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94 • chapter seven In the four years I worked with Jim Buckley, I wrote floor speeches, orations for RepublicanPartyandConservativePartyevents,innumerableremarksonvarious legislative topics, inserts for the Congressional Record, drafts of constituent letters, and many other pieces. But I did not write the most memorable statement he ever made in his six years in office. I refer to his remarks at a news conference on Tuesday, March 19, 1974, when he called for the resignation of embattled President Richard Nixon during the Watergate crisis. Politics often has a short memory, and today Jim’s speech is of interest only to political junkies, but for a brief moment it was the biggest and most widely reported political news in the nation. NationalReviewcolumnistJamesBurnham,agoodfriendofJim’sandrevered by all conservatives, provided a first draft, which Jim then revised, repeatedly. I learned this only after the speech was drafted, and I had no suspicion anything like this was on Jim’s mind. The first draft was Mr. Burnham’s, but the tightly reasoned argument, quietly effective presentation, painstaking distinctions, and civil, more-in-sadness-than-in-anger tone were pure Jim Buckley. Of all the things he ever said as a senator, this statement had the most immediate impact and got the most—and most frenzied—coverage and response. It might be asked: if you didn’t write the statement, why refer to it, since this is a book about your speechwriting? Good question. But I think Jim’s statement deserves comment because my reaction when I first read it, and Jim’s reaction to my comments, say a lot about how a politician and a writer work with, or often against, each other. So what I write here is less about the techniques of writing speeches and more about the relationship between the boss and a political aide. Aside from his defeat by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1976, Jim’s call for Nixon’s resignation was the most gut-wrenching, agonizing event in his alltoo -brief, one-term senatorial career. And yet, in a way, despite all the pain the speech caused many of his admirers and the unrestrained jubilation of those who despised his political conservatism, I believe it was perhaps his finest moment as a public figure, although for me it was a case of delight and dole in equal measure. His decision wasn’t just a profile in courage, it was the very definition of political courage, because Jim not only “spoke the truth to power”; he did something infinitely more difficult: he spoke an unpleasant, hurtful truth to his friends and allies—and to Richard Nixon, a man he generally supported. In politics that takes real guts. jim buckley and ronald reagan • 95 It is not necessary for me to repeat here the bizarre, complex, often unconnected series of illegal, immoral, and criminal events we now refer to as “Watergate.” Suffice it to say that by March 1974 the Nixon White House was under siege, the Republican Party was undergoing a nervous breakdown, and the country was riveted by almost daily reports in the press of yet another disclosure of malfeasance and unethical behavior in the Nixon administration. In those days, before the age of nanosecond-fast electronic reporting of events, morning newspapers did most of the heavy lifting when it came to scandals, and, as is well known, the Washington Post was often in the lead. I can remember mornings when I would open the front door to our house in Arlington, Virginia, bend to pick up the Post from the stoop, and see yet another photo of a friend or former colleague or acquaintance plastered across the front page. This was one of those situations in which political rhetoric could not change perceptions or alter the inexorable course of events. By this time, Nixon didn’t need rhetoric and he didn’t need heart. He needed direct divine intervention. The term “Great Satan” was not yet current, but Nixon’s many enemies would have enjoyed using it at the time, because the man they had said for decades was the personification of political evil had delivered himself into their hands. Now that they had him, they would never let him go. All that remained to discuss was how he would be drawn and quartered. For all their moralistic rhetoric about the need for compassion, many of Nixon’s enemies were pathologically sadistic in their undisguised glee at his disgrace. In Jim Buckley’s...

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