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ОглавлениеA Preliminary Experience A Preliminary Experience
ISUPPOSE A CONTROVERSIALIST reaches the point, or goes mad, where he simply ignores criticism that is genuinely unjust. I have learned, but incompletely. Give the benefit of every doubt to the critic; but what do you do—should you do?—can you do?—when there aren’t any doubts that he is factually incorrect? The orderly stages of redress are (a) a letter to the misrepresenter; (b) a letter (where relevant) to his editor; and (c) a lawsuit. Almost immediately after my first book (about Yale) was published, circumstances forced me to meditate on the textbook recourses. In those days I felt a fierce indignation whenever I ran across what I deemed not merely unfair criticism but positively indefensible criticism—i.e., of the kind that misstated the facts, or that gratuitously advanced nonexistent motives. (I knew less than I do now about perspectives of controversy.) In the first category I remember an exchange in the Atlantic with McGeorge Bundy, who flatly misstated (no doubt innocently) a set of facts integral to my analysis concerning which it happened that I was, very simply, correct. We slugged out an exchange in the Atlantic, from which I came to know, for the first time, how horribly inconclusive such exchanges are and learned something about the necessity of being fatalistic (some would say cynical)11 about the chances of historical justification. For one thing, one is not history, and history doesn’t care very much about one. For another, history is highly tendentious. For another, it is simply more than one can as a practical matter hope to do, to retain the interest, or to capture the attention, of the truth-minded concerning the rectification of factual inaccuracies which do not bear on the movements of the sun or the planets. I was greatly intrigued, when I first saw Simone Weil’s essay The Need for Roots, by her fervent, ingenuous statement that the service of the truth is everything—so much so, she said, that she would support a universal law to punish historical libel, such a law as would, for instance, have had the effect of putting Etienne Gilson in jail for writing that there had been no substantial opposition in Attica to the institution of slavery—how could he know? she asked indignantly.
I remember, as a very young (nineteen) second lieutenant in the army, being approached for advice by a private in his early thirties who told me his wife was in Reno suing him for divorce, which he was quite prepared to give her, but that he wondered whether her affidavit, to which he had been asked to acquiesce, charging him with afflicting extreme mental cruelty upon her, wouldn’t forever stigmatize him—unfairly, inasmuch as it simply wasn’t true. I counseled him, from the depths of my experience, never ever to yield, not under any circumstances to sign any such waiver. That evening I mentioned the episode to my uncle, a retired lawyer of bellicose personal rectitude, who gently informed me that my advice had been mistaken, that the adversary rhetoric of divorce proceedings meant nothing, absolutely nothing at all. I was shattered, and only wish that, in my disillusion, I had, while I was at it, asked him about the adversary language of nonmarital polemics.
Nobody—happy days—is going to put Etienne Gilson in jail for deductive slanders against the Greeks; to say nothing of McGeorge Bundy for explicit slanders against me. What to do—assuming one cares? Mr. George Sokolsky, the late and volatile columnist, told me on one occasion that in 1935, after a series of psychologically ruinous encounters with his critics, he instructed his secretary never ever again to permit him to see a single newspaper, magazine, or letter which contained material in it unreasonably critical of himself. Sometimes, he chuckled, his directive resulted in a deskload of correspondence that looked like a pile of those indiscreet letters written by GIs to their sweethearts during the Second War, with gaping holes cut out by the censor’s scissors. But the arrangement secured Sokolsky’s serenity, and that is worth something, one supposes.
Indeed, I see Mr. Sokolsky’s point. However, pending the day when I adopt his recourse, I find it continuingly relevant, in a book on contemporary politics, to attempt to controvert controvertible misrepresentations, not so much because I hunger after retroactive vindications (though they are always satisfying) but because it is generally interesting, or ought to be, to know the extent to which that kind of thing does in fact go on in matters in which the public is concerned, and especially interesting to inquire (a) what is the current appetite for pursuing the facts in a controversy; (b) whether that appetite is stimulated by pressures that are inner- or other-directed; or, if a little of both, in what balance; (c) what kinds of pressure are routinely brought to effect clarification; and whether they tend to be efficacious or not; and (d) what is the fallout of a lackadaisical concern for the truth on the morale and the potency of the general will and on the practice of democracy.
I had an experience a couple of months before the beginning of the New York campaign from which I learned a great deal and should have learned a great deal more. I learned at first hand something about how politicians react to certain kinds of provocations; something about the inflammatory leverage of even a single newspaper; and a great deal about the general journalistic indifference that immediately descends on the discovery that, after all, there wasn’t any scandal there at all, and never mind the incidental victims of the flurry.
Once a year, in New York City, Catholic policemen gather, under the auspices of the Holy Name Society, at a Communion breakfast. The affair habitually brings together more policemen than any other occasion of the year—about 6,000 of them (roughly a quarter of the total force). I was invited to address the policemen at the breakfast of 1965.
The next day all hell broke loose. Newsworthy New Yorkers were suddenly demanding that Mayor Wagner, who had been present at the breakfast, rebuke the police force—“for cheering Buckley on Sunday” (I quote Roy Wilkins)—and that the Police Commissioner, Michael Murphy, resign—“for permitting a rabble-rousing right-wing extremist. . . to address the breakfast” (I. D. Robbins, president of the City Club, and a candidate for anybody’s nomination for Mayor).
There had been three reporters at the affair, one of whom, representing the New York Herald Tribune, decided to play up my address as a major story. The New York Times’ reporter was also there, and he filed a substantial, though by no means sensational, report which, reduced, occupied a routine paragraph or two in the early-bird City Edition. The night editor of the Times, spotting the sensational spread in the rival Tribune, was alarmed at the prospect of missing a big story and thereupon escalated the original version for the later and definitive editions of the Times, leaning in part on the notes that had been left by the Times reporter (who had left the building and was unavailable), in part on the Tribune account. The Times headline: “BUCKLEY PRAISES POLICE OF SELMA / HAILED BY 5,600 POLICE HERE AS HE CITES ‘RESTRAINT.’” The stories, appearing on Monday morning (April 6), created a first-rate uproar, and members of the political celebrity register lined up to record their denunciations. In the afternoon a Times reporter called me for a statement. I wrote out and telephoned back one hundred and fifty words, of which the Times published, the next morning, about one hundred, omitting two passages I would not myself have omitted if I had been invited to edit my own statement.22
The statement I wrote was as follows. The italicized passages were omitted: “I am shocked in turn at the ease with which a routine job of misrepresentation by the press of a public speech can cause distinguished public figures to believe the unbelievable, namely that at a Communion Breakfast sponsored by the Holy Name Society of the Catholic Church, bigotry was applauded. I did not on the occasion in question breathe a word of prejudice against any people. I spoke sympathetically of the plight of the Negroes in the South. I deplored the violence in the South and the attitude of lackadaisical white Southerners towards it. I did criticize the general tendency of some of the noisiest elements in our public life to jump to false and contumacious conclusions about policemen. The trigger-willingness, shown today, to impute to the police a sympathy with bigotry is exactly the kind of thing I had in mind.”
To my astonishment, by Tuesday morning the uproar, far from abating, increased. “PROTESTS POUR IN ON BUCKLEY SPEECH” (New York World-Telegram). “. . . The protests continued to pour in today—from the NAACP, CORE and a State Supreme Court Justice—deploring the inaction of Mayor Wagner and Police Commissioner Murphy in the face of William Buckley’s blast at civil rights demonstrators before an audience of 6,000 City policemen” (New York Post). “. . . Large disquieting issues are stirred by the ovation some 6,000 New York policemen accorded a defense of the Selma police force—and an attack on Martin Luther King—delivered by William Buckley, Jr., the noted thunderer of right-wing extremism. . . . The ordeals of police service in these times in no way justify the salvos of applause that greeted the impassioned apologia for the Selma possemen recited by Buckley [in his] spirited whitewash of Southern police terrorism” (New York Post, editorial).
Could it be that my talk had been recorded? I telephoned the good monsignor in charge of the breakfast, and indeed a tape existed; and the press assembled at noon to hear it. The paramount question, curiously, was less what I had said, than how the audience had responded. Was the Tribune correct in reporting that the police had laughed—and applauded—when I alluded to the death of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, the Detroit housewife who, one month earlier, had gone to Selma to join the demonstrators—and got killed. The roomful of reporters listened intently to the tape as it unwound. And then, a paragraph or two before the critical moment, the tape suddenly and mysteriously stopped. Neal Freeman, of the staff of National Review, bent over the recorder to find that the tape, having first stuck in the external pressure pads, was twined all over the entrails of the machine. We waited nervously while he fiddled with it. I could not escape the growing sense of skepticism in the crowded room. Had the critical few feet of tape—recording the policemen’s misbehavior in response to my own—been intentionally wiped out? Five, ten minutes went by while Freeman—and I—sweated. Finally a technician with one of the television crews volunteered his services. In a few minutes, the tape was going again. Sure enough, a half-minute or so of the speech had been—irretrievably—destroyed. But it was before the critical passage. The voice resumed:
. . . Mrs. Liuzzo of Detroit went down to Alabama to protest conditions there [was saying], conditions of injustice to Negroes and a general, lawless disregard of their rights and honor. It was generally conceded—most specifically conceded by the Governor of 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.”
2. The Public Figures
I sent a telegram to James Wechsler, chief editorial writer for the New York Post. I was especially cross with him because, I reasoned, he was both a professional newspaperman and an acquaintance, and should therefore have approached the Tribune story with skepticism: “I ASSUME YOU WILL APOLOGIZE IN TOMORROW’S EDITIONS.”
To which he replied in an editorial (April 8) entitled “We Herewith Extend a Non-Apology”: “William F. Buckley, Jr., has addressed an imperious telegram . . . demanding an apology. His eagerness to keep his name in the papers is understandable. [Note the implicit premise: rather than that one’s name should reappear in a newspaper, one should acquiesce in a published distortion of one’s views.] . . . There will of course be no apology here. . . . [Our] editorial was seemingly [sic] inaccurate only in stating that the police specifically applauded Buckley’s defense [sic] of the possemen in Selma. The tape does not confirm that. But the laughter and applause scattered throughout the speech and the ovation at the end surely confirm the sympathy of the audience with the doctrine [sic] Buckley was expounding.”
To Roy Wilkins, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, I wired: “I trust you will publicly withdraw your criticisms of the Mayor and of myself after reading my speech, which is on its way to you by messenger. If there is a sentence in it with which you disagree, I should be greatly surprised. I believe you yourself if you had been present would have applauded my remarks.”
Eight days later I had no direct reply; so I wrote again:
April 14, 1965
Dear Mr. Wilkins:
I have not had an acknowledgment of my telegram to you, sent on the 6th of April, asking you to read my speech and then reconsider your criticisms of it. However, last Sunday’s New York Times quotes “a spokesman for Roy Wilkins” as saying that you have read the speech and nevertheless do not withdraw your charges. Would you be so good as (a) to confirm whether or not this statement is true; and (b) if it is, would you be so kind as to indicate what passages in the speech justified the criticisms you made public?
Mr. Wilkins finally responded:
April 19, 1965
Dear Mr. Buckley:
It was thoughtful of you to send me a full copy of your speech of April 4, 1965, to the Holy Name Society breakfast of the New York Police Department and I appreciated having the complete text before me. Only a murderous schedule which left me free only over the Easter weekend has delayed my written thanks until this late date.
I am afraid that from my particular point of vantage and of special interest I see more cause for alarm in the complete text than I could possibly see in the disputed frequency and exact location of the applause which greeted portions of the speech.
Enclosed is a reproduction of a column of comment I wrote for the New York Amsterdam News hard on deadline time. This fact plus the format of the column and its word limit precluded a full analysis.
I have never been one to discount your talents in putting an idea on paper and in employing, in the majority of cases, precisely the language required to evoke the response you seek, despite my disagreement with many of your theses.
In the Holy Name speech you were near your conservative best, and as excellent, ironically (to you), as is the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in some of his expositions.
The underlying theme that the wrong-doers are now top-dog and the defenders of law and order are forced to defend themselves, their faith and their deeds, while a popular one bolstered by many an appeal to unthinking emotion, is not tenable. Equating silent, orderly immobility, rooted in the certainty of the validity of the right of protest, with active anti-social acts such as robbery, assault and overt disorderly conduct is no service to the problem facing the Negro minority, the police and the nation.
This reasoning and its accompanying oratory serve the cause, not of conservatism, but of repression and retrogression. It is yet another stand of the Haves against the increasingly frequent and increasingly diversified sallies of the Have Nots. When the latter are of a different color the exhortations against change are even more effective than exhortations against dat ole debbil Communism.
Thank you again for sending me the text.
Very sincerely yours,
Roy Wilkins
Executive Director
All very interesting. But here is what Roy Wilkins had been quoted in the press as telegraphing Mr. Wagner: “approval . . . by New York City police of speech by William F. Buckley, Jr., who condemned peaceful demonstrators and praised the tear gas and club attacks on them by Selma police demands rebuke by you” (Tribune, April 6).
Jackie Robinson, the former baseball player and now banker and polemicist-about-town, had been quoted by the newspapers as saying: “ . . . the Mayor’s failure to respond to the attack on the civil rights movement constitutes a tremendous injustice to what is going on. . . . [The Mayor should] launch an immediate inquiry into the number of policemen in New York who belong to the John Birch Society” (World-Telegram, April 5). It was especially piquant, under the circumstances, to receive from him, hard on the heels of his statement, a telegraphed invitation to appear on his new television program:
Dear Sir:
Your statements before the Holy Name Society as reported in today’s New York Herald Tribune upholding the gestapo-like troops of little Governor Wallace are not surprising considering the kind of philosophy that you have constantly projected. It’s my belief that this philosophy poses a distinct threat to our democracy. On April 25 I begin a television show on the new UHF Channel 47. I challenge you to appear with me on that date to debate the position which you have taken and request that you have your representative contact my producer, Alfred Duckett, at LO 3-7154 to set up ground rules and arrangements.
Sincerely yours,
Jackie Robinson
I replied: “I shall not appear on your program until you have publicly apologized to me and to the police for your misrepresentations.”
Whereupon, the following day from Mr. Robinson:
If, as you claim, there are misrepresentations, are you again accusing the press of misquoting you, as you constantly said they misquoted Goldwater? You state you will not appear on my program “until I publicly apologize.” As you probably very well know, this means you do not ever expect to appear on the program.
I tried, to be sure exasperatedly, one more time:
Dear Mr. Robinson:
Why don’t you stop moralizing long enough to read my speech—or have it read to you—and then conclude whether or not I was misrepresented?
To which a reply which I leave it to the cryptographers to decipher, and reproduce here only to stress one of the points of this excursion, namely the difficulty—for reasons I shall be touching on—of persuading any living human being to rue, publicly or even privately, a misrepresentation to which he has become committed:
Dear Mr. Buckley:
I would like very much to see your position, you were as eloquent as ever in defending that position on Bary Farbus’ [sic] program. I find it most difficult to change, for all I said, I expect this from William Buckley. Your attitude regarding Mrs. Liuzzo, is most disturbing. I read in it that her having a Negro on the front seat is a provocation that you understand. Your speech as I see it is cleverly written to appeal to all the prejudices that were just below the surface in the last [Goldwater] campaign. I will digest it further and give you a more detailed personal analysis later. [I still await it.] However Mr. Buckley, I find it most interesting that Mayor Wagner publicly repudiated your speech.
I felt more optimistic about getting justice from Judge Samuel F. Hofstadter of the Supreme Court of New York City.
I wired him: “I regret that the misrepresentations of a press story caused you to reach most injudicious conclusions about what I said. Far from condoning police excesses in Selma I criticized them, praising only the restraint that preceded the violence. A copy of my full text is on its way to you by messenger. I am confident that you will agree with every line in it and would yourself have applauded it66 if you had been at the function. I believe you owe the Mayor an apology.”
This was not merely impudence: Judge Hofstadter has often been quoted as deploring the relative concern for the criminal, rather than the victim, which was the principal focus of my talk.
No answer.
I tried again on April 14, in a registered letter.
Whereupon a reply:
Dear Mr. Buckley:
This is to acknowledge your courteous letter. I thought your telegram rather peremptory and its suggestions ill-founded. In any event I could see no useful purpose in prolonging the incident, which I regarded as closed. That seems to be Commissioner Murphy’s idea, too. He has not responded to my telegram. As one with large experience in public affairs and exchanges, you will recognize this is a not unusual course.
God’s supreme gift to man is speech. Its anatomy does not lend itself to such dissection as you now suggest—after the event. Utterance must be heard as well as read whole: in complete context, background and occasion, and in intent and mood—not only of speaker, but audience—for it is not a unilateral episode.
My telegram, [quoted in the press] too, must be read entire, in context. Its essential thrust was protest against silence of city officials at an outbreak by public servants which, as described in the Press, betokened a grave deterioration in community relations.
Perhaps when we chance to meet some time the discussion can be carried forward if you think it helpful.
Faithfully yours,
Samuel H. Hofstadter
Judge Hofstadter’s telegram to the Police Commissioner, as quoted in the New York Post, April 6, had said: “5,600 members of the force cheered an attack on national civil rights leaders that would have done credit to the most rabid race-baiters.”
3. Mayor Wagner
Wagner’s behavior was a revelation. If an attempt to understand it is based on a priori grounds, one is absolutely baffled. Suppose he had said on Monday to the press: “Look, boys, if Buckley had said what he was reported to have said in the way he was reported to have said it—I’d have walked out of the room there and then. Why don’t you go get a text of his speech, or listen to the tape recording—and stop bothering me?”
It is very hard for someone outside politics to comprehend why this simple course was not the one he took. It required an act of heroic intellectual discipline to force myself to reason a posteriori, from the fact of what he did say, on back to the presumptive political wisdom of it. I did not, in the course of the forthcoming campaign, learn anything of more striking methodological significance than that politicians’ behavior should, as a general rule, be examined in that way. This is, I believe, to say something more than the truism that that which works, works. It is to ask why it is that that which works, works. The process requires, to begin with, an act of faith—in this instance, that Robert Wagner knows New York and knows politics far better than the little Platonists who, in that crowded room, fussed with the tape recorder, thinking to draw the curtain on absolute truth, and to induce universal agreement on it. Assuming the political competence of Mr. Wagner—which his record enjoins—productive reasoning begins, for the amateur, not with what he should have done, but with what he did; and what he did was subtly to underwrite the distorted newspaper accounts.
“Why?” is the next question; to which the necessary answer, barring tangential motives of unscientific bearing, is—because to do so made good politics. But why would it make for good politics to endorse the impression that (a) Mayor Wagner permitted himself to sit through a racist and brutal speech without protest, either on the spot or later in the day to the press; (b) the New York City police force is latently sympathetic with the brutality shown under stress by the Selma police force; and (c) the New York police force, or at least the Catholic—i.e., Irish and Italian—members of it, are latently anti-Negro?
Consider, first, the consequences of alternative reactions. Mayor Wagner could not, while I was speaking, very well have got up and left the Ballroom—for several reasons. The first (a) is that his act would have struck the audience, unaware of anything exceptionable in the address itself, as outrageous. The Mayor would have offended not only the police but the surrounding Catholic dignitaries, clerical and nonclerical. (b) So drastic an action would have been, for Mr. Wagner, totally out of style. He is not the kind of man who is given to instant demonstrations. (c) If he had subsequently denounced the speech, he’d have run, in diluted form to be sure, something of the risk of having done (a); the police would have resented his action as an act of demagogy and disloyalty.
He avoided this risk by divulging at a news conference April 6, after great pressure had been put on him for comment, that he disagreed “fundamentally with Mr. Buckley’s views,” and then with an indirect disavowal of the police: “I cannot control, and should not control the off-duty reaction of any group.” What did he accomplish? On one hand, he pleased those who were looking for a disavowal but, accustomed to the guarded nature of the Mayor’s political rhetoric, didn’t even hope for anything more categorical; on the other hand he seemed somehow to be saying to the police that he would never forsake their right to their own points of view.
But Wagner accomplished more than just this. He sustained a popular demonology. A primary obligation of a successful politician, I meditated, is to cherish and preserve all the reassuring demonologies. Now this is a tricky business, as this episode suggests: because the art, as practiced with the highest finesse, requires the preservation of a demonology but great vagueness concerning the identification of the demons. If Wagner had flatly identified the police as demons, he’d have risked too much by far, counting in not only the policemen’s votes, but their admirers’. Sometimes the politician will want to directly identify the demons, in which case the accusations are direct in reference, and unmeeching in tone. Franklin Roosevelt, even while specializing in the construction of coalitions, found it useful directly and provocatively to alienate the Wall Street community, which he hobgoblinized with relish, quite correctly calculating that for every banker’s vote he thereby lost, he won a hundred nonbankers’. Dwight Eisenhower rang down his thunder on a class less sharply identified, but nevertheless generally identifiable—the Washington bureaucratic jobholders, those “rascals” who needed “throwing out.” And Joe McCarthy inveighed against a group numerically insignificant and one stage further removed from instant identification, the “pro-Communists and the striped-pants diplomats.” Suppose that Franklin Roosevelt had announced that Wall Street was finally cleansed, and that therefore there was no longer any need to regard with suspicion the machinations of the big business community. Imagine if General Eisenhower had at some point in his campaign blurted out that, on sober reflection, he had not found enough rascals in Washington to warrant a national effort at uprooting them. Or if Senator McCarthy had announced his conclusion that the fellow travelers were of minor consequence, not worth a supererogatory persecution. The sense of deprivation by the followers of Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and McCarthy would have been acute.
Wagner knew in 1965, even as John Lindsay came to know, that there are imagined evils the dissipation of which is not merely not a public duty, but more nearly a public anti-duty. It would have been almost antireligious, it being the living faith of many of Mr. Wagner’s followers that the police are racist, to shatter the revelation that the police had finally, en bloc, betrayed their anti-Negro prejudices.
It was terribly clear from the visceral reactions of such people as Jackie Robinson that thousands upon thousands of people were taking a very special, even an acute, pleasure, from believing that a sudden flash of light had exposed the lineaments of the wolf—and how especially satisfying that it had been spotted under the ironic auspices of a Communion breakfast of the Holy Name Society! “I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time,” says the character in The Importance of Being Earnest. “That would be hypocrisy.” In due course I learned that it was emotionally necessary that Mr. Lindsay and, later, poor Mr. Beame, should denounce the conservatives as racists and rabble-rousers and hate merchants. They owed it to their public, even as the minister of religion owes it to his, to enjoin against the wiles of the devil. The devil, I happen to believe, exists. And many people believe that conservatives are basically racist and misanthropic: so never mind, the politician reasons, whether the devil exists, take advantage of him. If necessary, give him flesh.
It is always interesting to speculate on whether the care and feeding of hobgoblins is altogether cynical, whether the politicians come to believe their own myths. I can very well imagine Jackie Robinson at a cocktail party asking Wagner, “Why didn’t you do something about that vicious, racist address?” How would Wagner—the politician—have responded? I can less easily imagine the question being raised with Wagner by, say, Roy Wilkins; or by Mr. Justice Samuel Hofstadter (“Are you nuts, Sam?” would probably have been the response). There isn’t much point in speculating on Wagner’s subjective evaluation of a speech the misimpression of which he intentionally ratified. He would not be the first cynic to reach high office, nor his office the highest ever occupied by a cynic, however amiable. I recall an anecdote told me by Mr. Herbert Hoover a few years ago. He began it by saying how good a friend he was of Mr. Harry Truman and how well they had got on together during the period after the Second World War, when Hoover consented to head the commission on the operations of government. Then one day, in October 1948, while Truman was campaigning feverishly for re-election, Hoover picked up the morning paper and read that the evening before, in Boston, Truman had denounced the Republican Party as desiring to reintroduce the age of Hoover, defined as the exploitation of the poor for the benefit of the greedy rich. “I vowed,” Hoover told me, “never to speak to Truman again.” But when, a few months after his election, Truman asked Hoover to drop in at the White House on an urgent matter, “I couldn’t, of course, refuse a summons from the President of the United States. But I was determined to tell him off before we got down to business, and I did: ‘Mr. President,’ I said, ‘the remarks you made about me in Boston were as dirty and unforgivable as any I ever heard in a lifetime of politics.’ ‘I couldn’t agree with you more,’ Truman replied affably. ‘When I came to that paragraph in my speech, I almost didn’t read it.’”
Concerning the press, I learned at first hand not only the obvious lesson, that corrections very seldom catch up with distortions, but several other things besides. One of them is that, other than on the obvious occasions, one cannot know when a news story is going to be midwived by an enterprising reporter. I had expected no coverage at all, indeed I had completed the preparation of my talk late the previous night and did not even bother to make arrangements to have it retyped and reproduced. In the unlikely event that a reporter should want a copy, we could easily go off somewhere and Xerox a copy or two direct from my own manuscript—the time would be noon Sunday, and there would be no immediate pressure from deadlines.
No reporter asked for a copy, nor, as a matter of fact, approached me in any way. It had never at that point crossed my mind to enter politics, so that it wasn’t a matter of cautionary coverage that brought the press there. The Mayor and the Police Commissioner, after all, were present, and each of them spoke briefly, and just conceivably the Mayor would say something electric—this was to be a campaign year.
As it happened, the affair did turn out to be news. But I didn’t make the news because of what I had said, nor the policemen because of how they acted: a single reporter made the news. What I said, if it had been literally transcribed in a news story, would I think have been very interesting indeed—obviously one finds one’s own analyses interesting: but it would not have been news, it would have been commentary. What I said in that talk I could not myself digest into two paragraphs, so that if a reporter felt the obligation to report on my part in the affair, he’d have done what so often is done, which is merely to take one or two statements from the speech, decide that they should be those that are reproduced, and file the story.
But here a reporter had taken words not quite my own; failed to qualify them as I had qualified them; and—an infinitely adaptable resource at the disposal of any reporter who lacks either skill or conscience—there is the audience. The size, nature, and behavior of an audience are the most malleable factors in a newspaper story, and I saw them shaped time and again during the campaign. One can always produce, in self-defense, a copy of one’s speech. But one cannot produce the audience—for instance to establish that it was not true that it was rowdy; or that it was true that it was rowdy; or that it was not true that there wasn’t a single Negro in it, or the opposite; or that it wasn’t composed primarily of people in their late sixties, or of children in their early teens; to ascertain whether or not someone was carrying a placard suggesting that John Lindsay was a Communist, or whether someone else was there carrying one suggesting that Buckley was a Fascist.
Audience reaction can be ascertained through a tape, but that is a pretty clumsy business. To prove that there was silence requires the use of an extra-literary dimension—the use of the ear; and such awkward and humiliating arrangements as calling in a group of witnesses, and playing back the tape. It is risky at best. For one thing a tape may not have been made; for another, newspapers simply aren’t as a general rule interested in workaday historical revisionism. So that the mere process of self-defense against a press which manipulates the audience factor is at worst impossible, at best terribly clumsy. Yet consider, remaining with the present example, the impression that can be conveyed by the journalist’s brush:
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.
Now the exact words are not mine, nor is the emphasis the emphasis I made; but that much, at least, is correctible by the release of the text, though to be sure only effectively so depending on one’s access to those who read the original misrepresentation, and that of course is virtually impossible to achieve. We have seen that by good luck a tape recorder was rolling, and the press did turn out to hear the silence that didn’t rock the ballroom at this point in the address. But, finally, how could I prove that I didn’t smile out at the crowd? The answer of course is that I couldn’t; can’t. In fact I didn’t smile—at a professional level because at that point in my text, in heat after an elusive point, I needed to generate a fierce concentration of the kind that induces an audience to follow closely an intricate analysis. A smile would snap the mood. And, of course, because to have smiled at the moment would have been humanly, aesthetically, and emotionally unthinkable. In tense situations, unmonitored by television, a single reporter has the same power to create an image of his own choosing that a sculptor has sitting in front of a lump of clay.
A week or so after the affair, I appeared before a seminar of the Columbia School of Journalism, and in that bright company speculated on the theme that however you dot your i’s or cross your t’s, it may in fact be that to bring up a particular subject before a particular audience results in a dialectic whose meaning is a function of time and place. I remembered that a year ago Senator Goldwater had made his famous remark about atomic defoliation of the forests in Vietnam. The reporter had asked what is to be done in South Vietnam about the Communists’ supply lines, which move under cover of the forests and the jungles. Goldwater had answered: “There have been several suggestions made. I don’t think we would use any of them. But the defoliation of the forest by low-yield atomic weapons could well be done. When you remove the foliage you remove the cover.” Headlines. New York Herald Tribune: “GOLDWATER’S NUCLEAR PLAN TO WIN VIET.” New York Times: “GOLDWATER URGES NEW VIETNAM AID: WOULD USE ATOMIC WEAPONS TO CLEAR RED SUPPLY LINES.” Washington Post: “A-ATTACK ON VIET JUNGLE PROPOSED BY GOLDWATER.” Chicago Tribune: “GOLDWATER PROPOSES ATOMIC FIGHT IN ASIA.”
I remember, at the time, calling these extraordinary misrepresentations to the attention of a reporter from The New York Times, who expressed himself as outraged, no doubt sincerely, that this should have happened. He went on to track down a sensationalized dispatch from the Associated Press as having been originally at fault.
Before a blue-ribbon jury composed, say, of professors from the Columbia School of Journalism (the seminar was gratifyingly impressed by the experience I related), a Goldwater who had done no more than to speculate on hypothetical means by which to denude North Vietnamese supply lines might hope to be thoroughly exonerated from responsibility for such headlines as reported on what he had allegedly recommended: and the offending reporter or reporters, the wire services, and the newspapers might be fastidiously censured on an inside page in the school’s fortnightly bulletin. That kind of justification is, of course, immaterial in politics; moreover, the case might even be made that it is immaterial intellectually, on the grounds that, at least in nonacademic circumstances, political speculation is necessarily framed by the values that contemporary history composes. So that any distinction-making, however interesting or relevant sub specie aeternitatis, simply ought not to be attempted in addressing, for instance, six thousand policemen three weeks after the horrors of Selma, Alabama, if the purpose is to point out that the situation in Selma was complicated. The audience itself, with the benefit of the full context of the analysis, might very well understand. But there are reporters present, one of whom is likely to assume the position of Defender of the People’s Prejudices and construct his story on the basis of a putative irreverence to the people’s passions. It may very well be that constant attention needs, in politics, to be given less to the nature of what one has to say than to the nature of the audience before which one speaks it, and the surrounding order of prejudices. If the intellectuals of a community were poised to correct blatant misimpressions, that would be one thing. They aren’t. Politically active people must learn this; and those who believe that distinctions are always worth making, the more so the more impatient the public mood as regards them, should worry a little more than they apparently do about the difficulty of making such distinctions—other than, say, in the cozy surroundings of a book, or an academic quarterly, or a seminar at Columbia.
The press, I noticed, is not greatly concerned with self-discipline. For reasons perfectly understandable in commercial terms, the press cares about the scandal, much less about subsequent developments tending to dissipate the scandal—less, in a word, about exact history, exactly understood. Exact history, it might be maintained, isn’t necessarily what was said at a particular situation, but what subjects were treated, and how the speaker angled in on them, and how the audience reacted to what he said. It remains generally true, I was to find, that politicians tend to say nothing very much, as a general rule, primarily because they desire to say nothing very much. But it is also true that the cautious politician, if he desires to say something hazardous, had better come prepared with tape recorders, steno-typists, and, ideally, motion picture cameramen, trained on himself and on the audience. Even then, there is a risk: Who can be persuaded to come to the grand opening—and closing—of a cinemascopic version of what really did happen when the gamier story of what didn’t happen is already a few days old and, in any case, ever so very much more interesting?
1. I remember, as a very young (nineteen) second lieutenant in the army, being approached for advice by a private in his early thirties who told me his wife was in Reno suing him for divorce, which he was quite prepared to give her, but that he wondered whether her affidavit, to which he had been asked to acquiesce, charging him with afflicting extreme mental cruelty upon her, wouldn’t forever stigmatize him—unfairly, inasmuch as it simply wasn’t true. I counseled him, from the depths of my experience, never ever to yield, not under any circumstances to sign any such waiver. That evening I mentioned the episode to my uncle, a retired lawyer of bellicose personal rectitude, who gently informed me that my advice had been mistaken, that the adversary rhetoric of divorce proceedings meant nothing, absolutely nothing at all. I was shattered, and only wish that, in my disillusion, I had, while I was at it, asked him about the adversary language of nonmarital polemics.
2. The statement I wrote was as follows. The italicized passages were omitted: “I am shocked in turn at the ease with which a routine job of misrepresentation by the press of a public speech can cause distinguished public figures to believe the unbelievable, namely that at a Communion Breakfast sponsored by the Holy Name Society of the Catholic Church, bigotry was applauded. I did not on the occasion in question breathe a word of prejudice against any people. I spoke sympathetically of the plight of the Negroes in the South. I deplored the violence in the South and the attitude of lackadaisical white Southerners towards it. I did criticize the general tendency of some of the noisiest elements in our public life to jump to false and contumacious conclusions about policemen. The trigger-willingness, shown today, to impute to the police a sympathy with bigotry is exactly the kind of thing I had in mind.”
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. This was not merely impudence: Judge Hofstadter has often been quoted as deploring the relative concern for the criminal, rather than the victim, which was the principal focus of my talk.
