See You Later Alligator
Buckley, William E Jr.
SEE YOU LATER ALLIGATOR William F. Buckley, Jr./Doubleday/$15.95 Cynthia Grenier Who would have thought that Che Guevara would steal the show from William F. Buckley, Jr.'s nominal hero,...
...There is a good reason why Buckley does such a bang-up job rendering not only the inside of the missile crisis but the character of Guevara as well...
...he asks his editor-in-chief son-in-law, and then answers his own question: "I suppose so, otherwise I would send you to the Gulag...
...it wasn't you who had trouble with Spanish at Harvard...
...In addition to the formal acknowledgement, Buckley slips into the text of the novel a graceful tribute to Franqui's "jaunty, exuberant" editing of the newspaper Revolucion...
...Guevara, of course, was to die in Bolivia when the Cultural Revolution was just getting underway-had he lived he might well have been in for some more disillusionment...
...Guevara dominates the book from his first lines on page three (a quote from Goodwin's account): "I want to thank you for invading our country...
...Goodwin reported back to the President, handing over a box of Monte Cristo cigars as a gift from Guevara, and some years later wrote up the encounter in the New Yorker...
...and a genial, vulgar, wily Khrushchev ("Does Izvestiya have to be boring...
...Buckley also recalls the near-perfect blindness of the American newspapers of the day, with Walter Lippmann assuring his readers: "The present Cuban military buildup is not capable of offensive action'- this, when the Soviets had already installed their missiles in Cuba...
...Buckley's Guevara is independent of spirit, loyal to his beliefs, stingingly honest, ironic, intellectual, stoic, and withal charming...
...Among the twenty-two people whose assistance with the book Buckley acknowledges is Carlos Franqui, a former intimate of Castro and Guevara who wrote the classic Diary of the Cuban Revolution, 1952-1959 and more recently Family Portrait with Fidel (which 1 reviewed in the July 1984 issue of TAS...
...should be relaxing with the high culture-Alfred North White-head, a biography of Stendahl, the poems of Garcia Lorca-while Black-ford Oakes, champion of the Christian West, spends all his spare time reading Agatha Christie...
...With these events as his launching pad, Buckley lifts off into a nifty what-if: What if Kennedy had wanted to follow up on the Goodwin-Guevara meeting...
...Mind you, Buckley has always enjoyed dropping famous folk from recent history into his espionage entertainments-as witness his witty and irreverent incursions into the mind of President Kennedy in The Death of Henri Tod-but this is perhaps the first time that Buckley has created a character who, while faithful to the essence of the historical counterpart, is eminently worthy of a serious novel...
...It is much to Buckley's credit that he convincingly re-creates the very real fear and urgency of those few days after the missiles were discovered, when the whole world held its breath...
...See You Later Alligator begins with history: In 1961, presidential speechwriter Richard Goodwin and Cuba's then-Minister of Industries Guevara met at the Punte del Este economic conference and talked until Cynthia Grenier, formerly with the New York Times, is a movie producer...
...And with Central America in the forefront of the news and Fidel Castro still playing his same game twenty years later, we should be grateful that Buckley has chosen to bring this apposite history once again to our attention...
...Wouldn't it be reasonable to call upon a trusted CIA agent and dispatch him to Cuba . . . and next thing we know, Blackford Oakes is in orbit, headed for Havana, Guevara, and the Cuban missile crisis...
...In addition to Guevara, Buckley produces some other wickedly observed portraits: Fidel, el maximo lider himself, charismatic and quixotic...
...Between the Cuban missile crisis and the present, there is no shortage of material for further Oakes adventures, so we can hope that Buckley upgrades his hero's reading by the time the Six Day War or the Czech invasion come along...
...It has made a great power of us and eliminated all resistance to Castro...
...dawn...
...Blackford Oakes, on the other hand, has the thankless role of playing straight man to Comman-dante Guevara-until he discovers the secret of the missiles, whereupon Buckley takes the reader for a hang-onto-your-seats land and sea getaway...
...In the latter book Franqui describes a Guevara disillusioned by Soviet socialism and attracted to Mao's Communism...
...But since this is Buckley's most serious and accomplished novel, I feel emboldened to register one small complaint: Why is it that our enemy (for despite all his complexity and charm, Guevara was after all the man who uttered the cry still echoing throughout Latin America: "One, two, three Viet-nams...
...And we are again let in on the thoughts of Jack Kennedy ("Ministros del Economicas-not bad, Jack...
...There is nothing incongruous in a man of action with intellectual tastes, as Buckley, an exemplar of that sort of man if there ever was one, must surely know...
...his rather nasty brother Raul...
...SEE YOU LATER ALLIGATOR William F. Buckley, Jr./Doubleday/$15.95 Cynthia Grenier Who would have thought that Che Guevara would steal the show from William F. Buckley, Jr.'s nominal hero, Blackford Oakes, in his latest round of adventures...
Vol. 18 • June 1985 • No. 6
