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