Miles Gone By

Not even slow savoring could prevent getting to the end of “Miles Gone By” by William F Buckley. Very hard to imagine a life more blessed than his, and hard to picture someone making better use of that blessing than WFB. Intelligence, faith, fearlessness, great family, wealth, super education, exciting and rewarding work, great experiences in life, and the list just goes on and on.

Born to privilege, his youth was spent in Mexico, Paris, England, and much at a mansion in Connecticut called “Great Elm”. By virtue of time spent in his youth, he always spoke fluent Spanish and French as well as English, with a good deal of Latin and German thrown in from his education. Lots of horseback riding, including being in events at Rhinebeck, NY, just north of Hyde Park, where the box alongside his fathers, was that of FDR. Much sailing as a young man, a passion that he never gave up.

He did prep school at St Johns, Beaumont, in Windsor England … the very same Windsor where the name “Windsor Castle” comes from. His father took him to the airport to watch the plane of Neville Chamberlain land when he returned from negotiations with Hitler to announce “peace in our time”.

He was in the military service stateside towards the end of the War, and then on to Yale, graduating in 1950, as the class orator, I suspect with some level of honor.

 He wasn’t all business, he learned to fly in college and had a number of misadventures in airplanes, including deciding after only a couple of flights with the instructor that he would let a friend that had been a pilot in the war fly himself to Logan airport in Boston, and WFB would just fly the plane back, his first solo! The trip in was uneventful, but Buckley didn’t know how to use the radio, so took off without telling the tower, had navigational difficulties, and night was falling too fast, so he luckily found an airport, made his first solo landing and hitchhiked back to Yale. The kind of foolish and fearless personality that would perform a stunt like that often ends up dead, but sometimes they end up famous.

His first book at age 26 was “God and Man At Yale”, and it caused a huge stir. It was the first book to explicitly make that charge that higher education in the US had become anti-Christian, anti-Capitalist, and in many cases Anti-American. Leading edge thought in those days. The formulation; “I believe that the duel between Christianity and Atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle produced on another level.” is a brilliant summary of a lot of what has happened in America and the world since the 50’s.

His list of friends, associates, acquaintances is utterly amazing. Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, Whittaker Chambers, Roger Moore, John Kenneth Galbraith, Milton Friedman (nice pair of economists there), Claire Booth Luce, Alstair Cooke, Princess Grace, Vladimir Horowitz, Tom Wolfe, Barry Goldwater, Walter Cronkite, and on and on.

More than any other conservative of the era 1960-1980+, he was THE intellectual powerhouse of the movement, National Review was the publication of record, and “Firing Line” was the ONLY place where one could learn that there were at least one other side to most things presented in the media on TV. Liberals often loved to hate him, but they could not ignore the force of his intellect. He points out in one place, relative to his being in debates when running for Mayor of NYC; “It was widely speculated that I had an advantage, having in pursuit of unpopular ideas been frequently been required to face the opposition. I suspect-and admission against personal interest-that those points I have scored are primarily on account of their own cogency, rather than on account of any personal adeptness at formulating them.”

While he isn’t known as a modest man, in this case he is being a bit too modest, but he has a point as well. Since liberalism remains the dominate thinking in the mass media, not very many liberals have a solid understanding of how to defend their points. Their ideas are presented as the "universal"  ideas, why do they need to be defended? What WFB understood, and was able to articulate well is that the conservative position attempts very strongly to be CONSISTENT. Consistency means that there is a lot less to learn. 

Liberals need to recall that an unborn child has no right to any sort of life, but a Snail Darter in a stream somewhere has nearly unlimited rights to stop all manner of development. Kosovo is a great place to go to war without UN backing, Iraq, a few miles down the road is a TERRIBLE place to go to war without UN backing … oh, and by the way, genocide is an excellent justification in Kosovo, but it is a “who cares” in Iraq. It could go on for pages, but the point is when most of your positions are made up out of feelings, the phase of the moon, and political considerations on a given day, keeping it all straight can get very difficult. The best strategy is to curl your lip and look like you are going to cry like Bill Clinton. 

From the right though, one can lean back in their chair and pounce on the liberals like the intellectual tiger that was Buckley, and is not likely to be soon duplicated.

While he had a huge positive impact on history, the point that strikes me the most from the book is the intellect, the wit, the faith, and the pure joy of his life. His short essay on a pilgrimage to Lourdes is alone worth the price of admission. His experiences at sea, his love of sailing, boats, navigation, skiing, wines, racing at sea, and his trip to the Titanic aboard the Nautile are all captivating and so well written. He recounts how he had been told that; “Offshore yacht racing is like standing in an ice cold shower tearing up thousand dollar bills”.

I write this on a day when one of the Walton heirs, number seven richest in the world, died in an ultra light aircraft near Jackson Wyoming. Many of the wealthy realize that challenge, risk, and loss of physical comfort are an unavoidable part of living a worthwhile life. You can’t really buy the skill to compete in an off shore yacht race, and you certainly can’t buy the weather.

I’m very glad I bought a high quality hardcover of this one. I hope to pull it down off the shelves and give it a read once every decade or so as long as I’m around!