Real Lace (27 page)

After leaving the AEC, Tom Murray was made a part-time consultant to the Congressional committee that had tried to intercede for him. Still, though he did his best not to show it, he was privately bitter about Eisenhower's refusal to acknowledge his work by keeping him on the job. He even wrote a book, entitled
Nuclear Policy for War and Peace
, in which he gracefully and lucidly told of his AEC experiences, outlined his beliefs, and attempted to play down his differences with Lewis Strauss. Of this book, the
Times Book Review
commented, “It sheds important light for the first time on an area that has been shrouded in darkness and confusion and should serve as an important guide to public understanding of one of the most crucial issues of our generation, and
thus greatly aid in the formulation of a sane nuclear policy upon which may depend the future of all of us.” Editorially, the
Daily News
commented, “Read a book, Ike!” But the Eisenhower snub may have helped shorten Tom Murray's life. He died three years later, in May, 1961, at the age of sixty-nine.

Despite his soaringly liberal views on American atomic policy and world affairs, Uncle Tom had remained staunchly conservative in terms of his Church and family. In 1945 his niece, the beautiful Jeanne Murray, met and eloped to Philadelphia with the millionaire sportsman-playboy, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt. Jeanne had been working as a publicist for Sherman Billingsley's Stork Club, and the two had met there. For days afterward the tabloids were filled with photographs of the handsome pair. Though many an American family might be delighted to have a daughter marry a Vanderbilt, the Murrays were not. Not only was Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt not a Catholic, but he had been married before, and divorced, and had a child by his former wife. Vanderbilt men, furthermore, had already acquired a poor record when it came to keeping their wives. Jeanne's mother, Mrs. Jack Murray, was aghast when her daughter telephoned the news of the elopement, and it was weeks before she could bring herself to mail out a very few restrained wedding announcements. Most scandalized of all by Jeanne's behavior was Uncle Tom. At the time, he called on Jeanne's mother at her Park Avenue apartment, and told her, “You must never receive her again. She is not your daughter any longer.”

Chapter 19

THE BUCKLEYS OF “GREAT ELM”

The Buckley family has always preferred to think of itself as in a somewhat special category, set apart from such families as the Murrays and the McDonnells. They are, of course, “connected.” New York Senator James L. Buckley is married to the former Ann Cooley, whose brother, Richard, was married to the former Sheila McDonnell, though the latter couple is now divorced. “We've never had the interest in High Society that they've had,” says Carol Buckley Learsy. “Our interests, as a family, have turned in other directions.”

It is true that only a few of the Buckleys have regularly maintained a listing in the New York
Social Register
. The others have chosen not to be listed. And, in the 1920's, when a social publicist approached William F. Buckley, Sr., the founder of the family fortune, and said to him, “Mr. Buckley, for a fee of three hundred dollars a month I'll guarantee that you and your wife and children will appear once a week in society columns, and at least monthly
in social magazines,” the senior Buckley replied icily, “Young man, I'll pay you the same amount to keep me and my family out of the press.” Instead of social position, the Buckleys have devoted themselves to their
principles
, and such publicity as the family has had has resulted from their public expression of these principles—principles which have led the family to be labeled “America's First Family of Conservatism.”

The Buckleys, it sometimes seems, have
always
been conservative, and almost militantly so, defending their beliefs with more than a touch of steamy Irish temper. In 1793 a William Buckley of Clonmel, County Tipperary, marched to the guillotine, head held arrogantly high, for his leading role in the Royalist counterrevolution. The first Buckley to come to America had been an Orangeman—a member of the secret society organized in the North of Ireland in 1795 to defend the laws and rule of the reigning King of England, and to support the Protestant religion, but he showed his independent nature by marrying a Catholic girl from County Cork. His political stance had put him somewhat at odds with his England-hating Catholic neighbors near Killarney in the South, who took to crossing Buckley's fields in order to reach their potato farms and pastures. He formally requested them to stop, but they stubbornly refused to comply. One day, after an argument on this subject, Buckley lifted up a plowshare and hit one of his neighbors over the head with it. He was trucked off to jail, where he languished for several weeks while the village waited to see whether the man would die. When he did not, Buckley was released and permitted to emigrate to Canada as a felon. There he took up farming again.

His son, John Buckley, was an equally stubborn sort. He married an Irish Catholic girl named Mary Lee and then announced to her mother, “I'm taking Mary Lee to Texas.” Her mother cried, “I'd rather see her in the local graveyard than in that savage country!” But, her mother's wishes notwithstanding, he took
Mary Lee to Texas, where they settled in the border town of Washington de los Brazos. This turned out to be a fortunate move for future Buckleys. John Buckley was a great bear of a man who, in those freewheeling post-Reconstruction days, set himself up as sheriff of Duval County, and, armed with a nickel-plated Colt .45 Peacemaker, would strut into saloons to break up fights, ordering gunslinging cowboys to turn over their firearms. He prospered sufficiently to send his son, William F. Buckley, to the University of Texas, where he graduated with a law degree. With two other brothers, Edmund and Claude, William F. Buckley set up the law firm of Buckley, Buckley, & Buckley. This firm prospered, and presently was specializing in legal counsel for the various oil companies that were rapidly springing up on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border. Before long, the Buckleys were looking for—and finding—oil.

Will Buckley was every bit as tough-minded as his father. In an era and in a part of the world where every man, including his father, carried a gun, William Buckley chose to emphasize his strength of character by going about the streets of the tiny Texas towns and Mexican villages unarmed. Unlike his contemporary, Mr. Doheny, Buckley refused to bribe Mexican officials in order to acquire oil leases, but he was nonetheless able to get his hands on a good deal of choice land. His moralistic stand on bribery did not endear him to the Mexican Government, and for a while he was stalked by an armed assassin named Monty Michael, who already had a considerable reputation as a killer and bank robber. Will Buckley's approach to Monty Michael was typical of his approach to other problems: he disarmed Michael with his straightforwardness. Buckley knew the gunslinger was under orders to kill him, and so he went out of his way to make Michael's assignment easier and pleasanter. Once, when he noticed Michael shadowing him down the street, he stepped over to the fellow and said, “Monty, I'm having lunch in this restaurant with a couple of friends. Why
don't you and your boys pick up something to eat in the meantime?” The baffled outlaw stammered, “But, Mr. Buckley—don't you realize that I've been hired to scare you out of Mexico, and—if that doesn't work—to kill you?” Buckley said gently, “Well, never mind about that, Monty. Meanwhile, you'll have about an hour before I leave here.”

Mr. Buckley began making it a point to keep Monty Michael informed of his schedule and intended whereabouts. On chilly nights, while Buckley worked late in his office and while the bad men waited outside for him in an unheated vestibule, Buckley sent out for hot sandwiches, chili, and coffee for them. One very late night, Monty and his men came crashing into Buckley's office, their faces flushed from tequila. Each carried a Colt revolver at the hip, a cartridge-studded bandoleer over the shoulder, and all brandished sawed-off shotguns. Buckley was startled, but did not lose his composure. “Yes, Monty—what is it?” he inquired politely. Monty said, “We've been talking it over, Mr. Buckley. Look, the men who hired us to kill you are in the casino. They're drunk. Now, if it's all right by you, my friends and I'll amble down there and blast them to kingdom come. How's that, Mr. Buckley? We'd rather work for you.” Mr. Buckley said, “Good heavens, Monty—you can't do that!” The bewildered outlaw shook his head and said, “Mr. Buckley, I don't understand you. Pass up a chance like this. I just don't understand you.” He departed with his friends, and that was the last Will Buckley ever saw of Monty Michael.

Still, there was something about Southwestern lawlessness that rather appealed to Will Buckley. One of the stories of those days that he liked to tell involved a trip to Mexico City on a railway flatcar with his brother Edmund. There was a revolution going on and, according to Buckley, “Corpses were strung from every telephone pole for miles along the way!” Gazing with awe at the scene, the two brothers agreed, “This is a wonderful country!”

Wonderful or not, Will Buckley's most formidable enemy
became General Obregón, the revolutionary President of Mexico, but still Buckley would not pay the expected bribes. Obregón once swore, “If I don't live to kill Will Buckley and his sons, my sons will live to do it.” Finally, the pressure from Obregón's government became too much for him, and in 1921 Buckley was banished from Mexico as a “pernicious foreigner” and ordered never to return under penalty of death. Later, Buckley liked to explain to his children and friends that he could have paid the price to avoid expulsion, but that to do so would have meant sacrificing his principles, and this he would not do. Instead, he sacrificed about a million dollars' worth of oil properties which the Mexican Government expropriated. In any question of money versus principles, he explained, a man's principles must be served first. In 1922 he came to New York nearly penniless and proud of it. But, in the great boom market of the twenties, he plunged aggressively into Wall Street, specializing in the stocks of oil companies, which he knew best, and presently he was flat broke no longer. In fact, before he was through, he would amass another fortune in the neighborhood of $110 million.

In 1923, for $22,000, he bought a forty-acre farm and farmhouse in Sharon, Connecticut, which he named, expansively, “Great Elm.” He added onto the house at “Great Elm” until it became the huge Georgian showplace that it is today, filled with antiques, porcelains, crystal, and silver, and presently he acquired a second winter home in Camden, South Carolina. As his tastes grew patrician, he took to sporting a fresh carnation in his buttonhole, pince-nez, and high formal collars. His became a commanding presence in New York and as he strode about the grounds of his two country estates, which he dappled with prize livestock—Merino sheep, Irish hogs, and Jersey cattle.

He and his wife, Aloise, had ten children, and, as a parent, Mr. Buckley was both a classicist and a perfectionist. The children were tutored in French, Latin, Greek, Spanish, mathematics,
history, grammar, poetry, and music. As a former Texan, he insisted that his children be able to sit a horse, and so they had a private riding instructor. Once, fearful that his sons were becoming too effetely Eastern, he imported an entire boxcarful of broncos from the West. The horses proved to be unridable by anyone but a rodeo champion, and so they eventually had to be shipped back again. And there was one Christmas morning when the senior Buckley, dressed as Santa Claus and listening to the babble of children's voices, turned to his wife and said, “Aloise, has it occurred to you that it's been years since we understood a word our children say?” Promptly, speech instructors were added to the international retinue of tutors in the Buckley household.

Politically, he was, like his ancestors, every inch a royalist, standing somewhere to the right of William McKinley, and he lectured to his children endlessly on his suspicions of any kind of compromise, of government in general, and of liberals without exception. Though his relations with the Mexican Government were not cordial, he objected strenuously when President Wilson dispatched Marines to invade Veracruz. This was carrying government too far. He dispatched himself to Washington, where, as an expert on Mexican affairs, he testified before the United States Senate against the invasion, calling Wilson's decision “typical of the provincial American, who in need of civilization himself, seeks to civilize the rest of the world.”

He was a vociferous writer of memoranda to the various members of his family, and these dispatches might be directed to one person in particular or to all Buckleys in general. His directives advocated a continuous effort to develop the virtues of self-reliance and self-control, ambition, independence, good sportsmanship and good manners, honor, dependability, and steadfast devotion to the Roman Catholic Faith. They inveighed against smoking, slovenliness in any form, and all manifestations of indolence. A memo might take to task his daughter Maureen's
diction (which was never quite to her father's satisfaction, despite the instructors), or it might praise his son Jim's punctiliousness in paying back a ten-dollar loan. He particularly remonstrated against what he considered the overwhelmingly bad American habit of not listening to other people. He inveighed against divorce, overuse of alcohol, and reliance on the automobile for a journey that could be accomplished by shank's mare.

His memos—usually signed “W.F.B.”—overlooked few areas of his children's lives, and were issued from wherever Mr. Buckley's business might have taken him. Often they were touched with gentle humor. Writing to his son Bill on the subject of his younger brother, Reid, at Yale, he wrote:

Memorandum to William F. Buckley, Jr.:

Jane tells me that Reid has quite extensive sideburns. When he started growing them I mentioned them to him very casually and he said that that was required of the Glee Club—which sounds rather extraordinary. If you could gently suggest to him that he remove them, it would be a great relief to the family. I would rather he not belong to the Glee Club.