Books – Gregg Fedchak

Nuns Don’t Believe

Written by Gregg Fedchak on March 16, 2026. Posted in Books.

In the penultimate scene in the greatest novel ever written, Don DeLillo’s WHITE NOISE, a nun in an emergency room tells the protagonist that he’s a dumbhead if he believes in God and heaven. The prompt for this was a calendar on the wall of the treatment room with a Norman Rockwell-esque painting of JFK and the late Pope John (of Vatican II fame) enjoying a pleasant moment together in a partly cloudy heaven landscape.

jfk popejohn 1 2023 04 10 055755 ambb — ***John & John, idealized***

You’d have to be a dumb fool to believe in such a heaven, the nun tells our protagonist, Hitler Studies professor Jack Gladney. Jack protests that surely nuns believe and the church believes.

No, the nun says, we don’t believe, but we pretend to believe, because if those of you who don’t believe didn’t have nuns and priests and ministers pretending to believe, civilization would collapse.

And soon it will anyway, because most who pretend have, like our nun, teeth nearly transparent from age.

And this is from one of the most hilarious novels I’ve ever read.

I’ve read WHITE NOISE every three or four years for the last 40 years. I was in my late 20’s when it changed my life. It made me realize that there is a new, better, supercharged way to approach fiction. No more would writing be the effete village affair of Updike, Bellow, or Cheever, even when they were most offensive.

No more would stories be about bucolic burning of autumn leaves in an Updikian novel where the insufferable and inevitably depressed husband’s loins lust after his neighbor’s whatzits. Fiction could be a neutron bomb that leaves a lifeless landscape with nothing but orgasmic sunsets fueled by toxic wastes and death clouds.

pexels etatics inc 252430999 16051946 — ***Dylar: one a day obliterates the fear of death***

No one knows if WHITE NOISE is the first postmodern novel or whether it satirizes postmodernity. I think it’s the latter.

I think DeLillo hates the things that have made us no longer believe in God and the afterlife: toxic waste, garbage, divorce, violence, rampant and cancerous consumerism, the medical-industrial society, cable TV, fragmented attention spans, vacuous universities and colleges, ephemera, too much to do, easy intercontinental travel, obsession with physical health and fitness, obesity, foodie obsession, the equal ratio of teachers to students.

Babette, the protagonist’s fourth wife – I think fourth – teaches posture and sitting and standing classes in the basement of one of those ubiquitous-yet-empty mainstream Protestant churches.

When, Jack wonders, did everyone become a fucking teacher? And of such totally inane things?

WHITE NOISE is the only place to get hilarity out of guns, pills that erase the fear of death, nebulous masses inside the body, airborne toxic events, emergency evacuations, the insipid and lifeless mentality of medical prevention, the total and abject joke that postmodern universities and colleges have become, the stupidity of professors and experts and medical personnel, the uselessness of government.

pexels perfect lens 15264964 — ***Jack’s present from his father-in-law . . .***

Lubricating the whole world of the novel is television. If DeLillo had written WHITE NOISE today, we could add the internet.

Television fragments the world. It makes comprehension impossible.

The forest is lost for the trees.

TV and the net give us factoids, factoids that we get wrong anyway. Then we share our fake news and non-facts with the rest of the world. Then we’re so muddled and addle-brained that we begin to feel self-sufficient. A new raincoat, new fake news, the next vacuum cleaner is all we need.

We clutch those new things – and new spouses, and new trips, and new places to live – as shields against the ugly fact that we are dying. That new travel destination or shelter dog becomes a happy distraction from death. For a few days.

Today, we have distractions, not belief. And never has such a harrowing tale been better coated in honey than in WHITE NOISE.

pexels christiano sinisterra 3279598 5197107

woody allen polly bergen andy williams andy williams show 1965

Woody Allen’s Baum

Written by Gregg Fedchak on March 4, 2026. Posted in Books.

Woody Allen’s novel, WHAT’S WITH BAUM?, is so, so Woody Allen that it’s almost painful. But in a delightful way, if you’re a Woody Allen fan.

But is it a novel? Or is it a novella, which, as far as I’m concerned simply means “a short novel”? Or is it a really, really long short story?

Doesn’t matter. It’s vintage Woody Allen and it works.

All the familiar things are here in Baum, who is surely the author: a fear of everything, an obsession with death, a dislike of the country, a love of the city, complicated creative and family relations, an absurd sense of humor, brushes with hypochondria and ticks and suspicious-looking moles, and rivalry and reflexive falling-in-love.

woody allen hs yearbook — ***Woody’s high school yearbook photo***

Leaving aside news and tabloids and gossip, Woody is not pathological or in need of a diagnosis; rather, he is a gifted adult, which is a gifted child who draws Social Security. He is also an HSP, or “highly-sensitive personality”. His protagonist Baum rubs against this, and against hysteria, and talks to himself – in public, even – and Allen glues this together in a light, readable, fun book.

johnny carson woody allen the tonight show 1964 — ***Woody Allen with Johnny Carson when Carson was new at this, 1964***

I’m not sure that it makes sense to try to dig out deeper meaning from WHAT’S WITH BAUM? It’s entertainment. I suppose if you want to stretch things, it shows how creative rivalries in the publishing industry work, or how romances and marriages and divorces come about.

The most remarkable thing is that at 89, Woody Allen has not missed a beat. This is prime, even peak Allen at work. Sure, he’s working the same garden, not breaking new ground.

But he doesn’t have to. He’s proving that aging does not have to be a thing. Neither does adversity. What a lesson!

The Deadly Boob

Written by Gregg Fedchak on March 1, 2026. Posted in Books.

Incompetence is the hallmark of most forms of government, but especially of fascism. It’s amazing how many people die despite how ineffective and contradictory that incompetence is.

Fascism tends to promote insiders and confused ideologues and, like American prep or WASP culture, nitwits famed for drinking the most in college who piled up contacts and connections, extroverts who did the most networking, who were the most handsome or beautiful, or who came from a name family, preferably one with “enough” money but not too much.

Joachim von (the “von” was an affectation he added gratuitously) Ribbentrop was one of these men.

Primary occupation before becoming Hitler’s Foreign Minister in 1938: spirits salesman. A distributor of luxury products. Sales of whisky, wine, champagne in Europe. Biographer Michael Bloch in RIBBENTROP says that he was very good at selling beverages. His mild, benign, passive, easy touch hit the spot.

But noodled into action by his ambitious wife, Ribbentrop edged his way into politics. A conservative by nature, he was seduced by Hitler as so many other blank young Germans were.

And Hitler was seduced by him. Hitler was impressed by his half-assed knowledge of foreign languages, his salesmanship, his worldliness.

Eventually, Hitler felt he owed Ribbentrop one after the salesman lent his own country estate to the intricate secret negotiations that got Hitler installed in power.

The initial prize: Ribbentrop got to be Hitler’s private man-of-the-world, doing informal diplomacy, which was important since Hitler loathed “professional diplomats” that he inherited from the Weimar days of nominal German democracy.

By 1938, Ribbentrop (and his wife!) got what he wanted: appointment as the top secretary of state.

The end result was that he was hanged – it was a messy hanging, it took 10 to 20 minutes for him to die – by the Allies after the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

His primary crime was the primary crime of all the Nazi command. He had a hand, directly and indirectly, with the execution of the war and with genocide.

But as one of the lesser-known war criminals, the storyline Bloch tells of Ribbentrop is one of hopeless toadyism and of a hopeless passivity, a life not really lived despite wreaking havoc everywhere. Think of the Peter Sellers’ movie “Being There”, only with the Chauncy Gardener character as a Nazi. Things just seemed “to happen”.

Bloch quotes a neutral diplomat from Sweden as saying, ” . . . here was a man of very small mental stature, and moreover, rather ridiculous. It was an astonishing thought, that this man had all those years been Minister of Foreign Affairs of the German Reich.”

Hans Frank, a fellow Nazi, said of him at Nuremberg, “The poor fish . . . He is so untutored and so ignorant . . . I don’t see how he could have sold champagne let alone National Socialism . . . that poor simpleton . . . it was a crime on Hitler’s part to make him foreign minister of a nation of seventy million people.”

His other, more “famous” colleagues – Himmler, Goebbels, Goering, Speer – thought even less of him. Words like snob, haughty, idiot, friendless, careless, and stupid come up often. Even Hitler tired of him over time. “Keep him away from me,” was Hitler’s response to the banal and boring Minister.

So why did he stick? Because he was part of the way HItler arranged “his people”, playing one off another in the perpetual wargame of Nazi officialdom and administration. That all his colleagues denigrated him and hated him and even sometimes pitied him was vital.

That Hitler could trust him to passively yet noisily – droning on and on – support the Fuhrer was another factor. That Ribbentrop let Hitler set all German foreign policy himself was another.

And yet another factor was that Hitler could hypnotize Ribbentrop like a snake can a rabbit. It was a love affair.

In the end, Hitler had essentially appointed the guy who replenishes the products inside cigarette and soda vending machines, going from country to country instead of from bar to dorm, as his chief foreign officer. And people died.

Stuckness is a Worthy Goal

Written by Gregg Fedchak on January 21, 2026. Posted in Books.

Americans seemingly fall out of the womb with a desire to optimize.

We can never just be. We feel compelled to do. And to not just do, but to improve. And what we need to improve is some product. Even if the product isn’t a mousetrap or a juicy slice of software. Even if the product is ourselves.

This is so obvious that it feels obscene for me to even mention it.

We get MFA degrees if we want to write “creatively”. We get tutors if we want to learn how to play the piano. We hire “experts” to tell us how to landscape our gardens, coaches to train us, beauty “consultants” to advise us as to how to best dabble in alchemy and mythology, and so on.

Keep two things in mind: 1) Most of this shit is a scam on the part of overeducated narcissists to extract money from us with an easy career, and to make them feel more important to themselves than they really are and, more importantly, they know this in the depth of their souls; and 2) It’s all about that money. Nothing else.

Most people are lost and mono-dimensional.

LOST IN PERFECTION: Impacts of Optimisation on Culture and Society is a blend of sociology and psychology, and is an academic series of essays on how our manic drivenness affects the air we breathe culturally.

I can’t possibly do justice to how we got this way, so I’ll just list a list: the protestant work ethic, science, capitalism, neoliberalism, engineering, protestant asceticism, envy, mimesis (copying others), the miasma of advertising, Frederick Winslow Taylor (the efficiency expert of the 1920’s who virtually measured worker sweat to determine optimal levels of productivity), the internet, social media, self-tracking by devices, self-branding, product branding (brand “stories”), aesthetic medical procedures, the death of meaning/the death of religion/the death of God/the irrelevance of philosophy, and on and on.

Cut to the bare bone, protestantism made it possible to “get to heaven” by how productive you are. And by how much money you have.

So we have to be productive. We have to do. We have to optimize. We have to succeed, we have to achieve, we have to step on the other guys’ heads as we scramble up the ladder to the Almighty.

Even though God is gone, we still have the mindset of scrambling and of existential perfection, molded by commercial forces to suit their own purposes. We can’t rest. We can’t sit still. We must never get stuck in our lives. To be stuck means someone else may take the last available seat in heaven.

Apparently heaven has a limited seating capacity.

The problem is that this way of living, and without any faith to boot, is inhumane, not fit for us, not fit for human life.

We are not those one-dimensional creatures who need an expert hand or academic credentials, even if all the forces on earth try to beat us down. We are creative even in our seeming stuckness.

But we run away from our inherent creativity because too many money-grubbing half-humans make it seem too difficult to grasp the bigger picture without their help.

LOST IN PERFECTION is a big enough book that I may revisit it.

I read a book a few years ago by a guy named Ogilvy – a business consultant in San Francisco, I think – entitled something like LIVING WITHOUT A GOAL. It was about how scandalous it seems to live free and easy without deep planning, without rationalizing our selves, without engineering outcomes.

You’re already in heaven. You just don’t know it because nobody wants you to know it.

Ticky-Tacky Little Boxes

Written by Gregg Fedchak on December 22, 2025. Posted in Books.

I grew up in what political activist and sanctimonious Quaker Malvina Reynolds called ticky-tacky little boxes. So I figured I needed to read Edward Berenson’s “PERFECT COMMUNITIES: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia.” Edward, too, grew up ticky-tackily.

My childhood homes might have been the sort built by Bill Levitt after World War II (and by my father, who was a contractor about that time), but they were decidedly NOT in a typical beehive suburb. They were in small towns or in the countryside. One was a Cape Cod, one a ranch house.

And they weren’t tacky because they weren’t in a beehive formation. I hope.

But is this tacky?:

Well, it’s not tacky if you were a veteran coming home from World War II or the Korean “conflict” and desperately needed a place to live and raise a family in a high-value situation.

Developer Bill Levitt jumped into the gap and mass-produced on-the-spot communities – cities, really – at low cost. He did it throughout the northeast and Maryland and eventually beyond. The houses were (mostly!) sturdy and well-built, and most residents loved them.

Most importantly, they could afford them. They were a good deal.

bill levitt poses with full page newspaper advertisements for levittown — ***Bill Levitt, financially blessed in 1964***

But Berenson points out the fly in the soup, if that’s the expression. Levitt wouldn’t sell to Blacks.

A large part of “PERFECT COMMUNITIES” is about the racism of the postwar suburbs. They were uniformly inhospitable or unavailable to Blacks.

Levitt was a racist without being a racist but was a racist. Maybe. As laws and courts changed things, he begrudgingly opened up his communities.

But he was certainly not in the vanguard of the Civil Rights movement. He did what his overwhelmingly white veteran customers wanted, and kept his developments segregated.

This had the knock-on effect of making him more money. And what developer isn’t in the business to make money? They certainly aren’t in it to build critically-acclaimed domestic architecture. They build to a price point.

So should Levitt have pushed the racial integration boundaries? Yes. But dragging his feet was reality.

Levitt died penniless, a charity case patient in a hospital that he had years earlier helped to fund. He sold out to ITT, the master conglomerate merger hound of its day, in a very bad business decision. He loved his yacht – the third biggest private yacht in the world at the time – and his very non-Levittown estate. He loved drinking and partying and buying his wife jewelry.

So, in the end, no amount of money was enough for Bill Levitt anyway.

He would have had something more valuable at the end of his life if he had fought the times and built for all. And he would be even more fondly remembered today, even by songwriters.

pexels vikram upadhyay 1093402497 21638172

The Fabulous Phonograph

Written by Gregg Fedchak on November 19, 2025. Posted in Books, Music.

You can’t kill music in your home, although many have tried to beat it to death.

Roland Gelatt’s epic THE FABULOUS PHONOGRAPH 1877-1977 ends its story in 1977 because that’s when this now-rare book was published in its second edition.

It’s a shame that it ends when it does because 1977 is about when digital music and MTV and eventually streaming started, and before long, vinyl made a startling comeback. Now, in 2025, there are even signs that CD’s are making their own comeback.

And, of course, tubes have long been “back” among the most serious – or most deranged – audiophiles.

Why tubes now? Because like vinyl, they sound better than sterile 1’s and 0’s.

stax srm t8000 3 copy — ***new production vacuum tubes from a STAX electrostatic headphone amp***

But believe me, the history of home audio is already dense enough without adding its most recent, and volatile, years.

sr 0057mkii a2f3cbeb 0560 4700 88ff fc25a1d43245 1024x1024@2x copy.jpg — *STAX L500 electrostatic headphone, basic design late 1970’s to current*, Japan

You would only read this book if you were a nut, provided you could source it from interlibrary loan or a used book store. Because it is suffocatingly, if entertainingly, detailed.

I am so sick of tracing the path from gramophone to Edison cylinder to shellac to Nazi German magnetic tape and tape recorders to zonophones to record players to stereo to headphones to cassettes (also making a mild comeback today!). I am sick of following the massive and ridiculous trade wars and obscure dead artists and the fall and the rise and the even more advanced fall of recorded classical music.

This is a reference book, a textbook, and very much the sort of excellent writing we had before about 1990, scholarly yet accessible to almost-normal people.

There have been many calls to revise THE FABULOUS PHONOGRAPH, but I think it’s too late. Nobody writes this well now. The two styles of writing would mix like water and oil. Or like digital and analog.

But I did learn about Nipper, the little dog in the painting and ad logo, HIS MASTER’S VOICE.

Why was the dog named “Nipper”? Because he was a nasty little S.O.B. who would nip at the heels of household visitors.

His burial site was under a mulberry tree in Kingston-On-Thames, and it was honored with a plaque in 1949. A plaque on a bank that replaced the mulberry now honors Nipper, the little bastard.

And so the record goes round and round . . .

pexels samfollsf 34159730 — ***Nipper***

Hero or War Criminal?

Written by Gregg Fedchak on September 26, 2025. Posted in Books.

General Curtis LeMay once said something to the effect that if the United States lost the war with Japan, he’d be tried as a war criminal for his introduction of the aerial firebombing of Japanese cities. That level of critical awareness informed his every waking moment and yet never paralyzed him with doubt or hesitation.

LEMAY by Warren Kozak and BLACK SNOW by James Scott are very comprehensive biographies of a man who ran the Army Air Corps and the United States Air Force, in part, for the better part of World War II and the Cold War. He even ran for Vice President in 1968.

And despite helping to win the war in Europe, the war in Asia, and, eventually, the Cold War – he lived to see the Berlin Wall come down – he’s mostly forgotten today.

Perhaps he’s most remembered for being the living, breathing person the two generals in the Stanley Kubrick movie “Dr. Strangelove” were modeled after. Perhaps he’s most remembered for his role on the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy Administration and its 1962 October Missile Crisis, when he led the hawk side favoring a confrontation with the Soviet Union that could have resulted in a nuclear World War III.

Or, famously, he’s remembered for his saying that we should bomb North Vietnam “back to the stone age”. Or that the best way to conduct a war is to kill enough of the enemy so that eventually they stop fighting.

Or, simply, he’s remembered for overseeing the first use of nuclear weapons, at Hiroshima and then Nagasaki.

Or, even more simply, he’s remembered for killing enough – so, so many – Germans and Japanese, including civilians of course, that we won the war. That they, the enemy, quit fighting.

That’s a lot of “remembered fors” for a guy who is mostly forgotten.

file written by adobe photoshop? 4.0 — ***Tokyo, 1945, after LeMay switched from precision bombing to area incendiary bombing***

I don’t want to compare LeMay to Germany’s Himmler, but there’s a strange symmetry between Himmler taking the initiative in killing Jews en masse in the Holocaust when he noticed that nobody was complaining about it, and Curtis LeMay’s noticing that his ammo dump on Guam was filling with mostly incendiary-type bombs that burned entire cities at a time when the approved bombing style, the precision bombing of industrial and military targets, was failing badly.

Implicitly, the Army Air Corps and the Pentagon was saying to LeMay, go ahead. If you have the guts.

He had the guts. Clearly the Pentagon didn’t.

Everybody breathes a sigh of relief when somebody but them takes the initiative, for better or worse.

All of this was eclipsed by LeMay’s strange decision to run, after retiring from the military, with segregationist third party presidential candidate George Wallace in 1968. LeMay was no racist, as proven by his track record in service, but the odd move nevertheless darkened the rest of his life.

Tone deaf, but a genius, somebody you want on your side in a war – “just imagine him in the enemy’s uniform!” somebody famously said – and the epitome of the winning ideal, how do you defend a Curtis LeMay?

You defend him by preferring to have won.

curtis lemay (usaf) — ***prime Curtis LeMay portrait***

Coffee With Hitler

Written by Gregg Fedchak on August 18, 2025. Posted in Books.

I’m writing this on a day when the word “appeasement” will be bandied about in terms of Trump and Putin and the Ukraine. By coincidence I just finished reading Charles Spicer’s COFFEE WITH HITLER about the informal diplomats who tried to “civilize” the Nazis by befriending them before World War II.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain has gone down in history as being the biggest appeaser ever. He went to Munich at a critical moment, met Hitler, and sold out the West.

Entire books have been written about this. I don’t think it’s necessary to go into detail here, other than to say that Chamberlain thought he had good reasons to eat Nazi bullshit. But the truth is, he didn’t, not really, and was a fool. Millions died because of his appeasement – “giving in in an almost erotic way” is what political appeasement means.

Who is to say that Donald Trump isn’t almost sexually titilliated by Vladimir Putin, today’s war criminal?

But well before Chamberlain, there were informal British diplomatic maneuvers to befriend the Nazi regime, to form bonds of understanding between the German people and the British, and to “civilize” the German elite into the ways of the British Empire and the West in general. To “have coffee” with them is to “have tea” with them is to “shoot grouse” with them is to “have sticky sweet buns” with them. And concerts. And many long talks and walks, in England and Germany both.

This book is great, because it’s kind of a new topic on an overwritten war – about the unsung heroes and boobs who misstepped, misinterpreted, failed to take notes, lost their notes, fed their notes to their dogs, hid their notes, overstepped boundaries, did things they shouldn’t and should have, and so on.

And they have been, until now, a mostly forgotten crew, because formal, state-appointed diplomats and spies get all the publicity and history books. Yet in this case, some of the figures had more inside info than British formal agents had. And more social insight. They read German public opinion better. Sometimes.

Yet history has seen them mostly as appeasers of the Nazis, as idealistic folks run amuck, as idealists often are.

I’d give you names here, but I guarantee you wouldn’t know any of them. As it became clear that their efforts and info would not civilize anybody, and as war loomed, many of these figures – corporate leaders, independently wealthy artists, landed gentry, scholars – bounced into a vehement anti-German mode.

By then, what little the greater British public knew about their prior activities had stuck. They were roundly thought to be Nazi sympathizers even after they were hit by reality. Most faded from view, hid quietly in the countryside, worked at small projects.

It felt safest to downplay their past, no matter how well-intentioned. And most had been well-intentioned.

adolf hitler, 20. april 1945.jpg (2) — ***last known photo of Hitler, just outside his bunker***

World War II popped up seemingly overnight, although it certainly didn’t. The signs were there a decade earlier. Some tried to prevent it by befriending the other side, some – the formal state diplomats – by ignoring the signs and the info from the informal eyes and ears, some by freezing in place and hoping for the best.

And some, like Chamberlain, didn’t ignore the signs. He was simply naive.

A fool on a hill?

inf3 46 neville chamberlain artist wooding

Kennedys and Buckleys: Admirable or . . . Nuts?

Written by Gregg Fedchak on July 29, 2025. Posted in Books.

This is turning out to be a summer of WASPS, reading about rich clans that act like American nobility that are not Protestant but Catholic.

William F. Buckley, conservative, pops in his memoir, OVERDRIVE, about one “ordinary” week in his life in the early 1980’s. Goldwater and Reagan kingmaker and friend of George Bush the First, he was at the height of his influence. In this book he makes sure we know it. He also takes every possible opportunity to tell the story of his entire life, such as his stint as an undercover CIA agent in the early 1950’s.

william f. buckley, jr. 1985 (3x4 cropped) — ***William F. Buckley in his prime***

He could come off as fatheaded with this kind of book format, but he doesn’t. Instead he charmed me. He makes it natural that I’m sitting here thinking about scraping the rotten grass off the underside of my lawn mower deck, and he, at a similar time in life, was sailing the Atlantic.

A totally different book is Buckley’s younger brother Reid’s SPEAKING IN PUBLIC: Buckley’s Techniques for Winning Arguments and Getting Your Point Across.

Published by Bill Buckley’s NATIONAL REVIEW Books, Reid is equally charming, no matter how little you intend to speak in public, or even show up at your local grocery store.

Forget politics here. Even if you can’t stand the Buckley family and its politics, books like these make you like the Buckleys and admire their politics.

These guys were natural. They belonged in charge. They belonged in charge of public speaking schools, in charge of political movements, in charge of sailing and skiing and debating and running oil companies.

So did the Kennedys, on the other side of the political aisle.

Same thing: like the Buckleys, the Kennedys were Roman Catholic WASPS. The masses admired the Kennedy royalty the same way they admired and still admire the Buckley royalty.

Why?

Two reasons: both families were conservative in a very American sense, and both came from the same grubby roots as the rest of us.

Americans are basically conservative politically and always have been. You may have noticed that in recent decades.

JFK was a hawk and was hesitant when it came to civil rights. So were most Americans, sadly. American conservatism is a matter of degree only, and that Donald Trump has been elected twice shows how deep it runs in us.

As far as grubby goes, there was a Texas cowboy sheriff in the Buckley family as late as 1900, and a cooper – a barrel-maker – among the Kennedys in the mid-19th century.

This fits in nicely with my grandfather A working in the Lehigh Valley railyards and my grandfather B changing tires at a gas station, my father laying linoleum, and, for that matter, me moving books with a hod for one miserable summer.

The American story now is one of how the Kennedys and the Buckleys and the rest of us moved up and out thanks to ambition, luck, hard work, education, and an urge to run things. In fact, our social problem now is that there are too many Buckleys and Kennedys and people like us and everybody wants and demands more attention and admiration.

The big question: are families that are this driven – overdriven, indeed – admirable or crazy? Is it good or bad that America winds us all up and expects us to start our own Kennedyesque empires?

Common sense tells us that there is too much education and too few opportunities, and, soon, artificial intelligence will be all over the place sopping up all the love.

If we’re all little entitled Buckleys, who is left to admire anything?

William F. Buckley Wasn’t Gay. Neither Was Ronald Reagan.

Written by Gregg Fedchak on July 10, 2025. Posted in Books.

Although Reagan was concerned about being perceived as gay.

That this is what I took from reading Sam Tanenhaus’ 1,000 page biography of BUCKLEY: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America.

Google’s artificial intelligence flatly states,

” . . . there’s no credible evidence or indication that William F. Buckley Jr. was gay. While some individuals have made accusations, such as those made by Gore Vidal in a libel suit, they are unsubstantiated and widely considered to be personal attacks rather than factual claims, according to Wikipedia. Buckley was married to Patricia Buckley, with whom he had a son, Christopher Buckley.”

We know for sure that Buckley had sex at least once, and with his wife Pat, who gave birth to bestselling novelist Christopher Buckley. (Although Chris was not bestselling right out of the incubator.). This is pending a DNA test, I suppose.

c44909 16 — ***Reagan/Buckley. Quite a ticket.***

Reagan was concerned about being seen as gay because some of his movie roles had been a tad . . . effeminate.

To pull sex out of a subject biography for whom sex was not a primary concern is . . . concerning. It’s not Tanenhaus’ fault. He brings the subject up a reasonable number of times because Buckley was dogged by rumors of gayness.

Is it because people were envious of his WASPishness (despite being Catholic)? Because of his youthful good looks? Because they were liberals looking to besmirch Mr. Conservative? Because he and his wife were good friends of Truman Capote and other gays? Because conservative gays admired him and fantasized about him and “wished and hoped”? Because Buckley’s NATIONAL REVIEW magazine had gay staffers?

This I also took from the massive book: Buckley was in perpetual motion.

He wrote three newspaper columns a week for most of his life. He traveled constantly as a public speaker (my wife and I heard him speak at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY). He edited, ran, and wrote for NATIONAL REVIEW. He advised presidents and politicians. He ran for mayor of New York.

He raised money for all kinds of concerns, both political and charitable. He was part-owner of TV and radio stations. He recorded a TV program, Firing Line, for much of his life. He was a businessman. His family had oil interests. He wrote endless books and novels; as a novelist, he, too, was a bestseller.

He sailed. He played classical piano. He flew (badly – that hobby ended when he crashed his plane on a college campus).

But his industriousness was manically driven. The reader can’t help to feel like a lazy bastard in comparison.

Tanenhaus wonders if all that energy wasn’t spent out of a tragic fear of boredom and a desire to keep introspection at bay. Maybe about repressed gayness, maybe about an endless sense of (white, male) entitlement?

Jarringly, the book comes to a near stop with the election of Reagan in 1980. Buckley lived for another productive 30 years, but you’d never know it from this 1,000 page book.

Considering that it examines in length Young Buckley’s every bowel movement in prep school, why the early crap out?

I’m guessing Tanenhaus made way for Christopher Buckley’s excellent, earlier book on his father, which covered the later years affectionately and well.

Or perhaps he was just tired. The bio took him 25 years to write, and as you read, you get a sense that Tanenhaus is slowly grinding to a stop.

You’ll have to want to know a lot about mid-to-late 20th Century politics and public affairs to get into this book. But Tanenhaus is a great writer. He should be. He was editor of THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW.

And he knows how to spice it up in regular measured doses.