The Unmaking of a Mayor. William F. Buckley Jr.
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Alabama—that anyone arriving in Alabama to protest the existing order under the glare of national klieg lights, precisely needed protection against the almost certain recourse to violence of the unrestrained members of almost every society, who are disposed to go to criminal lengths to express their resentment. That, after all, is why the President mobilized the National Guard of Alabama—at the Governor’s urging. So the lady drove down a stretch of lonely road in the dead of night, ignoring the protection that had been given her, sharing the front seat with a young Negro identified with the protesting movement; and got killed. [Pause, and, from the audience, a dead silence.] Why, one wonders, was this a story that occupied the front pages from one end of the country to another, if newspapers are concerned with the unusual, the unexpected? Didn’t the killing merely confirm precisely what everyone has been saying about certain elements of the South? About the intensity of its feelings? About the disposition of some of its members to resort to violence in order to maintain the status quo? Who could have been surprised by this ghastly episode? Not Governor Wallace—who had precisely called on the Federal Government to provide protection for the demonstrators. Not, surely, The New York Times, which has told us for years that in the South lawlessness is practiced.
There was, again, not a sound from the audience, as I went on to state my thesis.33 (“Laughter and more applause”—Tuesday’s New York Post had already reached the stands—“greeted Buckley’s query, ‘Didn’t the killing confirm what some elements in the South said would happen?’” And, again the New York Post: “The cheers were even louder when Buckley criticized Mrs. Viola Gregg Liuzzo, the slain Detroit mother of five, for going to the march on Montgomery. . . .”)
The point I was trying to make, concerning which a reference to the treatment by the press of Mrs. Liuzzo’s murder (in contrast with its treatment of another category of crimes) was relevant, is irrelevant to this narrative. But for the convenience of those who wonder about the context of the controversial remarks, the entire (short) address is reprinted in Appendix A to this book, together with indications of audience reaction.
And, on the matter of my alleged praise of the “restraint” of the Selma police, again the tape rolled on:
Four weeks ago at Selma, Alabama, the conscience of the world was aroused at the sight of policemen swinging their sticks with purpose on the bodies of demonstrators who had set out to march to Montgomery, Alabama. The television cameras did not show—how indeed could they have done so?—the most dramatic part of the sequence. Dr. King and the demonstrators had crossed the bridge and there the policemen, acting under orders—whether ill-advised or not is most precisely not the business of policemen, who are not lawmakers or governors but agents of the lawmakers and governors—there the policemen informed them that they might not proceed. The next thing the American viewer saw was a flurry of night sticks and the pursuit of the screaming demonstrators back across the bridge into the streets of Selma. What the viewer did not see was a period of time, twenty long minutes, 1,200 seconds,44 freighted with tension, when the two camps stood facing each other, between the moment the sheriff told the demonstrators to return, which order the demonstrators refused by standing there in defiance of it, until the moment when the human cordite was touched—who threw the lighted match? We do not know—and the policemen moved, excitedly, humanly, forward: excessively, yes, and their excesses on that day have been rightly criticized, but were ever the excesses criticized of those who provoked them beyond the endurance that we tend to think of as human?
Although it never became a part of the controversy, I was factually incorrect here. I myself subsequently ascertained that the “twenty minutes” I had been told about by someone who misinterpreted a television comment on the day of the riots was more like three or four minutes.
Again, the tape registered a dead silence from the audience. (“He said the demonstrators ‘refused the order’ not to march in defiance. And the cameras showed only the beatings, ‘nothing of policemen’s restraint’ in the face of orders defied. The Hilton’s Grand Ballroom rocked with applause, as Mr. Buckley smiled out at the crowd,” reported the Tribune, April 5).
A week or two later Mr. John Leo, an associate editor of Commonweal, undertook, in the context, I hasten to say, of his own emphatic disapproval of my speech, a close textual analysis of the original report in the Tribune:
Mr. Buckley’s recent speech to Catholic policemen in New York City, dealing with police comportment in and around Selma, was objectionable enough on its face. But the reporter who spread the word [in] the Tribune was not content with his minor role in this little ritual. He apparently thought it was up to him to make a blood sacrifice of Mr. Buckley. According to good form, this is usually performed later by indignant editorial writers.
In his Tribune story, [the reporter] offered 26 quotes from the Buckley speech, most of them quite short. Nineteen of them were misquotations. Of the seven he got right, at least two were used unfairly. The ones he got absolutely straight, and used fairly (here presented in their entirety) were “10 days later,” “acting under orders,” “they might not proceed,” “you must stand mutely,” and “the Governor of Alabama.” Lest the reader think [the reporter] is particularly astute in handling quotes of four words or less, it should be pointed out that he flubbed six in this category.
Partial quotes, or quotes of less than a sentence, are themselves a debatable journalistic practice. Most papers use them sparingly; The New York Times won’t allow them at all. But it is safe to say that someone who offers us a whole story full of partial quotes is an amateur. Someone who gets four-fifths of them wrong is more than an amateur. He is a menace.
For instance, Mr. Buckley did not defend the actions of the police in Selma. In a phrase unreported by the Tribune he said clearly that they were guilty of excesses. All he asked was whether we are sure that some of the fury of the Selma police might not have been due to provocation under pressure. My own sympathy for Alabama law enforcement is not high, but Mr. Buckley’s question is worth considering. A friend of mine who was on the scene told of one excited Negro who kept dancing within inches of a policeman and taunting him to try clubbing him over the head.
I think Mr. Buckley’s speech, on the whole, was quite objectionable, both in thought and rhetoric. But there is no doubt that he has been treated rather shabbily, first by being subjected to a Pavlovian liberal response on the part of New York papers and pressure groups, few of which seem to have troubled themselves to discover what he actually said, and secondly, by the disinclination of the Tribune to apologize for a wretched story55 (The National Catholic Reporter, May 12, 1965).
As a matter of record, I should note that the vilification that continued to come in from all corners of the country, based on the Tribune’s story and subsequent aggrandizements on the theme, prompted me, finally, to file a lawsuit for libel. The Tribune thereupon agreed (July 7) to reprint Leo’s article preceded by what amounted to the publisher’s apology (“The Herald Tribune regrets that erroneous conclusions arose from the report . . .”). It was reassuring to ascertain that right, plus a good lawyer, can sometimes stimulate the dormant conscience.
I expected remedial action at three levels. First from the press. Second from public figures who had been misled by the press. Thirdly, from Mayor Wagner, whose protracted silence dumfounded me.
1. The Press
The New York Times’ story the next day devoted not a single word to the discrepancies between the tape and the Tribune’s—and its own—original stories.
The Tribune went this far in its story: “The tape recordings did not register any applause at a point where Mr. Buckley spoke of restraint by Selma police before they charged into the crowd of civil-rights people. However, [the] Tribune reporter who wrote the story said there was applause in the vicinity of his table in front of the dais that apparently was not picked up by the microphone.” This is the same applause that, the reporter in question had written, “rocked the Hilton’s Grand Ballroom.”