Cspan nearly 40 times and over the next five hourswere going to share some of those programs with you. First up tonight in 1993, Mister Buckley sat down to discuss a collection of his essays from his book happy days are here again. Here he is on cspans Interview Program from 1993, book notes. On the cover of your new book it says reflections of a libertarian journalist. Do you always call yourself a libertarian western mark. Off and on. As i of course do, its something called the movement was encouraged by me in National Review during the late 50s and the idea was to put out to the straight libertarians and conservatives how much they had in common and how effective this symbiosis would be between them. So from time to time i stressed the fact that every now and then that im a libertarian and in most of what i write theres a certain amount of it that is does not augment or diminish human liberty. Did i remember you saying maybe when you ran for mayor of new york that this may not be you but as far as youre concerned youd just as soon throw the garbage out the window and let people pick it up and deal with it rather than having the government dealwith it . Know, the, your memory was an exchange i had with james baldwin. In which he was defending the littering of the streets on the grounds that it was a form of protest against the city so for not paying close enough attention and i said look , it is very helpful to use that as a means of protesting. Should i throw my garbage out in the street when john lindsay walks out since i dont think you make a good mayor . It was really just sort of a rhetorical just abouts they get the best i can give them. In various modes over the past eight years those are very eventful years as they cover the collapse of the soviet union. A covered the death of some very important people. Plus a certain number of personal episodes. But what i do assisted by my sister who serves as the editor was to attempt to divide into appropriate sections of the moons in which i write carl sagan and jesse jackson, teddy kennedy, rick taylor and so on. Then analyzing a specific problems that i hope assuredly, another section on commenting, a section on reflecting and then celebrating and appreciating areas people and a sports activity or to. So its a wideranging collection. Its my ninth and the rest have involved overseas so i hope this will be. Host to people read former columns when youput them in a compendium like this . Guest the operative word in your question is ordinarily and ordinarily people dont buy anything unless they are a part of a hard constituency read Robert Lublin can count the day after tomorrow on telling 4 and a half thousand copies of his new book but if a publisher brings out the ninth collection, that usually means people have bought the first day. Host whats this in numbers of books that youve written . Guest the 25th. Host of all thosebooks which sold the best . Guest the book that sold the best was the second of my for sailing boat called atlantic high and then the mystery books all came in somewhere between 75 and 100. Except for the last one which came out shortly after the end of the cold war and suffered, i was a casualty of the end of the cold war and then the others, every book ive written most of them have been on the bestseller list. Which ones did youenjoy the writing part of the most . This will annoy you but i really dont like to write. Its terribly hard work. That maybe one reason why i have managed to develop to write quickly. If i have the same kind of languorous leisure in writing as my younger brother as a or eudora whatley has that says my god, this is the day in which i write and i can answer your question with a certain hedonism. Eudora said to me i write three times a week and then i wake up in the morning the first question i consciously ask myself is is it a day in which i have to write a column and if i have to its a day i wake uphappy. Host do you then write for an end, what are you trying to do . Guest a lot of us do things for the act or pleasure of it. Even weeding your garden, the active pleasure seeing the roses in the grass, or practice your scales for the active pleasure of having to develop your technique. As eudora once put it to me i like to have written and thats a nice thing to have written in part as its so onerous. Other than the bignames, the Ronald Reagans and Richard Nixon , i think i know this but do you know which person you quoted the most or talk about the most in this book . Guest no i dont. Host what i surprise you if i said Whittaker Chambers. You obviously surprised me on the other hand imweighing what you said. Chambers during the period we were Close Friends which is about seven years wrote me and in fact he wrote me such beautiful letters that they were published as a book. And he kept saying things that were very arresting both in what he said and in the way that he said. As a matter fact a novel i have coming up next january one of the high points in it has to do with the discovery by young veterans of the afghan war in moscow. Of the description by Whittaker Chambers in one of his letters to me of the neurotic key, it was a group of young people who met silently in the czarist days and swore to give their lives over to the assassination of atyrant. So lenin saw those days but then discovered they were pretty dangerous because people could get the same idea as being applicable to lenin and therefore all trace of them was removed from soviet literature so you have to find out thats enormously important and a Dramatic Development inrussian history. What kind of an impact you have on you and when did you know him and let me grow in this or somebody was never heard him. Guest chambers was the Time MagazineSenior Editor who in sworn testimony named people he had known working as a secret intelligence agent for the soviet union. And one of those was out to yes. Theyre in sued the greatest ongoing division i guess in american cultural history on the impression of who was lying. The evidence was overwhelming that the person who was lying is out your hips but we became friends and actually a Senior Editor of the National Review so he came up very frequently and he died at a young age of a heart attack but he had an enormous impact when his book was written. They ran the first chapter which was a letter to his children. The things which he said when i left the soviet union, left the communist cause to join the cause of the west, i couldnt help but feeling perhaps i was leaving the winning side to join the losing side. So there was that great sense of melancholy and much of his writings. I was about to point out that the first chapter of his book in the saturday evening post that sold 500,000 more copies than normal. So he 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 take any quotation of him is likely to bring on tedium in the reader. Host i saw a reference a couple of months ago to the fact that in august 1948 in that hearing that it was the first ever televised hearing. I didnt know that. I want to go back to that task you what impacts, Richard Nixonwas on the committee . That was the First Episode in nixons career. Gave him an enormous launch. Because the committee was a little bit dazzled by the firepower of the forces and they were about to pull away and say this was right and chambers was a liar. When nixon moved in, to mobilize the evidence and persuaded the Congressional Committee that his was the poverty line, not chambers. It was that that gave him the reputation that awarded him to receive in the senate two years after that the Vice President of theUnited States. Where you then . Guest he was Vice President in 1952 and i graduated in 1950 so but the hess chambers drama was a significant episode. When i was at school. Liberals tend to assume that this was correct because of his pedigree was so formidable. He had to go on to Johns Hopkins and he gone on to Harvard Law School and he had clerked with who was it . In the Supreme Court, the same as jerry shaw, liberal. And then dean actions in had sort of testified to the nobility of his character and all this time he was typing out secrets for the soviet union with his wife priscilla is. So it was a tremendous blow to the liberal establishment. This shining legacy of the new deal was in fact a traitor. Most people who identify with him years ago could see thats what he was, arthur injure for instance but some people are still hypnotized with the subject of comedy like the grassy knoll her son jfk area its more fun to believe it was a conspiracy buddy the conspiracy. Do you remember back in those years was influencing you the most . When you went to yale. I had a few professors who you probably wouldnt have heard of the wereinfluential. Ive always found it hard to answer a question 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 tothis particular thing. My colleagues of 25 years nationally was James Burnham who is probably the best known american strategists by training in philosophy, first in his class in princeton and he influenced me enormously i didnt meet him until the magazine began. What year to the magazine began western mark. 65. In the back of your book its the section in which its called appreciating. And a number of people that you write about are no longer alive. Let me pick a couple of these area some of them are alive andask you about them. Malcolm h, who was he . Guest malcolm was i probably have to say the best known british journalist up until 15 years ago. He was married to the niece of Beatrice Webb and he went to the soviet union as a committed youngsocialist , procommunist and he was there about one winter and wrote a devastating critique of life under stalin, this was in the early 30s. He still stayed on the socialist side of the world. Then during the war, he was very active and after the war he was the editor of punch magazine. One had to be sort of a humorist to do that. Meanwhile he was simultaneously editing the book section for esquire magazine but little by little he began in march that would turn out to be in ineluctably directional towards the masses. He became a christian and his perspective changed but not his eating powers so when he was talking about christ or the commandments or about our duty to one another he would manage to do so as i humorist. And under the circumstances it gave me kind of a list to his evangelism that was quite distinctive. I saw him believe it or not the aas society of newspaper editors in washington, and he was just the after dinner speaker and he ended up with a paragraph that embellished the idea of the meaning of historical death for him and had these pagans, so he became probably the most influential englishspeaking intellectual. Host how wellknown was he . Guest it was on firing line quite a lot of times. We became very close personal friends and in fact he and i once did a program in the vatican on the Sistine Chapel and he called me and said you know, i hate famous people. Ive known them all and they areall a disappointment but i want to meet the pope. He said you crank up your muscle and ill crack up my so he and david niven had an audience with the pop pope which was very amusing because the pope and been briefed on who we were. When he came to malcolm he looked at him with that sort of benign face. He said, you are radio. However often do you ask yourself what is the appropriate answer to the question you are radio . So he said i do have my voice on radio dated and said you were the great friend of my predecessor and david had probably never even heard of pope paul before. It quickly became plain that the pope thought we were visiting under basketball matters or something. Anyway, he was vastly amused by that episode. Host did he know whoyou are . Guest i thought he i tipped him off because had access to the Sistine Chapel for the first time in history and as a result of an intermediary who had gotten permission for us to use 48 hours to make our documentary though i thought i tipped him off and i said your holiness is going to be very hard for me to get used to having my private chapel at homewhen ive had access to yours. Thinking that would flash that but the mom singer showed up with a picture of the kagan and we said goodbye. After that the mother said to me, i want to do a program with you call why i am not a catholic. Though we did. And he called and said i want to do another series with you. I am a catholic. He had poked in the interval, he was a wonderful man, a great wit and a brilliant analyst. I want to ask you about a quote you put in your column and how often do you write with an ip after it, you often do that . Guest i do it a fair amount, ive been doing it for the national for yearsand years. I dont know how many ive done, maybe 100. Im not an obituary writer, thats not my profession. Host is there some data describe what it takes to get you to write aboutsomebodys obituary. Do youhave to like them . Guest or dislike them, one for the other or they have to have been a friend of the National Review or mine or some importance. When i wrote in my old journal when i assign them, i would write them when he asked me to and when i was ready to do so. As i did in the case of leverage and maybe im the only one here that has done the column. Host let me read his column and ask you if you agree read as an old man looking back on ones life one of the things that strikes you most forcibly is the only thing thats taught one anything is suffering. Not success, not happiness, not anything like it, the only thing that teaches one what life is about is the joy of understanding, the joy of coming into contact with what life signifies is suffering. Guest let me comment on that by saying two things. Number one, i understand that historical discipline that caused him to write that way. It is a lesson of joe, that job taught us. That suffering can be an doubling and in the case of malcolm muggeridge, he seemed to feel that temples sharply but it may have been, there was a certain sense in which is sort of gloom about the materialism of man and mans failure to be inspired by, to be inspired by that particular part of our patrimony that inspires caused him to feel that expiation. For instance he became a vegetarian and he didnt drink anybooze, any wine or anything. He didnt used to be that way but one had a sense he was taking some sort of pleasure from the mortification of the flesh and that, but that pleasure never affected his mood. John lennon in thinking about his days at National Review says was this one of the best things he did was to mark he said i had lunch with chambers which was like having brunch with the brothers there soft. It was incorrect as a of cameras the emanated melancholy. It is not incorrect to say that he felt the probability of his melancholy with muggeridge didnt. Muggeridge was a consistent entertainer. Without in any way getting in the way of his ownmessage. Do you feel people expect you to entertain them all the time . I think its a terrible sin to bore people. And im easily bored myself. I mean, im perfectly happy to admit if i attended a lecture by emmanuel cant i might very well go to sleep. But thats my fault, not his. So under the circumstances when i write i do make an effort to please the reader in the same way that a pianist at the dive, once to use courts that please the listener. If you sit down to play a musical repertoire and limit yourself to a predominant and a tonic, youre never going to give use it the kind of variety that makes it special. By the same token it seems to be if you deny yourself the hard work and at the same time the pleasure of using the language exploitative late, you shouldnt really be writing professionally. Host youve got a bunch of letters also in here, letters that have been sent to you. Mister buckley, this isfrom hamilton morgan. Regarding your firing line interview with Andrea Kissinger from a qualified tv professional objectively concerned american, number one. A matter in which you sit is rude. You remember this . Guest no. Host cant use it upright in an adult fashion and in single shots you appear tilted, into shots use it as if your guest as bo. 2, even in questioning you appear rude. You dont ask questions of a guest even one in with whose opinions you favor and your questions comein a long form of interrogation. You always come up with the personal insecurity of a long premise attempting to show what youknow. You answer him, his first name says no i cant think straight, congenital but when you get a letter like this first of all, guest what was my comment. Host most people dont talk about it out loud. If you think my questions are long try socrates. Three, of course i want to share what i know about the study, i spent three nights reading up about it the night before. Have you ever jumped out of a plane at midnight with a parachute with the mission of eliminating the guard at the end of the bridge . I havent either but if i did i would want detailed introductoryinstructions and on and on. Guest i take it more seriously than i remember having done so. Having brought the subject up which you just did. I dont usually appear on television dressed this way but i just finished a 2000 mile hike so i appreciate your missionnot to go unchanged and you gave it to me. The answer is we all have our idiosyncrasies but hes absolutely wrong on points 500 points six because i think going on that program for 29 years. I have one complaint in those 29 years from my guests was that i didnt get them all the time i wanted to say it in the way they wanted what they wanted to say no thats not bad. Number two on the matterof introducing the guests , since i often have people for not widely known, philosophers or poets or whatever, i feel an obligation to acquaint the listener with them. And if you take a couple minutes to do that i don