Chapter One
The Conservative Movement Elects Its U.S. Senator
The day Jim Buckley won his seat as junior senator for New York, my family became camp.
The next day -- November 7, 1970 -- the New York Times called my brother Bill and asked him to write a piece entitled "The Buckley Mystique," which made him acutely uncomfortable. He tracked me down to the Midwestern college where I was lecturing, proposing that I discharge the commission. As I recall, it was eleven o'clock in the morning. The piece had to be completed within the hour and telexed to the National Review offices, whence it would be relayed to 229 West 43rd Street.
The assigned topic made my flesh crawl also. We were not Roosevelts. We were not Kennedys. There was no "mystique" about us at all. We were an ordinary, though large and rambunctious, American family. We had extraordinary parents, principled as no Kennedy going back to old Joe (and from him back to old Nick) ever was, inclining us to a radical dissent when it came to popular culture and to political opinions that were at the time unpopular and that are now once again in eclipse. I'd never have used mystique in connection with my family. Difficult, yes. Talented, yes. Pugnacious, yes. Argumentative, yes. Principled, yes. We were brought up to be fastidious about the English tongue. The term charisma was loosely flung about in those days, particularly in connection with John F. Kennedy, but if that rogue was filled with the grace of God, I'll eat my broccoli. The Times's use of mystique descended from a hero-worshiping inflation of language that we Buckleys as a tribe detested and that was to me and my brethren disgusting. As br'er Bill pointed out, however, the Times was willing to pay one thousand bucks.
The prospect of earning such a fat sum from the cathedral of Northeastern liberalism was too tempting to resist. I secured a classroom where I could seclude myself, placed my battered Smith-Corona on the desk, and batted out the eight hundred words. What I did was to deny that there was any "mystique" about us. The whole point of our politics was what our parents drilled into their children: that "God, family, and country," in that order, demanded our unswerving loyalty, that we as individuals -- we Americans -- had to have "character," that we individually had to develop integrity, and that the people of a republic (and a proud country like the United States) had to be self-reliant. We were not serfs, beholden to crown or state.
Our upbringing was peculiar. Though Father was a man of almost painful personal shyness, respecting his children, he abandoned modesty for a pride that could be ludicrous. Privately he fretted over our moral and intellectual failings. At dinner parties, on the other hand, he was complacent that his poor guests were hugely entertained by hearing us howl through Mexican ballads or by listening to me, age seven, Charge Through the Light Brigade. We like to died.
At the age of eight, I finally put a stop to calls for my recitation by whipping out a toy but lethal-looking metal sword and, with wild histrionic thrusts, brandishing it at Cossack to-the-right-of-me and Cossack to-the-left-of-me, nearly slicing the choker chain off one venerable lady and all but decapitating her husband.
I was the rebellious child, among nine others of similar deplorable nonconformity. Checked, but never daunted, Father persisted in embarrassing us right down to the toenails, even when we were adolescents, grasping our upper arms in his freckled rancher's grip and propelling us into the breast or bosom of startled visitors, proclaiming our most recent accomplishments, say a B in math. He would beam on us those round, pale blue eyes, magnified by his pince-nez into exophthalmic infractions of a delight perfect in its assumption that we were wonderful.
Yes, we revered our Texan sire; and reciprocated his with our love; and were painfully conscious that our accomplishments did not approximate our father's boundless fantasies. We have all been moderately possessed by the compulsion to make good on his (and Mother's) enormous (and undeserved) pride. This has stung us into working harder than some people, if not as hard as a good many others. And it has caused us to shrink -- with the same childhood embarrassment -- from the limelight, something frequently observed about my brother Jim during his political campaigns, less often about Bill, except by those who know him well. Sister Priscilla, who became the formative managing editor of National Review (arguably the most influential political journal in the second half of the twentieth century), once flew all the way to France in order to escape an (otherwise unavoidable) speaking engagement. Aloise -- Allie -- could not bring herself to stand up and ask a question at a public meeting. Patricia, managing editor of Triumph, an ideologically embattled Catholic magazine, had to disguise herself in a red beret before summoning the courage to demonstrate against the abortion laws.
I doubt any of us enjoys public attention, which is why so many of us have hidden behind the metal arras of the typewriter. Professionally, Bill has been soaked in klieg light since he wrote God and Man at Yale back in 1952, when he was just 27. There survived in him, nevertheless, the self-deprecatory spirit that, often by sleight of wit, objectified the public personality -- he doesn't allow himself to be confused with those who sell themselves into believing in their own myths. The status of celebrity, as distinguished from the obligations thereof, Bill treated always as frolic, hoping you wouldn't be so undiscriminating as to take it too solemnly, either. And so with Jim, different as he is: temperamental humility that made campaigning an agony, until the cause began to carry him.
As a tribe, we find it difficult to blow our own trumpet, to pose as charismatic leaders, to feel the self-assurance that permits others to believe in their indispensability to the world at large. We are, therefore, happier as advocates of someone else (a sibling will do); of, by preference, an intellectual or moral idea.
The strength of personality of Father and Mother and their rigorous systems of belief nourished in us, their children, a similarity of perceptions that has characterized us our whole lives long. Our bonding as a family of individuals has expressed itself in the social, spiritual, and intellectual dimensions in astonishing degree. Though we differ widely among ourselves, and almost always, when coming together, argue fiercely, it's often as though the ten of us were extruded from the same toothpaste tube.
And that's so. I don't know how to reduce this in abstract fashion, and I can only hope that what I venture to hypothesize is not nonsense; but the strong unity of consciousness that we siblings have always exhibited is directly received from our parents. Take things mechanical. Mother famously spent half an hour in the kitchen attempting to open a can of tamales with a pencil sharpener. Father understood intellectually what consequence a hammer had on a nail, but he was deprived of motor intelligence. If ever he had tried to bang a nail into a wall, it would have entered at an inauspicious angle, he would have smashed his thumb, or the wall would have collapsed. Bill is fatally fascinated by mechanical wonders, possibly because, though their dialectic is at least in design autotelically dispositive, conceptually evoking a theorem in Euclid or the perfection of a Bach fugue, in practice they defy him. Reading his books on sailing the high seas, one concludes that Bill is cursed either by a native ineptitude or by an inherited ill fate. His sonar and other expensive systems of navigation are forever breaking down. This puts him out of sorts, as I have suggested, because mechanics demonstrably are based on the elementary logic of cause and effect, and it is unjust that he, a master of such relationships in statecraft and prose -- if one says A, one must say B; if the adverb accomplishes no purpose, strike it; if a wing nut is attached to a bolt here, there is a discernible explanation for the connection there -- is more often the victim of disorder than the agent of effect. Once sailing into Stratford-on-Avon (Connecticut), as we were setting forth for a bit of the bard and supper in town, he switched the bilge pumps on, and when we got back, only the tippety-top of the mainmast was visible, its burgee bravely fluttering. The pumps had reversed, flooding the hold, and the boat had sunk at its mooring. That was spectacular.
Jim, I am told by his wife, Ann, used to assume a bemused expression when she handed him a screwdriver, directing him to a cupboard door that was hanging from its hinges, at which he would stare and then retire to his study for some reading. Our sister Aloise was fascinated by gadgets and novelties, but they almost never performed for her as advertised; the funky birthday candle that could not be blown out set the tablecloth on fire. Priscilla uses word processors and such with aplomb but is wisely content to inquire nothing about the zillion little gremlins inside who do her bidding at the touch of a key. Our sister Maureen was given the fouled-up subscription department of the fledgling National Review magazine to put in order. Subscriptions conceptually are a simple mechanism, but not at National Review. To one frustrated gentleman who, alternately, received either no copy of the magazine or two copies, and for whom there was nothing that could be done, no matter how often he complained, she wrote, "Dear Sir: Having reviewed the record, my advice to you is that you cancel your subscription and then resubscribe under an assumed name." As for me, there is nothing mechanical with which I am not at odds. The history of my tractors, my bush hogs, my balers, my disk harrows, my irrigation systems, my ice makers, my laptops, my ink-jet prin...
