The Unmaking of a Mayor. William F. Buckley Jr.
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effect of putting Etienne Gilson in jail for writing that there had been no substantial opposition in Attica to the institution of slavery—how could he know? she asked indignantly.
I remember, as a very young (nineteen) second lieutenant in the army, being approached for advice by a private in his early thirties who told me his wife was in Reno suing him for divorce, which he was quite prepared to give her, but that he wondered whether her affidavit, to which he had been asked to acquiesce, charging him with afflicting extreme mental cruelty upon her, wouldn’t forever stigmatize him—unfairly, inasmuch as it simply wasn’t true. I counseled him, from the depths of my experience, never ever to yield, not under any circumstances to sign any such waiver. That evening I mentioned the episode to my uncle, a retired lawyer of bellicose personal rectitude, who gently informed me that my advice had been mistaken, that the adversary rhetoric of divorce proceedings meant nothing, absolutely nothing at all. I was shattered, and only wish that, in my disillusion, I had, while I was at it, asked him about the adversary language of nonmarital polemics.
Nobody—happy days—is going to put Etienne Gilson in jail for deductive slanders against the Greeks; to say nothing of McGeorge Bundy for explicit slanders against me. What to do—assuming one cares? Mr. George Sokolsky, the late and volatile columnist, told me on one occasion that in 1935, after a series of psychologically ruinous encounters with his critics, he instructed his secretary never ever again to permit him to see a single newspaper, magazine, or letter which contained material in it unreasonably critical of himself. Sometimes, he chuckled, his directive resulted in a deskload of correspondence that looked like a pile of those indiscreet letters written by GIs to their sweethearts during the Second War, with gaping holes cut out by the censor’s scissors. But the arrangement secured Sokolsky’s serenity, and that is worth something, one supposes.
Indeed, I see Mr. Sokolsky’s point. However, pending the day when I adopt his recourse, I find it continuingly relevant, in a book on contemporary politics, to attempt to controvert controvertible misrepresentations, not so much because I hunger after retroactive vindications (though they are always satisfying) but because it is generally interesting, or ought to be, to know the extent to which that kind of thing does in fact go on in matters in which the public is concerned, and especially interesting to inquire (a) what is the current appetite for pursuing the facts in a controversy; (b) whether that appetite is stimulated by pressures that are inner- or other-directed; or, if a little of both, in what balance; (c) what kinds of pressure are routinely brought to effect clarification; and whether they tend to be efficacious or not; and (d) what is the fallout of a lackadaisical concern for the truth on the morale and the potency of the general will and on the practice of democracy.
I had an experience a couple of months before the beginning of the New York campaign from which I learned a great deal and should have learned a great deal more. I learned at first hand something about how politicians react to certain kinds of provocations; something about the inflammatory leverage of even a single newspaper; and a great deal about the general journalistic indifference that immediately descends on the discovery that, after all, there wasn’t any scandal there at all, and never mind the incidental victims of the flurry.
Once a year, in New York City, Catholic policemen gather, under the auspices of the Holy Name Society, at a Communion breakfast. The affair habitually brings together more policemen than any other occasion of the year—about 6,000 of them (roughly a quarter of the total force). I was invited to address the policemen at the breakfast of 1965.
The next day all hell broke loose. Newsworthy New Yorkers were suddenly demanding that Mayor Wagner, who had been present at the breakfast, rebuke the police force—“for cheering Buckley on Sunday” (I quote Roy Wilkins)—and that the Police Commissioner, Michael Murphy, resign—“for permitting a rabble-rousing right-wing extremist. . . to address the breakfast” (I. D. Robbins, president of the City Club, and a candidate for anybody’s nomination for Mayor).
There had been three reporters at the affair, one of whom, representing the New York Herald Tribune, decided to play up my address as a major story. The New York Times’ reporter was also there, and he filed a substantial, though by no means sensational, report which, reduced, occupied a routine paragraph or two in the early-bird City Edition. The night editor of the Times, spotting the sensational spread in the rival Tribune, was alarmed at the prospect of missing a big story and thereupon escalated the original version for the later and definitive editions of the Times, leaning in part on the notes that had been left by the Times reporter (who had left the building and was unavailable), in part on the Tribune account. The Times headline: “BUCKLEY PRAISES POLICE OF SELMA / HAILED BY 5,600 POLICE HERE AS HE CITES ‘RESTRAINT.’” The stories, appearing on Monday morning (April 6), created a first-rate uproar, and members of the political celebrity register lined up to record their denunciations. In the afternoon a Times reporter called me for a statement. I wrote out and telephoned back one hundred and fifty words, of which the Times published, the next morning, about one hundred, omitting two passages I would not myself have omitted if I had been invited to edit my own statement.22
The statement I wrote was as follows. The italicized passages were omitted: “I am shocked in turn at the ease with which a routine job of misrepresentation by the press of a public speech can cause distinguished public figures to believe the unbelievable, namely that at a Communion Breakfast sponsored by the Holy Name Society of the Catholic Church, bigotry was applauded. I did not on the occasion in question breathe a word of prejudice against any people. I spoke sympathetically of the plight of the Negroes in the South. I deplored the violence in the South and the attitude of lackadaisical white Southerners towards it. I did criticize the general tendency of some of the noisiest elements in our public life to jump to false and contumacious conclusions about policemen. The trigger-willingness, shown today, to impute to the police a sympathy with bigotry is exactly the kind of thing I had in mind.”
To my astonishment, by Tuesday morning the uproar, far from abating, increased. “PROTESTS POUR IN ON BUCKLEY SPEECH” (New York World-Telegram). “. . . The protests continued to pour in today—from the NAACP, CORE and a State Supreme Court Justice—deploring the inaction of Mayor Wagner and Police Commissioner Murphy in the face of William Buckley’s blast at civil rights demonstrators before an audience of 6,000 City policemen” (New York Post). “. . . Large disquieting issues are stirred by the ovation some 6,000 New York policemen accorded a defense of the Selma police force—and an attack on Martin Luther King—delivered by William Buckley, Jr., the noted thunderer of right-wing extremism. . . . The ordeals of police service in these times in no way justify the salvos of applause that greeted the impassioned apologia for the Selma possemen recited by Buckley [in his] spirited whitewash of Southern police terrorism” (New York Post, editorial).
Could it be that my talk had been recorded? I telephoned the good monsignor in charge of the breakfast, and indeed a tape existed; and the press assembled at noon to hear it. The paramount question, curiously, was less what I had said, than how the audience had responded. Was the Tribune correct in reporting that the police had laughed—and applauded—when I alluded to the death of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, the Detroit housewife who, one month earlier, had gone to Selma to join the demonstrators—and got killed. The roomful of reporters listened intently to the tape as it unwound. And then, a paragraph or two before the critical moment, the tape suddenly and mysteriously stopped. Neal Freeman, of the staff of National Review, bent over the recorder to find that the tape, having first stuck in the external pressure pads, was twined all over the entrails of the machine. We waited nervously while he fiddled with it. I could not escape the growing sense of skepticism in the crowded room. Had the critical few feet of tape—recording the policemen’s misbehavior in response to my own—been intentionally wiped out? Five, ten minutes went by while Freeman—and I—sweated. Finally a technician with one of the television crews volunteered his services. In a few minutes, the tape was going again. Sure enough, a half-minute or so of the speech had been—irretrievably—destroyed. But it was before the critical passage. The voice resumed:
. . . Mrs. Liuzzo of Detroit went down to Alabama to protest conditions there [was saying], conditions of injustice to Negroes