The Unmaking of a Mayor. William F. Buckley Jr.
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me to his new office manager, Miss Jane Metze of Harriman, N.Y. She was highly attractive and a constant distraction, a distraction, in fact, to which I have chosen to ascribe all responsibility for the rookie mistakes recounted in this volume.
There were rivals for the attention of Miss Metze. Being a charitable sort, I will leave the married celebrity unnamed. Of the others, the most formidable was the journalist John Phillips, a big, rawboned fellow with hands that could palm basketballs. A diligent reporter and a fine writer, his copy made for good reading. Until one morning, that is, when lingering over a campaign breakfast of coffee (black) and pizza (cold), I came upon a reference to Miss Metze as a “honey blonde with an oozy voice.” Really, John!
When he showed up at headquarters that morning, I accosted John, pushing the newspaper into his chest and saying in a voice louder than necessary, “This is beneath even you, John. Using The New York Frigging Times as a dating service!” My sworn testimony is that the legendary John Phillips, who wrote under the fancy-pants byline McCandlish Phillips . . . blushed.
On an impulse never regretted, Miss Metze and I were married on a cold day in March 1966. Bill was still in Switzerland, dashing down mountains and dashing off books. Just before the service was to begin I received a telegram. It was signed by General Pulaski and it read “I won’t be attending your wedding if you won’t attend my goddamn parade.”
The Unmaking of a Mayor
(A self-interview, delivered before the
National Press Club, Washington, D.C., August 4, 1965)
Q. Mr. Buckley, why are you running for Mayor of New York?
A. Because nobody else is who matters.
Q. What do you mean, “who matters”?
A. Who matters to New York. New York is a city in crisis, and all the candidates agree it is a city in crisis. But no other candidate proposes to do anything about that crisis.
Q. What is it that distinguishes you from these other candidates? Why should only great big brave you consent to run on a program that would really liberate New York, while the other candidates do not?
A. Because the other candidates feel they cannot cope with the legacy of New York politics. That legacy requires the satisfaction of voting blocs, with special attention given to the voting bloc or blocs most fractious at any given election period. But to satisfy voting blocs increasingly requires dissatisfying the constituent members of those same voting blocs in their private capacities. However, since it is more dangerous to dissatisfy organized blocs of voters than individual voters—even if they happen to be members of voting blocs—political candidates in New York address their appeals to the bloc rather than to the individual.
Q. Would you mind being specific?
A. As far as New York politicians are concerned, a New Yorker is an Irishman, an Italian, or a Negro; he is a union member or a white collar worker; a welfare recipient or a city employee; a Catholic or a Protestant or a Jew; a taxi driver or a taxi owner; a merchant or a policeman. The problem is to weigh the voting strength of all the categories and formulate a program that least dissatisfies the least crowded and least powerful categories: and the victory is supposed to go to the most successful bloc Benthamite in the race.
Q. What’s the matter with that?
A. What is the matter with it is that New York is reaching the point where it faces the marginal disutility of bloc satisfaction. The race to satisfy the bloc finally ends in dissatisfying even the individual members of that same bloc. If, for instance, you give taxi owners the right to limit the number of taxis available in the city, people who need taxis to get from where they are to where they want to go can’t find taxis when they most want them. If you allow truck drivers to double-park because it is convenient to them and to the merchants whose goods they are unloading, traffic is snarled and taxi drivers can’t move fast enough to make a decent living. When the traffic is snarled, people stay away from the city and the merchants lose money. If the merchants lose money they want to automate in order to save costs. If the unions don’t let them automate they leave the city. When they leave the city there are fewer people to pay taxes to city officials and to the unemployed. (The unemployed aren’t allowed to drive taxis because the taxi owners share a monopoly.) Taxes have to go up because there are fewer people to pay taxes. The unemployed grow restless, and breed children and crime. The children drop out of school because there isn’t anyone at home to tell them to go to school. Some of the children who go to school make school life intolerable for other children in school, and they leave and go to private schools. The teachers are told they mustn’t discourage the schoolchildren or they will leave the schools and commit crime and unemployment. The unions don’t want the unemployed hired because they will work for less money, or because they are Negroes and Puerto Ricans and obviously can’t lay bricks or wire buildings like white people can, so they are supposed to go off somewhere and just live, and stay out of the way. But they can’t live except in houses, and houses are built by plumbers and electricians who get eight, ten, twelve dollars an hour, which means that people can’t afford to buy houses, or rent apartments, at rates the city can afford to pay its unemployed, so the federal government has to build housing projects. But there aren’t enough housing projects, so there is overcrowding, and family life disintegrates. Some people turn to crime, others to ideology. You can’t walk from one end of New York to another without standing a good chance of losing your wallet, your maidenhead, or your life; or without being told that white people are bigoted, that Negroes are shiftless, that free enterprise is the enemy of the working class, that Norman Thomas has betrayed socialism, and that the only thing that will save New York is for the whole of the United States to become like New York.
Q. What would you do, if you became Mayor of New York?
A. I would treat people as individuals. By depriving the voting blocs of their corporate advantages, I would liberate individual members of those voting blocs.
Q. What would the individual stand to gain, if you were Mayor of New York?
A. (1) The security of life and limb; (2) an opportunity to find gainful employment without the artificial hindrances now imposed by monopoly labor unions and certain minimum wage laws; (3) the hope of finding decent living quarters without paying profits to land speculators or oligopolistic construction companies; (4) the opportunity to be educated without weekly litmus tests administered by an Interracial Commissioner to determine whether the composite color of every school is exactly the right shade of brown; and (5) the internal composure that comes from knowing that there are rational limits to politics, and that one tends to be better off where government is devoted to dismantling, rather than establishing, artificial privileges of the kind New York has been establishing for years, following the lead of Washington, D.C.
Q. What does Washington, D.C, have to do with this?
A. Many of the reforms that New York needs New York cannot effect unless Washington grants it the authority to proceed. For instance, New York can’t guarantee newspaper service or shipping service to New Yorkers unless national legislation is passed which would permit the prosecution of union monopoly practices in restraint of trade. New York can’t finance its own reforms so long as the money it needs to effect them drains down to Washington to be spent in watering the caliche country surrounding the Pedernales River. New York can’t do anything about the structural unemployment problem unless the minimum wage laws are eased—that kind of thing.
Q. Why didn’t you run in the Republican primary?
A. Why didn’t Martin Luther King run for Governor of Alabama?
Q. For one thing, he isn’t a resident of Alabama.
A. That could be arranged.
Q. Are you