Airborne: A Sentimental Journey

...Buckley is a confirmed optimist but he is also a realist and his precautions against possible mid-Atlantic emergencies, (sinking in two minutes, or in five and over) make fascinating reading...

...Let's go take a look at Sarina," said Buckley pointing to LOci Guinness' sparkling, burnished beauty built by Krupp in the late twenties...

...a monthly intellectual review...

...First, the Editor correctly describes his publication as...

...That good and evil, especially in the political realm, are relative terms, and even interchangeable terms, can be seen in the fact that Hitler would, as Toland puts it, ~ have gone down as one of the greatest figures in German history" had he died seven or eight years sooner William H. Nolte is Chairman of the English department of the University of So,th Carolina...

...Apparently none of his great rivals--Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill--has so captured the posthumous mind...

...When he put the pistol to his head, the Russians were in the next street, gleefully making the rubble bounce...

...So let it be with Caesar...

...The incident came sharply to mind when he told me during the winter that he was planning to navigate across the Atlantic...

...And it was, he always protested, only the Russians whom he really wished to defeat...

...As Foxie fell away and scraped along the spotless white side of Sarina, leaving a color~l deposit of daffodils, goldenrod, zebras, and horned toads, Truman Capote's round bespectacled countenance appeared beside the steward...

...we also hit Sarina hard amidships...

...Only one month before her great Transatlantic effort, Cyrano, on charter once more, was the silent witness of another disaster when the charterer's wife, a certified diver, was found dead on the ocean floor forty feet below...

...Foxie, my little boat, had lately been redecorated by our two small daughters and was covered with a riot of color, large stick-on flowers of every sort, animals of all shapes and sizes, and several Ban the Bomb emblems...

...The good is oft interred with their bones...

...Thus Shakespeare's Antony, over the body of Caesar and in the face of the multitude, gave the lie to the very views he expressed and with rhetorical flourish transformed the dead tyrant into a dreaming demigod...

...they knew by the late 1930s thathe could lead the nation only to destruction...

...he hissed over his shoulder...

...With his deep, almost mystical love of the sea and his abiding respect for it, Buckley has produced a heart-warming, moving, and often hilarious mix of happenings, flashbacks, and excitements skillfully spiced with his own notes made during the voyage and the "journals" kept by several members of his crew--all easy to digest by the landlubber who has no need nor wish to know the difference between a gollywobbler and a Fisherman...

...The prefects (older boys in authority) were allowed to administer the cane to other boys...

...The great joy of Airborne is that it is not a straight narrative of the actual crossing...

...An idle speculation, perhaps, particularly since no one can know what needs will oppress future generations or what their aspirations will be...

...is...an intellectual, but the Reviewer Designate of Buckley's latest work has private information that there lurks in his own closet a skeleton of alarming proportions--David Niven is a semi-educated half-wit...

...only later in a different age did their spirits pick up a crown...

...I was sent, between the ages of six and seventeen, to English boarding schools during their most ferocious period...

...Buckley remained admirably calm and issued sensible instructions to me for rectifying our strange appearance and effecting a dignified retreat while at the same time ignoring the pointed remarks that now rained down upon us from Mr...

...As I prepared to jump, because it seemed to me that Buckley at the helm was about to dismast Foxie on Sar~na's anchor chain, I noted the expression on his facemtotal calm, the sort of incandescent peace that fakirs display when sitting bareassed on nails...

...Behind him were the young, the proletariat, and the forward-looking...

...Come Quick...

...Certainly the number of the faithful had shrunk since, say, 1938, which was truly Hitler's year, at which time the vast majority of Germans considered him their savior, and many people throughout Europe admired him as the leading man of the age...

...from Miami, Florida to the Mediterranean sea, 4,400 miles across the Atlantic Ocean...

...Toland concludes his biography with this sentence: "The most extraordinary figure in the history of the twentieth century had vanished--unlamented except by a faithful few...

...Everything that could go wrong or break down during this production did so, but Buckley led his troops to final victory, with great panache (though he does not say so himsel 0 relying almost entirely on a saltsoaked sextant, and occasional glimpses of the sun, the moon, and the swinging stars...

...William S. Paley, and others...

...Second, D.N...

...Two months before his first Bermuda Race his 40-foot racer The Panic mysteriously sank at her moorings during the night, and she almost repeated the performance a year later in the middle of the Chesapeake...

...He seemed, indeed, the archetypal answer to German prayers...

...he once remarked that the inscription on his tombstone should read, "He was the victim of his generals...

...L~el Guinness, Mr...

...Don't forget the supporting cast, though: they all came through nobly, and son Christopher is already a literary force to be reckoned with ...A lovely "TRIP" and you can smell the sea...

...and then in quick succession when he failed to throw a life preserver to his sister The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977 25 who fell overboard off Martha's Vineyard...

...Also anyone with the price of a Newsletter, a Book, or a Television set knows that William F. Buckley, Jr...

...Buckley luckily dismissed my catamaran as a bad risk because a vicious "Mistral" was blowing...

...She withstood this onslaught and shook us off as a Great Dane might dismiss a Yorkshire Terrier, but the "thud" caused a steward in a white jacket who was serving luncheon to appear at the rail far above our heads and to flap at us vaguely with a napkin...

...We approached Sarina at a great rate with our sail scraping the water and about half an inch of freeboard to spare before the Mediterranean boiled in and sank us...

...As the existentialists are fond of saying, we usually die too late or too soon...

...Hitler will be with us for a long time, whether as ogre or failed messiah...

...henceforth the only hope lay in negotiating a peace with the West...

...That Hitler failed to accomplish his wild dreams of "unifying" Europe and saving it from the Bolshevist menace is obvious enough, but then so too were Jeanne d'Arc and Napoleon (to name but two such idealists) unsuccessful in their immediate efforts...

...BOOK REVIEW Adolf Hitler John Toland / Doubleday / $14.95 William H. Nolte While reading John Toland's enormous, splendid biography of Hitler I couldn't help wondering what the future will make of this most gifted and appalling tyrant, certainly the most awesome mover of men, at least in the West, since Napoleon...

...To be sure, Hitler's General Staff had always distrusted him and truly hated him at the end...

...One mitigating thought, however...

...The amazing thing is that Germany could have stood so long against such overwhelming opposition...

...During the Vineyard Race Buckley blew the navigation and the same craft ended up on the rocks, and in another race, with his wife aboard, The Panic was later dismasted off Block Island...

...While no one in his right mind would argue that Hitler has undergone, or is undergoing, any such sea-change, our fascination with his life is, if anything, increasing as the years pass...

...Though not many would argue with that assessment of Hitler, I fear that Toland engages in wishful thinking when he insists that only a few people still believed in him in those last days...

...The number of strokes was ordained by the Headmaster who gleefully dealt with the more hardened criminals among us himself...

...Soon after Buckley found Cyrano his chosen conveyance for "THE BIG ONE," she "several times ran aground in Bahamian waters" and then, while she was on charter to a friend for a dinner cruise on the Hudson, a cable snapped upon which a nonswimmer was sitting, with tragic results...

...Bill Buckley's come to call...

...the reason for my unease, more complicated because it is two-fold...

...I have tried hard to be overly critical of Buckley's book and I have come up empty --I loved it[ His political writings frequently send me scurrying to the Oxford Dictionary for clarification of certain words but, apart from a glorious (and I suspect homemade) "Buckley verb" that appears on an early page in connection with the cleaning of some dirty glass--"to repristinate"--I sailed through the book with the greatest joy and no intellectual inferiority complex...

...Splendid descriptions abound of the near disasters which seem rather ominously to have dogged the author's seafaring days since the age of thirteen when he capsized his first 17-foot boat and saved the life of a friend clinging to the hull b.y undertaking a long hazardous swim from the middle of a cold Connecticut lake...

...In a letter to the Times in 1938, Winston Churchill paid him this grudging compliment: "I have always said that I hoped if Great Britain were beaten in a war we should find a Hitler who would lead us back m our rightful place among nations...

...P--s Off...

...Obviously "THE BIG ONE" was a success or this book would never have been written, but as a movie actor I despise film critics who in a few sentences presume to tell a story which has taken others months of hard work and preparation to bring to the screen, so I will simply recommend Airborne wholeheartedly as being well worth the price of admission: ih fact it is cheap at the price...

...Buckley conceived a spectacular maneuver which would bring Foxie head to wind and alongside the great yacht's highly polished gangway, but something went badly wrong and he produced instead a "Chinese gybe"ma dreadful happening when the end of the sail becomes wrapped around the top of the mast...

...I frankly fear that, as in the case of so many other Caesar-figures and all-too-human saviors, distance will make clean, or in any event blur the visage which today, little more than thirty Years after his suicide in his Berlin bunker, leers at us with such nightmarish clarity...

...And why not...

...only the very lucky exit at the proper time...

...Occasionally therefore it would transpire that friend would have to chastise friend...

...and Mrs...

...Niven is author most recently of the best-selling memoir, Bring on the Empty Horses...

...But he insisted on putting to sea in the other, a top-heavy, over-canvassed 20-foot cabin "cruiser" with far too light a centerboard and a rudder that was apt to leave its appointed sockets and flap about uselessly in an emergency...

...His generals were the victims, of course, and deserve at least some sympathy for their predicament...

...The evil that men do lives after them...

...and Mrs...

...It prepares the reader for all sorts of possibilities because as the voyage progresses Buckley recounts with warmth and high humor several Foxie-type shambles during his cruising and racing life that occurred prior to embarking on "THE BIG ONE...

...Between Bismarck's victory in the Franco.Prussian War in 1871 (a victory, as Renan told the French at the 26 The Alternative: An American Spectator January 1977...

...Riding at anchor across the bay, she was full of guests and a 24man crew, her great schooner bow sniffing disdainfully at the rising wind, her huge yellow funnel slanting aft, and the white Ensign of the Royal Navy (and members of the Royal Yacht Squadron) flapping proudly from her stern...

...A few months previously he and his wife Pat had paid us a visit at our home on Cap Ferrat...

...The flattery is easy to diagnose...

...So too does the understanding he displays of his wife's apprehensions about the whole undertaking and of her anguish at the realization that she is saying goodbye to the three most precious things in her life--her only son, her only sister, and her husband...

...The failure of their efforts helped convince Hitler that he was fated to accomplish his mission even though he knew, as he admitted to his Generals in November of 1941, that victory was impossible...

...There are masterful portraits of his crew which included his son, his sister-in-law, and three close friends, one of whom was replaced for urgent business reasons on arrival in Bermuda by a large young man who comes aboard, promptly gets seasick, and is not mentioned or apparently seen again until he bobs up in somebody's journal 1,800 miles further East asking between brandies ashore in the Azores for the quickest way to get to London...

...Alongside our house lay my two unreliable and very small sailing boats...

...but to show there was no favoritism, a strict code of honor existed and friend laid mightily into friend if not with zeal at least with a certain sense of "fair play...

...When Buckley sometime in the winter of 1974 told me that he was definitely planning to make this trip the following summer, I put out no feelers as to whether there might be a place for me among his crew...

...The Junkers, as everyone by now knows, tried again and again to kill him...

...than he did...

...In 1958 he won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Separate Tables...

...Like Napoleon he was, par excellence, The Man on Horseback...

...To tell the truth, I held certain reservations about the success of the enterprise...

...His opposition in Germany, as elsewhere, came mainly from conservatives, reactionaries, and intellectuals...

...He offered what most men need--jobs, order, and hope...

...When America entered the War the following month, even that hope went out the window...

...is a close friend of W.F.B., so this review is rightly suspect on both counts...

...This is a book written by a kindly, acutely observant adventure-loving man for all of us, a book about an adventure upon which he had long promised himself he would one day embark--to sail a small (30 ton, 54 foot at the waterline) schooner David Niven, a sailor of note, has appeared in 90 motion pictures over 4O years...

...Macmillan / $12.95 David Niven When the Editor of The Alternative invited me to review William F. Buckley, J r.'s book Airborne I was first flattered, then appalled...

...Of this Hitler was well aware...

...he commanded in his native tongue...