For years William F. Buckley was a voice in the wilderness, a vigorous conservative at odds with the principles of the day. Then, in 1981, one of his followers became President. Life must have been good. Here he allows himself an opportunity to bask in his triumph.
It's not a great book, given the subject is a rather self-involved man nattering on about himself without much self-editing. If you are a Buckley fan, "Overdrive" is still worthy reading, Buckley sharing eight days of his life in a spirit of candor, vigor, and good humor. If you are a Buckley detractor, "Overdrive" is also worthy reading, because the man provides plenty of ammunition to feed the negative image of him as a Latin-spouting Thurston Howell type.
So clamorous were the reviews he felt a need to respond to his critics in an "Introductory Epilogue" that ran with the paperback edition of this book in 1984. "My limousine has miles to go before I sleep," he writes.
The epilogue is probably the weakest part of the book, given that Buckley is on the defensive and allowing himself to be defined by folks like Nora Ephron, who wrote of him: "Give an Irishman a horse, and he'll vote Tory." (Ouch!) The rest of the book chronicles Buckley's life from November 16-23, 1981, not because anything particularly special happened then but because Buckley felt it would make a worthy experiment, "a book-length work about the events of a single week as it unfolded". He did this once before, in 1970 with "Cruising Speed", but of course he was enjoying better weeks in 1981 with his guy Reagan in the Oval Office.
"Overdrive" captures one phone conversation between Buckley and Reagan ("a social call") as well as another where Vice President George H. W. Bush calls to apologize for having to miss a lunch at Buckley's magazine, National Review, because of a government shutdown crisis. He also takes in the New York stage production of "Nicolas Nickleby" with Reagan's son Ron. It's that kind of book; Buckley making seemingly offhanded points regarding his new proximity to power that really are the point of the book.
None of this is nearly as interesting as Buckley's own company. He talks about running interference between feuding friends; sneaking in a late afternoon yacht trip just off his Stamford, Connecticut home; hosting the taping of two episodes of his TV show, "Firing Line"; writing his column in his converted garage; and the simple joy of being the idol of some and target of others. In the process, there is room for many entertaining stories that don't go on too long and a wonderfully stinging line or two: "Put it this way: If the Scotch tape at Watergate had stuck, maybe there wouldn't have been any boat people."
The negative is that all this is fairly unstructured material, not really united by any narrative thread. Buckley jumps around a lot, with parenthetical observations that run for pages at a time, and encomiums to assorted characters he writes of as if we need no more information than their names. Buckley's main audience were his NR readers; at times you feel he was writing "Overdrive" for them alone.
Buckley's humor is his saving grace here. Noting the New York Times writers he knows are all pretty merry characters, he points out one exception, a editorial page director "understandably melancholy about having to live in a world whose shape is substantially of his own making."
The world Buckley was making is with us still, years after his passing. At its best, "Overdrive" makes one both hopeful and nostalgic about his legacy enough to (somewhat) overlook the quirks and faults along the way.
