Church. I could not understand another point of view; it seemed to me that anyone who was not an isolationist or a Catholic was simply stupid. Instead of keeping these sentiments to myself, I blurted them out and supported them upon the slightest provocation. I was intolerant about all kinds of things. I would not sit in on sex conversations or trivial gossip because I considered them wrong….The result of this was that my company was very little sought for except by a close few friends.

  When I went into the Army, I learned the importance of tolerance, and the importance of a sense of proportion about all matters—even in regard to religion, morality etc….I found that there were actually very few prerequisites to the good friend: he had to have a good sense of humor, a pleasant personality and a certain number of common interests.

  WFB Sr. did not live to see WFB Jr. achieve his greatest fame or influence, the eventual triumph of the ideals Will had labored to instill in his children; he died shortly before National Review, launched with a $100,000 “loan” from him, marked its third anniversary. But Will saw his son marry Pat, witnessed the publication of God and Man at Yale (1951) and McCarthy and His Enemies (1954), and supported his son’s early career as l’enfant terrible of American commentary.

  ROSEN: I’m wondering if there’s anything you’ve done since you became a so-called public person of which you think your father would have disapproved.

  WFB: Well, there’s a—there’s a certain looseness of language, which is pretty conventional today, not to say profligate, which would have been very shocking to somebody in my father’s generation. My father died in 1958. [laughs] And I remember when he read the galleys of my book on Joe McCarthy. I used the word—intending exactly to use it—a “damned son-of-a-bitch.” And he was really offended by that. He put a big cross mark in the margins, suggesting that it should be eliminated. I suppose he would have gotten used to the vernacular, because everybody has to; otherwise, they can’t watch television. That’s your fault!…But beyond that, no, I don’t think there’s any position that I have taken that would have surprised or disappointed him.

  The first piece below is the eulogy that ran in National Review in October 1958. Then follows a short treatment of Will’s final days from the privately published W.F.B.—An Appreciation by His Family and Friends (1959) and a reminiscence, published forty years after Will’s death, about an “affair of the heart” and a final communication from the grave.

  “William Frank Buckley, 1881–1958”

  National Review, October 25, 1958.

  The vital statistics are that he grew up in Texas and, as the oldest son, undertook, upon the premature death of his father, to look after the health and welfare of his mother and the education of his three brothers and two sisters. He did this, and educated himself at the University of Texas by teaching Spanish, which he had mastered by living as a boy on the frontier. He went to Mexico to practice law, and saw the revolution against the benevolent and autocratic Porfirio Diaz and what followed in its wake, and learned, and never forgot, his distrust of the revolutionary ideology.

  There are not many alive who knew him then, but those who did remember keenly the intelligence, the wit, the largeheartedness, and—always—the high principle, which brought him a singular eminence in the community. That eminence the American government repeatedly acknowledged, as when three successive Secretaries of State called on him for guidance; as when the Wilson administration offered him the civil governorship of Veracruz (he refused indignantly); as when the Mexican government appointed him counsel at the ABC Conference in Niagara; as when he was called by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as the premier American expert on the tangled affairs of Mexico. And in 1921, the end of the line: exile from Mexico. At that, he was lucky. For he had indeed materially aided a counterrevolutionary movement. The fact that the counterrevolutionists were decent men, and those in power barbarians, does not alter the political reality, which is that it is a very dangerous business indeed to back an unsuccessful insurrection, and he knew it and barely escaped with his skin.

  He had married, and had three children, and would have seven more, all ten of whom survive him. He launched a business in Venezuela, and his fortunes fluctuated. But as children, we were never aware of his tribulations. We knew only that the world revolved about him and that whether what we needed was a bicycle, or an excuse to stay away from school for a day, or the answer to an anguished personal problem, he was there to fill the need, and when he thought the need exorbitant or improper, he would, by a word, bring us gently to earth. He worshipped three earthly things: learning, beauty, and his family. He satisfied his lust for the first by reading widely and by imposing on his lawless brood an unusual pedagogic regimen. The second impulse he gratified by a meticulous attention to every shrub, every stick of furniture that composed his two incomparable homes. The third he served by a constant, inexplicit tenderness to his wife and children of which the many who have witnessed it have not, they say, often seen the like.

  In his anxiety for the well-being of his country his three passions fused. Here in America was the beauty, the abundance, that he revered; here in the political order was the fruit of centuries of learning; here his wife, and his ten children, and his thirty-one grandchildren, would live, as long as he lived and years after. So he encouraged us to stand by our country and our principles. To his encouragement, moral and material, National Review owes its birth and early life. It was only two weeks ago that, crippled and convalescent in Austria, he registered, in turn, joy, and indignation, and amusement, and sadness, as his wife read aloud to him from the latest issue of this chronicle of America’s glories and misadventures.

  My father died last week at seventy-seven, and we take leave of him in the pages of the journal which had become his principal enthusiasm. We pray God his spirited soul to keep.

  “The Last Days”

  In Buckley, Priscilla L., and Buckley, William F., Jr. (Eds.), W.F.B.—An Appreciation by His Family and Friends (privately published, 1979).

  [At bottom, Buckley listed the “honorary pallbearers”: Cecilio Velasco, Van Zandt Wheeler, Joseph H. Himes, Warren W. Smith, George S. Montgomery, Jr., J. MacMillan Harding, Dr. M. D. Touart, John deLoach, and John Villepigue.]

  Father and Mother spent the late summer of 1958 at Bad Gastein in Austria, as they had two of the preceding three summers. Bad Gastein was
one of the few places in which Father found refuge in his lifelong flight from hay fever. Reid and Betsy and their children joined them there and spent several weeks with them. They met again in Paris. From there, Reid and Betsy returned to Spain where they were living; and Mother and Father took the train to Le Havre, and boarded the S.S. United States.

  Father had been in high spirits. He was feeling well, and had enjoyed and profited from the daily baths at Bad Gastein. He spent hours every day playing with Hunt and Job; he read voraciously letters from his children, and kept abreast of developments in the office. And Mother, as always, was at his side. But by the time he reached Paris he was eagerly looking forward to the return trip, and reunion with his children. The night before he left Paris, he was suddenly nauseated. That was the beginning, the doctors later deduced, of his fatal brain hemorrhage.

  But the disturbance was not prolonged, and they left on schedule for Le Havre; again, Father was feeling well, and had a hearty dinner on boarding the liner Thursday evening.

  On Monday afternoon, the day before the ship was due in New York, the office at 103 East 37th Street received a cable from Mother addressed to John. The cable was read to Bill, because John was in Canada hunting, and Jimmy was in the Philippines. Father had become ill, Mother cabled, giving no details, and we should request Dr. Touart to meet the boat when it docked the next morning. Bill telephoned the S.S. United States. He reached Mother, who told him that during the preceding day and a half Father had been losing consciousness. The ship’s doctor, and an internist who was among the passengers and had been consulted, diagnosed the trouble as probably due to a stroke. By Monday afternoon, Father was only intermittently conscious.

  At eight that night, Mother called again and spoke with Maureen. Father had been moved to the ship’s infirmary, she reported, at the suggestion of the doctor. Arrangements had been made for Mother to spend the night with him in the adjacent bed. Fearing the worst, Mother had called in a priest, who administered the last rites. Father remained unconscious except for an occasional intelligible remark addressed to Mother.

  (Four years earlier, gravely ill after his first stroke, Father lay seemingly unconscious on his hospital bed at Charlotte, N.C. Mother opened his bible and began to read aloud from the psalms in the Old Testament. Father’s voice rang out for the first time in four days: “Boy, could those Jews write!” And, having paid tribute to good prose, which he always admired, he relapsed immediately into his coma.)

  We lost touch with the boat after nine. The ship-to-shore Transatlantic telephone service is suspended at that hour, until eight the next morning. The entire night was consumed by devoted friends of the family, notably Bill Shields and Austin Taylor [Pat Buckley’s father], in attempting to arrange for Bill to go out to The Narrows the next morning on the Coast Guard cutter that takes out customs officials, reporters, and persons whose presence is indispensable to the serenity of very important passengers. The bureaucratic logjam was finally broken the next morning, thanks to Ralph de Toledano, and permission was secured a bare ten minutes before the cutter set out at ten in the morning. Mother meanwhile had been reached by telephone. There was no change in Father’s condition. Bill reached the S.S. United States at eleven. Father was unconscious; Mother had not slept.

  The boat docked at one and Father was taken immediately to the Lenox Hill Hospital by ambulance.

  Dr. Touart took immediate charge. A spinal tap confirmed his suspicion that there was, or had been, bleeding within the skull. They would wait to see whether the blood vessel would mend itself, and whether the brain had been damaged. By Wednesday, Father had not recovered consciousness, and an exploratory brain operation was indicated, to repair the blood vessel and examine the damage that had been done. The hemorrhage was located by X-ray, and the operation performed on Thursday, by Dr. Juan Negrin.

  Except for Reid who was in Spain, and Jimmy who was in Manila, the entire family had come to New York (John was reached in Canada and returned immediately), including Father’s youngest sister, Aunt Eleanor. We hoped the operation would reveal the point of pressure against the brain which was causing the unconsciousness, and that, relief having been effected, Father would revive, and recover. Meanwhile, he was not in pain, or so the doctors assured us; and there is no reason to believe that he was ever aware of what went on during that week. After Monday, the last day aboard the S.S. United States, he did not have a moment of consciousness; or a moment’s apprehension. There had been plenty, in the last four years, against which to exercise his enormous reserves of courage: a paralyzed left side, the treatment—and the inevitable condescension—that is meted out to all cripples; yet he was never heard by any living soul, including the woman in whom he confided everything, and reposed all his trust, to utter a single word of complaint—against the pain, the boredom, the humiliations, the immobility. But at the end, he was not called upon to suffer more.

  Twenty-four hours after the operation, he had not revived, and his blood pressure was alarmingly low. But on Saturday, it began to rise, and danger of postsurgical shock appeared to have been surmounted. Priscilla and Jane drove to Sharon to pick up a fresh set of clothes. Mother had dinner on Saturday night, after leaving the hospital, with Aloise, Patricia, Gerry, Maureen, and Carol. She talked after dinner with the nurse in attendance, who reported that Father was sleeping peacefully.

  At ten minutes to three in the next morning, on Sunday, October 5, the telephone rang. Mother picked up the phone. The nurse told her to hurry to the hospital, that Father had taken a turn for the worse. Within fifteen minutes she and Aloise and Patricia and Carol arrived at Lenox Hill. Father was dead.

  That afternoon the family met at the Church of Our Savior at 38th Street and Park Avenue where a priest read the rosary. The word had got out quickly, and many of his friends and associates, from his office and elsewhere, appeared at the church, and joined the family in prayer.

  Mother decided to bury Father in Camden, having inferred from a casual remark he once made that this was Father’s preference. Monday evening, the family, including Aunt Eleanor, boarded a private car at Pennsylvania Station. We reached Camden at 11:30 the morning of October 7th, a bright and beautiful day. Father was taken to the funeral home, which was a sea of flowers. At 4:00 P.M. the pallbearers, Austin Sheheen, Carleton Burdick, Cyril Harrison, Thomas A. Ancrum, David R. Williams, John Whitaker, Henry Carrison, Sr., Ross Buckley, and Edmund Buckley, Jr., brought the casket into the crowded church, and Father Jeffords performed a funeral service that lasted about ten minutes. The procession to the cemetery included about a hundred cars. We took a circuitous route, to avoid a parade which the mayor of Camden had postponed a half hour to make it possible for us to cut through the town to the cemetery. Six months before, the mayor had called on Father with a delegation, to present him with a silver bowl, a token of Camden’s gratitude for Father’s generosities over the years. As we drove by, the policemen saluted the hearse.

  Father’s tombstone, which is on the northern side of the Quaker Cemetery, and is shaded by a magnolia tree, bears the inscription “W.F.B., 1881–1958.” —W.F.B., Jr.

  “Wine in the Blood”

  Wine Enthusiast, June 1998.

  At age 40, my father had never (he said so, and he never lied) tasted an alcoholic drink. But that year his doctor, after fishing around with whatever doctors fish around with to examine the heart, recommended that he drink red wine every day. It became an affair of the heart.

  He tended to take on his enterprises in a big way. I have an early memory of my father doing a single thing with his own hand (he was inept in manual pursuits). He was in the large wine cellar he had built during the ’20s, in his house in Connecticut, engaged now in the painstaking job of pouring wine from the barrels he had bought in France into appropriate bottles, which he then labeled. I remember that it was a very protracted project, lasting several evenings. In those days serious purchasers brought their wine in barrels to America and let the wine rest for five or six years
before decanting it. But that has changed—I suppose, as a result of cork technology. And I assume there are additives now that accelerate the wine’s development, even as they short-change its longevity. In any event, my memory of it is that by the end of the ’30s Father was buying his wine already bottled, wherein lay a tale that greatly amused his ten children during the war years.

  In 1939, Father augmented his collection by ordering a great many splendid French wines. It is difficult, at my age, to imagine such practices in wine-collecting as my father engaged in, which was quite simple and direct: He would order the best wines (of contemporary vintage) that could be bought. Today we spend our lives tasting hundreds of wines and swooping down on the bargains. My father—and who knows how many others—simply bought, having tested them, the best wines. In the ’30s, these were moderately priced. But the large shipment he ordered in 1939 was held up because, of course, freight was suspended during the war.

  But the mails were not suspended, and every year or so the wine broker would write from Lyon reporting that my father’s wine was still securely stored at a repository in the countryside, safe from bombs bursting in air and other wartime distractions. But then the terrible letter came in 1943—the Nazis had discovered the hidden wine in the château and consumed it! My father was stoical about these things, but he was, not unexpectedly, saddened at the loss of thousands of bottles of lovely Bordeaux and Burgundies.

  The second letter on the subject was a happy surprise. In fact, the German soldiers had fled and the merchant learned that they had not discovered the wine, which rested contentedly in its storing place. That was good news, but sadly interrupted by the next letter, some time soon after the Normandy landing in 1944. The American invading force had chased out the Germans—but, “en cherchant partout,” they had come upon the wine and, presumably toasting to the Allied cause, had consumed it.