Overdrive (2 page)

Well, Christo is in Washington now, and so I pick up his telephone when it rings. Half the time I serve as his social secretary ("No, Christopher isn't here, he is in Washington; would you like his telephone number?"). The rest of the time I find myself responding to commercial calls, because Christopher's number is listed, mine isn't. Those conversations go, typically:

"Mr. Buckley?"

"Yes."

"Mr. Buckley, we have a special offer of
Time
magazine, for thirteen weeks, for only seven dollars and twenty-five cents."

Calls such as these are difficult because the process of self-extrication is complicated. I can't now say, "I'm not Mr. Buckley." And to say, "I am Mr. Buckley's father" invites informality. Unlike Waugh, who wrote that he understands formality and understands intimacy, but can't stand informality, I like informality; but not when it is conducive to conversation I wish to avoid. I can't say I
already
have two subscriptions to
Time
magazine, which is the truth, because that invites the questioner to ask how is it that her records show me delinquent? So I say something about having a subscription that goes to the office, thanks very much, and hang up. They are trained not to be too persevering. I know, because Jim McFadden, keeper of all the secrets at
National Review
, once told me he uses the system; for all I know, the same girls.

The second telephone has three lines. One of them I think of as my wife's telephone. The light is regularly lit, as her friends have in common not only their kindness, but their loquacity. A second line we call "Eudosia's phone" after our Cuban cook, retired after twenty-five years with us. The third is a tie line to my office in New York, and when that indicator is depressed, the telephone operator at my office answers, and puts me through to whomever.

The desk itself is decrepit in appearance, but superbly shaped. Back in 1951 everything in Mexico was cheap, and I had this huge, indulgent desk constructed for a few hundred dollars. It resembles in shape a bow, and I sit where the arrow would cock, with plenty of room to my right, and to my left, enough room for as many as three people to occupy it simultaneously. When I went to Mexico, it was for the CIA. The rules are that if you resign your post in less than one year, you must reimburse the government the cost of having shipped your household goods abroad. If you stay one year, you need not reimburse the outbound shipping costs, but you must pay the cost of returning your goods to the United States. If you stay two years or more, you can claim the cost of shipping your household goods both ways.

I stayed less than one year, as it happened; but I made an elementary deduction, namely that the customs charge on the furniture I acquired in Mexico was legally subtractable from the total sum due. Why? Because while in Mexico I was (however secretly) working for the government of the United States, and household goods purchased in connection with government duty performed abroad are not taxed on returning home. But as a deep-cover agent I could not reveal to the customs official that I was properly immune from customs duties. So I paid customs. I then took the figure—it was approximately five hundred dollars —and subtracted it from the total owed to the CIA, making out (as instructed to do) a personal check to an anonymous person residing at some address or other in Washington. I thought this not only just, but resourceful.

A few weeks later, my secretary told me that downstairs to see me was a gentleman who identified himself as an old friend from Yale, Robert Lounsbury. And indeed it was he.

Lounsbury, a tall, talented student at the law school while I was an undergraduate, had, for reasons I've forgotten, learned fluent Spanish as a child, as had I. So acute had been the shortage of Spanish teachers in the fall of 1946, and so inflated the student demand for instruction in the language, that Yale had had to take three students—one law student (Lounsbury), and two undergraduates (me and an American raised in Argentina)—and admit them to the faculty. So that Bob Lounsbury, who lived with his wife and child in a little house near the law school, and I met daily in adjacent classrooms and became close friends. (I never knew a man who took more voluptuous pleasure from opera recordings.) Lounsbury, I also remembered, had caused a slight ruffle in official Yale during my junior year, because one of his students was Levi Jackson, the amiable and formidable black captain of the football team. Ten days or so before the Yale-Princeton game, Lounsbury grabbed me as we were both leaving our classrooms and gestured me to the end of the room, where he triumphantly produced from his briefcase two letters. The first, addressed to him, was written by the Director of Athletics, and said (I quote from memory): "Dear Mr. Lounsbury: I note that Mr. Levi Jackson is having difficulty with Spanish. The rules of the College automatically place on probation, forbidding extracurricular activity to, any student who fails a subject in the midterm exam. The midterm comes one week before the Yale-Princeton Game. I trust Mr. Jackson will have no problem in this regard. Yours, (etc.)." A huge smile on his face, Lounsbury then gave me his freshly typed answer, which he was about to drop in the post office:
^;
'To the Director of Athletics, Yale University. Dear Mr. Kiphuth: I am sorry to say that the probability is
very
high that indeed Mr. Levi Jackson will have a considerable academic problem before the Yale-Princeton game. Sincerely, Robert H. Lounsbury, Princeton 1943." He howled as he licked the envelope. But Bob was good-natured; Levi played in the game. And Yale lost.

After a few minutes Bob revealed he was here on official business—that he was an agent of the CIA, and had been instructed to arbitrate the financial differences between me and the United States Government. I was genuinely astonished that Bob was a spook (Lounsbury, I had felt sure, was headed right to a senior law firm), but even a short period in the CIA prepares you not ever to be astonished for long. I appealed to Lounsbury, honors graduate of the Yale Law School: Had not the identical government that had taken five hundred dollars from me in customs duties also immunized from customs duties all government employees stationed abroad? Hadn't I therefore forfeited that five hundred dollars only because I had kept silent, as a government agency had pledged me to do, my reason for being in Mexico? Bob agreed that the judicial poetry was all on my side, but said that the books simply made no provision for what I had done. He smiled: Would I agree to pay two hundred dollars? I agreed: provided it was put down as a gift from me to Uncle Sam, so that I could reserve the satisfaction of having won the juridical point. Again he smiled, said nothing, and I gave him a check made out to cash for two hundred dollars.

I never, I recently explained to someone, revealed the secret of my former employment until I was blown—by William Sloane Coffin, Jr. It was Watergate-time and for some reason he and I found ourselves at opposite ends of a telephone line. At the end of the business he was calling me about he told me that while he had served as chaplain at Williams College no doubt I would be pleased to learn that he had taught ethics to Jeb Magruder, one of the White House people freshly sentenced for conspiracy to obstruct justice and defraud the United States. It was public knowledge that Coffin had himself been a member of the CIA before going to Yale, so I blurted out, "And
you
will no doubt be pleased to learn that my superior in the CIA was Howard Hunt." We cackled—but he indiscreetly (on the other hand, does it really matter, at this remove?) used the information at a public meeting, and my (and the government's) twenty-year-old secret was out. Poor Bob Lounsbury, who had become moderately prominent in Democratic-intellectual affairs in New York, committed suicide about ten years ago. I don't know why, but happily assume his tragedy was unrelated to any contrition felt for what he had done, or almost done, to Levi Jackson, and to the Director of Yale Athletics.

In the drawers of this desk is an accumulation, twenty-five years of assorted matter, but I know where the paper clips are and, indeed, the loaded pistol. (I loaded it after my friend the Columbia University philosophy professor Charles Frankel and his wife were shot at night, in their country home, a few years back.) The office has two armchairs, one of them folding out into a cot of sorts, good for a catnap. The walls are packed with books, research materials, and photographs. Most of the surface of the table is piled high with papers and the usual paraphernalia— dictating machines, reference books, a large Royal standard typewriter, purchased at Yale when I was a freshman and in perfect operating condition. I am content here, and productive.

The car, coming down the drive, has passed my window: Jerry has come for me. I look at my watch. No problem; I will be in New York easily by three. My column has been phoned in, and I have written that morning the promised piece for
TV Guide
on "memorable guests of 'Firing Line.' " ("The most effective guests on 'Firing Line' are those who talk, listen, and who plead seductively, masters of their argument, serene in their convictions. The most effective guests are not, however, always the most memorable.") I wrote of guests who had appeared ten years earlier, in 1971. Of Huey Newton (as in "Free Huey") who had flummoxed me by an absolutely perfected double-talk,
absolutely
inscrutable as to meaning. Of Bernadette Devlin, the young Ulster militant whom
I
had flummoxed by instinctively lighting her cigarette halfway through the show, causing her inadvertently to say "Oh, thanks very much"—thus shattering her carefully cultivated bellicose front. (Afterward she told me heatedly that lighting her cigarette was a typical act of male chauvinism.) Of Harold Macmillan who, having reached the sixteenth century in the course of making a historical
tour d'horizon
, suddenly said, "Oh, isn't this program over yet?" And of Jimmy Hoffa, who told me how necessary it was to be tough in this world if one wanted to survive; soon after, disappearing below some cement somewhere.

Jerry was back at the garage within ten minutes, with Rebeca and Olga, respectively a solicitous and fussy Guatemalan and an otherworldly and gay-spirited Ecuadorian, who have been with us for a number of years. Neither speaks English, both are infinitely good-natured. And of course my beautiful old pooch Rowley, who had already made one round trip in his beloved car, Jerry having driven Pat to the city earlier, while I stayed behind to write and attend to correspondence. Jerry Garvey is a huge man who, while a firefighter, ran a driver service when off duty, his reserves of energy being inexhaustible, even as his competence is complete in all but mechanical matters: He shares my difficulty in distinguishing between pliers and tweezers.

When Jerry was on duty in the Fire Department Tom, also a fireman, would substitute for him, it having been contrived that Tom and Jerry would never simultaneously be on duty at that fire station. Jerry elected to retire from the service after twenty years, and now drives full time for me. In fifteen years I have never heard him complain, not even about his brain-damaged but apparently contented daughter, whom he permits to sit with him in the front seat, but only on weekends, and when the car is empty, or when I alone occupy it.

It is a large car. I remember having no exact figure in mind when the manager of the garage in Texarkana asked me how long I wanted it, so I simply extended my legs from the desk chair I was sitting in and suggested it be two feet longer than the current standard model. What happened was that three years ago, when it came time to turn in my previous car, which had done over 150,000 miles, the Cadillac people had come up with an austerity-model limousine, fit for two short people, preferably to ride to a funeral in. The dividing glass between driver and driven was not automatic, there was no separate control for heat or air conditioning in the back, and the jump seats admitted only two, because now the axle was raised a good six inches, making it impossible to furnish uninterrupted seat space stretching across the middle (all these features were Cadillac's accommodation to the fuel economies specified by Congress). This simply would not do: I use the car constantly, require the room, privacy, and my own temperature gauge, else I'd have to live off Jerry's, and how could that air, cold or hot, find its way aft with the partition closed, which is how I usually keep it, so that Jerry can listen to the radio, while I do my telephoning or dictation?

There was, as usual, a market solution. You go out (this was in 1978) and buy a plain old Cadillac. You deliver it to a gentleman in Texarkana. He chops it in two, and installs whatever you want. Cost? Interesting: within one thousand dollars of the regular limousine, and I actually don't remember which side. The only problem is that people who come into the car will, unless warned, wheel about and sit down allowing for the conventional interval.

They land on the floor, because the back seat is—two feet behind where it normally is.

Olga is up with Jerry. Rebeca sits with me. Rowley is sleeping, over the heat ducts, but we are used to this. The briefcases and other paraphernalia have been carried out of my office. I ask Jerry if he turned on the burglar alarm in the house (Gloria has taken the train, to meet an early appointment), and he says yes, he did. For fifteen years we didn't even have a key to the house, having lost the one the owners left us. But then there was a burglary, and they took all the silver. I say "they" because notwithstanding that there were servants sleeping on the third floor, the burglars took their time, and evidently were, or became, hungry: the next morning, when the police came, the remains of two table settings, rather formal under the circumstances, I thought, were still there on the kitchen table with the apple cores, bread crumbs, and so on. The diners had plenty of silver for their modest needs.

So now we have one of those alarms which ring first at the switchboard of the company's headquarters in New Jersey. From there, someone reacts by dialing your number. If there is no answer, or if the person who answers does not recite the code word, then the switchboard immediately notifies the police and a neighbor (you have given the switchboard two neighborly neighbors' numbers). The plot is that everyone then convenes at your house, and your neighbor, who has a passkey, opens the door, the police arrest the burglar, and you feel your money was well spent. Several times the police have arrived at our place to find an empty house. The false alarms are embarrassing, but it is also true that there have been no further burglaries.