Perhaps the only realistic element in the persona of
Blackford Oakes, the protagonist of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s spy
novels, is that he’s a Yalie. So far as I am
aware, even James Bond did not manage to bed the Queen. As
for the rest—startlingly handsome, a gentleman’s
sense of gallantry, an eminently likeable personality, a
temperament forged by a sound, Judeo-Christian outlook
and old-fashioned patriotism—well, the odds of finding them
in one man, much less a man whom the CIA might in fact hire,
must incline to the galactically improbable.

Except when set against the life of Blackie’s progenitor.
Now closing in on his eightieth birthday, Bill Buckley was born
to an oilman expelled from Mexico for his
counterrevolutionary sympathies, was packed off to a British
boarding school on the eve of World War II, flew planes on
the side at Yale, was derided as a “fascist” for writing a
book about those years shortly after he graduated, founded
what would become one of the twentieth century’s most
influential journals of opinion before he turned thirty, ran for
Mayor of New York, saw a friend who embodied all the ideals
of National Review elected President and win the Cold War,
all the while attracting additional notoriety for equally
public roles as sailor, musician, and TV talk-show host.
If Ian Fleming had ever proposed such a fabulous character
he would have been laughed out of every publishing house in
America.

In Miles Gone By,
Bill now offers up the Authorized Version
of this life.[1]

Strictly speaking, it is not an autobiography
at all, but a collection of previously published material “in
the nature of a narrative survey” of his life. The official
line is that any autobiography would in effect be a matter
of paraphrasing material that has come before.

Though I would have enjoyed a more orthodox memoir—one that not
only recounted the course of his life but also weighed earlier
judgments and actions on a scale of mature
reflection—Miles Gone By affords its own advantages. Chief
among these is that the material appears more or less as it
appeared when he wrote it, to wit, what he thought when he
thought it, and not—as with most memoirs—filtering it
through what he might prefer to say today.

My personal experience with Bill was limited but telling. In
the three years I was on his payroll manning NR’s Washington
bureau, I don’t recall Bill’s having once materialized in
our offices there. This rather belies what I usually find to
be the public image of a political junkie. But Bill’s
political temperament inclined more to Cincinnatus than
Caesar—especially if one imagines Cincinnatus with a
sailboat instead of a plow.

There remain those, some of them Bill’s comrades in arms,
who find this hard to reconcile: the sailor who escapes it
all with the man who helped give America Ronald Reagan (when
I was there, the magazine had matchbooks printed with a
picture of President Reagan reading NR under the caption: “I
got my job through National Review”).
The concern seems to be
that enjoying
oneself so thoroughly, at a time when So Many Serious Issues
Still Threaten The Republic, violates some precept.
But that is only true when
measured against the nasty calculus of a utilitarian age
that forgets what it means to be human. Miles Gone By is a
bracing reminder of an essential conservative principle:
that the state exists so that we might have private lives,
not vice versa.

Consequently, we are presented with a work that only
indirectly wades into Buckley’s politics or philosophy. The
most overt manifestations come in his chapter on his 1951
book God and Man at Yale, where he recounts “the heated
reaction to a book that professes concurrently a concern
over the ascendancy of religious skepticism and political
statism.” But the impassioned back and forth laid out in
that chapter (which illuminates his subsequent decision to
found National Review) is the exception rather than the
rule. This is a work whose dominant tone is an affection
that warms each page: affection for his mother and father,
for his friends and colleagues, for his faith and his country,
for all that made this life possible.

Let me give an example. In the second chapter Bill speaks of
being sent by his father to St. John’s, Beaumont outside
London
in 1938. It
begins with one of those curious happenstances of biography:
As Master Buckley was being transported to his new school,
his father commanded the driver to pop by the airport—where
the Buckley family watched Neville Chamberlain descend from
the airplane that had brought him from Munich to announce
he’d brought “peace in our time.”

Now, in the best of times one approaches reminiscences about
life at a British boarding school—much less one run by
Catholic priests—with some trepidation. Leaving aside the
standard snickerings over buggery, such memoirs typically include
too the standard set pieces about bullying followed by the final
settling of scores. It is just here where Miles Gone By is
different.

It’s not that St. John’s is some sepia-toned, prewar idyll.
To the contrary, Bill makes palpable the “awful
homesickness” of a young Buckley “pressing the collar of [his]
pajamas” against his mouth lest the others hear him crying
out of loneliness. But what bursts through are the occasions
of kindliness, and in those places where the emphasis is on
wrongs done, they deal with those that a callow young
American inflicted on his masters.

In one episode, he accidentally tips over Father Manning’s
tin of pipe tobacco. A second later the “majestic” Father
Manning was on his hands and knees of the study trying to
rescue each little grain of tobacco. “That is my month’s
allowance, Billy,” Father Manning tells him. “I cannot
afford to let any go unsmoked.” Buckley recalls finding this
extraordinary—“that this … seer should have less than all
the tobacco he wanted.” Further enquiries about what he
might do to alleviate the hardship reveal that Father
Manning’s vows extended to precluding him from accepting
gifts of tobacco. Today, no doubt, the Jesuit fathers have
overcome such hard and fast scruples (along with much else),
but the impression they left on a young Buckley says
something about their effect.

In another instance, he recounts a privileged day out at the
Grand National with the visiting Buckley père, at which he was
to bet two shillings given him by Father Sharkey on a horse
called Workman. As it turned out, Workman proved triumphant,
paying 18–1. But Bill had forgotten to place Father
Sharkey’s bet! He didn’t dare tell the senior Buckley, and
after “confessing” (no pun intended) to a Father Sharkey who
had been happily anticipating his winnings, he
went to bed “fearing the obloquy of my schoolmates” once
word of his failure leaked out. But the scandal was
stillborn, because Father Sharkey had covered for him.

Understandably Miles Gone By features more of the celebrity
elbows he’s rubbed up against, from David Niven (“In Niven’s
company, no one had a chance to live very long as a
wallflower”) and Clare Booth Luce (who “entertained with
brilliant charm, wrote for sundry publications, painted, and
stared life in the face, including bad personal habits”) to

The New Yorker’s William Shawn (who told him, “Mr. Buckley,
I really do not think that you know the correct use of the
comma”) and colleagues such as Whittaker Chambers, who in
National Review was inclined to indulge his “orotund gloom”
about the coming collapse of Western civilization, but here
is presented as being asked by an earnest nineteen-year-old
co-ed what he thought of
“Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.”

It is a tribute to Bill that not all the events recorded
here show him to advantage. Far from using the memoirs to
take full credit for Ronald Reagan, whom he first met in
1961, Bill cheerfully concedes that he was “way behind in
apprehending his potential.” Even after the Gipper had
secured the governorship of California, Bill opined to
Nelson Rockefeller “there’s no way a former actor could go
for President.” Rockefeller demurred: anyone who won a
California election with a million-vote margin, he declared,
was definitely presidential material. A pity
Rocky is no longer around to read this, for I suspect it is the
only recorded public admission from a Reagan Republican
ceding superior wisdom to Rockefeller Republicans.

Late-life biographies, of course, are inevitably tinged by
melancholy, if only because the more we enjoy the past the
more we want to avoid thinking of it as an end-note. But
again affection intervenes, especially when he writes of the
lesser knowns such as John T. Gaty. Not many histories would
mention John Gaty, a man Bill never even met. But in 1967,
Bill learned he had been listed in Mr. Gaty’s will as one of
nine trustees designated to meet once a year—in
Wichita—to dispose of his estate to outfits “which will
promote individual liberty and incentive as opposed to
socialism and communism.”

Apart from Bill, the list of desginated
trustees included Barry Goldwater, John
Tower (who confided to him at one of these meetings that
Reagan didn’t have the “intellectual ability” to serve as
president), Strom Thurmond, Edgar Eisenhower (“the
rightwardmost of the three Eisenhower brothers”), and Dean
Clarence Manion of the Notre Dame Law School. Over the
years a number of fledgling conservative societies survived
because of the small grants they received from the Gaty fund,
whose benefactor surely would have considered himself repaid
beyond his dreams in the election of 1980.

That is not to say that all goes smoothly. Take the time Bill resolved to
act on his annual New Year’s resolution to do something
about “the Milquetoast” in him. The occasion soon presented
itself on a Vermont mountaintop while waiting in line at a
ski shop. While one attendant waited upon the woman in front
of Bill, his middle-aged co-worker sat on a nearby stool
chatting with his workmate and making no motion to serve the
other customers.

After a while, Bill broke. “If you are not too busy,” he
asked icily, “would you mind handing me a screwdriver?” The
man, who had been puffing away on a pipe, looked surprised
and apologized—he wasn’t supposed to move because he’d
just suffered a heart attack. That was the signal, Bill
writes, for “a great whirring noise that descended from
heaven” as a helicopter landed, a stretcher was produced, and the
man was taken to a nearby hospital. From his description of
the aftermath in the ski shop, one is left with the sense
that at that point the charitable thing might have been to
evacuate Bill on that helicopter too.

There is more, much more—too much for one review.
I am unqualified to evaluate Bill’s musical forays.
The chapter on his solo performance of Bach’s Concerto in

F-minor before the Phoenix Symphony Chamber Orchestra goes
into considerable detail about the many months of practice the
invitation required. In many ways, however, the enterprise
strikes me as not so far removed from his work at National
Review, where he presided over an intimidating array of
conservative noises: the mournful low notes of the cello
(Whittaker Chambers); the clear trumpet (Frank Meyer); the
iconoclastic bassoon (Willi Schlamm); the happy, self-deprecating
flute (his sister Aloise Buckley Heath); and the steady A of
the oboe to which the others are tuned (Jim Burnham). Against the
demand to extract some sort of editorial harmony from this crowd,
an eight-and-a-half minute Bach concerto must have come as
something of a relief.

About the sailing I am even less qualified to judge. Given
my own tendencies toward the Sam McGee School of the
hardships and forced intimacy of such excursions (“It wasn’t
much fun but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee”), such
passages do not elicit from me any
wish-I-was-there feelings. This
has nothing to do with Bill’s writing. To the contrary,
there is a good argument to be made that it is precisely
when Bill is writing about sailing that he is at his most
taut and rhythmic, as in the passage that ends this book:

You have shortened the sail just a little, because
you want more steadiness than you get at this speed, the
wind up to twenty-two, twenty-four knots, and it is late at
night, and there are only two of you in the cockpit. You are
moving at racing speed, parting the buttery sea as with a
scalpel, and the waters roar by, themselves exuberantly
subdued by your powers to command your way through them.
Triumphalism … and the stars seem to be singing for joy.

You could say the same thing about the satisfaction that comes
from writing a fine paragraph. Or a life that set itself,
with astounding success, against most of the prevailing
winds of his day.

Come to think of it, I think he just did.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. 
   Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography,
   by William F. Buckley, Jr.;
   Regnery, 594 pages, $29.95.
   Go back to the text.