The Unmaking of a Mayor. William F. Buckley Jr.Читать онлайн книгу.
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