Sailing away: William F. Buckley's art of revealing nothing

Washington Monthly, Oct, 2004 by Jamie Malanowski

There's not much politics in Miles Gone By; odd in a man who has spent so much of his life observing the public realm. Still, Buckley has been by disposition a counterrevolutionary, living with his band of true believers in an attitudinal exile. Still, he did meet lots of people, and there are two anecdotes in this book that make me wish Buckley would fire up his word processor and produce one more book. In one recollection, John Tower, standing next to Buckley at a post-meeting pee in 1968, said he didn't think Ronald Reagan had the "intellectual capacity" to be president. In another, during Watergate, after the Saturday Night Massacre, Barry Goldwater said to him over a Coca-Cola, "There is absolutely no doubt that Nixon is guilty. You know, if I had been beached ten years ago on an island cut off from the world, and a helicopter suddenly dropped down and described the mess in the White House, I'd say to myself, Richard Nixon has got to be President of the United States."

Indiscretions I Have Known--now that would be a book!

Jamie Malanowski is a New York writer