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Revels with a cause
National Review, August 29, 2005 by Linda Bridges
Living It Up with National Review: A Memoir, by Priscilla L. Buckley (Spence, 247 pp., $27.95)
DURING all those years when Bill Buckley was editor-in-chief of NATIONAL REVIEW and was simultaneously writing his thrice-weekly column, preparing for and taping his weekly Firing Line, and traveling the length and breadth of the country on the lecture circuit, somebody had to be in charge back at 150 East 35th Street. Well, that somebody has finally written down the story of those days, a story that until now had mostly been part of the oral tradition, told to entranced young staffers over lunches and at the ritual Wednesday evening Editorial Drinks.
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Not that Priscilla Buckley was always to be found at the office. As she tells us early on in this new memoir, the deal she struck with her brother before agreeing to become managing editor included six weeks' vacation a year--this in lieu of the kind of salary her skills could have commanded, but NR couldn't afford. And so this story of office life, and of the events of those often turbulent years--especially the out-of-control Sixties--is interleaved with accounts of the author's travels at home and abroad.
Full-disclosure time: This is not an arm's-length review. Priscilla Buckley befriended me when I arrived at NR as a summer assistant, taught me my craft, and introduced me to moules ravigote, the Peter Wimsey novels, and eau de vie de framboise. I in turn was one of many who urged Priscilla to put it all in print. Then again, the very memory of those Wednesday evenings set up for me a high standard for this book: Would the stories on the page have the same elan as they did when spoken impromptu by such a vivid personality?
The answer, I thankfully report, is: Yes. Living It Up with National Review is a splendid account of a life of journalism, politics, adventure, friendship, and faith. It is not always delightful; there are dark patches throughout: hurtful office disputes, some of them ending in ruptured friendships, as with Willi Schlamm and Willmoore Kendall; the pain of losing two sisters much too young, Maureen at age 31, Aloise at 48; the difficulties, professional and emotional, of coping with the upheavals of the 1960s. But mostly it's delightful.
As Priscilla recounted at the end of her first volume of memoirs, String of Pearls, she had decided by the fall of 1955 that it was time to leave the newsroom at United Press in Paris and come home. She had learned things and met people she otherwise never would have experienced, and she adored--still does adore--Paris. But the hours were killing and the pay low. More important, her father had been very ill, and France was a long way away from the Buckley family homes in South Carolina and Connecticut--especially in those days before the passenger jet had been perfected. But Priscilla would not wind up spending a lot of time at her father's side. Brother Bill needed her terribly, and she responded to his call, with her parents' blessing.
And so she joined the fledgling enterprise, to which Bill had already recruited their buoyant younger sister Maureen. While Bill attempted to keep peace among the "brilliant, but highly combustible" senior editors, Priscilla recounts, she set out to investigate some of the issues riling folks on the Right. (You couldn't yet speak of a conservative movement, although NATIONAL REVIEW was fast becoming the center around which the movement would coalesce.) One of her first signed articles brought on not a few CMSs (cancel-my-subscription letters). It was titled "Siberia, U.S.A.," and in it she examined--and found wanting--the theory that the federal government had a plot "to get rid of political dissenters and critics on the right, particularly those who favored the Bricker Amendment, by deporting them to Alaska." One of the CMSs conjectured that "Miss Buckley had remained in France too long, and acquired socialistic notions."
She loved investigative reporting, but NR soon needed her more in another capacity. Suzanne La Follette, the magazine's founding managing editor, was approaching retirement. And so Priscilla took over the reins. This meant constant interruptions in her own writing to make decisions about length and placement of articles, to pass judgment on editorial art, to smooth authors' ruffled feathers. But it also meant the fun of watching 23-year-old Maureen tame unruly subscribers. Maureen warned one lady that if she canceled one more time, "she was out for good. The lady did not take the warning seriously, and, after her next CMS, it took her three months of increasingly humble and contrite notes to get back in. Her final letter started: 'I surrender, dear. Maureen, please, please resubscribe me. I promise to be good.'"
Priscilla also enjoyed observing the omnicompetence of Jim McFadden. He had walked into NR's offices, age 26, after being discharged from the army, and told WFB he wanted nothing more than to work for NR. He would prefer to be a writer or an editor, he said, "'but if those jobs are filled I'll do any job you give me, Mr. Buckley, and I'll do it well.'" McFadden made good on that promise. After straightening out the chaotic circulation department, he set to work writing promotional material that "enticed readers to try this new, intellectually abrasive product, a conservative journal of opinion, if you please."
