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.
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?
