Like John O’Sullivan, I’m currently traveling in Europe and spent yesterday being asked wherever I went about Bill Buckley. He is an heroic figure to many because he was right about the great question of the second half of the 20th century at a time when far too many in the west thought it boorish and vulgar to be: As a character in one of his last novels tells a self-regarding liberal, “The kind of people who have offended you since you were at college are the people who won the Cold War.”
Bill was not a shrill man about politics, but he had a consistent moral clarity. Not long ago, we had a lunch a deux and spent most of it chatting about spy fiction. His Blackford Oakes novels had just been reissued, and Bill was talking of how he’d created Blackie as an antidote to the John Le Carre ethos, in which there’s no good, there’s no bad, there’s just shades of gray and total moral equivalence between east and west, and thus between their respective warriors at the KGB and in the western intelligence agencies. And once you accept this view the conflict is necessarily trivial: it’s just a game between opposing bureaucracies whose machinations and manoeuvres are their own justification. Le Carre was profoundly wrong but a good enough writer that his became the default template of spy fiction, and, because life imitates art, of far too many real intelligence types at the CIA and MI6 toward the end of the Cold War.
In the Oakes novels, by contrast, you can find amidst all the plot shenanigans huge insights that stand up better than anything in the conventional shades-of-gray stuff. Bill said that several of the scenarios were inspired by his brief time as a delegate to the UN General Assembly, when he was affronted by the boastfulness of the totalitarian regimes but even more offended by the inclination of western diplomats to string along with them. At that lunch, we were talking about one of the best novels, Stained Glass, in which Oakes finds himself pressed into the service of realpolitik even as he acknowledges that the young idealist is actually in the right.
I was trying to recall the precise wording of the marvelous characterization of the Cold War made by the German Count in that book and, of course, I didn’t quite get it right and Bill had written another two or three dozen tomes since and so couldn’t conjure it, either. But I looked it up after the lunch: The character speaks of the division of Germany by a consortium in which one side “had designs on human liberty everywhere” while the other was ”fatigued by a war that had roused its people from a hemispheric torpor which they once thought of as a part of the American patrimony–an American right, so to speak”. I thought there was more truth in that than in the entire Le Carre oeuvre, and we then got into a disagreement about whether those opposed to the Bush project in the Middle East were merely the latest subscribers to the “American right” to “hemispheric torpor”. Not an unpleasant disagreement but a civilized one ending with Bill flashing his splendid joyous toothy grin.
He had a very good aside in one of those thrillers: “By the way, Sally, does anybody ever confess to just plain ‘reading’ Jane Austen? I know only people who ‘reread’ Jane Austen.” The Oakes books are well worth rereading.