Losing Mum and Pup (18 page)

I
would get reports from Julian and Danilo on how it was going down in Florida. There were good days and not-so-good days, the
not-so-good days often following not-so-good nights, when Pup, frustrated at finding himself awake at three a.m., would reach
for a fistful of sleeping pills. By this point, I found myself hoping that one night he would accidentally overdose. There
was no guilt to the thought. I wanted him out of pain.

Pup revealed to me, in an unusually legibly typed e-mail, that he’d discussed the religious aspect with a local doctor—“
un Católico
” (a Catholic), he pointed out. The e-mail revealed nothing more, and I did not press. I wondered how their conversation would
have gone. Lots of subjunctive, I should think, on Pup’s part, a lot of lawyerly subordinate clauses:
Were one, say, to ingest a specific number of Stilnoxes… might that, under certain circumstances, bring about the necessary
diminution of pulmonary functionality so as to frustrate, say, the cardiological imperatives?
Tonight’s guest on
Firing Line
—Dr. Jack Kevorkian.

In other news, he was back to writing his column, and I rejoiced at that. Since 1962, his whole work metabolism had been set
to the rhythm of the column. One particular column he wrote in Florida was, I thought, especially good, and I sent him a filial
e-mail pat on the back, telling how proud I was of him that he could still muster the old skills. He responded instantly,
and I could feel him glowing through the computer screen. Toward the end of his life, Joseph Conrad, grumpy over a bad review,
said at the table with admirable ingenuousness—not always a trait in evidence among great writers: “I don’t want criticism.
I want
praise
.”

One night—it would have been 1974 or 1975—before Pup launched twin new careers as a writer of sailing books and Blackford
Oakes novels (both genres propelled him to the top of the best-seller lists), he was gloomy over a recent thrashing he’d taken
from
The New York Times Book Review.
Pup was no stranger to bad reviews. Reviewing his first book, McGeorge Bundy, speaking for the Establishment, called him,
among other unpleasant things, “a twisted young man.” And he’d been called far worse over the years. But after this umpteenth
consecutive drubbing by the newspaper of record, he was hurting. As we sat in the sun-room at Wallack’s Point, he said to
me, “They might at least say that I write well.” Some criticism did amuse him. Up until it changed ownership,
Kirkus Reviews
gave a hostile review to every single one of his books. Around our house, Mrs. Kirkus was referred to as “that-bitch-Virginia-Kirkus.”

He did, certainly, like praise.
Not
unusual in writers, but Pup had developed certain—shall we say—Conradian aspects in his declining years. During the posthospital
convalescence, he would have me read to him e-mail “William F. Buckley” news alerts that he’d programmed Google to send him.
There were mentions in cyberspace of “William F. Buckley” about every three seconds. By the time I’d read the one hundredth
or so out loud to him, this had become a somewhat vexing aspect of my nursing shifts. I would come to groan upon opening his
e-mail to see seventy-five WFB news alerts.

I called him in Florida one day. He sounded very down and said that he was having a “rough time” with his Reagan book. My
eyes watered. I thought,
Jesus. Eighty-two years old, founder of a political movement, author of over fifty books, nothing left to prove, barely able
to breathe, and still beating himself over the head because the writing’s not going well.

He kept at it, and that book, his last, is going to press now as I write this. The first chapter ends with a speech he gave
in 1985, in President Reagan’s presence, at the thirtieth-anniversary dinner of
National Review
. He addressed it directly to his old friend. It ends:

As an individual you incarnate American ideals at many levels. As the final responsible authority, in any hour of great challenge,
we depend on you. I was nineteen years old when the bomb went off over Hiroshima, and last week I turned 60. During the interval
I have lived a free man in a free and sovereign country, and this only because we have husbanded a nuclear deterrent, and
made clear our disposition to use it if necessary. I pray that my son, when he is 60, and your son, when he is 60, and the
sons and daughters of our guests tonight will live in a world from which the great ugliness that has scarred our century has
passed. Enjoying their freedoms, they will be grateful that, at the threatened nightfall, the blood of their fathers ran strong.

His fifty-sixth and, given that he died while writing it, one might suppose, final book. I put it this way not to be coy,
but because there seems to be a possibility, given enthusiasm in various publishing quarters, of bringing out another collection
of his articles. So this might turn out not to be his last book. His book on Barry Goldwater has just come out. One month
before, another book, a collection of his “Notes and Asides” from
National Review,
appeared under the really great title
Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription
. And here came yet another in the pipeline. Pup wrote more books dead than some authors do alive.

That his last book would be about Reagan struck me as a natural coda to his oeuvre, inasmuch as WFB was the founder and primum
mobile of the movement that eventually put Reagan in the White House. As it’s been said more than once: If it hadn’t been
for Buckley, there mightn’t have been Goldwater, and without Goldwater, there mightn’t have been Reagan.

Ronald Reagan was an elusive personality. His biographer Edmund Morris found him so elusive that he resorted, in his masterful
but certainly controversial book
Dutch,
to confect a fictional character, simply in an effort to deconstruct his subject. But though Reagan tended famously to shy
from intimacy, I think it’s possible that Pup may have gotten as close to him as any friend could. It certainly
was
a friendship. WFB was very close to Nancy Reagan, as the letters in the book attest. At various points, Pup became a mentor
(that ghastly word again) to the Reagan children, Patti and Ron Jr.

I first met Reagan when Pup took me along with him to California in 1966 to do several
Firing Line
tapings. Honesty compels me to say that for this fourteen-year-old, the real excitement of the trip was the
Firing Line
taping not with the new governor of California, but with Robert Vaughn, star of
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Vaughn was at the time an aspirant liberal eminence, which vocation turned out to be short-lived.

The Reagans gave a cocktail party for Pup at the governor’s mansion. Le tout Sacramento turned out. I was swiftly ignored
amid the sea of grown-ups and wandered out into the garden and sat down by myself. A few moments later, I sensed the presence
of someone next to me and, turning, saw the governor of California looming large and movie-star handsome in a white jacket.
He had seen me go off by myself and, sensing that I must be feeling lost and out of place, had left his guests to come and
talk. I never forgot that. If Reagan was capable of reticence, he was also capable of graciousness. He was a gentleman. In
that capacity, he and WFB were made for each other.

Fifteen years later, quite by accident (I’d written something in
Esquire
that had impressed Vice President George Bush’s press secretary), I found myself working in Ronald Reagan’s White House.
The Reagans kindly invited me to the odd social occasion. At one of these, I nearly caused a faux pas of national proportion.

The invitation was for dinner in the residence upstairs and a movie afterward. I had a big speech to write for Bush that night
and pleaded urgently with Muffie Brandon, Mrs. Reagan’s social secretary, to be excused from the movie. She
tsk-tsk
ed but said all right, but that I must be discreet about leaving. I said of course. As I made my stealthy exit just before
the lights went down in the family theater, I rounded a corner in the hallway and bumped smack into—Ronald Reagan, returning
either from the men’s room or from ordering a richly deserved missile strike on some Middle Eastern despot.

He smiled that thousand-watt smile and regarded me curiously.

“Where are you going?” he said. “We’re about to start the movie.”

“Um,” I said, dissembling, “just going to the men’s room, Mr. President. I’ll be right there. Go ahead and start without me.”

He smiled and went off, phalanxed by Secret Service, including Tim McCarthy, who a few months earlier had interposed himself
between the president and John Hinckley, taking a .22 slug in the chest.

I made my way down the long corridor in the basement and was about to exit the White House when I heard behind me a sibilant
and frantic,
“Psssst!”

Looking back, I saw Muffie Brandon gesticulating urgently.

“He just announced to everyone that we weren’t going to start without you.”

Oh dear. I skulked back, Muffie more or less leading me by the ear, to find fifty guests glowering at me and my seat saved—in
the front row, next to the president and Mrs. Reagan.

I experienced many such acts of grace and favor during my time at the White House. Looking back on it, I realize—not that
I didn’t at the time—that these were reciprocations for the kindnesses Pup had shown to the Reagan children.

A few years later, in 1985, I found myself—again, accidentally—ghostwriting David Stockman’s memoirs, under furious deadline
pressure. (I use the term
ghostwriting
in the narrow, technical sense: My job was to turn a mountain—yea, a veritable Kilimanjaro—of manuscript into readable English.)
There was a piquancy to this assignment, inasmuch as David Stockman had become famous mainly for an act of impertinence to
Reagan while serving as his budget director. But a) Stockman’s beef was about policy, not in any way ad hominem against Reagan;
and, well, b) I needed the dough.

In the midst of this death march fell
National Review
’s gala thirtieth-anniversary dinner at the Plaza in New York. I pleaded with Pup that I couldn’t attend—I barely had time
to eat meals.
No
, he insisted,
you have to be there
, as he put it somewhat mysteriously,
for reasons that will become apparent
. I grumpily assented. Pup wasn’t someone to whom you could say no.

So I went and was seated right above the podium when he gave the speech that is reproduced earlier. Looking back on that moment,
on those two amazing men, I reflect that, yes, the blood of the fathers truly did run strong.

T
he lease on the Fort Lauderdale house was up mid-January, but with the Reagan book still unfinished, and January in Connecticut
being January in Connecticut, I tried to persuade Pup to remain in Florida. But he was adamant about coming home, and I suspect
now that he was coming home to die. With all due respect to the Sunshine State, when my time comes, I shouldn’t want to die
there, either. I can see spending some of my senescence there, but I shouldn’t want the Reaper to find me on the golf course
or in a condo. “I want death… to find me planting my cabbages,” wrote Michel de Montaigne. But to die in, say, Fort Lauderdale…
there seems something—as Pup would say—
contra naturam
about that. In
The Importance of Being Earnest
, the Reverend Chasuble, informed that soand-so died in Paris, tut-tuts: “In Paris? I fear that does not point, at the end,
to a very serious state of mind.”
^*
New Englanders, growing up as we do with hot summer fields and frozen-over ponds, are hardwired to the seasons. Now it was
winter in Connecticut, and I think Pup wanted to be back on native soil when it happened. It was time.