Music for Our Ears. - Review - book review

National Review, June 5, 2000 by Aram Bakshian Jr.

Let Us Talk of Many Things: The Collected Speeches, by William F. Buckley Jr. (Prima/Forum, 511 pp., $30)

THIRTY years ago, on a drizzly autumn evening at the University of Maryland, I first heard Bill Buckley address a live audience. I use the verb "heard" advisedly. It was not until later that evening, at a reception, that I actually saw him. The students had turned out in such large numbers that I had to listen to Buckley's speech along with an overflow crowd of several hundred via the sound system in the corridor outside the packed auditorium.

Curiously, or perhaps not so curiously, my clearest memory of that evening is not what Buckley actually said to the students but the impact he had on them. They were rapt, occasionally amused, and intensely attentive. These are scarcely the characteristics one tends to associate with student crowds in the 1970s, but there was something about Bill Buckley, about what the man said and the way he said it, that won him a friendly and respectful hearing in what one would have expected to be hostile territory.

Why? Perhaps part of the answer is to be found in David Brooks's foreword to Let Us Talk of Many Things, an annotated collection of Buckley speeches spanning an amazing half century.

For all Buckley's contributions to conservative ideas [Brooks writes], his most striking contribution is to the conservative personality. He made being conservative attractive and even glamorous. One suspects that more people were inspired by his presence at these events than were converted by the power of mere logic. It would be wonderful if we could go back . . . armed with the knowledge we now possess: that in most cases, subsequent events have proved that Buckley's tormentors were wrong, and he, it transpires, was right.

Now, thanks to the publication of Let Us Talk of Many Things, we can go back and, in appreciating the speeches, we can reach a fuller appreciation of the speaker himself, that enigmatic, indispensable man who, almost single- handedly, won American conservatives acceptance, if grudging acceptance, in the political and cultural mainstream. Characteristically, Buckley takes a more self-deprecating view of himself, as when in his introductory essay he recounts the successful noon lecture he delivered on a California campus at the height of the anti-Vietnam frenzy:

After it was over, I said rather complacently to my host, a professor from the department of psychology, that it was reassuring that I had the power to compel a college audience to listen to me on so excitable a subject. His comment was wonderfully deflating: "Don't you understand, Mr. Buckley? When you speak, they treat you as they would a man from the moon. They don't care what you say. They are just biologically curious."

If so, his student audience was unknowingly adhering to one of Buck ley's own earliest maxims, ex pounded in a Class Day Oration at Yale 50 years ago: "Nothing, it is true, is healthier than honest scrutiny, with maybe even a little debunking thrown in."

Again and again, it is the Buckley gift for scrutiny and debunking that skewers the foe while entertaining the audience. For example, shortly after the launching of the Reagan Revolution in 1981, he began his commencement address to the Cornell University Graduate School of Business and Public Ad ministration by explaining that:

I have been asked to talk about the debate going on in Washington over the startling new approach to economic policy. One week ago I spent an hour on television with my old friend John Kenneth Galbraith. The nature of the economic revolution going on these days is best measured by my informing you that Professor Galbraith spent most of the hour talking about the dangers of inflation. If Ronald Reagan accomplishes nothing more, he will go down in history as having catalyzed a fear of inflation in John Kenneth Galbraith, Edward Kennedy, and Tip O'Neill.

He then went on neatly to eviscerate Jimmy Carter for his shabby performance in the late presidential campaign, only slightly spoiling the effect by summoning up a fanciful picture of Carter "planting a three-cornered hat on his head and declaring himself the descendant of Napoleon." As any good military historian will tell you, while Napoleon did wear a cocked hat, it was a bicorne, not a tricorne, the latter having gone out of martial fashion by the end of the 18th century.

Buckley himself is more catholic when it comes to choice of headgear, wearing hats as speaker, columnist, editor, television personality, diplomat, master mariner, and novelist with equal aplomb. But even at his most entertaining, there is true moral substance beneath the style. In a 1984 speech at the University of Arizona, he explained as much when he described what makes Blackford Oakes, the hero of his successful string of spy novels, tick:

Blackford Oakes has weaknesses spiritual and corporal. But a basic assumption guides him. It is that the survival of everything we cherish depends on the survival of the culture of liberty; and that this hangs on our willingness to defend this extraordinary country of ours, so awfully mixed up, so much of the time; so schizophrenic in its understanding of itself and its purposes; so crazily indulgent of its legion of wildly ungovernable miscreants-to defend it at all costs. With it all, this idealistic republic is the finest bloom of nationhood in all recorded time, and save only that God may decide that the land of the free and the home of the brave has outrun its license on history, we Americans must contend, struggle, and if necessary fight for America's survival.