William F. Buckley's Son Spills the Beans On the Family

Well I am sure this book will be a tad controversal next month. Crunchy Con has the link as well as thoughts when children talk a little ill of their dead parents. See William F. Buckley Son Spills the Beans On the Family

It is a pretty fasicnating read. Here are two parts. The first pretty funny:

Some years before, Pup commissioned a large bronze crucifix from the Connecticut sculptor Jimmy Knowles. It’s a beautiful piece of modern art. He placed it in the middle of the lawn in Stamford, to a distinct grumbling by Mum, who viewed her garden as off-limits to my father’s artistic (and in this case overtly religious) intrusions. Mum’s ashes were now inside the cross, in a heavy brass canister that looked as if it had been designed as a container for enriched plutonium. Pup’s instructions were that he, too, should be cremated and join her in the cross. The idea of Mum, who wasn’t very religious, encased for all eternity inside Pup’s crucifix had afforded her and me a few grim giggles over the years.
“Just sprinkle me in the garden or send me out with the trash,” she told me. “I most certainly do not wish to be inside that object.” But Mum died first, so that was that.
Pup expected me to keep the Stamford house, but beautiful as it was and fond though (most of) my memories were of it, it’s expensive, and after paying all the death taxes, I doubted I’d be able to maintain it. But not wanting to hurt his feelings, I went along with the fiction that I would keep it. This, however, left me with a conundrum: what to do with the cross. One evening during his convalescence I tiptoed into this minefield over our martinis.
“Say, Pup, I know you want your ashes in the cross. . . .”
“I absolutely want them in the cross,” he said, in a pre-emptive, “Firing Line” tone of voice.
“Right. Right. I was only thinking, what if, you know, the house, if I, well, you never know . . . if I ever had to sell it. . . .”
“Your point being?”
“Well, I mean, a new owner . . . surely . . . might, uh. . . .”
“Why wouldn’t a new owner want the cross?”
“Well,” I said, taking a deep swig of my frosty see-through, “they might be, I don’t know, Jewish, or whatever. They might not want an enormous crucifix in their garden.”
“Why not?”
I stared.
“It’s a work of art,” he said.
“It is. It is absolutely that. (Clearing of throat.) Still. . . .”
“I wouldn’t worry about it.” How well I knew this formulation. “I wouldn’t worry about it” was W.F.B.-speak for “The conversation is over.”
Thus I was left with the impression I had committed lèse-majesté by suggesting that a future owner — Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Amish, Zoroastrian — might be anything less than honored to have William F. Buckley Jr.’s last remains in his garden, encased in an enormous bronze symbol of the crucified Christ. Certainly it would present the real estate broker with an interesting covenant clause. Now, um, Mr. and Mrs. Birnbaum, you do understand that Mr. and Mrs. Buckley’s ashes are to remain in the crucifix, in the garden, in, um, perpetuity?

This part of Nixon History is pretty gripping:


THERE’S A MR. X, APPARENTLY
One day, as I sat in Pup’s study planning the memorial service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the phone rang. A gentle, sandpapery voice came on the line.
“I’m looking for Christopher Buckley.”
“Yes, this is he.”
“Oh, Chris, it’s George McGovern calling.”
Pup and George McGovern were political opposites, but they became fast friends a decade earlier after engaging in a series of public debates. I remembered Pup grinning one day over lunch, announcing: “Say, have I told you about my new best friend? George McGovern! He turns out to be the single nicest human being I’ve ever met.”
I recall my jaw dropping. When McGovern ran for president in 1972, Pup had written and spoken some pretty tough things about him (though never ad hominem). As I winched my lower mandible back into place, I reflected that this relationship wasn’t at all improbable. Some of Pup’s great friendships were with card-carrying members of the vast left-wing conspiracy: John Kenneth Galbraith, Murray Kempton, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the A.C.L.U. head Ira Glasser and Allard K. Lowenstein, among many others. But there were piquant twists to the friendship with McGovern.

Pup’s boss at the C.I.A. in Mexico in 1951 was E. Howard Hunt. Howard was — you may have heard something about this — indicted in 1972 after locks were jimmied open at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate, in an effort, among other things, to sabotage George McGovern’s presidential campaign. Pup left the C.I.A.’s employ in 1952, but he remained friends with Hunt and was godfather to — and, indeed, trustee for — the Hunts’ children.

As Watergate unfolded, I found myself home from college some weekends, in the basement sauna with Pup after dinner, listening to him as he confided his latest hush-hush phone call from Howard. It was dramatic, even spooky, stuff. The calls would come at pre­arranged times, from phone booths. One night, Pup looked truly world-weary. Howard’s wife, Dorothy, had just been killed in a commercial-airline crash while on a mission for him, reportedly delivering hush money to Watergate operatives.

“It turns out that there’s a safety-deposit box.”
I was 21, an aspiring staff reporter on The Yale Daily News. Watergate was a very big story. No: the biggest story since the Fall of Rome. Oh, how my little mouth salivated. Not that I could repeat a single word of any of this.
“A safety-deposit box?”
“There’s a Mr. X, apparently. The way it works is this: I don’t know his identity, but he knows mine. Howard has given him instructions: if he’s killed — ”
“Killed? Jesus.”
“ — if something happens. . . . In that event, Mr. X will contact me. He has the key to the safety-deposit box. He and I are to open it together.”
“And?”
Pup looked at me heavily. “Decide what to do with the contents.”
“Jesus, Pup.”
“Don’t swear, Big Shot.”
“What sort of contents are we talking about?”
This next moment, I remember vividly. Pup was staring at the floor of the sauna, hunched over. His shoulders sagged. He let out a sigh.
“I don’t know, exactly, but it could theoretically involve information that could lead to the impeachment of the president of the United States.”

This conversation took place in December 1972. In the post-Clinton era, the word “impeachment” has lost much of its shock value, but back then, before the revelation of the Oval Office tapes, or the revelations of the White House counsel John Dean, the phrase “impeachment of the president of the United States” packed a very big wallop. I was speechless. Pup was, to be sure, a journalist, but he took no pleasure in possessing this odious stick of dynamite. His countenance was pure Gethsemane: Let this cup pass from me. He would later publicly recuse himself, in the pages of his own magazine, from comment on Watergate, pleading conflict of interest based on his status as trustee for the Hunt children.

And now George McGovern, whose campaign was the target of Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy and the other “plumbers,” was on the phone from South Dakota, to condole someone he had never met and to say that he was planning to come to the memorial service, adding with what sounded like a grin, “if I can make my way through this 15-foot-high snowdrift outside my house.” I put down the phone and wept.