Revels with a cause

Meanwhile, Priscilla was becoming the doyenne of an unusual educational establishment. Jim Burnham, her longtime officemate, walked in one morning and heard her side of a phone conversation, evidently with the mother of a young man who would be arriving in a few days as a summer assistant. As she explains to Burnham after hanging up, the boy has never been in New York, and his mother, "hearing all those stories about violence in our fair city, is worried. I have been reassuring her." That evening at dinner, Burnham delightedly recounts this to WFB, concluding: "Bill, you and I think we are putting out a magazine, but what we actually have is Miss Buckley's finishing school for young ladies and gentlemen of conservative persuasion."

But life at NATIONAL REVIEW is only half of Priscilla Buckley's story. The other half takes her around the world: from an epic battle between dove hunters and game wardens in South Carolina to a humbling, exalting safari in Kenya; from a serene canal trip in northern Wales to a hair-raising (and -soaking) whitewater raft trip through the Grand Canyon; from the haunted beauty of Angkor Wat to a Moscow where from St. Basil's Cathedral you could watch the goose-stepping guards at Lenin's tomb, and shiver at the thought that the infamous Lubyanka was just a couple of streets away.

"It turns out to be a bracing week," Priscilla writes of her and sister Jane's decision to bring a hot-air balloon to Sharon, Connecticut. "Jane, and the famous retired racing driver John Fitch, a Le Mans veteran, land in a sandpit thirty-six miles down wind from Sharon, having been airborne just a little over an hour, as the result of a miscalculation of the strength of the prevailing winds. John, who knows about things like stresses, is terrified. Jane, whose grasp of physics is minimal, thinks it a lark."

On a rainy day in Bayeux, at the end of a luxurious barge trip down the Seine, "We duck into the simple fisherman's church near the market place, enticed by a full-throated organ. A bride and groom are plighting their troth on this vigil of the great Feast of Corpus Christi. We pause to light a candle in memory of missing friends, and hurry back to the Normandie and our farewell dinner."

In 1962, Priscilla visits Angkor Wat and the other wonders left behind in 1434 when the Khmer king moved his capital south, to Phnom Penh. A dozen years later, she writes, "a new brand of Khmers, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, ... overran the Angkor ruins.... It was rumored that the Khmer Rouge, in their mad lust to destroy every vestige of previous civilizations in Cambodia, had dynamited Angkor Wat." That did not happen, but there was "tremendous damage." As of 1970, "nine hundred trained men worked at the Angkor ruins under French direction. By 1981 only five of them were known to be alive. The painstaking records of eighty years of clearing, reconstruction, dike-building, and restoration ... all had been wantonly destroyed."