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The first book, The Fall of the Berlin Wall, part of publisher Wiley's Turning Points series, could have been written by the author of Ecclesiastes after he'd downed a few martinis. Though there is plenty of blame-placing (on JFK, France, and the West in general for capitulating to the Communists over the wall's construction), the book lacks the old polemicist's instinct. Reagan's entreaties to tear the wall down are set in a broader historical context that shows plenty of cracks already formed. There is some humor but no rah-rah cheerleading. The actual physical destruction of the wall occupies less than three pages all told. In sum, it is the work of an old man who has seen beyond the struggles of his youth into the longer run of human affairs, and perhaps beyond. The wall, Buckley notes, was built by men who served a failed empire. Most of them are dead, but then so are the wall's opponents, now including the most vocal one. And one season gives way to the next.
Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography has been widely noticed for the actions that surrounded its release. Though Buckley retired from his magazine in 1990, he retained his ownership in the enterprise and exercised it. In 1997, he fired editor-in-chief John O'Sullivan for, among other things, overdoing the anti-immigration fusillades. Since then, there had been a lot of fevered speculation about the future of the magazine, post-Buckley. This past year, he decided to settle the matter. In June, he gave ownership over to a board of five people, including his son, novelist Christopher Buckley.
His departure was notable in itself, but during an exit interview with a reporter for the New York Times, the elder Buckley let slip that, against the hawkish editorial position of his magazine, he now viewed the recent war with Iraq to have been a mistake. He then amplified this apostasy by praising an antiwar article in The American Conservative, as well as the magazine itself, in his syndicated column.
Then there is the matter of his boat. If there is one thing that Buckley has been more closely associated with than the conservative movement, it is sailing. His voyages have been the subject of several books, and nautical themes figure prominently in his novels. Re-reading Overdrive, I was struck by how he exploited any sliver of spare time at his Stamford, Connecticut, estate to set sail. He writes in Miles Gone By that his father bought him a small sailboat in June 1939. Named Sweet Isolation in deference to Buckley Sr.'s America First-style politics, "It was a torrid affair from the moment I sighted her." The lasting relationship was with the sea. And now, after more than 60 years of sailing, Buckley has announced that he is putting the latest boat up for sale, never to be replaced. The old mariner expounds:
When you are in the harbor, four congenial people around the table, eating and drinking and conversing, listening to music and smoking cigars, the wind and the hail and the temperature outside faced up to and faced down, in your secure little anchorage—here is a compound of life's social pleasures in the womb of nature. So that deciding that the time has come to sell [the boat] and forfeit all that, is not lightly taken, bringing to mind a step yet ahead, which is giving up life itself.
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