Libertarians and conservatives how much they have in common and how effective it would be between them. Certainly in most of what i write theres a certain amount that is oriented to diminish human liberty. Cspan do i remember you saying when you ran for mayor of new york that as far as you are concerned they would throw the garbage out the window and let people pick it up rather than have the government do with that . Guest your memory is an exchange i had with James Baldwin in which he was defending the littering of the street on the grounds that it was a form of protest against the city and not paying close enough attention. I said look, it isnt very helpful to use that as a means of protesting. It was really rhetorical. Cspan if somebody buys the book what do they get . Guest while, they get the best i can give them in various modes. Over the past eight years, they covered the collapse of the soviet union, they covered the death of some very important people, plus a number of personal episodes. What i do, assisted by my sister that serves as the editor is the attempt to divide into the mood of the day right Teddy Kennedy and so on and then analyzing specific problems. Then a section on commenting and celebrating and appreciating those people in a sports activity or two, so it is a wideranging collection. The rest have been well received. Cspan do people ordinarily buy these columns and articles and stuff when you put them out in a compendium like this . Guest ordinarily, the answer is ordinarily people dont buy anything unless they are a part of the hard constituents. If a publisher brings out your ninth collection, but usually ty means that people bought the first eight. Cspan with this come in numbers, the perks that you for ten . Guest 35th. Cspan of all those books, which sold the best . Guest the book that sold the best was the second of my four sailing books called atlantic high. And then the mystery books all came in somewhere between 75 and 100, except the very last one which came out shortly after the end of the cold war and suffered a. A. I was a casualty at the end. And then the others. Every book ive written have been on the bestsellers. Cspanbest sellers. Cspan which ones did you enjoy the writing the most . Guest it is terribly hard work. That may be one reason why i had managed thave managed to develoe facility to hide quickly. If i had the same kind of languorous pleasure in writing that my younger brother has or that say from just gets up and thinking this is a day in which i write, then i could answer your question with a greater sense of hedonism. You know, george will once said to me i write three times a week and when i wake up in the morning the first question i subconsciously ask myself is is this a day in which i have to write a column and if the answer is affirmative i wake up bright and happy. It happens reverse with me. Buying a mac d cspan do you write for him and instead of i mean what are you trying to do . Guest also, a lot of us do things for the after pleasure of it, even leaving your garden. The after pleasure of seeing the roses into the grass, up, or practice your skills for the after pleasure of helping to develop your technique. As Whittaker Chambers once put it to me, id like to have written, and thats a nice feeling to have written in part because it is onerous. Cspan other than the big names, the ones that would be obvious, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon i went through and counted so i think i know, but do you know which person you quoted were talked about the most in this . Guest no, i dont. Cspan would it surprise you if i said Whittaker Chambers . Guest well, you obviously surprised me. On the other hand, im weighing what you said. Whittaker chambers, during the period where we were very close friends, which is about seven years, wrote me in fact, he wrote me such beautiful letters that they were published as a book. And he kept saying things in it that were very interesting both in what he said and the way he said. As a matter of fact, for the novel i have coming up next january, one of the high points in it have to do with the discovery by young veterans of the afghan war in moscow of the description by Whittaker Chambers and one of his letters to me of the narcotic. They are a group of young people who met silently into days and swore to give their lives over to the assassination of a tyrant. So, one in celebrated narodniki as whittaker timbers pointed up and discovered that they were pretty dangerous because people could get the same idea bringing applicable women and therefore all trace of them was removed from soviet literature and you had to turn to Whittaker Chambers. Cspan what kind of impact did it avenue and when did you know him . Let me throw this one for somebody thats never heard of him. Who was he . Guest Whittaker Chambers was the Time MagazineSenior Editor, who in sworn testimony, named people he had known while working as a secret intelligence agent for the soviet union. And one of those was alger hiss. There ensued the greatest ongoing division, i guess, an american culturainamerican culte question of who was lying. The evidence is pretty overwhelming that the person who was lying was alger hiss, who is still alive by the way. But we became friends in 1954, actually formally a Senior Editor of National Review though he cannot very infrequently. He died at a young age, 61, of a heart attack. He had an enormous impact on his book with ms. Was written. They ran the first chapter which was a letter to his children. The famous letter in which he said when i left the soviet union, with the communist cause to join the cause of the west, i couldnt help feeling that perhaps i was leaving the winning side to join the losing side. So there was that great sense of melancholy in much of his writings. I was about to point out that they serialized the first chapter of his book in the saturday evening post and sold 500,000 more copies than normal. So it had a huge impact on everybody who read it. And from that moment on, he became something of an American Legend and probably still is. So i dont think any quotation of him is likely to bring on tedium in the reader. Cspan cspan eye for the reference a couple of months ago to the fact that in august of 1948, in that hearing, that it was the firstever televised hearing. Guest i didnt know that. Cspan the alger hiss, the house unamerican activities committee. I want to go back to the task Richard Nixon was on the committee . Guest he was. As a matter of fact, that was the First Episode in nixons career that gave him an enormous launch because the committee was a little bit dazzled by the firepower of the hiss forces. They were about to pull away and say he was right and chambers is a liar. When nixon moved incoming email as to the efforts and persuaded the Congressional Committee that in fact, hiss was probably lying, not chambers. So he became very conspicuous during the period. And it was the fact that gave him the reputation that awarded him a seat in the senate two years later and two years after that the vice presidency of the United States. Cspan where were you then . Guest well, he was elected Vice President in 1952 and i graduated college in 1950. But the hiss chambers drama was a very significant episode of when i was in school. Liberals tended to assume that this was correct because of his pedigree. It was so formidable. He had to go on to johns hopkins, then hed gone to the Harvard Law School company worked with, who was the the famous jewish liberal cspan frankfurter. Guest yeah, then dean acheson ha had us wouldve testified to the nobility of his character. And all this time he was typing out secrets to the soviet union with his wife, priscilla hiss. So that was a tremendous blow to the liberal establishment. This shining legacy of the new deal was, in fact, a traitor. Most people who identified with the new deal years ago conceded that thats what it was, or thirst messenge messenger for i. So some people are still hypnotized with the subject of, sort of like the grassy molars on jfk. Its more fun to believe that its a conspiracy beneath a conspiracy. Cspan did you remember, back in those years, who was influencing you the most . Back when you went to yale . Guest i had a few professors who you probably wouldnt have heard of who were influential. Ive always found it hard to answer the question of who influenced you the most, because it seems to me that in retrospect, it is a kind of collage of people and its very hard to sort out what it was that influenced you in respect to this particular thing. My colleague for 25 years in a National Review is james burnham, who was probably the bestknown American Geophysical strategist by training and philosophy at first in his class in princeton. And he influenced me enormously. Bui didnt meet him until tonig. Magazine began. 55. Cspan in the back of your book is the section in which its called appreciating. In number of people that you write about are no longer alive. Let me take a couple of these some of them are alive and ask about them. Malcolm muggeridge. Guest Malcolm Muggeridge was i think probably safe to say the bestknown british journalist up until ten or 15 years ago. He was married the niece of beatrice webb, and he went to the soviet union as a sort of committed young socialist, pro communist. And then he was there for about one winter and wrote a devastating critique of life under stalin. This was in the early 30s. She still stayed over, pretty much on the socialist side of the world. He wrote industriously for the Manchester Guardian and others. There were several books. Then during the war, he was very active. After the war of is the editor of punch magazine. One had to be sort of a humorist to do that, plus a great school for journalists. And while he was editing the book section for esquire magazine. Little by little, he began a march that would turn out to be ineluctably directional towards damascus. He became a christian and his perspective changed, thats not his idiomatic powers, so that when he was talking about christ or the commandments were about one another he would do so as a humorist. And he gave credibility to his evangelism is quite distinctive. I saw him, believe it or not, speak to the American Society of newspaper editors in washington. The editor of every principle newspaper in the United States. And he was just the after dinner speaker. He ended up with a paragraph that embellished the idea of the meaning of the star over bethlehem and had these pagans absolutely stupefied by the sheer beauty of it. So anyway, he became probably the most influential englishspeaking intellectual evangelist. Cspan how well did you know him . Guest he was on firing line actually quite a lot of times, seven or eight times. We became very close personal friend. As a matter of fact he and i once did a program in the vatican on the sistine chapel. He called me up and said you know, i hate famous people. I know them all but i want to meet this pope. He and i and my wife had a private audience with the pope. He hadnt been briefed on wh hoy words when he came to Malcolm Muggeridge, he looked a you loom with that sort of phased cspan the current pope . Guest the current time yes. He said you are radio . Now, however often you ask yourself the question what is the appropriate answer to you or radio, so i have to come up with one. So Malcolm Muggeridge said yes, your holiness, i do a certain amount of work on radio. Then he turned to david and said he was a great friend of my predecessor. Now david has probably never even heard of pope paul, but it quickly became plain that the pope thought we were visiting basketball managers or something. At any rate, muggeridge was vastly amused by that episode. Cspan did he know who you were . Guest no, but i thought id get him off because here we have access to the sistine chapel, the first time in history, as a result of an intermediary who had gotten permission for us to use it for 48 hours to make our documentary. Documentary. So i thought id tip them off. So i said your holiness, its going to be very hard for me to get used to my private chapel when i get home after having had access to yours thinking, you get it, thinking that would flashback. He sort of snapped his fingers and the monsignor showed up, pictures were taken and we said goodbye. But anyway, after that, muggeridge said to me i want to do a show with you called why i am not catholic. I said fine. So we did it, and he gave all the reasons why he wasnt catholic. Then he said i want to do another show with you. Why i am a catholic. He had hoped. He was a wonderful, wonderful man. A great way to get a brilliant analyst. Cspan cspan i went to ask about the quotes that you put your column by the way, how often do you write about, rest in peace, do you often do that . Guest ive been doing it for the National Review for years and years. I mean i dont know how many ive done, maybe 500 or so. Cspan in othe cspan in other words guest im not in the obituary writer that his and my profession. Cspan but is there some way to describe what it takes to get you to write about somebodys obituary . I mean they have to like him . Guest or dislike them, one or the other. Or they have to have been a friend of the National Review or of mind or have had some historical importance. When i was editor of my own journal, i wrote about them when i assigned them. Now that John Osullivan is the editor, i write them when he asks me to and when i agreed to do so. And occasionally i send one out as a regular column on as i did in the case of muggeridge, and i dont know, whether they be used only one here that i sen sent of the column. Brian mcnamee read this quote and ask you whether you agree. As an old man, looking back on ones life, its one of the things that strikes you most forcibly that the only thing thats part one anything is suffering dot success, happiness, not anything like that. The only thing that teaches one would like us about the joy of understanding, the joy of coming in contact with what life really signifies is suffering. Guest well, let me comment on that by saying two things. Number one, i understand the historical discipline the caused him to write that way. It is, you know, the lesson of job, that he taught us that suffering can be ennobling. And in the case of Malcolm Muggeridge, he seemed to feel that impulse very sharply. But if they have been part of his votes there was a certain sense in which he was a materialism man and a failure to be inspired by that particular part of our petri money they gave to patrimony that should inspire us, caused him to feel and expiation of sorts was in order. For instance, he became a vegetarian, and he didnt think any clues or wine or anything. He didnt use to be that way, but one had a sense that he was taking some sort of a pleasure from the mortification of the flesh, but the pleasure never affected his mood. John leonard, in his introduction, and thinking back on his days at the National Review says, hes listing the various things he did and said i had lunch with Whittaker Chambers, which was like launching with the brothers caret macsoft. Its incorrect to see if Whittaker Chambers but he emanated melancholia when you were with him. Its not incorrect to say about him develop the possibility of his melancholy. With muggeridge, you didnt. Muggeridge was a consistent entertainer, without in any way getting in the way of his own message. Cspan do you feel that people expect you to entertain them all the time . Guest well, i think its a terrible sin to bore people, and im easily bored myself. I mean, im perfectly prepared to admit that if i attended a lecture by emmanuel, i might very well go to sleep. But thats my fault, not his. So under the circumstances, when i do write, i do make an effort to please the reader in the same way that a pianist at a dive, wants to use chords that please the listener. If you sit down to play a musical repertoire and limit yourself to a dominator subdominant anatomic how youre never going to get the music the kind of variety that make it so special. By the same token, it seems to me that if you deny yourself the hard work and at the same time the pleasure of using the language explicitly, you shouldnt really be writing professionally. Cspan youve got a bunch of letters also in here come of letters that have been sent to you. Dear mr. Buckley this is from hamilton morgan of terrorism, new york. Regarding your firing line interview with Henry Kissinger from a qualified to be professional objectively concerned american, number one, the manner in which you said as word. Do you remember this . Guest no. Cspan cant you sit upright in an adult fashion . In a single shots, you appear tilted, and two shots use it and as if your guest has been no. Number two, in questioning you appear rude, you dont ask questionquestions up against eve whose opinions you favor with your questions come in a long form of interrogation. Three, you always come up with a personal insecurity of them on the profits attempting to show what you know. You answer him. The first thing you say is no, i cant think straight, congenital. But when you get a letter like this, first of all guest what was my comment . Cspan what is your comment . Most people dont talk about it out loud. If you think my questions are long, try socrates. Three, i want to share what i know on the subject after all i spent three hours reading up on it the night before. Have you ever jumped out of an airplane at midnight with a parachute . With the mission of eliminating the guard at the end of the bridge . Well i had either decided i would certainly want detailed introductory instructions and on and on. Guest well, guest wel