Logistically, Obama may be able to “close Guantanamo pretty quickly” once he finds facilities on the mainland to house the prisoners, said Matthew Waxman, a former Defense Department official who teaches law at Columbia University. “The bigger issue is on what legal basis are you going to hold them?”
So What are they going to do if they can not get the goods? Sounds like we will have some terrorists running around the U.S. doing what they do best. If 9/11 defined the beginning of the Bush administration this may be Obama's moment.
How wonderful!
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Guantanamo
Interesting tidbit from Bloomberg on the plan to bring these terrorists to the U.S.:
Monday, December 1, 2008
Bill and Pat Buckley
This is a long one but a great insight to the man of the Right:
Mr. and Mrs. Right
They called each other “Ducky.” And they died within months of each other, in April 2007 and February 2008, as if William F. Buckley Jr., the famously polysyllabic founder of the modern conservative movement (and of its literary flagship, the National Review), could not go on without Patricia, the equally opinionated social lioness he’d married 57 years earlier. Talking to Nancy Reagan, Henry Kissinger, and the Buckleys’ only child, Christopher, who has been making his own headlines, the author explores the complex connections—political, intellectual, and romantic—behind the ineffably stylish world of Pat and Bill.
by Bob Colacello January 2009
His memorial service was at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, on Fifth Avenue. Hers was at the Temple of Dendur, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His was a Requiem Mass, with 18 priests, banks of Easter lilies along the altar rail, and Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto for a postlude. Hers was a Celebration of the Life, with a brief benediction, a gigantic bouquet of fuchsia rhododendrons behind the lectern, and Rodgers and Hart’s “Isn’t It Romantic?” on the soundtrack of the opening photomontage. His was open to the public, and a capacity crowd of around 2,200 mourners—a sprinkling of socialites and journalists engulfed by a legion of right-wing eggheads—squeezed into the cathedral’s pews. Hers was by invitation only, and socialites vastly outnumbered eggheads among the approximately 400 select, each of whom was perched on a gilded ballroom chair with a hot-pink cushion.
Henry Kissinger spoke at both.
William F. Buckley Jr., the intellectual force behind the modern American conservative movement, and his fashionable wife, Patricia, may have seemed to be a study in contrasts—Auntie Mame and the Absent-minded Professor, Pericles and Cleopatra—but those who knew them best understood how in tune they were mentally, morally, politically, and romantically. As Kissinger noted at her memorial, “Theirs was one of the great love stories of our time. The combination of Pat and Bill brought about a binary reaction that perhaps only a nuclear physicist could explain.” One of the clearest signs of the depth of their affection was the fact that each called the other by the same nickname: Ducky.
In 1985, Bill Buckley himself wrote about another great love affair: Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s. Read “The Way They Are,” by William F. Buckley Jr.
Pat Buckley died on April 15, 2007, at age 80, of septic poisoning after a vascular operation on her left leg. Her memorial, organized by the Buckleys’ only child, Washington-based writer Christopher Buckley, took place a month later. Kissinger’s eulogy was followed by those of former New York City commissioner of cultural affairs Schuyler Chapin, Vanity Fair contributing editor Reinaldo Herrera, investment banker Frederick Melhado, and costume-jewelry designer Kenneth Jay Lane (who compared Pat to Hatshepsut, one of the few female pharaohs of Egypt). Christopher’s teenage daughter, Caitlin, recalled her grandmother’s lessons in comportment, such as “Never ever butter your bread in midair—only people who are deeply common do that.” “When I was seven or eight,” Caitlin continued, “she taught me the art of air-kissing. She said this would be essential later in life when I moved to New York.”
Bill Buckley was too shaken up by his wife’s passing to deliver his eulogy, so it was printed in the program. He quoted a condolence letter from an acquaintance: “I am a confirmed nonbeliever, but for once I would like to be mistaken, and hope that, for you, this is not good-bye, but hasta luego.” Buckley commented, “No alternative thought would make continuing in life, for me, tolerable.” Friends who had not seen him for a while were shocked by his appearance. “I couldn’t believe the state he was in—really like a derelict,” recalls the interior designer Mica Ertegün. “I’m so worried about Bill,” Nancy Reagan told me in a telephone call shortly after Pat’s death. “I don’t know how he can go on without her. She ran his life, really. And he let her. He wanted her to.”
He lasted another 10 months, collapsing at his desk in his home in Stamford, Connecticut, on February 27, 2008. He was 82 and suffering from diabetes and emphysema. The New York Times, mimicking his trademark predilection for obscure polysyllabic words, called him the “Sesquipedalian Spark of the Right.” Nearly every major newspaper in the world ran a lengthy obituary, and Newsweek did a cover story, titled “Mr. Right, R.I.P.”
At St. Patrick’s the faithful responded to Kissinger’s emotion-choked eulogy with sustained applause. “Bill Buckley inspired a political movement that changed American politics,” the former secretary of state intoned. “He founded the National Review that, for over a generation, has shaped American political discussion; he hosted an influential talk show [Firing Line] for 30 years; he wrote an elegant column. Every year, he authored a beautifully written novel; in what passed for his spare time, he produced several nonfiction works and delivered over 50 lectures annually. He was a passionate skier, an accomplished harpsichordist, and a daring sailor. He wrote as Mozart composed, by inspiration; he never needed a second draft … this noble, gentle, and valiant man who was truly touched by the grace of God.”
Though Buckley’s brother the former senator James Buckley and sister the retired National Review managing editor Priscilla Buckley read from the Bible, Christopher Buckley was the only other eulogist. After quoting Hamlet—“I shall not look upon his like again”—and calling his father “the world’s coolest mentor,” Christopher concluded, “This afternoon I’ll make one last trip up there [to Stamford] to bury him.… I shall place in his coffin his favorite rosary, the TV remote control—private joke—a jar of peanut butter, and my mother’s ashes.”
Dead or alive, the Buckleys continue to command attention. The BBC has a William F. Buckley documentary in production, and two biographies are on the way: an authorized life by New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus and an oral history by former Washington Post gossip columnist Lloyd Grove. Bill Buckley’s 55th book, The Reagan I Knew, which he was close to finishing when he died, has just been published by Basic Books. A memoir of his personal and political relationship with President Reagan, it includes 40 years of correspondence between Buckley and both Ronald and Nancy Reagan, as well as a foreword by Christopher Buckley, who helped Linda Bridges of the National Review complete it.
But the book that will no doubt create the greatest stir is Christopher’s own memoir of his parents’ last days, Losing Mum and Pup, due out in May. Coming on the heels of his latest novel, Supreme Courtship, a send-up of the nation’s highest judicial institution, it will be his 14th book—literary prolificacy runs in the family. “Writing this book may have been simply a way of spending more time with my parents, before finally letting them go,” Christopher, who is 56, told me. “I honestly had no intention of writing about them. But I’m a writer, and when the universe hands you material like this, it would seem an act of conscious omission not to do something about it. It spilled out of me. I wrote it in 40 days—no biblical association intended. This book is going to land hard in some quarters, although anyone who concludes that it’s anything but an act of love will, I think, be wrong. It’s a book about two very complex people. They were not your typical mom and dad. This is not Ozzie and Harriet. They were William F. and Pat Buckley. The phrase ‘larger than life’ doesn’t twice cover it.”
A Couple of Swells
Nancy Reagan recalls hearing the story of how Bill proposed to Pat: “She was playing bridge and Bill took her aside and asked her to marry him. And Pat said, ‘Bill, three other men have asked me the same question. I said no to them, but I’m saying yes to you. Now, may I go back to my bridge game?’ Can’t you just hear her?” (In other versions Pat was playing canasta and had turned down as many as eight previous suitors.)
The couple had met some months earlier, in the fall of 1948, when Bill was a junior at Yale and Pat was a sophomore at Vassar, where she shared a dormitory suite with Bill’s sister Trish, who had arranged a blind date. Pat was not quite ready when Bill arrived. “I offered to paint her fingernails,” he later wrote. “And she immediately extended her hand.”
They were married on July 6, 1950, in Vancouver, where the home of Pat’s parents, Austin and Kathleen “Babe” Taylor, occupied an entire city block. The Taylors, according to Buckley biographer John B. Judis, “had major holdings in gold, oil, and timber,” making them one of the richest families in Canada. Pat’s father also owned Canada’s leading Thoroughbred stable; two of his horses had nearly beat Seabiscuit in the 1930s. “The Taylors were the big cheeses in Vancouver,” says Virginia Wright, who grew up with Pat. “But Pat was not at all like her parents. She was something else, a rara avis, so glamorous in a town that was so hick and quiet. I think she felt fulfilled when she met Bill. She never looked back. Her maid of honor never heard from her again.”
While Pat agreed to be wed in a church ceremony presided over by the Catholic archbishop of Vancouver, her parents insisted on having the city’s Anglican bishop bless the bride and groom at the reception for 1,000 guests that followed on their lawn. And from then on, whenever the subject of Bill’s well-publicized Catholicism arose, Pat would loudly announce, “I am Church of England.”
Despite the religious differences, Bill got along just fine with his in-laws, whose political views were as right-wing as his and whose great wealth impressed him. As one friend told me, “Bill really believed that it was virtuous to be rich. And anybody who was very, very rich must be a good guy.” In his recently published memoir, An American Family, Bill’s brother Reid Buckley reproduces a “Memorandum to Austin C. Taylor” from their father, William F. Buckley Sr.:
I have tried for many years to interest my children in conventional sports, but I have not been very successful. Billie is easily the worst in this regard, having no interest in tennis, golf, or other activities which satisfy the great majority of the nation. If you expect to entertain him, you will find it necessary to furnish him with 1) a horse, 2) a yacht, or 3) a private airplane. Aloise joins me in affectionate regards to you and Babe.
Bill’s parents, Will and Aloise Buckley, may not have been as rich as the Taylors, but they were hardly paupers. Will, a Texas wildcatter, made his first fortune drilling for oil in Mexico, then lost it when he was expelled, in 1921, for counterrevolutionary activities against that country’s leftist government. By the time Bill was born, in 1925, the family was based on a 47-acre estate called Great Elm, in Sharon, Connecticut, but Will’s business interests caused them to spend long stretches in Venezuela, France, England, and Italy. Bill and his nine siblings were privately tutored in everything from Latin to ballroom dancing, and all of them were fluent in Spanish, French, and English by the time they were 13. In 1940, Bill was enrolled at Millbrook, a private Episcopalian boarding school in the Hudson Valley, where, according to one fellow student, there were no Jews and only a handful of Catholics.
Frederick Eberstadt, a New York friend who was a classmate at Millbrook, says, “It sounds funny, but Bill’s biggest interest was kidding around. He was very Catholic, though. He had a little shrine in his room, a Madonna inside this kind of stone box. He asked me what I thought of it, and I said it was kitsch. He said, ‘You don’t understand.’ I said, ‘What don’t I understand?’ He said, ‘It’s the mother of God.’ Even at that age, to his thinking, it could not be kitsch, because it was the mother of God.”
After two miserable years on army bases in Georgia and Texas during World War II, the pampered young heir entered Yale, where he flourished, becoming chairman of the Yale Daily News, a star of the debating team, and a member of Skull and Bones. A month after graduating, he married Pat, who had left Vassar, and they rented a house near New Haven, where in six months Bill wrote the book that would make him famous, God and Man at Yale, a fierce attack on his alma mater for not upholding Christianity and free enterprise against atheism and collectivism.
One night during this period, Bill’s best college friend, Evan Galbraith, dared him to break into the Yale Bowl so that they could run a 100- yard race on the cinder track bordering the football field. Frederick Melhado, who was a class behind them, remembers, “Pat immediately elected herself to manage this daunting project. She conscripted a group of about 20 of us to carry flashlights and lanterns. The locks were broken, the chains were removed, and we filed silently through the tunnel that led into the stadium. Bill won a close race. But you could see here a preview of what became their standard operating procedure. Pat was the leader.”
To avoid further military service, in the Korean War, Bill signed up with the C.I.A. and served in Mexico City under the station chief, Howard Hunt (of Watergate fame). After nine months he quit to take a job in New York as an editor at The American Mercury, the irreverent literary magazine founded by H. L. Mencken in the 1920s, which over the years had drifted to the right. Pat was pregnant with Christopher, who was born in September 1952. “I am the only only child in the Buckley clan,” says Christopher. “My mom had two ectopic pregnancies, as they were called in those days. So I was continually, and somewhat annoyingly, reminded as I was growing up that I was ‘a miracle child.’”
“If Pat could have had seven or eight children, like all the other Buckleys, she would have been the Great Earth Mother, which was her real character,” says her friend Bootsie Galbraith, Evan’s widow. “There would have been none of the charity stuff, no need to be as social.” Lynn Wyatt, the Houston hostess, puts it another way: “Pat was Mother Superior. She took care of everybody, and she bossed everybody around.”
One could say that Pat’s two closest girlfriends in New York represented the two sides of her personality. Shirley Clurman, an ABC producer for Barbara Walters and the wife of Bill’s good friend Richard Clurman, the Time-Life News Service’s chief of correspondents, was warm, motherly, completely down to earth, and almost dowdy. The famous fashion plate Nan Kempner, on the other hand, was brittle, needy, socially obsessed, and almost as theatrical as Pat. Reinaldo Herrera points out, “Pat could have been a great actress. She didn’t talk, she delivered.”
Birth of a Movement
After producing an heir for Bill, Pat’s next order of business was to find a Great Elm of their own. Every day for weeks she would set out from Manhattan in search of a country house that would satisfy Bill’s three requirements: not too expensive, on the water, and within an hour of Grand Central. She found a 15-room Victorian house on three acres facing Long Island Sound in Stamford and immediately set about sprucing it up to her taste. She added a music room, where Bill could play his harpsichord, and had a pool built right on the Sound, where Bill wanted it. “It was the most wonderfully eccentric house, pink on the outside, red on the inside, filled with paintings of every color, by painters you never heard of,” says Kenneth Lane, a frequent houseguest. “In the spring and summer, there was every kind of flower in every color you could think of.”
John Fairchild, the fashion world’s high priest, says, “I once asked Pat why she painted the house pink. After all, they didn’t live in Bermuda. She said, ‘To attract the sailors.’ She was the brightest light in that New York group, and a great hostess. I remember going for dinner once—I think we were six or eight. I’d never seen so many lamb chops in my life.”
By 1953, Bill had left The American Mercury and begun collaborating with his brother-in-law Brent Bozell on a book titled McCarthy and His Enemies, a defense of the anti-Communist crusade of the controversial Senator Joseph McCarthy. Published in March 1954, a month before the notorious Army-McCarthy hearings, it turned Buckley, according to John Judis, from an enfant terrible to a pariah “among the eastern intelligentsia.” One of those who backed away was the young Harvard instructor Henry Kissinger. “I invited Bill to write an article on McCarthy for a magazine I was editing called Confluence, which brought together Europeans and Americans on agreed-upon subjects, and to my shame I didn’t publish it,” Kissinger tells me. Nonetheless, it was the beginning of an enduring friendship. “You know how it was with Bill—suddenly you found yourself in his orbit,” says Kissinger, who recalls meeting Pat a little later. “I had not had much contact with New York social life in those days, so for me she was a rather overpowering personality. But over the years I grew tremendously fond of her. She had no hesitancy in interrupting me in mid-paragraph, saying, ‘You’re making no sense at all.’”
In 1955, Bill teamed up with Willi Schlamm, the chief foreign-policy adviser to Time-magazine boss Henry Luce, to create the National Review. A Jewish former Communist who had fled Austria after Hitler took over, Schlamm had proposed to Buckley the previous summer the idea of a weekly magazine that would exert pressure from the right on the American political establishment. Buckley’s father enthusiastically threw in the first $100,000, and Buckley and Schlamm raised another $450,000 from conservative Yale alumni, including New York financier Jeremiah Milbank, Houston oilman Lloyd Smith, and South Carolina textile manufacturers Roger and Gerrish Milliken, as well as from Henry Salvatori, the Los Angeles oil tycoon who would later become a power in Ronald Reagan’s Kitchen Cabinet. The first issue appeared in November, with a statement of purpose vowing to oppose big government, uphold the “organic moral order,” and resist Communism, which it defined as “the century’s most blatant force of satanic Utopianism.” By 1961 circulation had reached 54,000 and Buckley had emerged as the leading voice of conservatism. The following year he launched his nationally syndicated column. He was instrumental in founding Young Americans for Freedom, which became a driving force behind Barry Goldwater’s run for president, in 1964. Buckley himself ran for mayor of New York City as a Conservative in 1965, against Democrat Abe Beame and Republican John Lindsay. Although he won only 13.4 percent of the vote, the publicity he gained enabled him to start Firing Line in 1966.
Buckley’s fans saw him as a dazzling verbal genius; his detractors considered him a supercilious put-down artist. Among those not impressed by his stellar rise was Gore Vidal, who could be at least as acerbic and patrician as Buckley. The two authors first clashed in back-to-back appearances on The Jack Paar Show in 1962. After Vidal claimed on-air that Buckley’s political views were identical to those of the John Birch Society and suggested that Buckley had never worked for a living, Buckley sent a telegram to Paar in which he referred to Vidal as “a pink queer.” Matters came to a head when the two traded insults on ABC during the 1968 Democratic convention, with Vidal calling Buckley “a crypto-Nazi” and Buckley threatening to “sock” him “in the goddamn face.” In follow-up pieces in Esquire, Buckley focused on homosexual themes in Vidal’s work, and Vidal responded by implying that Buckley was a homosexual and an anti-Semite, whereupon Buckley sued and Vidal countersued. After three years of legal wrangling, Vidal’s suit was thrown out, Buckley dropped his, and Esquire settled a modest sum on Buckley. Vidal still bristles at the mention of his old enemy’s name. “He was out to get me from the very beginning,” he says. “He wanted me to write for his little magazine. I spurned him, and he didn’t like that. Bear in mind, this was a very stupid guy, who never read any of those books he referred to, and Americans, being such hicks, thought he was a great nobleman and a real gentleman. I never heard such trash as when he cooled it.” Even Vidal, however, says of Pat, “I liked her, and it was mutual.”
Bill always claimed that Pat opposed each of his new ventures, which, however, “once they were undertaken, she took part in enthusiastically.” Twice a month she hosted National Review editorial dinners at their East 73rd Street duplex maisonette, which was decorated in her favorite colors—red, orange, and purple—except for the dining room, which was painted black. Drinks were taken in the library, where a full-length portrait of the hostess—in a flame-red caftan, with her beloved Cavalier King Charles spaniels at her feet—hung over the fireplace. These dinners brought together the magazine’s writers and editors with such famous Buckley friends as Whittaker Chambers, Clare Boothe Luce, and Lauren Bacall. Kissinger recalls, “Pat’s role was a combination of making sure that everybody was comfortable, that the conversation was on an important level, and that Bill was the featured person. She did that with extraordinary tact, but not as a hostess, as a partner.”
As John O’Sullivan, longtime writer and editor at the National Review, put it in an online tribute to Pat, “Together they were conservatism’s golden couple, giving a contemporary Manhattan gloss to a movement that its enemies would like to have caricatured as provincial, dull, and outdated.”
“I don’t know how Bill could have picked any woman in the world to be his wife other than Pat,” says Aileen Mehle, the society columnist, “because she could match him—even intellectually, and certainly as far as humor was concerned. Most women would have felt challenged by Bill, but she always held her own. She blurted out anything she felt like blurting out. If she loved you, she loved you madly. If she hated you, look out. Don’t forget, she was six feet tall. But she always wore flats so she wouldn’t be taller than Bill.”
Hostess with the Mostest
Pat called herself “a good Arab wife” and would say, “Wherever Bill goes, I pitch the tent.” In addition to the Manhattan and Stamford residences, the Buckleys rented the Château de Rougemont, outside Gstaad, Switzerland, every winter, and Bill owned and occasionally chartered a series of small yachts, on which he sailed around the Caribbean and made three trips across the Atlantic and one across the Pacific. He also made a ritual of moonlit Friday-night sails out of Stamford. “Seeing Pat stock a boat was incredible—the wine, the vegetables, the canned stuff,” says Mehle. “She was the galley master.” Mehle, who traveled often with the couple, remembers them showing up at an airport in the Bahamas with 42 duffel bags. “You know how many times she counted those bags? Not Bill! He never counted bags.” According to Christopher Buckley, “Even when she wasn’t speaking to my dad, which was a lot of the time, she would pack his bags. Deep in her DNA was something that I think she had learned from her mother: you take care of your men.”
Her greatest logistical feat was the annual move to Switzerland, where Bill would write a whole book in two months’ time, nonfiction to begin with, including his first memoir, Cruising Speed (1971), and later spy novels, such as Saving the Queen (1976) and Marco Polo, If You Can (1982), featuring a hero modeled on himself, Blackford Oakes, a blue-eyed, Yale-educated C.I.A. agent. Julian Booth, the English chef who was with the Buckleys for 35 years, describes Pat setting up the château: “It was a three-day preparation at least. We’d have everything stored upstairs in the eaves. She had her own sheets and linens, and of course the cutlery and crockery were all hers. So we would unpack that. And we would transform what we called the nursery into his office and studio. Basically, there was a billiard table, and we would put a Ping-Pong table over the top, and that was his table for painting. When he was in the château, he loved to paint. He and his research fellow—usually a different one each year—would work in the mornings, then lunch, ski, and be back usually by 3:30 in the afternoon. And then work until the cocktail hour. And then join the guests for dinner. And then play the harpsichord or paint.”
“David Niven was there every night. He was Bill’s closest friend,” recalls Taki Theodoracopulos, the Greek shipping heir, who began his journalistic career in 1967 as a photographer for the National Review. “Roger Moore was there. Kenneth Galbraith was there. In those days the Buckleys stayed up very late, whooping it up. Pat always played the outraged duchess: ‘No, I’m not going to let Taki take you deep-mountain skiing, Bill.’ And Bill would sort of smile wryly.”
As Gstaad became more and more social, in the 70s, so did the scene at the Buckleys’. Nan Kempner would show up every February and take two rooms, one for her and one for her couture gowns. Other regulars included Lynn Wyatt, Brazilian socialite Elizinha Moreira-Salles, and Spanish extra man Pano de Hoyos. As editor of Interview, I was invited to stay in 1978, and I arrived in time for a standard lunch of fettuccine with gobs of pâté de foie gras, stuffed roast pheasant, and chocolate mousse. I had barely taken a sip of the Château Margaux when Pat bellowed, “I cannot understand how a nice Catholic boy like you could work for that creep Andy Warhol!” Julian Booth recalls of those days, “We would have the Greek night, with King Constantine, the Goulandrises, and Taki. Then we’d have a German night, with Count and Countess von Oeynhausen. And then the Danish night, when Princess Benedikt would come. And the Monegasque night—the Grimaldis and David Niven.”
Jamie Niven, David’s son, says, “My father saw them all the time in the winter. They were really, really close. We called them the Buckles. In the summer they would come and stay at my father’s house at Cap-Ferrat. One year, Château de Rougemont burned, and it was terribly damaged. So they moved down the road five kilometers and spent that winter with my father. The harpsichord was saved. It went downstairs in the little wine cave my father had. Bill took that over and worked in there.” Jamie, who didn’t get along with his stepmother, grew very close to Pat over the years. “I remember I was talking to her on the phone, and she was telling me I couldn’t do this and I couldn’t do that. I said, ‘You know, you’re not my mother. You can’t talk to me like that.’ She said, ‘I have been your mother, Sonny, and I shall remain your mother until I die.’ So I became Sonny to her, and I would call her up and say, ‘Mother, how are you today?’”
When David Niven died, in 1983, Jamie was on a fishing trip in Idaho. True to form, Pat called the governor of Idaho, who sent a plane to pluck him out of the woods, making it possible for him to get to Switzerland in time for the funeral. Jamie says, “About two years later, the Museum of Modern Art decided to have a fund-raising evening for the film department in memory of my father. My first call was to Pat. She became chairman of the evening, and we made more money than MoMA had ever made in one night.” Pat and Jamie subsequently organized events at the museum honoring Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, Gregory Peck, and Clint Eastwood.
“I am, to put it in really vulgar language, a money raiser,” Pat Buckley once told a reporter, “a money raiser for things I believe in.” Her two principal charities were New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum. Starting in the 1960s, she and Nan Kempner co-chaired annual galas for the hospital, raising some $75 million over 30 years’ time. From 1978 to 1995, Pat chaired the Costume Institute’s yearly benefit, which was so exclusive—and lucrative—that it became known as the Party of the Year. For the opening of Diana Vreeland’s 1981 exhibition, “The Eighteenth-Century Woman,” for example, nearly every major European designer flew over, and the 720 dinner guests ranged from Doris Duke and Diana Ross to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Bill Paley. After dinner, 1,000 kids paid $100 each to dance in the Temple of Dendur. “Pat ran those parties with an iron fist,” says Blaine Trump, who helped Pat with her charities. “She would figure out what the tables were going to look like, and who could buy the tables. She was also very aware of the fact that you don’t spend a lot of money on the fluff—you make sure that the charity gets the money. Once Pat sat down with you, you were done—get your checkbook out. And when you did something for her, there was no one more appreciative. You always got a beautiful note and some wonderful pâté or something that Julian had whipped up.” Sean Driscoll, whose Glorious Food catered the parties, adds, “Pat was totally hands-on. If we were running out of time and there were still flowers to be hung from the chandeliers, she would just get up on a ladder and do it herself.”
‘Pat was the Queen of New York when Reagan was president,” says Louise Grunwald, the Park Avenue hostess and widow of Time bigwig Henry Grunwald, who served as ambassador to Austria under Ronald Reagan. “That was Pat’s high point. The best invitation in town was to go to the Buckleys’. It was the best fun: it was journalists, it was celebrities, it was Tom Wolfe, it was fabulous. Who gives parties like that today?”
The Buckleys’ friendship with the Reagans went back to 1961, when Bill was giving a speech in Beverly Hills to an organization called Citizens for Better Education and Ronald Reagan was asked to introduce him. Over the years Bill would sometimes stay at the Reagans’ house when he was in California. Nancy recalls, “After he left, the kids would always say, ‘Why can’t we have peanut butter on our toast like Bill Buckley?’” Nancy’s good friend Betsy Bloomingdale remembers how attractive Bill was back then, especially whenever he made a toast at one of the Reagans’ dinners. “He’d get up at the head of the table, put his thumbs in his pockets, and he had a way of rocking as he spoke. And we would sit there mesmerized. Nancy and I thought he was the most divine thing we ever saw.” The Bloomingdales’ boys went to the same Catholic boarding school as Christopher, Portsmouth Abbey, in Rhode Island, and the two mothers found the nearby hotels so depressing that they rented and decorated an apartment for their visits.
While Reagan relied on Bill for ideological guidance, he was also amenable to taking his recommendations for appointments. In Bill’s posthumous memoir, he prints a letter in which he suggests that Reagan “enroll the help” of Evan Galbraith, whom the president shortly thereafter made ambassador to France. The book makes clear as well how close Bill was to Nancy. In a January 22, 1985, letter to her he writes:
This is a love letter.
When El Presidente was sworn in, and after he spoke, I was standing five feet behind him—and you. And I saw your fingers caressing his. You thought the gesture entirely private, but I have Eyes That See All, and I was not, in living memory, so moved by so tender a liaison between a great leader and his incomparable wife.
The Buckleys were at the first private dinner the Reagans gave at the White House, in honor of Prince Charles, and at their last private dinner, when Nancy’s official portrait was unveiled. In between, they attended a state dinner for Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, a private dinner for Laurence Olivier, and the famous party where Princess Diana danced with John Travolta. They were invited to stay overnight at the White House and to fly on Air Force One—honors granted not even to Nancy’s closest confidant, Jerry Zipkin, the Park Avenue real-estate heir and social arbiter.
Feuds and Milestones
All through the 1980s, Pat and Jerry, who were the best of friends, ran Nancy Reagan’s social calendar when she visited New York. They were quite a duo, one as funny as the other, and both highly opinionated, judgmental, and cutting. They also shared a passion for gin rummy. “When you spent the weekend in Stamford, every afternoon you played gin rummy,” says Aileen Mehle. “And everybody wanted to hurry up and finish lunch so we could play. Not Bill. He never did play gin—ever. Those gin-rummy games should have been taped. Oh, my God, the things people said to each other. Naughty, naughty.”
Perhaps it was inevitable that two personalities as strong as Pat and Jerry would have a falling-out. Christopher Buckley thinks his mother’s relationship with “old Zip” may have come to an end over the card table at East 73rd Street. “Apparently, at one of those card games, Jerry said something snappish to one of the other men in my mother’s regular group—all confirmed bachelors—and Mum demanded that he apologize. I’m sure drink had been taken. Jerry refused, and it went from there.” Other people said Zipkin had gone around town saying Pat had a drinking problem, and it got back to her. I recall Zipkin vowing over lunch at Mortimer’s that he would never speak to Mrs. Buckley again, after she had seated his date, the Duchess de Cadaval, at Bill’s table at a Costume Institute ball, and put him in Outer Mongolia. “I think their fight was about Nancy,” says Kenneth Lane. “There was a little bit of competition. I thought it was very stupid, so I had them both to lunch, without telling them that the other one was coming. It did not work.” Blaine Trump adds, “We tried to have a peacemaking summit at Le Cirque. Jerry asked for his fish grilled dry, and it came with a sauce, and he did his usual thing with the waiter. Pat said, ‘You just can’t treat people that way.’ And that was the end of the summit.”
Sadly, Pat would also break with another of her closest pals, the fashion designer Bill Blass. “There was an incident with Blass,” says a friend of theirs, “when she had too much to drink, and he said, ‘That’s enough.’”
Zipkin died in 1995, Blass in 2002. Pat attended Zipkin’s funeral; Blass didn’t want one.
In July 2000, the Buckleys celebrated their golden wedding anniversary with a dinner for 50 friends and relatives on the terrace of the house in Stamford. They chartered a bus to bring some of the invited from Manhattan. As Bill was greeting people arriving in their own cars—Henry and Nancy Kissinger, Reinaldo and Carolina Herrera, Frederick and Virginia Melhado, C. Z. Guest, Aileen Mehle—Pat stuck her head out their upstairs bedroom window and hollered to him, “Ducky, you’re not going to believe this, but the bus is broken down, and our guests are sitting on the side of I-95.” Their chauffeur and another driver were dispatched to rescue the stranded guests, Evan and Bootsie Galbraith among them.
After a buffet of barbecued pork and whole lobsters, Christopher showed a video he had made for his parents’ 40th anniversary. This was followed by a speech from Bill, which he ended with “To spend 50 years with Pat, you have to love her.” Pat then stood up and explained why she had changed clothes during the dinner. She said that the red-and-white-striped dress she was now wearing had been made by the Paris couturier Jacques Fath, and that she had been wearing it the night Bill proposed to her. “And it still fits!” she added proudly.
On Christmas Eve 2002, the Buckley family was shaken by an item in the New York Daily News revealing that Christopher was “embroiled in a paternity action” with former Random House publicist Irina Woelfle, “over her 2-year-old son, Jonathan,” and that he had voluntarily taken a DNA test, which had established him as the boy’s father. After Christopher agreed to pay $3,000 a month in child support, the press dropped the subject. Although Christopher and his wife, Lucy Gregg Buckley—the daughter of a former C.I.A. officer, with whom he had two children, Caitlin and William Conor—seemed happily married, even close family friends refrained from asking Pat and Bill about the situation. As Blaine Trump says, “Pat usually talked about everything, but this became the unspeakable. And for Bill, who was so Catholic, it was something he couldn’t abide.”
Christopher was not always the perfect son he appeared to be. He has admitted that he was high on LSD during an interview with Mike Wallace for a segment 60 Minutes did on his father in 1970. Christopher was quite open with me about his relationship with his parents. “It was tough, but I wouldn’t trade it,” he says, adding that he and his father had exchanged at least 7,000 letters and e-mails over the years, and “it’s quite possible that over half of them involved contentions.” Some of their biggest arguments were about religion. Bill, who had a private Mass said every Sunday for him, the two Hispanic maids, and any houseguests who were Catholic, was understandably upset when his son “demurred”—Christopher’s word—from the faith. “My father had a great sense of humor, but it absolutely stopped at the threshold of the Church. And that became a source of great disappointment to him. The funny thing is, my mother got it. She and I probably, over the course of the last 20 years, spent about a third of the time not speaking, but I could go to her more than I could go to him.”
In 1985, Bill Buckley himself wrote about another great love affair: Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s. Read “The Way They Are,” by William F. Buckley Jr.
Unfortunately for Christopher, last October he found himself in the tabloids again, when Irina Woelfle filed a lawsuit seeking additional child support for their son. What shocked people most was a line from Bill Buckley’s will that seemed exceptionally cruel: “I intentionally make no provision herein for said Jonathan, who for all purposes … shall be deemed to have predeceased me.” The Hartford Courant, which broke the story, estimated the value of Bill Buckley’s estate at more than $30 million, though presumably $24.5 million of that was the asking price for the Buckleys’ co-op apartment on East 73rd Street. The New York Post followed up with Woelfle’s neighbor’s claim that Christopher had “never laid eyes” on his “love child,” who “wistfully watched his friends play with their fathers and asked his mom about his own dad” at the local community pool in Coral Gables, Florida, where Woelfle now lives. Restricted from responding by his lawyer, but aware that he was not coming across as a paragon of parenthood, Christopher told The New York Times that he looks “forward to the day when I can have a relationship with Jonathan.”
No sooner had that brouhaha died down than Christopher found himself in more hot water when he endorsed Barack Obama in an online article, setting off an avalanche of hate e-mails from furious Republicans and leading him to resign from the National Review. (The writer David Frum, a Sarah Palin critic, decided to exit not long after.) Christopher still, however, sits on the board and owns one-seventh of the shares. Indeed, some friends are not so sure that Bill would have disapproved of his son’s temporary defection from the G.O.P., given that he himself, like many old-school conservatives, had broken with George W. Bush on the Iraq war. Pat, whose views were often to the right of her husband’s—she maintained that we should have “turned Iraq into a parking lot” during the first Gulf War—might have been more upset.
The year before the anniversary party, Bill had given up Firing Line, after hosting 1,504 programs over 33 years. He had already stepped down from the editorship of the National Review, and in 2004 he would divest himself of his controlling interest by giving his shares of voting stock to a corporation whose original trustees included Christopher and Evan Galbraith. In 2005, for the 50th anniversary of the magazine, President George W. Bush hosted a lunch in Washington to honor Bill. He continued writing his syndicated column and saw the publication of five more books, including Last Call for Blackford Oakes, Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription (collected letters to and from the editor of the National Review), and Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater.
Pat, who over the years had had a long history of accidents and falls and had had four hip replacements, was also slowing down. The Buckleys stopped going to Gstaad in 2004 and Pat spent much of the winter in Nassau. “Something happened with her,” Jamie Niven says. “She became almost reclusive as time went on. She wasn’t in town as much. She spent more time in Stamford. I used to take her to lunch at the Carlyle hotel, because it was quiet and you could hear. She told me that she was really tired of a lot of things that she had done in New York. Things had just taken a change, and they weren’t what they used to be for her.” She could still throw a punch, however. At a lunch that Deeda and William McCormick Blair Jr. gave in 2006, the host, who had served as an ambassador under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, had the temerity to say that he admired Al Gore. Pat reared up and snorted, “Have you lost your goddamn mind?”
Friends kept dying on her. Her favorite escort, Johnny Galliher, who had replaced Zipkin at her card table and in her heart, went in 2003. Nan Kempner died of emphysema in 2005. In the last interview Pat ever gave, she told George Gurley of The New York Observer, “I was with her the day before she died. I was going to Europe the next day, and I said, ‘Nan, I’m not going to go to Europe,’ and she looked at me with those watery eyes. She said, ‘Go.’ She knew.… It was very hard for me.”
“I don’t think Pat was particularly anxious to hang around,” says Frederick Melhado. “I kept getting that feeling, and I kept saying to her, ‘You cannot feel that way.’ Because the thought of her not being around was just unbelievably sad to me.” In his eulogy at her memorial, he recalled telling her a few weeks before she died, “I wish I had a magic wand.” Pat had responded, “I know, Freddy, but we run out of magic wands eventually.”
“I was there the day she died, having lunch with Bill,” says Taki. “He had asked Reinaldo Herrera and me to go up. I’ve never seen a man cry so much.”
Bob Colacello is a Vanity Fair special correspondent.
Mr. and Mrs. Right
They called each other “Ducky.” And they died within months of each other, in April 2007 and February 2008, as if William F. Buckley Jr., the famously polysyllabic founder of the modern conservative movement (and of its literary flagship, the National Review), could not go on without Patricia, the equally opinionated social lioness he’d married 57 years earlier. Talking to Nancy Reagan, Henry Kissinger, and the Buckleys’ only child, Christopher, who has been making his own headlines, the author explores the complex connections—political, intellectual, and romantic—behind the ineffably stylish world of Pat and Bill.
by Bob Colacello January 2009
His memorial service was at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, on Fifth Avenue. Hers was at the Temple of Dendur, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His was a Requiem Mass, with 18 priests, banks of Easter lilies along the altar rail, and Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto for a postlude. Hers was a Celebration of the Life, with a brief benediction, a gigantic bouquet of fuchsia rhododendrons behind the lectern, and Rodgers and Hart’s “Isn’t It Romantic?” on the soundtrack of the opening photomontage. His was open to the public, and a capacity crowd of around 2,200 mourners—a sprinkling of socialites and journalists engulfed by a legion of right-wing eggheads—squeezed into the cathedral’s pews. Hers was by invitation only, and socialites vastly outnumbered eggheads among the approximately 400 select, each of whom was perched on a gilded ballroom chair with a hot-pink cushion.
Henry Kissinger spoke at both.
William F. Buckley Jr., the intellectual force behind the modern American conservative movement, and his fashionable wife, Patricia, may have seemed to be a study in contrasts—Auntie Mame and the Absent-minded Professor, Pericles and Cleopatra—but those who knew them best understood how in tune they were mentally, morally, politically, and romantically. As Kissinger noted at her memorial, “Theirs was one of the great love stories of our time. The combination of Pat and Bill brought about a binary reaction that perhaps only a nuclear physicist could explain.” One of the clearest signs of the depth of their affection was the fact that each called the other by the same nickname: Ducky.
In 1985, Bill Buckley himself wrote about another great love affair: Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s. Read “The Way They Are,” by William F. Buckley Jr.
Pat Buckley died on April 15, 2007, at age 80, of septic poisoning after a vascular operation on her left leg. Her memorial, organized by the Buckleys’ only child, Washington-based writer Christopher Buckley, took place a month later. Kissinger’s eulogy was followed by those of former New York City commissioner of cultural affairs Schuyler Chapin, Vanity Fair contributing editor Reinaldo Herrera, investment banker Frederick Melhado, and costume-jewelry designer Kenneth Jay Lane (who compared Pat to Hatshepsut, one of the few female pharaohs of Egypt). Christopher’s teenage daughter, Caitlin, recalled her grandmother’s lessons in comportment, such as “Never ever butter your bread in midair—only people who are deeply common do that.” “When I was seven or eight,” Caitlin continued, “she taught me the art of air-kissing. She said this would be essential later in life when I moved to New York.”
Bill Buckley was too shaken up by his wife’s passing to deliver his eulogy, so it was printed in the program. He quoted a condolence letter from an acquaintance: “I am a confirmed nonbeliever, but for once I would like to be mistaken, and hope that, for you, this is not good-bye, but hasta luego.” Buckley commented, “No alternative thought would make continuing in life, for me, tolerable.” Friends who had not seen him for a while were shocked by his appearance. “I couldn’t believe the state he was in—really like a derelict,” recalls the interior designer Mica Ertegün. “I’m so worried about Bill,” Nancy Reagan told me in a telephone call shortly after Pat’s death. “I don’t know how he can go on without her. She ran his life, really. And he let her. He wanted her to.”
He lasted another 10 months, collapsing at his desk in his home in Stamford, Connecticut, on February 27, 2008. He was 82 and suffering from diabetes and emphysema. The New York Times, mimicking his trademark predilection for obscure polysyllabic words, called him the “Sesquipedalian Spark of the Right.” Nearly every major newspaper in the world ran a lengthy obituary, and Newsweek did a cover story, titled “Mr. Right, R.I.P.”
At St. Patrick’s the faithful responded to Kissinger’s emotion-choked eulogy with sustained applause. “Bill Buckley inspired a political movement that changed American politics,” the former secretary of state intoned. “He founded the National Review that, for over a generation, has shaped American political discussion; he hosted an influential talk show [Firing Line] for 30 years; he wrote an elegant column. Every year, he authored a beautifully written novel; in what passed for his spare time, he produced several nonfiction works and delivered over 50 lectures annually. He was a passionate skier, an accomplished harpsichordist, and a daring sailor. He wrote as Mozart composed, by inspiration; he never needed a second draft … this noble, gentle, and valiant man who was truly touched by the grace of God.”
Though Buckley’s brother the former senator James Buckley and sister the retired National Review managing editor Priscilla Buckley read from the Bible, Christopher Buckley was the only other eulogist. After quoting Hamlet—“I shall not look upon his like again”—and calling his father “the world’s coolest mentor,” Christopher concluded, “This afternoon I’ll make one last trip up there [to Stamford] to bury him.… I shall place in his coffin his favorite rosary, the TV remote control—private joke—a jar of peanut butter, and my mother’s ashes.”
Dead or alive, the Buckleys continue to command attention. The BBC has a William F. Buckley documentary in production, and two biographies are on the way: an authorized life by New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus and an oral history by former Washington Post gossip columnist Lloyd Grove. Bill Buckley’s 55th book, The Reagan I Knew, which he was close to finishing when he died, has just been published by Basic Books. A memoir of his personal and political relationship with President Reagan, it includes 40 years of correspondence between Buckley and both Ronald and Nancy Reagan, as well as a foreword by Christopher Buckley, who helped Linda Bridges of the National Review complete it.
But the book that will no doubt create the greatest stir is Christopher’s own memoir of his parents’ last days, Losing Mum and Pup, due out in May. Coming on the heels of his latest novel, Supreme Courtship, a send-up of the nation’s highest judicial institution, it will be his 14th book—literary prolificacy runs in the family. “Writing this book may have been simply a way of spending more time with my parents, before finally letting them go,” Christopher, who is 56, told me. “I honestly had no intention of writing about them. But I’m a writer, and when the universe hands you material like this, it would seem an act of conscious omission not to do something about it. It spilled out of me. I wrote it in 40 days—no biblical association intended. This book is going to land hard in some quarters, although anyone who concludes that it’s anything but an act of love will, I think, be wrong. It’s a book about two very complex people. They were not your typical mom and dad. This is not Ozzie and Harriet. They were William F. and Pat Buckley. The phrase ‘larger than life’ doesn’t twice cover it.”
A Couple of Swells
Nancy Reagan recalls hearing the story of how Bill proposed to Pat: “She was playing bridge and Bill took her aside and asked her to marry him. And Pat said, ‘Bill, three other men have asked me the same question. I said no to them, but I’m saying yes to you. Now, may I go back to my bridge game?’ Can’t you just hear her?” (In other versions Pat was playing canasta and had turned down as many as eight previous suitors.)
The couple had met some months earlier, in the fall of 1948, when Bill was a junior at Yale and Pat was a sophomore at Vassar, where she shared a dormitory suite with Bill’s sister Trish, who had arranged a blind date. Pat was not quite ready when Bill arrived. “I offered to paint her fingernails,” he later wrote. “And she immediately extended her hand.”
They were married on July 6, 1950, in Vancouver, where the home of Pat’s parents, Austin and Kathleen “Babe” Taylor, occupied an entire city block. The Taylors, according to Buckley biographer John B. Judis, “had major holdings in gold, oil, and timber,” making them one of the richest families in Canada. Pat’s father also owned Canada’s leading Thoroughbred stable; two of his horses had nearly beat Seabiscuit in the 1930s. “The Taylors were the big cheeses in Vancouver,” says Virginia Wright, who grew up with Pat. “But Pat was not at all like her parents. She was something else, a rara avis, so glamorous in a town that was so hick and quiet. I think she felt fulfilled when she met Bill. She never looked back. Her maid of honor never heard from her again.”
While Pat agreed to be wed in a church ceremony presided over by the Catholic archbishop of Vancouver, her parents insisted on having the city’s Anglican bishop bless the bride and groom at the reception for 1,000 guests that followed on their lawn. And from then on, whenever the subject of Bill’s well-publicized Catholicism arose, Pat would loudly announce, “I am Church of England.”
Despite the religious differences, Bill got along just fine with his in-laws, whose political views were as right-wing as his and whose great wealth impressed him. As one friend told me, “Bill really believed that it was virtuous to be rich. And anybody who was very, very rich must be a good guy.” In his recently published memoir, An American Family, Bill’s brother Reid Buckley reproduces a “Memorandum to Austin C. Taylor” from their father, William F. Buckley Sr.:
I have tried for many years to interest my children in conventional sports, but I have not been very successful. Billie is easily the worst in this regard, having no interest in tennis, golf, or other activities which satisfy the great majority of the nation. If you expect to entertain him, you will find it necessary to furnish him with 1) a horse, 2) a yacht, or 3) a private airplane. Aloise joins me in affectionate regards to you and Babe.
Bill’s parents, Will and Aloise Buckley, may not have been as rich as the Taylors, but they were hardly paupers. Will, a Texas wildcatter, made his first fortune drilling for oil in Mexico, then lost it when he was expelled, in 1921, for counterrevolutionary activities against that country’s leftist government. By the time Bill was born, in 1925, the family was based on a 47-acre estate called Great Elm, in Sharon, Connecticut, but Will’s business interests caused them to spend long stretches in Venezuela, France, England, and Italy. Bill and his nine siblings were privately tutored in everything from Latin to ballroom dancing, and all of them were fluent in Spanish, French, and English by the time they were 13. In 1940, Bill was enrolled at Millbrook, a private Episcopalian boarding school in the Hudson Valley, where, according to one fellow student, there were no Jews and only a handful of Catholics.
Frederick Eberstadt, a New York friend who was a classmate at Millbrook, says, “It sounds funny, but Bill’s biggest interest was kidding around. He was very Catholic, though. He had a little shrine in his room, a Madonna inside this kind of stone box. He asked me what I thought of it, and I said it was kitsch. He said, ‘You don’t understand.’ I said, ‘What don’t I understand?’ He said, ‘It’s the mother of God.’ Even at that age, to his thinking, it could not be kitsch, because it was the mother of God.”
After two miserable years on army bases in Georgia and Texas during World War II, the pampered young heir entered Yale, where he flourished, becoming chairman of the Yale Daily News, a star of the debating team, and a member of Skull and Bones. A month after graduating, he married Pat, who had left Vassar, and they rented a house near New Haven, where in six months Bill wrote the book that would make him famous, God and Man at Yale, a fierce attack on his alma mater for not upholding Christianity and free enterprise against atheism and collectivism.
One night during this period, Bill’s best college friend, Evan Galbraith, dared him to break into the Yale Bowl so that they could run a 100- yard race on the cinder track bordering the football field. Frederick Melhado, who was a class behind them, remembers, “Pat immediately elected herself to manage this daunting project. She conscripted a group of about 20 of us to carry flashlights and lanterns. The locks were broken, the chains were removed, and we filed silently through the tunnel that led into the stadium. Bill won a close race. But you could see here a preview of what became their standard operating procedure. Pat was the leader.”
To avoid further military service, in the Korean War, Bill signed up with the C.I.A. and served in Mexico City under the station chief, Howard Hunt (of Watergate fame). After nine months he quit to take a job in New York as an editor at The American Mercury, the irreverent literary magazine founded by H. L. Mencken in the 1920s, which over the years had drifted to the right. Pat was pregnant with Christopher, who was born in September 1952. “I am the only only child in the Buckley clan,” says Christopher. “My mom had two ectopic pregnancies, as they were called in those days. So I was continually, and somewhat annoyingly, reminded as I was growing up that I was ‘a miracle child.’”
“If Pat could have had seven or eight children, like all the other Buckleys, she would have been the Great Earth Mother, which was her real character,” says her friend Bootsie Galbraith, Evan’s widow. “There would have been none of the charity stuff, no need to be as social.” Lynn Wyatt, the Houston hostess, puts it another way: “Pat was Mother Superior. She took care of everybody, and she bossed everybody around.”
One could say that Pat’s two closest girlfriends in New York represented the two sides of her personality. Shirley Clurman, an ABC producer for Barbara Walters and the wife of Bill’s good friend Richard Clurman, the Time-Life News Service’s chief of correspondents, was warm, motherly, completely down to earth, and almost dowdy. The famous fashion plate Nan Kempner, on the other hand, was brittle, needy, socially obsessed, and almost as theatrical as Pat. Reinaldo Herrera points out, “Pat could have been a great actress. She didn’t talk, she delivered.”
Birth of a Movement
After producing an heir for Bill, Pat’s next order of business was to find a Great Elm of their own. Every day for weeks she would set out from Manhattan in search of a country house that would satisfy Bill’s three requirements: not too expensive, on the water, and within an hour of Grand Central. She found a 15-room Victorian house on three acres facing Long Island Sound in Stamford and immediately set about sprucing it up to her taste. She added a music room, where Bill could play his harpsichord, and had a pool built right on the Sound, where Bill wanted it. “It was the most wonderfully eccentric house, pink on the outside, red on the inside, filled with paintings of every color, by painters you never heard of,” says Kenneth Lane, a frequent houseguest. “In the spring and summer, there was every kind of flower in every color you could think of.”
John Fairchild, the fashion world’s high priest, says, “I once asked Pat why she painted the house pink. After all, they didn’t live in Bermuda. She said, ‘To attract the sailors.’ She was the brightest light in that New York group, and a great hostess. I remember going for dinner once—I think we were six or eight. I’d never seen so many lamb chops in my life.”
By 1953, Bill had left The American Mercury and begun collaborating with his brother-in-law Brent Bozell on a book titled McCarthy and His Enemies, a defense of the anti-Communist crusade of the controversial Senator Joseph McCarthy. Published in March 1954, a month before the notorious Army-McCarthy hearings, it turned Buckley, according to John Judis, from an enfant terrible to a pariah “among the eastern intelligentsia.” One of those who backed away was the young Harvard instructor Henry Kissinger. “I invited Bill to write an article on McCarthy for a magazine I was editing called Confluence, which brought together Europeans and Americans on agreed-upon subjects, and to my shame I didn’t publish it,” Kissinger tells me. Nonetheless, it was the beginning of an enduring friendship. “You know how it was with Bill—suddenly you found yourself in his orbit,” says Kissinger, who recalls meeting Pat a little later. “I had not had much contact with New York social life in those days, so for me she was a rather overpowering personality. But over the years I grew tremendously fond of her. She had no hesitancy in interrupting me in mid-paragraph, saying, ‘You’re making no sense at all.’”
In 1955, Bill teamed up with Willi Schlamm, the chief foreign-policy adviser to Time-magazine boss Henry Luce, to create the National Review. A Jewish former Communist who had fled Austria after Hitler took over, Schlamm had proposed to Buckley the previous summer the idea of a weekly magazine that would exert pressure from the right on the American political establishment. Buckley’s father enthusiastically threw in the first $100,000, and Buckley and Schlamm raised another $450,000 from conservative Yale alumni, including New York financier Jeremiah Milbank, Houston oilman Lloyd Smith, and South Carolina textile manufacturers Roger and Gerrish Milliken, as well as from Henry Salvatori, the Los Angeles oil tycoon who would later become a power in Ronald Reagan’s Kitchen Cabinet. The first issue appeared in November, with a statement of purpose vowing to oppose big government, uphold the “organic moral order,” and resist Communism, which it defined as “the century’s most blatant force of satanic Utopianism.” By 1961 circulation had reached 54,000 and Buckley had emerged as the leading voice of conservatism. The following year he launched his nationally syndicated column. He was instrumental in founding Young Americans for Freedom, which became a driving force behind Barry Goldwater’s run for president, in 1964. Buckley himself ran for mayor of New York City as a Conservative in 1965, against Democrat Abe Beame and Republican John Lindsay. Although he won only 13.4 percent of the vote, the publicity he gained enabled him to start Firing Line in 1966.
Buckley’s fans saw him as a dazzling verbal genius; his detractors considered him a supercilious put-down artist. Among those not impressed by his stellar rise was Gore Vidal, who could be at least as acerbic and patrician as Buckley. The two authors first clashed in back-to-back appearances on The Jack Paar Show in 1962. After Vidal claimed on-air that Buckley’s political views were identical to those of the John Birch Society and suggested that Buckley had never worked for a living, Buckley sent a telegram to Paar in which he referred to Vidal as “a pink queer.” Matters came to a head when the two traded insults on ABC during the 1968 Democratic convention, with Vidal calling Buckley “a crypto-Nazi” and Buckley threatening to “sock” him “in the goddamn face.” In follow-up pieces in Esquire, Buckley focused on homosexual themes in Vidal’s work, and Vidal responded by implying that Buckley was a homosexual and an anti-Semite, whereupon Buckley sued and Vidal countersued. After three years of legal wrangling, Vidal’s suit was thrown out, Buckley dropped his, and Esquire settled a modest sum on Buckley. Vidal still bristles at the mention of his old enemy’s name. “He was out to get me from the very beginning,” he says. “He wanted me to write for his little magazine. I spurned him, and he didn’t like that. Bear in mind, this was a very stupid guy, who never read any of those books he referred to, and Americans, being such hicks, thought he was a great nobleman and a real gentleman. I never heard such trash as when he cooled it.” Even Vidal, however, says of Pat, “I liked her, and it was mutual.”
Bill always claimed that Pat opposed each of his new ventures, which, however, “once they were undertaken, she took part in enthusiastically.” Twice a month she hosted National Review editorial dinners at their East 73rd Street duplex maisonette, which was decorated in her favorite colors—red, orange, and purple—except for the dining room, which was painted black. Drinks were taken in the library, where a full-length portrait of the hostess—in a flame-red caftan, with her beloved Cavalier King Charles spaniels at her feet—hung over the fireplace. These dinners brought together the magazine’s writers and editors with such famous Buckley friends as Whittaker Chambers, Clare Boothe Luce, and Lauren Bacall. Kissinger recalls, “Pat’s role was a combination of making sure that everybody was comfortable, that the conversation was on an important level, and that Bill was the featured person. She did that with extraordinary tact, but not as a hostess, as a partner.”
As John O’Sullivan, longtime writer and editor at the National Review, put it in an online tribute to Pat, “Together they were conservatism’s golden couple, giving a contemporary Manhattan gloss to a movement that its enemies would like to have caricatured as provincial, dull, and outdated.”
“I don’t know how Bill could have picked any woman in the world to be his wife other than Pat,” says Aileen Mehle, the society columnist, “because she could match him—even intellectually, and certainly as far as humor was concerned. Most women would have felt challenged by Bill, but she always held her own. She blurted out anything she felt like blurting out. If she loved you, she loved you madly. If she hated you, look out. Don’t forget, she was six feet tall. But she always wore flats so she wouldn’t be taller than Bill.”
Hostess with the Mostest
Pat called herself “a good Arab wife” and would say, “Wherever Bill goes, I pitch the tent.” In addition to the Manhattan and Stamford residences, the Buckleys rented the Château de Rougemont, outside Gstaad, Switzerland, every winter, and Bill owned and occasionally chartered a series of small yachts, on which he sailed around the Caribbean and made three trips across the Atlantic and one across the Pacific. He also made a ritual of moonlit Friday-night sails out of Stamford. “Seeing Pat stock a boat was incredible—the wine, the vegetables, the canned stuff,” says Mehle. “She was the galley master.” Mehle, who traveled often with the couple, remembers them showing up at an airport in the Bahamas with 42 duffel bags. “You know how many times she counted those bags? Not Bill! He never counted bags.” According to Christopher Buckley, “Even when she wasn’t speaking to my dad, which was a lot of the time, she would pack his bags. Deep in her DNA was something that I think she had learned from her mother: you take care of your men.”
Her greatest logistical feat was the annual move to Switzerland, where Bill would write a whole book in two months’ time, nonfiction to begin with, including his first memoir, Cruising Speed (1971), and later spy novels, such as Saving the Queen (1976) and Marco Polo, If You Can (1982), featuring a hero modeled on himself, Blackford Oakes, a blue-eyed, Yale-educated C.I.A. agent. Julian Booth, the English chef who was with the Buckleys for 35 years, describes Pat setting up the château: “It was a three-day preparation at least. We’d have everything stored upstairs in the eaves. She had her own sheets and linens, and of course the cutlery and crockery were all hers. So we would unpack that. And we would transform what we called the nursery into his office and studio. Basically, there was a billiard table, and we would put a Ping-Pong table over the top, and that was his table for painting. When he was in the château, he loved to paint. He and his research fellow—usually a different one each year—would work in the mornings, then lunch, ski, and be back usually by 3:30 in the afternoon. And then work until the cocktail hour. And then join the guests for dinner. And then play the harpsichord or paint.”
“David Niven was there every night. He was Bill’s closest friend,” recalls Taki Theodoracopulos, the Greek shipping heir, who began his journalistic career in 1967 as a photographer for the National Review. “Roger Moore was there. Kenneth Galbraith was there. In those days the Buckleys stayed up very late, whooping it up. Pat always played the outraged duchess: ‘No, I’m not going to let Taki take you deep-mountain skiing, Bill.’ And Bill would sort of smile wryly.”
As Gstaad became more and more social, in the 70s, so did the scene at the Buckleys’. Nan Kempner would show up every February and take two rooms, one for her and one for her couture gowns. Other regulars included Lynn Wyatt, Brazilian socialite Elizinha Moreira-Salles, and Spanish extra man Pano de Hoyos. As editor of Interview, I was invited to stay in 1978, and I arrived in time for a standard lunch of fettuccine with gobs of pâté de foie gras, stuffed roast pheasant, and chocolate mousse. I had barely taken a sip of the Château Margaux when Pat bellowed, “I cannot understand how a nice Catholic boy like you could work for that creep Andy Warhol!” Julian Booth recalls of those days, “We would have the Greek night, with King Constantine, the Goulandrises, and Taki. Then we’d have a German night, with Count and Countess von Oeynhausen. And then the Danish night, when Princess Benedikt would come. And the Monegasque night—the Grimaldis and David Niven.”
Jamie Niven, David’s son, says, “My father saw them all the time in the winter. They were really, really close. We called them the Buckles. In the summer they would come and stay at my father’s house at Cap-Ferrat. One year, Château de Rougemont burned, and it was terribly damaged. So they moved down the road five kilometers and spent that winter with my father. The harpsichord was saved. It went downstairs in the little wine cave my father had. Bill took that over and worked in there.” Jamie, who didn’t get along with his stepmother, grew very close to Pat over the years. “I remember I was talking to her on the phone, and she was telling me I couldn’t do this and I couldn’t do that. I said, ‘You know, you’re not my mother. You can’t talk to me like that.’ She said, ‘I have been your mother, Sonny, and I shall remain your mother until I die.’ So I became Sonny to her, and I would call her up and say, ‘Mother, how are you today?’”
When David Niven died, in 1983, Jamie was on a fishing trip in Idaho. True to form, Pat called the governor of Idaho, who sent a plane to pluck him out of the woods, making it possible for him to get to Switzerland in time for the funeral. Jamie says, “About two years later, the Museum of Modern Art decided to have a fund-raising evening for the film department in memory of my father. My first call was to Pat. She became chairman of the evening, and we made more money than MoMA had ever made in one night.” Pat and Jamie subsequently organized events at the museum honoring Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, Gregory Peck, and Clint Eastwood.
“I am, to put it in really vulgar language, a money raiser,” Pat Buckley once told a reporter, “a money raiser for things I believe in.” Her two principal charities were New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum. Starting in the 1960s, she and Nan Kempner co-chaired annual galas for the hospital, raising some $75 million over 30 years’ time. From 1978 to 1995, Pat chaired the Costume Institute’s yearly benefit, which was so exclusive—and lucrative—that it became known as the Party of the Year. For the opening of Diana Vreeland’s 1981 exhibition, “The Eighteenth-Century Woman,” for example, nearly every major European designer flew over, and the 720 dinner guests ranged from Doris Duke and Diana Ross to Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Bill Paley. After dinner, 1,000 kids paid $100 each to dance in the Temple of Dendur. “Pat ran those parties with an iron fist,” says Blaine Trump, who helped Pat with her charities. “She would figure out what the tables were going to look like, and who could buy the tables. She was also very aware of the fact that you don’t spend a lot of money on the fluff—you make sure that the charity gets the money. Once Pat sat down with you, you were done—get your checkbook out. And when you did something for her, there was no one more appreciative. You always got a beautiful note and some wonderful pâté or something that Julian had whipped up.” Sean Driscoll, whose Glorious Food catered the parties, adds, “Pat was totally hands-on. If we were running out of time and there were still flowers to be hung from the chandeliers, she would just get up on a ladder and do it herself.”
‘Pat was the Queen of New York when Reagan was president,” says Louise Grunwald, the Park Avenue hostess and widow of Time bigwig Henry Grunwald, who served as ambassador to Austria under Ronald Reagan. “That was Pat’s high point. The best invitation in town was to go to the Buckleys’. It was the best fun: it was journalists, it was celebrities, it was Tom Wolfe, it was fabulous. Who gives parties like that today?”
The Buckleys’ friendship with the Reagans went back to 1961, when Bill was giving a speech in Beverly Hills to an organization called Citizens for Better Education and Ronald Reagan was asked to introduce him. Over the years Bill would sometimes stay at the Reagans’ house when he was in California. Nancy recalls, “After he left, the kids would always say, ‘Why can’t we have peanut butter on our toast like Bill Buckley?’” Nancy’s good friend Betsy Bloomingdale remembers how attractive Bill was back then, especially whenever he made a toast at one of the Reagans’ dinners. “He’d get up at the head of the table, put his thumbs in his pockets, and he had a way of rocking as he spoke. And we would sit there mesmerized. Nancy and I thought he was the most divine thing we ever saw.” The Bloomingdales’ boys went to the same Catholic boarding school as Christopher, Portsmouth Abbey, in Rhode Island, and the two mothers found the nearby hotels so depressing that they rented and decorated an apartment for their visits.
While Reagan relied on Bill for ideological guidance, he was also amenable to taking his recommendations for appointments. In Bill’s posthumous memoir, he prints a letter in which he suggests that Reagan “enroll the help” of Evan Galbraith, whom the president shortly thereafter made ambassador to France. The book makes clear as well how close Bill was to Nancy. In a January 22, 1985, letter to her he writes:
This is a love letter.
When El Presidente was sworn in, and after he spoke, I was standing five feet behind him—and you. And I saw your fingers caressing his. You thought the gesture entirely private, but I have Eyes That See All, and I was not, in living memory, so moved by so tender a liaison between a great leader and his incomparable wife.
The Buckleys were at the first private dinner the Reagans gave at the White House, in honor of Prince Charles, and at their last private dinner, when Nancy’s official portrait was unveiled. In between, they attended a state dinner for Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, a private dinner for Laurence Olivier, and the famous party where Princess Diana danced with John Travolta. They were invited to stay overnight at the White House and to fly on Air Force One—honors granted not even to Nancy’s closest confidant, Jerry Zipkin, the Park Avenue real-estate heir and social arbiter.
Feuds and Milestones
All through the 1980s, Pat and Jerry, who were the best of friends, ran Nancy Reagan’s social calendar when she visited New York. They were quite a duo, one as funny as the other, and both highly opinionated, judgmental, and cutting. They also shared a passion for gin rummy. “When you spent the weekend in Stamford, every afternoon you played gin rummy,” says Aileen Mehle. “And everybody wanted to hurry up and finish lunch so we could play. Not Bill. He never did play gin—ever. Those gin-rummy games should have been taped. Oh, my God, the things people said to each other. Naughty, naughty.”
Perhaps it was inevitable that two personalities as strong as Pat and Jerry would have a falling-out. Christopher Buckley thinks his mother’s relationship with “old Zip” may have come to an end over the card table at East 73rd Street. “Apparently, at one of those card games, Jerry said something snappish to one of the other men in my mother’s regular group—all confirmed bachelors—and Mum demanded that he apologize. I’m sure drink had been taken. Jerry refused, and it went from there.” Other people said Zipkin had gone around town saying Pat had a drinking problem, and it got back to her. I recall Zipkin vowing over lunch at Mortimer’s that he would never speak to Mrs. Buckley again, after she had seated his date, the Duchess de Cadaval, at Bill’s table at a Costume Institute ball, and put him in Outer Mongolia. “I think their fight was about Nancy,” says Kenneth Lane. “There was a little bit of competition. I thought it was very stupid, so I had them both to lunch, without telling them that the other one was coming. It did not work.” Blaine Trump adds, “We tried to have a peacemaking summit at Le Cirque. Jerry asked for his fish grilled dry, and it came with a sauce, and he did his usual thing with the waiter. Pat said, ‘You just can’t treat people that way.’ And that was the end of the summit.”
Sadly, Pat would also break with another of her closest pals, the fashion designer Bill Blass. “There was an incident with Blass,” says a friend of theirs, “when she had too much to drink, and he said, ‘That’s enough.’”
Zipkin died in 1995, Blass in 2002. Pat attended Zipkin’s funeral; Blass didn’t want one.
In July 2000, the Buckleys celebrated their golden wedding anniversary with a dinner for 50 friends and relatives on the terrace of the house in Stamford. They chartered a bus to bring some of the invited from Manhattan. As Bill was greeting people arriving in their own cars—Henry and Nancy Kissinger, Reinaldo and Carolina Herrera, Frederick and Virginia Melhado, C. Z. Guest, Aileen Mehle—Pat stuck her head out their upstairs bedroom window and hollered to him, “Ducky, you’re not going to believe this, but the bus is broken down, and our guests are sitting on the side of I-95.” Their chauffeur and another driver were dispatched to rescue the stranded guests, Evan and Bootsie Galbraith among them.
After a buffet of barbecued pork and whole lobsters, Christopher showed a video he had made for his parents’ 40th anniversary. This was followed by a speech from Bill, which he ended with “To spend 50 years with Pat, you have to love her.” Pat then stood up and explained why she had changed clothes during the dinner. She said that the red-and-white-striped dress she was now wearing had been made by the Paris couturier Jacques Fath, and that she had been wearing it the night Bill proposed to her. “And it still fits!” she added proudly.
On Christmas Eve 2002, the Buckley family was shaken by an item in the New York Daily News revealing that Christopher was “embroiled in a paternity action” with former Random House publicist Irina Woelfle, “over her 2-year-old son, Jonathan,” and that he had voluntarily taken a DNA test, which had established him as the boy’s father. After Christopher agreed to pay $3,000 a month in child support, the press dropped the subject. Although Christopher and his wife, Lucy Gregg Buckley—the daughter of a former C.I.A. officer, with whom he had two children, Caitlin and William Conor—seemed happily married, even close family friends refrained from asking Pat and Bill about the situation. As Blaine Trump says, “Pat usually talked about everything, but this became the unspeakable. And for Bill, who was so Catholic, it was something he couldn’t abide.”
Christopher was not always the perfect son he appeared to be. He has admitted that he was high on LSD during an interview with Mike Wallace for a segment 60 Minutes did on his father in 1970. Christopher was quite open with me about his relationship with his parents. “It was tough, but I wouldn’t trade it,” he says, adding that he and his father had exchanged at least 7,000 letters and e-mails over the years, and “it’s quite possible that over half of them involved contentions.” Some of their biggest arguments were about religion. Bill, who had a private Mass said every Sunday for him, the two Hispanic maids, and any houseguests who were Catholic, was understandably upset when his son “demurred”—Christopher’s word—from the faith. “My father had a great sense of humor, but it absolutely stopped at the threshold of the Church. And that became a source of great disappointment to him. The funny thing is, my mother got it. She and I probably, over the course of the last 20 years, spent about a third of the time not speaking, but I could go to her more than I could go to him.”
In 1985, Bill Buckley himself wrote about another great love affair: Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s. Read “The Way They Are,” by William F. Buckley Jr.
Unfortunately for Christopher, last October he found himself in the tabloids again, when Irina Woelfle filed a lawsuit seeking additional child support for their son. What shocked people most was a line from Bill Buckley’s will that seemed exceptionally cruel: “I intentionally make no provision herein for said Jonathan, who for all purposes … shall be deemed to have predeceased me.” The Hartford Courant, which broke the story, estimated the value of Bill Buckley’s estate at more than $30 million, though presumably $24.5 million of that was the asking price for the Buckleys’ co-op apartment on East 73rd Street. The New York Post followed up with Woelfle’s neighbor’s claim that Christopher had “never laid eyes” on his “love child,” who “wistfully watched his friends play with their fathers and asked his mom about his own dad” at the local community pool in Coral Gables, Florida, where Woelfle now lives. Restricted from responding by his lawyer, but aware that he was not coming across as a paragon of parenthood, Christopher told The New York Times that he looks “forward to the day when I can have a relationship with Jonathan.”
No sooner had that brouhaha died down than Christopher found himself in more hot water when he endorsed Barack Obama in an online article, setting off an avalanche of hate e-mails from furious Republicans and leading him to resign from the National Review. (The writer David Frum, a Sarah Palin critic, decided to exit not long after.) Christopher still, however, sits on the board and owns one-seventh of the shares. Indeed, some friends are not so sure that Bill would have disapproved of his son’s temporary defection from the G.O.P., given that he himself, like many old-school conservatives, had broken with George W. Bush on the Iraq war. Pat, whose views were often to the right of her husband’s—she maintained that we should have “turned Iraq into a parking lot” during the first Gulf War—might have been more upset.
The year before the anniversary party, Bill had given up Firing Line, after hosting 1,504 programs over 33 years. He had already stepped down from the editorship of the National Review, and in 2004 he would divest himself of his controlling interest by giving his shares of voting stock to a corporation whose original trustees included Christopher and Evan Galbraith. In 2005, for the 50th anniversary of the magazine, President George W. Bush hosted a lunch in Washington to honor Bill. He continued writing his syndicated column and saw the publication of five more books, including Last Call for Blackford Oakes, Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription (collected letters to and from the editor of the National Review), and Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater.
Pat, who over the years had had a long history of accidents and falls and had had four hip replacements, was also slowing down. The Buckleys stopped going to Gstaad in 2004 and Pat spent much of the winter in Nassau. “Something happened with her,” Jamie Niven says. “She became almost reclusive as time went on. She wasn’t in town as much. She spent more time in Stamford. I used to take her to lunch at the Carlyle hotel, because it was quiet and you could hear. She told me that she was really tired of a lot of things that she had done in New York. Things had just taken a change, and they weren’t what they used to be for her.” She could still throw a punch, however. At a lunch that Deeda and William McCormick Blair Jr. gave in 2006, the host, who had served as an ambassador under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, had the temerity to say that he admired Al Gore. Pat reared up and snorted, “Have you lost your goddamn mind?”
Friends kept dying on her. Her favorite escort, Johnny Galliher, who had replaced Zipkin at her card table and in her heart, went in 2003. Nan Kempner died of emphysema in 2005. In the last interview Pat ever gave, she told George Gurley of The New York Observer, “I was with her the day before she died. I was going to Europe the next day, and I said, ‘Nan, I’m not going to go to Europe,’ and she looked at me with those watery eyes. She said, ‘Go.’ She knew.… It was very hard for me.”
“I don’t think Pat was particularly anxious to hang around,” says Frederick Melhado. “I kept getting that feeling, and I kept saying to her, ‘You cannot feel that way.’ Because the thought of her not being around was just unbelievably sad to me.” In his eulogy at her memorial, he recalled telling her a few weeks before she died, “I wish I had a magic wand.” Pat had responded, “I know, Freddy, but we run out of magic wands eventually.”
“I was there the day she died, having lunch with Bill,” says Taki. “He had asked Reinaldo Herrera and me to go up. I’ve never seen a man cry so much.”
Bob Colacello is a Vanity Fair special correspondent.
The New Deal That Wasn't
WASHINGTON -- Early in what became the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes was asked if anything similar had ever happened. "Yes," he replied, "it was called the Dark Ages and it lasted 400 years." It did take 25 years, until November 1954, for the Dow to return to the peak it reached in September 1929. So caution is sensible concerning calls for a new New Deal.
The assumption is that the New Deal vanquished the Depression. Intelligent, informed people differ about why the Depression lasted so long. But people whose recipe for recovery today is another New Deal should remember that America's biggest industrial collapse occurred in 1937, eight years after the 1929 stock market crash and nearly five years into the New Deal. In 1939, after a decade of frantic federal spending -- President Herbert Hoover increased it more than 50 percent between 1929 and the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt -- unemployment was 17.2 percent.
"I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started," lamented Henry Morgenthau, FDR's Treasury secretary. Unemployment declined when America began selling materials to nations engaged in a war America would soon join.
In "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression," Amity Shlaes of the Council on Foreign Relations and Bloomberg News argues that government policies, beyond the Federal Reserve's tight money, deepened and prolonged the Depression. The policies included encouraging strong unions and wages higher than lagging productivity justified, on the theory that workers' spending would be stimulative. Instead, corporate profits -- prerequisites for job-creating investments -- were excessively drained into labor expenses that left many workers priced out of the market.
In a 2004 paper, Harold L. Cole of UCLA and Lee E. Ohanian of UCLA and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis argued that the Depression would have ended in 1936, rather than in 1943, were it not for policies that magnified the power of labor and encouraged the cartelization of industries. These policies expressed the New Deal premise that the Depression was caused by excessive competition that first reduced prices and wages, and then employment and consumer demand. In a forthcoming paper, Ohanian argues that "much of the depth of the Depression" is explained by Hoover's policy -- a precursor of the New Deal mentality -- of pressuring businesses to keep nominal wages fixed.
Furthermore, Hoover's 1932 increase in the top income tax rate, from 25 percent to 63 percent, was unhelpful. And FDR's hyperkinetic New Deal created uncertainties that paralyzed private-sector decision-making. Which sounds familiar.
Bear Stearns? Broker a merger. Lehman Brothers? Death sentence. The $700 billion is for cleaning up toxic assets? Maybe not. Writes Russell Roberts of George Mason University:
"By acting without rhyme or reason, politicians have destroyed the rules of the game. There is no reason to invest, no reason to take risk, no reason to be prudent, no reason to look for buyers if your firm is failing. Everything is up in the air and as a result, the only prudent policy is to wait and see what the government will do next. The frenetic efforts of FDR had the same impact: Net investment was negative through much of the 1930s."
Barack Obama says the next stimulus should deliver a "jolt." His adviser Austan Goolsbee says it must be big enough to "startle the thing into submission." Their theory is that the crisis is largely psychological, requiring shock treatment. But shocks from government have been plentiful.
Unfortunately, one thing government can do quickly and efficiently -- distribute checks -- could fail to stimulate because Americans might do with the money what they have been rightly criticized for not doing nearly enough: save it. Because individual consumption is 70 percent of economic activity, St. Augustine's prayer ("Give me chastity and continence, but not yet") is echoed today: Make Americans thrifty, but not now.
Obama's "rescue plan for the middle class" includes a tax credit for businesses "for each new employee they hire" in America over the next two years. The assumption is that businesses will create jobs that would not have been created without the subsidy. If so, the subsidy will suffuse the economy with inefficiencies -- labor costs not justified by value added. Here we go again? A new New Deal would vindicate pessimists who say that history is not one damn thing after another, it is the same damn thing over and over. George Will's e-mail address is georgewill(at)washpost.com. (c) 2008, Washington Post Writers Group
The assumption is that the New Deal vanquished the Depression. Intelligent, informed people differ about why the Depression lasted so long. But people whose recipe for recovery today is another New Deal should remember that America's biggest industrial collapse occurred in 1937, eight years after the 1929 stock market crash and nearly five years into the New Deal. In 1939, after a decade of frantic federal spending -- President Herbert Hoover increased it more than 50 percent between 1929 and the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt -- unemployment was 17.2 percent.
"I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started," lamented Henry Morgenthau, FDR's Treasury secretary. Unemployment declined when America began selling materials to nations engaged in a war America would soon join.
In "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression," Amity Shlaes of the Council on Foreign Relations and Bloomberg News argues that government policies, beyond the Federal Reserve's tight money, deepened and prolonged the Depression. The policies included encouraging strong unions and wages higher than lagging productivity justified, on the theory that workers' spending would be stimulative. Instead, corporate profits -- prerequisites for job-creating investments -- were excessively drained into labor expenses that left many workers priced out of the market.
In a 2004 paper, Harold L. Cole of UCLA and Lee E. Ohanian of UCLA and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis argued that the Depression would have ended in 1936, rather than in 1943, were it not for policies that magnified the power of labor and encouraged the cartelization of industries. These policies expressed the New Deal premise that the Depression was caused by excessive competition that first reduced prices and wages, and then employment and consumer demand. In a forthcoming paper, Ohanian argues that "much of the depth of the Depression" is explained by Hoover's policy -- a precursor of the New Deal mentality -- of pressuring businesses to keep nominal wages fixed.
Furthermore, Hoover's 1932 increase in the top income tax rate, from 25 percent to 63 percent, was unhelpful. And FDR's hyperkinetic New Deal created uncertainties that paralyzed private-sector decision-making. Which sounds familiar.
Bear Stearns? Broker a merger. Lehman Brothers? Death sentence. The $700 billion is for cleaning up toxic assets? Maybe not. Writes Russell Roberts of George Mason University:
"By acting without rhyme or reason, politicians have destroyed the rules of the game. There is no reason to invest, no reason to take risk, no reason to be prudent, no reason to look for buyers if your firm is failing. Everything is up in the air and as a result, the only prudent policy is to wait and see what the government will do next. The frenetic efforts of FDR had the same impact: Net investment was negative through much of the 1930s."
Barack Obama says the next stimulus should deliver a "jolt." His adviser Austan Goolsbee says it must be big enough to "startle the thing into submission." Their theory is that the crisis is largely psychological, requiring shock treatment. But shocks from government have been plentiful.
Unfortunately, one thing government can do quickly and efficiently -- distribute checks -- could fail to stimulate because Americans might do with the money what they have been rightly criticized for not doing nearly enough: save it. Because individual consumption is 70 percent of economic activity, St. Augustine's prayer ("Give me chastity and continence, but not yet") is echoed today: Make Americans thrifty, but not now.
Obama's "rescue plan for the middle class" includes a tax credit for businesses "for each new employee they hire" in America over the next two years. The assumption is that businesses will create jobs that would not have been created without the subsidy. If so, the subsidy will suffuse the economy with inefficiencies -- labor costs not justified by value added. Here we go again? A new New Deal would vindicate pessimists who say that history is not one damn thing after another, it is the same damn thing over and over. George Will's e-mail address is georgewill(at)washpost.com. (c) 2008, Washington Post Writers Group
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