The Nation's Pulse/The Sobran Scandal
Sobran, Joseph
and stray youth a year. For nine months volunteers between the ages of 17 and 21 would do community work through-out Canada for a dollar a day. "I learned to use survey equipment and to write a good...
...But that didn't always happen...
...One of the columns in Right Reason took him to task for comparing the Republican delegates at the 1980 convention to the sort of people who elected Adolf Hitler...
...Despite lofty goals and a budget that came to $10,000 per head, about a thirdof Katimavik participants thought their jobs were dull and unfulfilling...
...I learned to use survey equipment and to write a good resume," is how the recruitment brochure quotes one graduate...
...Wieseltier said it certainly was proper, but added that it was "scandalous" and "utterly incestuous" that the Spectator should have given the same book to me to review...
...Some have argued that Hebert should have waited until he was no longer a member of the Senate to stage his protest...
...For the middle-class kids who flocked to the program, Katimavik was considered little more than a good time...
...They insisted on stopping every ten minutes to take their clothes off...
...I am one of Buckley's longtime staffers...
...I did get a parking ticket at an airport once, but I managed to keep it off the front pages...
...Fairlie is an English gent who, it transpired, had known Buckley some years ago...
...My whole life seemed to flash before my eyes...
...Wherever Hebert starves next, controversy will follow...
...It was divulged yet again in the identifying note that accompanied my review...
...At its best, Katimavik amounted to shipping kids from Ontario and Quebec 3,000 miles to mow lawns in the Yukon...
...Buckley's longtime staffers at National Review" The secret was out...
...Buckley replied by taking out a full-page ad in the New Republicreprinting the column about Fairlie...
...As a senior staffer at National Re-view, I am privy to the information that Fairlie borrowed several hundred dollars from Buckley years ago and, promising to repay it forthwith, vanished...
...It was reviewed by Henry Fairlie in the New Republic, and by me in The American Spectator...
...There is no point in denying it now...
...Judge of my dismay, then, when I picked up my Wall Street Journal one morning as I sipped my coffee and, expecting nothing more heart-pounding than (say) a stern editorial on marginal tax rates, found my name at the center of a scandal...
...He cited Michael Oakeshott as a case in point...
...Miss Rosett asked Wieseltier if he really thought it was proper for Fairlie to review a book in which he was ridiculed...
...Ottawa's present government-slashing mood clearly has Hebert's doctors and close familyand friends concerned...
...Who, it will be asked, is this Wieseltier and what does he want...
...He has now repaid Buckley, after his fashion...
...In Ottawa, on Parliament Hill, this was considered shocking, but among Canadian youth it was hardly news at all...
...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1986...
...Buckley made some sport of Fairlie's hyperbole, manners, grammar, and love of the bottle...
...Fairlie glancingly mentioned that he was attacked in the book and proceeded to give not only the book but Buckley's life, intellect, talents, and character a somewhat unfavorable review...
...It found that nearly three-quarters of the participants drank too much, and 55 percent admitted they used drugs...
...Actually, the secret was out long ago...
...Others, like the government leader in the Senate, Duff Roblin, have complained that Hebert should have held his hunger strike from his desk in the chamber and not the lobby because that implied that "what we say here doesn't count...
...Miss Rosett explained to Journal readers that I was "one of Mr...
...This may not sound like the makings of scandal, but an unsuspecting world was to learn otherwise...
...I had better reconstruct the events and allegations leading up to the morning I refer to...
...I had only myself to blame...
...Coffee spurted from my nose...
...Usually on these trips we would do twenty miles a day, but with Katimavik we did about six miles in four days...
...Nixon's name is still mud over at the New Republic, where scan-dal is deplored and rectitude prized, but his rehabilitation holds out the promise of a new dawn to us sinners...
...This was where matters stood when the Wall Street Journal ran a story by Claudia Rosett about Buckley, Fairlie, and me...
...One thing's for sure...
...For the uninitiated, it should be explained that Hitler's name is mud nowadays...
...One-time summer camp instructor Tom Connell recalls taking a Katimavik group on a canoeing trip...
...Even for a journalist I lead a pretty dull life...
...It is especially crushing that he should find Henry Fairlie more to his liking...
...It was a few weeks after this that my own review of the same book appeared in The American Spectator...
...Of the several articles of his I've read, the only one I remember clearly was one that snarled that conservatives lack compassion and cling to privilege, or words to that effect...
...In the mean-time, however, his actions have forced Canadians to take a step back and ask some tough questions about their democracy...
...And that's the way I like it—a nice, quiet existence...
...dire consequences for my reputation...
...I cleaned up a wood lot and added sunshine to the lives of handicapped children...
...THE NATION'S PULSE THE SOBRAN SCANDAL by Joseph Sobran...
...A few months ago, a book by William F. Buckley, Jr., gathering dozens of his columns over several years, was published under the title Right Reason...
...But I'm getting ahead of myself...
...Dreadful by my standards, anyway...
...It's too early to judge the ultimate effect on my career, but I draw solace from the recent appearance of Richard Nixon on the cover of Newsweek...
...Was it possible...
...I learned French while renovating a home for the aged...
...Where Senator Jacques Hebert goes from here is not clear...
...As for me, I thought it best to lie low for a few days after the scandal broke...
...I stocked up on cheap cigars and disconnected my phone, pondering my next move...
...I had always known, in the back of my mind, that my association with this journal, though unfailingly pleas-ant and lucrative, could only lead to Joseph Sobran is one of William Buckley's longtime staffers at National Review and a nationally syndicated columnist...
...The room swam like Mark Spitz...
...He struck me as a young and intelligent man...
...I've never been romantically linked with actresses in the gossip columns or arrested at an airport...
...scan-dal . . . The American Spectator...
...Briefly forgetting myself, I uttered a dreadful oath...
...Ihave met him only once...
...Some reckless, mindless functionary at the Spectator, forgetting the adage that loose lips sink ships, had told the reading public that I was "a senior editor of National Review," thereby vitiating the impact of my praise of the book and playing right into Wieseltier's hands...
...I'm not one of those relentless investigative chaps who get anonymous threats from husky-voiced guys on the phone telling them how many different pieces they'll wind up in if they don't lay off the big story...
...Yes . . . there it was, in black and white . . . "Sobran...
...The story introduced a new character: Leon Wieseltier, the book review editor of the New Republic...
...It should have been foreseeable that a young man who could regard Michael Oakeshott as his moral inferior would find J. Sobran a particularly poor moral specimen...
...The morning when my hitherto tranquil life was shattered, perhaps forever...
...At the end of their term, students were expected to have found themselves and were rewarded with $1,000...
...Meanwhile, I can peddle my sordid tale to cheap tabloids like this one...
...You could always recognize the Katimavik people," says John Clark, a former travel guide who ran into them often, "because they were the ones necking in the bus station...
...At the height of the furor the Conservative government released the findings of a special report on the Katimavik pro-gram...
Vol. 19 • July 1986 • No. 7
