I no longer subscribe myself, but thanks to a well-meaning friend I receive National Review magazine in the mail. When it arrives I page through it and invariably am reminded how much pizzazz and wit have gone out of the bi-monthly publication since its founder, William F. Buckley Jr. -- who would be 85 on November 24; he died in 2008 -- stopped editing it.
Buckley's legendary rapier pen drew a lot of young people to conservatism in the 1960s. Many of us tried to emulate his writing style, and when I landed my first opinion piece in The Milwaukee Journal and received a note from Marde Burke, then the beloved eminence grise of the journalism dept. at Milwaukee Area Technical College of which I am an alumnus, informing me that according to the "Gunning Fog Index" my prose was practically impenetrable, I swooned with self-approbation. Most of WFB's newspaper columns and magazine stuff was way over my own head. But he sure drove liberals nuts, and at the time there seemed no higher calling than that.
In 1972, I made it into National Review with a feature piece ratting out the pinko professors I had in my first year at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. It brought me a check for $200, which paled in significance and value next to the handwritten note that accompanied it: "Mr. Ehrmann: You have a nice talent. (Signed) WFB."
Two years later, at the invitation of the UWM Dept. of Mass Communication, three episodes of "Firing Line," the weekly PBS show featuring Buckley in debate against a liberal adversary, were filmed on campus.
Fellow journalism student Jackie Loohauis -- now a feature writer for the Journal Sentinel -- and I were dispatched to fetch WFB at the Milwaukee airport, along with his close pal E. Howard Hunt -- they worked together at the CIA, and Buckley was godfather to three of his kids -- who was a mastermind of the botched burglary of Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC, in 1972, for which he eventually did 33 months in the can. Hunt was scheduled to be one of Buckley's guests on "Firing Line." (The other two: former Sen. Eugene McCarthy and then-Wisconsin Congressman Les Aspin.)
Buckley and Hunt sat in the back seat of the rental car, and as we pulled away from the airport my ears twitched in anticipation of eavesdropping on a conversation that Woodward and Bernstein themselves would've killed to overhear.
But there was no big scoop. Or, if there was I couldn't understand it, because all the way to the Pfister Hotel, Buckley and Hunt conversed in Spanish. I was in the B.A.-General program at UWM, which meant I didn't have to take any math or foreign language, and without which I would still be struggling for my degree today.
As a member of the student panel on the "Firing Line" broadcast with Rep. Aspin, I got to ask a single question at the end of the show. Sweating through a brand new conservatively mod outfit purchased for the occasion at Johnny Walker's, I tried to be just as arch and withering as the host in asking Aspin why he didn't go after waste in domestic spending with the vigor and bombast he used to oppose military expenditures. He genially swatted me down like a bell-bottomed gnat.
As we left him later inside the Mitchell Field terminal, WFB shook my hand and told me, "Good question!" But the feeling that I'd blown it was confirmed later that year when I wasn't chosen for an internship at National Review. "If we had one more spot, you would've gotten it," consoled Priscilla Buckley, WFB's sister and managing editor of the magazine, in her rejection letter.
At the time I was probably crushed. But I came to realize that at those famous intellectual editorial conferences I would've been in way over my head and worthless, unless for some reason there had been a discussion about whether a prime Joe Louis would've taken Muhammad Ali. (The answer, by the way, is yes. To paraphrase WFB himself from his 1968 televised slugfest with Gore Vidal, Joe would've socked Ali in his goddam face and he would have stayed plastered.)
