Casual
Eastland, Terry
Casual THE GIFT OF FRIENDSHIP I once wrote a letter to my hero, hoping to get one back. This was early in 1976, and I’d recently taken my fi rst newspaper job. William F. Buckley Jr., who was...
...And to make it to his home for dinner...
...The thought of Bill Buckley calling my paper to fi nd out where I was staying in New York was amazing...
...It wasn’t necessary to cut either throat, as I had to go back to work right before he was due to go speak...
...Once he observed that a review I’d written of one of his collections was “simply the best” he had ever received...
...William F. Buckley Jr., who was willing to challenge liberal orthodoxy and defend traditional norms like no one else, was as famous as I was obscure, and I could think of no good reason he would actually write back...
...That he liked it was a huge encouragement to someone toiling in the newspaper equivalent of low-A ball...
...on the day of the speech...
...He was, after all, the most prolifi c writer around, and he did his weekly Firing Line show and all the speeches, and then there was the skiing in Switzerland, the transatlantic sailing, and more...
...I wrote Bill that I’d be up to cover it...
...What I didn’t understand then was that my hero had an unusual gift for friendship...
...TERRY EASTLAND...
...I remember the time I checked into a room in Norfolk late one night and heard a voice in the hall that could have belonged only to one man...
...I began to see that two months later when I went to a lecture he gave at High Point College in North Carolina...
...I think Bill’s days somehow went longer than 24 hours...
...Then we ordered from room service...
...But stepping outside my door, I saw that the man entering his room with a huge bag in each hand was indeed Bill Buckley...
...That Buckley could remember it at all astonished me...
...But Bill invited me in and dialed up room service...
...Surely not, I thought, too coincidental...
...Bill was to lecture at a local college, and I wrote to say I was looking forward to the event...
...That “by the way” sentence served to invite me into my hero’s company: The two of us could discuss Nock and maybe other writers and ideas...
...I thought that would be that...
...I like to think he wasn’t joking...
...And in my case, and doubtless others, he often had something generous to say...
...Lewis...
...Afterwards a large crowd gathered around him...
...He’d go to such lengths...
...I got just close enough to introduce myself...
...In reply, remembering that I’d told him I recognized his High Point speech as one previously published in the Alternative, he told me he might give that old speech and didn’t want me to have to sit through it again...
...But he overcame distance with notes and letters...
...He answered a question I’d asked him about Albert Jay Nock, ending with this: “By the way, I own the holograph of Jefferson,” Nock’s biography of Thomas Jefferson...
...But he was critically important for those of us who came up in the fevered sixties and then had to endure the seventies, for he helped us make our way athwart history to the better time of the Reagan years...
...I watched him compose his column in maybe 20 minutes...
...It had appeared eight months earlier in the old Alternative, soon to be renamed the American Spectator, and it was my fi rst magazine piece ever...
...Many of his friends—and they ran across the political spectrum—knew him as I did from afar, through the mail...
...But Buckley greeted me as though we’d known each other for years and began walking me out, asking whether I’d like to get something to eat...
...They had to, to accommodate his innumerable friendships...
...Bill’s legacy is found all over politics and the media today...
...But it was the next sentence that bowled me over: “That was a splendid essay you did on C.S...
...As it happened, I managed to reach him...
...A year later I was in San Diego working for the morning newspaper...
...But the busy Buckley—“Dictated in Switzerland, Transcribed in New York,” it said atop the page—wrote back...
...But that was Bill...
...The times I saw Bill were infrequent...
...The crowd parted before the two of us like the Red Sea...
...It was too late for a visit...
...For us, he’ll always remain a hero, and for many, too, he’ll remain in memory an abiding friend...
...I left struck by the fact that he’d not thought about his speech in the two hours before he was to give it...
...If I see you in that front row, I shall cut either my throat or yours...
...Possibly yours, since otherwise”— fl ashing his characteristic wit—“I would not get my fee...
...He responded that since I hadn’t said where I’d be staying, he’d try calling my newspaper to fi nd out, as he wanted “to see if you can join us for dinner...
...Bill invited me to drop by his hotel at 5:30 P.M...
...Later that year the Democrats were to hold their convention in New York...
Vol. 13 • March 2008 • No. 25
