Overdrive

...IVlany other fashionable taboos fall by Buckley's wayside...

...In the course of that proceeding the General Counsel of the SEC wrote to the Buckley family that the SEC complaint "does not allege that the described transactions were 'fraudulent.'" Yet afterwards, the same General Counsel seems to have told a Time reporter, who had reported that the SEC had accused the Buckley companies "of having defrauded stockholders to feather the family's nest," that the SEC's letter "was not intended to address the question of whether Time's interpretation of the transactions was accurate...

...I wish there were more of him...

...Yet he never treated a single homosexual (and he had treated scores of them) whom he did not cure of homosexuality...

...Later Buckley expresses the hope that Fedder's predecessor, Stanley Sporkin, a man who made large corporations tremble at his frown and who is now chief counsel of the CIA, will at the CIA "be instrumental,in doing as much damage to the Soviet enterprise as he did to American enterprise...

...Hayek's insistence "that if one came upon a society in which no one was wealthy, that society would be better off endowing one hundred people at random with a million dollars each than being without citizens with surplus funds...

...We need Bill Buckley...

...The flowers, the china, the wineglasses, place settings...

...Put it this way: If the Scotch tape at Watergate had stuck, maybe there wouldn't have been any boat people...

...They envy him for his inherited money, his good looks, his luck, and what they would call his "lifestyle...

...It is a relief to find Buckley frowning at the SEC's mendacious sanctimoniousness, in the context of an SEC civil complaint against certain companies controlled by the Buckley family...

...Buckley's opposition to taxing, and particularly to taxing the rich more than those who are just struggling along, must touch the most sensitive nerve of his egalitarian critics, rich and poor alike...

...Indeed, Buckley's daily life, as described in the eight days covered by his "Personal Documentary," demonstrates how socially useful inherited wealth can be...

...Then, too, he rightly reminds us that the philosophical premises of the progressive income tax remain largely unexamined...

...But even he could not do so if he had to drive himself, instead of being driven by Jerry, the most admirable factotum I have encountered since Lord Peter Whimsey's man, Bunter...

...How true - but who else would have the courage to say so...

...Typically a patient, referred to him by another doctor because of symptoms for which no physical cause could be found, would say: "Doctor, I am a homosexual, I am happy, and I don't want you to treat my homosexuality...

...What then was it intended to address...

...Homosexuality, he discovered, was usually a neurosis, in which an insecure childhood caused by a weak, ineffectual, or absent father played the determinative role...

...At the same time he is sensitive about not interfering...

...Why had Fedders [the General Counsel] written that he was 'concerned' with the 'impression' left by [Time's] article that the SEC's complaint 'alleges' fraud...

...Buckley seems almost maniacal in his efficient use of time...

...Hilaire Belloc Only a saint could not envy William F. Buckley, and I doubt whether any of his lycanthropic critics would not jump at the chance of changing places with him...

...And when it comes to that noble but virtually abandoned cause of supply-side economics and the paralyzing fear of "the great looming deficit," Buckley cheerfully seems to ignore the formidable phalanx of the most respectable in the land and their open letter to the President by insisting that lowering taxes is more inportant than reducing the federal deficit...

...The time saved him by these helpful domestic spirits is not all consumed by affairs...

...But the critics envy him for the wrong reasons...

...BOOK REVIEWS Remember from this to be properly vexed When the newspaper editors say, That "The type of society shown in the Text Is rapidly passing away...

...The Securities and Exchange Commission is one of OVERDRIVE: A PERSONAL DOCUMENTARY William F. Buckley, Jr...

...On Watergate he says, "I'd rather the burglary, however reprehensible, had succeeded, than that Watergate and the collapse of a foreign policy should have happened...

...the country house in Stamford and the apartment in Manhattan function because the "infinitely good-natured" maids Rebeca and Olga, "respectively a solicitous and fussy Guatemalan and an otherworldly and gay-spirited Ecuadorian," are shuttled between town and country by Jerry...

...The Board members, he was told, "review Public Agenda projects, publications, and other materials to insure that they are free of ideological bias, that they are balanced and thoughtful, and that they represent the highest level of analysis and research...

...One could write a book, or at least compose a sermon, on the fallacious premises upon which such boards are erected, but Buckley disposes' of the matter in a few lines: "Prose like that gags, doesn't it...

...Buckley takes time to be aware of all of them, to worry about them when they are sick, to take them sailing, to call them on the telephone...

...Buckley has little hesitation in rejecting an invitation to serve as a member of the Policy Review Board of something called the Public Agenda Foundation, a Board "consisting of leading citizens with many different backgrounds, philosophies, and experiences" which "functions to guarantee the objectivity of the Public Agenda's work...

...but Buckley knows that after rising at Stamford in the morning he can breakfast, write his column, and have it ready for National Review's editorial conference in Manhattan at 9:45 a.m.-having dictated correspondence in his car on the way...

...As this journal of a week in Buckley's life demonstrates, he is one of the very few visible media figures not enslaved by the pernicious myths that rule intellectual and political American discourse...

...The most appealing aspect of Buckley's personality is the time he gives to his family and his friends, including the servants who are friends and family both...

...I'll treat your neurosis (your headaches, your insomnia, your stomachaches, your inability to hold a job-whatever it was...

...In Mexico, Buckley visits his old retired nurse, Felipa, who was with the Buckleys 35 years, and puts in a call to his nonagenarian mother so that Felipa, 93, can talk to her "about events in the year 1910...

...Buckley has never been afraid to confess his faith in God, and in the sophisticated intellectual circles of some of his friends that may take even more courage than his other deviations from the expected...

...Buckley attacks even more dangerous sacred dragons...

...My point here is the discreet one, that the assumption that homosexuality is an enduring condition (like alcoholism) is simply mistaken, by the evidence of anyone who knew Chambers...

...That question is best saved for another exploration...

...He never did...

...Buckley writes: "The phenomenon of the sometime homosexual, wholly cured, is not one with which most of us are familiar...

...It is fashionable nowadays to say that a person's sexual 'preference' is not a datum of any consequence...

...asks Buckley, with good reason, not knowing that disgraceful retreat under pressure is not unheard of at the SEC...

...Take our age's passion for substi- tuting committees and commissions with pompous names for the lonely pursuit of verities...

...And who else among the friends of John Kenneth Galbraith and the Boston Globe's Tom Winship would dare criticize Yale President A. Bartlett Giamatti and television producer Norman Lear for their silly and humorless attacks on the Moral Majority...

...Doubleday/$16.95 Franz M. Oppenheimer them...

...My father who practiced psychiatry, first in Germany and after his emigration in San Francisco, had collected substantial evidence in support of Buckley's impression that homosexuality is a disease that can be cured...

...I reproach myself that men tend not to focus on the amount of time these things take...

...and my father would reply, "I promise I won't...

...Lesser men may fear that when faced with a blank page they may have nothing to say before an hour or more have passed...

...That half of my life, I like to think, I behave less offensively to my Maker than the other half," or "I must remember to pray more often...

...We are constantly made aware that servants are a necessary element of his days: the book begins with the line "Gloria brought in my lunch on a tray...

...For better or for worse "prayer breakfasts" have become a Washington institution, but that does not make it easy to write that "[I] remember to count on my fingers the five decades of the rosary, a lifelong habit acquired in childhood, and remembered about half the time...

...He actually accepted a place on President Eisenhower's Commission on National Goals, and resigned only when berated by an insolent puppy who asked him whether he could imagine Plato, Aristotle, or Kant serving on such a commission...

...Another pernicious myth touched upon in Overdrive is the supposed biological and hereditary nature of homosexuality, on which many of the political objectives of militant homosexuals are predicated...

...Buckley tells of his astonishment at learning that his friend Whittaker Chambers had been an active homosexual during five years in the 1930s and of his belief-mistaken we now know-that former Congressman Bob Bauman had told the truth about his "tendency to homosexuality having gone with the alcohol...

...And at the risk of offending Bella Abzug, he confesses to think a housewife's role creative: coming home after midnight he is shown by his wife the table set for a lunch with Vice President Bush...

...For reasons mysterious to me, the SEC invariably emerges from reviews of its operations, be it by private self-appointed review boards or congressional oversight committees, bathed in the odor of sanctity...

...During my father's entire professional life he endeavored to find a true "biological," i.e., an incurable homosexual...

...but I cannot promise you that when cured you'll still be a homosexual...

...But what they ought to envy him for is his independence, his moral courage, his industry, and his faith...

...Apparently he believes that inherited wealth is a good thing, endorsing F.A...

...By contrast he never succeeded to cure a single alcoholic...

...Even the great late judge Learned Hand did not have such an instantaneous reaction when exposed to similar cant...