Cruising Speed: A Documentary
Brudnoy, David
"Cruising Speed: A Documentary" Of course, the Fraser solution to a real problem like Japan's would be more careful planning, more rigid control, further...
...Skinner's way is not...
...It was necessary, in telling the Eleanor Roosevelt story, always to refer to her as "The Great Pink Lady" - - the feeling being "that is the way BILL would want it to be told...
...Why does he talk that way...
...The Alternative December, 1971 15 fronting this situation...
...Good luck...
...For he is not your Typical Conservative...
...And on we go through these things, some, really, of no importance, though they're nicely recounted, others of greater interest to me, like his rather stylized account of how the magazine gets put together...
...It is most evident in his assumption that all men, no matter what, are always going to desire the technical processes and technological devices that result in the polluted biosphere and ravaged resources which he decries...
...Jared Lobdell here tells us, truly, that "for philosophical guidance a conservative looks instead in to Mission Control' in Woodstock" - - to the "old man in the back of the room," to Frank S. Meyer, that is...
...The book is not straight on...
...he'd be veritable tiger if anyone tried to shove him under the IRT, as if he'd take the IRT, while I'm only good for a hundred pushups and twelve laps...
...Where does he eat...
...William Buckle)' is intrigued by the process of education, not just the stuff that goes on these days in classrooms across the land, but the whole manner in which people educate and are educated, especially the latter...
...One knew his reputation, of course, and it was not hard to imagine, in retrospect, a kind of hauteur and instant dismissal of everyone in the room - - everyone meaning me...
...Gary P o t t e r Quite enough, I imagine, is said in this issue by my brother Lobdell, of recollections of Chairman Bill...
...Not when the sailor himself asks on the last page: "How will I satisfy them, who listen to me today, tomorrow...
...Buckley's life, not a miniapologia pro vita sua (Heaven forfend) nor a dust-dry diary (and so to bed) nor a reconstruction of some week of crisis (and may he never go through so many that he'll follow in the footsteps of Richard Nixon and tote us through a rehash of his crisis, one by one by one by one), but a most engaging ramble through an ordinary week, so we are to believe, incorporating a great swatch of material from speeches given, letters written and read, various confrontations and the like...
...To be able to go through the complete Buckley oeuvre and agree with it a// - - good Lord...
...With whom does he frolic...
...What is his wife like...
...About eighty percent of Cruising Speed appeared ex.cerpted this summer in The New Yorker, in two installments...
...Were one-to search for the archtypical conservative, one would not find him-it-her regularly on 73rd Street or in Stamford, Connecticut or on Mr...
...One can never imagine someone plus Randian que La Rand, but there are many men more "conservative" than Mr...
...The remark on cynicism has nothing to do with this...
...Someone, in a speech, listing the distinguished Conservatives there present, has mentioned the name of William F. Buckley, Jr., and I begin ta understand what the word "pandaemonium" means: I am reminded .of a scene in Sdaramoudhe,where a political speech on stage has brought forth "a hurricane of furious appiause" and the actors stand transfixed like small boys who have set a match to a sun-scorched ha)rick...
...Buckley listens...
...What does he think of Hugh Hefner and Dick Gregory...
...David Brudnoy David Brndnoy is an obscure gynedologist who lives in Ulan Bator, reads every book published, and is currently completing a definitive nine-volume HIStory oJ Avar~e...
...Had there been a look of disdain as he glanced around the room...
...Buckley's way, but for those who can't seem to get anything done, the Buckley way might he the answer: JUST DO IT...
...Nixon had a little scratchpad on his lap while listening, he had the marvelous feeling that the President was actually listening ~to him...
...With that, an end to reminiscences here...
...Well, some of it's there, ready for one of those inevitable pencil-clutching, tongue<larting, heresy-dreading Buckleyolators to memorize and imitate--if he so chooses...
...Cruising Sliced is the iournal of a week in Mr...
...Buckley is neither a knee-jerk anything, nor a cuckoo...
...Were I to add a few, they might include the night in New York when, after dinner following a taping of "Firing Line," I realized that I had a plane to catch in too few minutes, and he went dashing down the street to hail a cab for me...
...And those occasional (to me) incredible suggestions, like the one in the late lamented Look a while before it became late, that Ame~'ie~ ~_bnnld go oo.t _and elect itself a Negro President 'round about 1980...
...That is, were he to write a book specifically devoted to explaining how he has grown and does grow mentally, he would include within i t many of the episodes or similar episodes such as those that appear in Cruising Speed...
...Buckley, too, certainly, but one does not find in him a neatly packaged saran-wrapped conservative's conservative...
...I admire the man Bucldey and like the book, but certainly don't see any resemblance to myself in it...
...Look in Cruising Speed for wl~at it proclaims itself to be, a documentary of a week in the life, and find also, an added bonus, quite a bonus, his most charming book by far...
...The attitude was akin to that which (I would guess) led Arlington House to entitle their recent Buckley sampter Quotations from Chairman Bill,though one doubts it had as much hmnour...
...I seem to recall that B.F...
...But certainly we're not supposed to think that's all, are we...
...We talked, I know, of drugs and alcohol and youth culture, Churchill and Ireland and what was happening at Yale...
...I shy from contact lenses and so Evelynwoody my way through his remarks on his struggle with those things...
...How does Win...
...what does, and what I wish I could locate some witty definition of, is irony...
...Roosevelt was planning to appear at a future Political Union meeting...
...For once I was seeing not Buckley-the-subject-of-stories or Buckley-the-soureeof-imitations but the genuluce Conservative Hero...
...bone up on The Speech (one of his retinue) just before giving it, instead of agonizing about it for weeks...
...at cruising speed...
...I am looking up from the stage, where I have been arranging the visiting dignitaries...
...would indicate a reader too mundane to contemplate, o r a Buckley too predictable for one to want to read another line by, or about...
...Some people, myself included, invariably divide the world into those with the ironic sense and those without...
...Far from it...
...Some reviewers of Cruising Speed appear to be fascin~/ted by How Does Bill Buckley Do All That in One Short Week...
...One finds it in Mr...
...But this is surely a sliver of 16 The A l t e r n a t i v e December, 1971 that unwritten book...
...Of course, the Fraser solution to a real problem like Japan's would be more careful planning, more rigid control, further technical intervention in the life processes...
...And am glad that I don't...
...I talked too much: he is a good listener...
...27), he states: "We can predict that some factor or combination of factors will sooner or later control further increase (in population...
...Then the book came and filled in all the gaps and I understood even more...
...And conservatives find "philosophical guidance" in others instrumental in making National Review, and in Human Events...
...I suppose by learning some more and siring a little of it through to those who listen to what he says...
...It was an informal speech and I found myself sitting, almost exactly, at the feet of Gamallel...
...None of their arguments are outlined in Fraser's book, much less answered...
...If the book were simply a collection of What I Did Last Week, it wouldn't be unworthy of a reader's time, but wouldn't be Buckley...
...combine things I~e seen him in action, so Cruising Speed offers no surprises to me regarding Buckley's mysterious energy...
...but I~e concluded after lo these many years that of all the gentlemen I've ever met, two of the most consistently gentlemanly are my father and William Frank Buckley, Jr...
...He delivered at the Party banquet...
...He lets us see how he's educated, not without considerable irony, but also with enough concrete examples so that we are not left unsure...
...Skinner has some sort of contraption in his study by which he records his productivity, day by day, week by week -- year by year -- charting his output...
...One inevitably gravitates to those sections that treat things dear to one's heart...
...For instance, type columns while ridin_g in the car, if you have a chauffeur...
...Numero unius, exclusio alterius, as he would say, so I'll hedge...
...He cheats us here, telling us way too little about Patricia Taylor Buckley...
...But of course Pierce told only a slice of the 1ruth, as did Wilde in his definition of a cynic: one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing...
...But I do not think I was yet seeing the genuine Bill Buckley...
...The second excerpted half, however, caught me up, made me go back and read the first, and I understood...
...Thomas has been wrong, and I have been right...
...How come Profeser Revilo Oliver thinks Bill Buckley just may be a commie...
...Bill Buckley stories were part of the cocktail-party repertoire at Yale - - how, after one in a series of debates with Norman Thomas, he had been asked whether there was any consistent thread to their debates, and had answered, "Why, yes, in all our dehates there has been one consistent thread, and that is, that Mr...
...Except that I rebelled against the hero-worship, I could have dined out for a week on the strength of the wordless encounter at the Elizabethan Club ("And did you once see Shelley plain...
...Some years later, in Madison, in 1961, he spoke to a meeting of the Wisconsin Conservative Club, during the summer National Student Association meeting...
...The title, for instance Buckley sails, and as sailors are supposed to know, cruising speed means something nautical...
...Yet, contradition, he will concede that "'As with other problems that we have considered (most notably water, mineral and energy consumption) this one (garbage) is increasing faster than the population...
...One would wonder why he continued with his book after that if it weren't plain that Fraser can't imagine population being naturally limited by any factor short of disaster, the ultimate disaster probably being defined by him as the collapse of technolugy, which would probably -- so he would suppose -- entail the disappearance of the race...
...search for your Prototypical Conservative somewhere else, and your cuckoo in a clock, not in Cruising Speed, which is not his best book (that's The Unmaking ol a Mayor) or his most tender (Odyssey ol a Friend), or his wittiest repository of reportage (The Jeweler's Eye, The Governor Listeth), or his most strident (God and Man at Yale, Up From Liberalism), or his most polemical (McCarthy and his Enemies), or well, never make lists...
...I put him down mentally as a sporting type - - sunburn, khakis, blue blazer - - possibly a sometime crew captain who had been elected:to the club on the vague grounds of good fellowship:or general likeableness...
...I suppose that's what makes Ramsey Clark seem to me so perfectly dreary, and Bill Buckley so otherwise...
...I noted (for Buckley imitations, like Buckley stories, were a passport to immediate acceptance in conservative gatherings) how he arched on tiptoe before making a point, how be jabbed his hands into his pockets, how he furtively mopped his brow with a large red handkerchief...
...The exiguous bibliography (13 volumes listed) is headed by two Paul Ehrlich books and, such as it is, goes on from there...
...Oh, yes, he has some-of his Things, like the Church, and the crusade contra pornography, and the like...
...How will he satisfy himself tomorrow, "so imperfectly...
...The cover shows a funny little periscope peeping out of a beautiful body of water...
...Who's his favorite pianist...
...So who listens anymore...
...Buckley's boat Cyranno...
...To be able to encompass anybody totally, to know all his reasons, and his reasonings, to be able to chart anyone's mind down t o the last little tittle, is a bore...
...Our bodies being the first things to go, I too trudge off to a gym regularly, more regularly than he, to seat and groan and court hernias...
...Hell, how will I satisfy myself tomorrow, satisfying myself so imperfectly, which is not to say insufficiently, today...
...Cruising Speed is ironic in so many ways that I think it's lost on many readers, those who don't read in and around and through hot just read straight on...
...I thank Bill for a couple hundred pages of it...
...Another three years, and I see him in my mind's eye in a box in Madison Square Garden, in t h e summer of 1964, the Goidwater rally...
...Or how, as an undergra_&_~Ate, in the Political Union, he had so insulted Eleanor Roosevelt that s h e had instantly :vowed never to return to Yale...
...Read, that ye may be instructed...
...Conservative of 73rd Sh, eet and Stamford, Conn...
...He's enough of a student of history and literature to eschew naming his book, in imitation of one of the last great scions of America's premier family, The Education of William Buckley...
...I read his section about his weekly gym session more carefully...
...He might, I thought, have been a favourite prepschool teacher and I a returning altmmus...
...Others would disagree...
...Nor is he one of those cuckoos in the land, those idee lixe chaps...
...The man's faith in technology and technical intervention is evident in his endorsement of the continued widespread use of pesticides and his characterization of the late Rachel Carson and her book Silent Spring as "sentimental" and "'gross...
...There was a chair in the corner that belonged on Satin-days to an elderly bibliographer, and the rest of the week to anyone who wanted a good view of members and guests at the Elizabethan Club pourlug themselves aftexnnon tea...
...He left after finishing his tea - - the door slammed, and then two or three of the club's more knowledgeable members came in: I heard one saying "Must be some kind of reactionary shindig in town - - that was Bill Buckley just going out...
...But I cannot for the life of me recall one thing he said that night...
...Ambrose Pierce defined admiration as the polite recognition of another's resemblance to oneself, and I guess in that case not many could admire Bill Buckley...
...Not included in the very slim index are such names as Colin Clark, or even Barry Commoner...
...Not just because he's polite, but to learn...
...Buckley deal with rudeness...
...Not only that, very early on in the book (p...
...In 1968, we met at the Newark Airport, khakis still, touch of sumburn, no blazer, hair now going pepper and salt, on his way back from visiting Edgar Smith in the Death House at Trenton, on his way up to a Party of the Right banquet at Yale...
...I don't understand the logic leading to that one at all...
...Not that all that he learns, and says, is congenial to all who listen, even those who listen, as I listen, from a_perspective of general approval...
...But since no one will ever care enough to try to see if I could defy the laws of gravity from off the Empire State Building, I learn far more common things than he learns...
...But does the title Cruising Speed here mean something...
...I admit to a weakness for charm in this increasingly charm-drained world...
...The first was delightful but, I thought it incomplete and it took no genius to think this, since the journal plainly told us that it was the first of two pieces, but so what...
...and in Congress, and off in the woods of Mecosta, Michigan...
...Bill Buckley was, to Yale's conservatives, a folk-hero, well on his way to becoming a solar myth...
...To this:day, I do not know ff the first is true: of the second, I know only that, at the time of her death, Mrs...
...He is educated by contact with those he meets...
...Which is one of his distinctive characteristics, and, I'd wager, the cross that some who worship him bear...
...I was sitting there early one afternoon some dozen years ago when a fair-haired man in his early thirties came in, looked around briefly, poured himself a cup of tea, inspected the sandwiches (cucumber, which means it was a Tuesday afternoon), and went off into the front room...
...What I mean by - - unj.erk your knee is: don't expect this man to conform to anybody's expectation of what the complete Conservative is...
...We stopped for a cup of coffee on the road - - coffee out of paper cups, an old Mercedes-Benz (his car), the Connecticut countryside in January, a conversation of which (barring his wonderment that Edgar Smith could be a likeable human being after ten years without seeing the light of day) I remember little enough...
...He remarked somewhere, in a column, perhaps, or on a TV talk show, that when he was with Richard Nixon once, and Mr...
...Thus, it is people who are the "problem" and must he suppressed, not a technology which is out of control...
Vol. 5 • December 1971 • No. 3
