Letters: Sep. 12, 1969

(4 of 4)

Sir: I do not mean to reproach you, or even to give you the impression that I think you'd care if I did. But I do believe that the writer of the story on Vidal and me turned in a remarkable performance. "When they fence on television or in type, bitchiness erodes their polish and learned discourse dissolves into tantrums." The man who wrote that sentence doesn't know the difference between a tantrum and a psalm. The writer then goes on to stick into my mouth an unpleasant sentence I never wrote (the author of that sentence is clearly designated in my piece as the Times Literary Supplement). But the extraordinary achievement was to quote Vidal's charges against me, in particular that my views are those of the founders of the Third Reich, which, were it so, would, among other things, impeach the professional resources of TIME magazine for not having discovered this signal piece of intelligence in the course of preparing a cover story on me. I write to you because I care what you believe, and because, in the same issue of TIME magazine, you exhort all of America to indignation. I don't see a better provocation to indignation than Vidal, and it surprises me—hell, it pains me—that your writer should, after acknowledging that the low blows were Vidal's, repeat them matter-of-factly.

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. New York City