The party at the Plaza.

THERE IS a wonderful confluence of events at work here, as the President has returned from his historic and successful meeting with Gorbachev in time to be here to NATIONAL REVIEW'S Thirtieth Anniversary Dinner. For, thirty years ago when NATIONAL REVIEW was being founded, democratic socialism was still the accepted world view of most Western intellectuals. But we stand here tonight at a time when it is democratic capitalism, and not democratic socialism, that is the model for the world.

A great many people have dedicated themselves to the conservative revolution in this country, many of them sprinkled throughout this august crowd. But still, in twentieth-century America, who says "conservatism" says "NATIONAL REVIEW."

In 1952 the conservatives lost all the floor fights at the Republican convention and coulnd't get their man nominated. NR was born in 1955, and by 1964 we had captured the grass roots of the Republican Party as well as the nomination. It took 16 more years before we were able to capture not only the nomination but the Presidency as well....

what will the world look like thirty years from now, when NR celebrates its sixtieth anniversary, in the year 2015, and conservative Presidents have been in office all that time?

Bill Buckley will be the only ninety-year-old enfant terrible in history.

We will file our income taxes on a postcard. The maximum rate will be around 10 or 15 per cent. Interest rates will be 5.5 or 6 per cent. And the dollar will be as good as gold.

America will have tested, developed, and deployed President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.

NR's Sixtieth Anniversary Dinner will be held in the free city of Havana. The editors decided to save Moscow for the Diamond Jubilee.

The bad news is that William J. Brennan, at 109, will still be contemplating retirement from the Supreme Court. The good news is that Jim Buckley will be the longest-serving Chief Justice in history.

For thirty years NATIONAL REVIEW, its founders and editors, writers and staff, and financial contributors, have told the truth. The people of America --indeed, of the world--owe an enormous debt of gratitude to NATIONAL REVIEW. You have been instrumental in changing the political face of America for decades and, as I believe, for all time to come.

RICHARD BROOKHISER 

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, Mr. President . . . In thinking about the future, my mind kept returning to an incident five years in the past. It was an incident that directly concerned you, Mr. President.

It came at a moment when it was not at all certain that you were ever going to be President. The 1980 Iowa caucuses had just occurred, and the New Hampshire primary was several weeks away. I was traveling with the Reagan press--and the consensus was that you were on the ropes, with a strong minority holding that you had been technically knocked out.

You had taken a three-day swing, from Illinois to South Carolina, to Miami, to New Orleans, and finally to Minneapolis. You went to the Minnesota Club for a powwow with your advisors, and the press went on to a place called Stem Hall where you were scheduled to speak.

You were late. There was a little pick-up band in plastic boaters that played "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight" about a dozen times. I had a chance to look over the crowd.

Finally, you arrived, and they gave a whoop. There had been a string of warm-up speakers--worse than average --but they hadn't paid any attention to them. They wanted you.

At the time, I thought the burden of being a politician was an enormous one. Because a democratic politician has made a pledge, to all of his supporters, that he will stand by certain ideas. It seemed a very solemn pledge to me that night--a pledge a politician dare not break.

But I think now that the obligation does not run from politician to voter. It runs from both of them, to the common idea. It was the ideas that brought the people there that night, every bit as much as the politician.

NATIONAL REVIEW, and those who support it, took their own pledge to certain ideas thirty years ago. They are more important than any President we elect, or any writer we run. In three years, Ronald Reagan will retire from public office. In time, all of us will retire from our jobs. In a hundred years, there is not a person or a thing in this room that will remain.

But our ideas will remain. They will have to remain if a respect for freedom and order--for the laws of nature and nature's God--are to survive in a dark and doubtful world.

We have a lot of work ahead of us in the next thirty years--and a lot to work for.

JOSEPH SOBRAN 

I'VE BEEN working at NATIONAL REVIEW for 13 years, and I have the honor to be listed as a senior editor now, but I must say I still sometimes feel like the college boy I was twenty years ago.

Remembering my first intoxicated discovery of NATIONAL REVIEW I recall most strongly the delicious shock of finding things said I'd assumed it was practically illegal to say. I didn't realize it was even possible to say them, or think them, let alone agree with them. And NATIONAL REVIEW said these things with a wonderfully audacious humor. If you were drinking a beer while you read, there was a terrible danger that the beer would come out your nose. I read it with an exhilaration that was in equal parts a sense of delight and a sense of deliverance.

In those days, right after what was called the Goldwater debacle, the idea of a conservative President seemed worse than farfetched. For conservatives there was no prospect of victory. We were immediately busy convincing ourselves that we weren't an endangered species. And yet NATIONAL REVIEW never lost the serenity of a man who is utterly resolved to be himself, win or lose. It espoused unpopular ideas until they were popular ideas, but it never sold out in order to sell.

So here we are, enjoying as happy an ending as this life ever affords. To a group disinclined to expect progress, progress has come as a happy shock. One of our readers has even proved that if you'd rather be right than be President, you can wind up being President!

JEFFREY HART 

By a strange chance of fate, I found myself thinking about these remarks in Whittaker Chambers's old office at NATIONAL REVIEW, where I now work when not at Dartmouth. It seems appropriate for me to be using Chambers's office, because his memoir, Witness, was one of the principal books that made me, while in college, a conscious, as distinguished from an instinctive, conservative.

The whole Hiss affair had been shocking enough, but it was the more so because of the respectable support Hiss--even after his conviction--had on the Columbia campus. It remained for Witness to give the whole thing historical and even cosmic resonance.

If the word "seriously" can still be made to retain something of its old power, Chambers took Communism seriously. He viewed it as a comprehensive negation, a coherent structure of anti-values, saying no to everything the West had said yes to. It was as if an intricate mask of Western culture had been designed, and then turned inside out. Not God but materialism. Not freedom but necessity. Not liberty but total control. Not independent truth but truth contingent upon power.

I recalled that st. Augustine had defined evil as the absence of good. We were looking at, yes, Mr. President, an evil empire.

Alger Hiss was the perfect metaphor for all this: a man spawned by the West--Johns Hopkins, Harvard Law, Justice Holmes's law clerk, high up in government--but a man who had been turned inside out, and therefore lived a lie, because he believed in a lie.

Nothing that has happened to this hour contradicts Chambers' view of the matter. His mind and spirit haunt my little office at NATIONAL REVIEW.

GEORGE WILL 

IT IS MY privilege tonight to serve as a kind of Aaron Copland, composing a fanfare for an uncommon woman: Priscilla Buckley, who is ending more than a quarter of a century as NATIONAL REVIEW's managing editor.

When considering how best to salute this woman of comprehensive interests, I turned for advice to someone whom the President himself consults daily. I sought advice on how to do justice to the political sophistication of this woman. And Donald Regan said to me: Whatever else you say, say she is interested in throw-weight. Well, of course she is, but that is not the point. The point is that Priscilla has shown us all how to combine such serious interests with an undiminished anr irrepressible flair for fun. Priscilla is the flute in our conservative orchestra--subtle, complex, yet always on the verge of merriment. Exactly thirty years ago, as the first issue of NATIONAL REVIEW appeared, Secretary of State Dulles gave a speech asking: Is the spirit of Geneva dead? NR's answer was: "We certainly hope so." Obviously, diplomacy has not changed, but conservatism has, and for the better, thanks in large part to Priscilla. She has taught, by example, the compatibility of political commitment and generosity of spirit. She has, in equal measure, passionate conservatism and overflowing good humor.

I collect oxymorons, those internally contradictory phrases such as "married bachelor," or "Lebanese government," or "Jack Kemp Deficit Reduction Plan." Here is a phrase that may sound contradictory, but is not. The phrase is "healthy infection." That is a plain description of Priscilla's gift to conservatism: the gift of infectious laughter.

For thirty years, NATIONAL REVIEW has not been knwon for its lackadaisical approach to orthodoxies. But neither has it been merely like the Catholic bishop of Little Rock who, a generation ago, was asked his opinion of the ecumenical movement. He replied: "My opinion is that we're right and they're wrong and they've got to admit it."

For thirty years, NATIONAL REVIEW has kept the faith, but has also kept its sense of humor. To Priscilla goes much of the credit for that fact, and hence the fact that many of those who were wrong, thirty years ago, now knwo in their hearts that NATIONAL REVIEW was right from the start. They have come to right reason, through the allure of conservatism with a smiling face. Indeed, conservatism has sometimes advanced less by logic than by laughter--by the ability to laugh away the kind of extravagant politics practiced by the candidate in Maryland a few years ago who said, "If I am elected, the schools will begin to produce Beethovens and Einsteins." We in Maryland would be pleased if, upon leaving school, our children had heard of Beethoven and Einstein.

It was an architect who said that God is in the details. It could have been Priscilla. If an architect gets the details wrong, only a building collapses. If a writer gets the details wrong, a sentence or even an argument comes tumbling down. And we graduates of the Priscilla Buckley School of Journalistic Craftsmanship believe that a poorly constructed sentence is as unforgivable--even as dangerous--as a poorly constructed building.

Some conservatives, I among them, have stained-glass minds. We have a certain sympathy for medieval notions. We are therefore pleased that Priscilla's philosophy rests on the concept of the divine right of editors. When exercising that right over a rabble of writers, she reminds me of Benjamin Jowett, of nineteenth-century Oxford. He was the head of an Oxford college, and would only occasionally call his dons in to get their opinion. And when ending a meeting with turbulent dons, Jowett would loftily announce: "The vote is twenty to one. I see we are deadlocked." As I understand it, Mr. President, that's called Cabinet government.

Furthermore, a managing editor lives with iron deadlines and plastic writers. She must have unshakable composure in the recurring crises of publishing. Priscilla's composure earns her the John Jacob Astor trophy for composure. It is so named, by me, because Astor was on the Titanic, having a drink in the longe, when the ship hit the iceberg. He turned to the steward and said, "I sent for ice, but this is ridiculous." Among Priscilla's many graces is a similar grace under pressure. The idea of NATIONAL REVIEW without Priscilla Buckley as managing editor induces in many of us a certain vertigo. I have an acquaintance who says his idea of immortality is to live until the Washington subway is finished. My idea of immortality is to live until we quit complying with SALT II. Forgive me, Mr. President, an editorialist is never off duty.

but for many of us, our idea of immortality was to live just as long as Priscilla was doing what she does so well. But she is not leaving NATIONAL REVIEW. she will still be a guiding spirit within the NR family. In recent years, my association with the NR family has been intermittent. For example, in the late 1970s I assisted Bill Buckley in a debate about the Panama Canal Treaties. We were on the wrong side--we supported the treaties. But we so decisively defeated our opponent--a former governor of California--that he has not been heard of since. However, I, like everyone else who has had the inestimable joy of learning from Priscilla Buckley, have never left, will never leave the NR family. She is a teacher, and as Henry Adams said, a teacher has a kind of immortality, because one never knows when a teacher's influence stops. Priscilla's influence radiates through American journalism. I am but one of many lucky writers who have the elevating duty of trying daily to live up to my teacher, Priscilla Buckley. And all of us who have warmed ourselves at the hearth of her friendship are thankful for the pleasure of her company. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Priscilla Buckley.

PRISCILLA BUCKLEY

AS IS WELL KNOWN to my friends and colleagues, I rarely speak in public. But both times I have been forced to speak, the President of the United States has been in the audience. Now I'm getting the hang of it. The Pope of Rome had better watch out.

George Will has been mighty flattering tonight. George, you can come to my party any time.

Years ago Frank Meyer put his finger on my true role at NR, which has nothing to do with technical competence. I have beenknown to commit a solecism. It was at an "Agonizing Reappraisal," one of the quarterly editorial conferences we hold three times a year. The discussion had become heated. Frank was pacing the floor (always a bad sign), when I made a joke or some remark to ease the tension. Frank stopped his pacing, and turned to me. "Priscilla," he said, tnederly, "you are the grease in our crankcase." I was deeply touched.

James HJilton's Mr. Chips looked back on a long line of boys he had taught down through the years. Tonight I look back on 750 blue-bordered issues of NATIONAL REVIEW--"a blue-bordered oasis in a sea of desolation," an early reader called them. Like boys, some issues turned out better than others. It was youthful impetuosity, I think, that led us to write in December 1963: "The editors of NATIONAL REVIEW regretfully announce that their patience with President Lyndon B. Johnson is exhausted."

But it was sheer bad luck, some years later, that our definitive answer to critics of nuclear power should come out the very day Three Mile Island blew. No one--including our publisher--found our Pentagon Papers hoax in 1971 quite so funny as we did. Bill Rusher does not get as easily carried away as the editors by our wit and merriment. He provides the needed ballast to out Ship of State, and takes our occasional ribbing with sunny good humor--because he knows he's right.

With a setback here and there, nonetheless, the magazine grew from its thin, gangly, butcher-paper early self, and matured. The time came when we confounded our critics. One bright November day five years ago, the American people, just as NR had been accused of doing, turned the clock back, past the Great Society, the New Frontier, and the New Deal--by electing to the Presidency a man whose vision of a brighter, simpler, more resilient, more self-reliant America they shared.

Since this is a night for a moderate tooting of horns, let's say it right out: NATIONAL REVIEW played its part in that epochal political sea-change. And so did so many of you in and out of this hall tonight--loyal friends and supporters of this enterprise, and unswerving, as the editors and staff of NATIONAL REVIEW seek to be, in a shared devotion to the land we love so well.

Thank you, And God bless.

PRESIDENT REAGAN

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I mean it literally when I say it is a delight to be here tonight. The editors, associates, an friends of NATIONAL REVIEW are celebrated not just for skillful argument and sound polemics, but for the wit, warmth--even merriment--of their gatherings.

I will admit that like most of his friens, I wonder if Bill Buckley's well-known regard for fun doesn't geta little out of hand. A couple of years ago, I made a congratulatory phone call to an anniversary party for Bill Buckley's television show. Now, as you know, Firing Line attracts many important guests, som of whom, however, are also very, very controversial. No sooner had I picked up the phone and said, "Hello," than Bill's voice came ringing through: "Mr. President, I'm standing here with Gordon Liddy on my right and Howard Hunt on my left, and we await your orders, sir."

And once when Bill was asked what job he wanted in the Administration of his friend the Presidnt, he replied in his typically retiring and deferential way: "Ventriloquist."

But when you think about it, the word "fun" really is importnt to the meaning of NATIONAL REVIEW and the conservative movement it fostered, a word, as Bill Buckley might put it, that is "transcendentally freighted, resonant with metaphysical meaning and overtone. By which he would mean (I got used to interpreting in Geneva--so with you permission, Bill) it is a word not very popular in our century. Especially with those who preach the supremacy of the state, who think they can remake man and society in the image of a brave new world. For these serious people, earthly paradise is always just around the corner, and evenings like these are bourgeois distractions. Laughter itself is suspect; and even fun is an act o subversion. It is purportedly why Lenin refused to listen to music.

But it is also why all of us are here tonight--to celebrate thirty years of witty, civilized pages from our beloved NATIONAL REVIEW and the damage, the terminal damage, those pages have done to modern statism and its unrelenting grimness.

Since its beginning in 1955, NATIONAL REVIEW has argued that politics and state power--like all human endeavors--have their limitations, and that acknowledging those limitations is the beginning of political--even earthly--wisdom. It is really an acknowledgment that God means for us--at least sometimes--to take life as it comes: to woo, to laugh, to love, and to make room, as you have tonight and throughout the thirty-year life span of NATIONAL REVIEW, for fun.

If any of you doubt the impact of NATIONAL REVIEW's verve and attractiveness, take a look around you this evening. The man standing before you now was a Democrat when he picked up his first issue in a plain brown wrapper; and even now, as an occupant of public housing, he awaits as anxiously as ever his biweekly edition--without the wrapper. Over here is the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who, besids running a successful presidential campaign in 1980, is the same New York lawyer who drew up the incorporation papers for NATIONAL REVIEW. Or ask any of the young leaders in the media, academia, or government here tonight to name the principal intellectual influence in their formative years. On this point, I can assure you: NATIONAL REVIEW is to he offices of the West Wing of the White House what People magazine is to your dentist's waiting room.

So in standing up, then, for what Russell Kirk might call the metaphysics of fun, I think history will show NATIONAL REVIEW also launched a spirited and decisive defense of freedom. NR taught several generations of conservatives that it is this recognition of a higher order that enables the individual to stand against the massed power of the modern state and say: No, there is more to life than your budgets and bureaus, your camps and constraints.

All of this was against the trend of the times and drew its share of disapproving stares. Just when political commentary had become so ponderous, alon comes this spirited, captivating little journal pledging in the now familiar words of its first issue: "It stands athwart history, yelling, Stop ..."

Let me now simply and briefly do what I came here to do tonight, and that is, as President of the United States, to salute the editors, associates, and friends of NATIONAL REVIEW; and on behalf of America, the Free World--and especially the not-so-free world--to thank each one of you for your extraordinary work, your sacrifice, your daring and devotion.

I want to assure you tonight: You didn't just part the Red Sea--you rolled it back, dried it up, and left exposed, for all the world to see, the naked desert that is statism. And then, as if that weren't enough, you gave to the world something different, something in its weariness it desperately needed, the sound of laughter and the sight of the rich, green uplands of freedom.

But if tonight we celebrate NATIONAL REVIEW as a force for change of hurricane force, we also note tonight that the eye of the hurricane is retiring. Priscilla Buckley is known for her adventurous spirit; nowhere has that spirit been better evidenced than in her willingness to be at the center for almost thirty years of the whirlwind at 150 East 35th Street. That she has come through all this with a reputation unchallenged for journalistic skill and professionalism, as well as the sweetest dispostion on the Eastern Seaboard, is testimony to her work and to her life. Tonight, Priscilla, America and its President and all of us honor you and thank you.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, recently a message from Bill Buckley was sent through the White House staff about my remarks here--and I quote--"Bill says this is the Thirtieth, and you should say something important like announcing a new Marshall Plan."

Well, we shall see about a Marshall Plan; but for the moment, perhaps a few concluding remarks on the future of this journal and the conservative movement it fostered are in order. I think most of you are aware that there is now in the nation's capital a consensus on the need for reducing marginal tax rates--even the Ways and Means Committee proposal, though it is not the bill we asked for, agrees that such high rates are an obstacle to economic growth and initiative.

On another front, not only has the House of Representatives agreed to humanitarian assistance to the Nicaraguan freedom-fighters, it has lifted, largely on its own accord, the ban against helping anti-Communist insurgencies in Africa. I think you will agree that it is a long way to travel: from "Dear Comandate" to spontaneous repeal of the Clark Amendment.

Believe me, there were few articles of faith in the liberal credo more fervently held than: first, a belief in government as the great redistributor of income through punitive tax rates; and second, an adherence to post-Vietnam isolationism and the adolescent notion that anyone brandishing a rifle, wearing green fatigues, and calling himself a socialist revolutionary was worthy of American sympathy or support.

Now the question I want to ask you is this: If at NATIONAL REVIEW'S last anniversary dinner someone had told you that in a little over four years tax rates could be cut from 70 per cent to nearly half of that and that we would be not only helping a growing anti-Communist insurgency in Central America but liftingthe prohibition against such assistance in Angola--and that in both cases these changes would be effected by a House of Representatives supposedly dominated by liberal Democrats--wouldn't you have tagged him or her a hopeless optimist?

Yet it is all happening and will continue to happen. And for this reason: We have reached that point which military historians single out as critical to the outcome of any battle; the point at which one side begins to display a decisive will to win, a kind of psychological dominance over the consciousness of the other. The point at ehich the adversary is more preoccupied with countering our next tactical move than with changing a strategic picture that he does not even realize is shifting dangerously against him. How many Northern generals, preoccupied, in General McClellan's words, with what "Bobby Lee will do next," came to naught because they failed to do what common sense or their own strategic plan dictated? As Yogi Berra said once: "90 per cent of this game is half mental."

And today, the adversaries of conservatives seem sometimes mre concerned with our agenda than we are ourselves. It is the kind of slide that, once it begins, is almost impossible to halt. Already some young members of the other party have had to face charges that they are me-too Democrats--what a refreshing ring that has to those of us who remember how a similar expression was used in the Fifties. And I wonder if the day is not too far off when some Democratic presidential candidate sweeps the primaries by declaring, "We are all conservatives now." And then proudly boasts of his subscription to NATIONAL REVIEW. Again, without the wrapper.

Ladies and gentlemen, the strategic situation internationally is als changing, and decisively so. While democracies are growing in economic strength, the totalitarian world is in decay and disarray. We see that Marx was right: The economic order is making demands on the political order. But he was wrong about where it wuld happen. China is only the most remarkable and most recent example. Add to this the growth in democratic institutions all around the world. In Asia, the realization that personal freedom means economic growth has made a number of small nations models of economic progress. Even Europe, the birthplace of socialism, is now catching up with the Laffer curve. And it is especially in Europe that we see one of the most important changes I believe this journal has helped to spark: Statism has lost the intellectuals.

So there is, after all, a Marshall Plan to announce here this evening-- but not, this time, one confined to Europe or limited to monetary aid. A Marshall Plan of mind and heart and spirit--a Marshall plan of ideas. Ideas that NATIONAL REVIEW first promoted: the worth of the individual, the value of personal freedom, the efficacy of the free market, the wisdom of representative, constitutional government, and the rule of law under God.

We know that the permanent things this journal stands for, if given only the slightest bit of breathing space, must and will triumph; it is this spark of life that this journal and the conservative movement have provided.

When he left Communism for the Western side, one editor of the magazine said he understood his defection to mean he was joining the losers. I can think of no better way to pay tribute to his memory--and frankly nothing he would have liked better-- than to say: We can affirm here tonight that Whittaker Chambers was wrong. That civilization will triumph. That freedom is the winning side.

One final note: I think eventually the pundits and analysts are going to catch on to the enormous force and deep roots of the conservative movement. Some of them even seem to have finally realized that I actually am one and that I mean it. And when that happens, they are going to realize something not only about this journal, but about its founder the editor: that Bill Buckley is perhaps the most influential journalist and intellectual in our era--that he changed our country, indeed our century.

While I am quite certain that this is what history will say, I also know you and I would add something, because you and I remember a time of the frest primeval, a time when nightmare and danger reigned and only the knights of darkness prevailed; when conservatives seemed without a champion in the critical battle of style and content. And then, suddenly riding up through the lists, came our clipboard-bearing Galahad: ready to take on any challengers in the critical battle of point and counterpoint. And, with grace and humor and passion, to raise a standard to which patriots and lovers of freedom could repair.

Like myself, many of you have known and been grateful for bill's friendship--like everything else he does, he has made of that too an art form.

So, Bill, one last word to you. We thank you for your friendship. You are, of course, a great man. And so we thank you also for NATIONAL REVIEW, for setting loose so much good in the world. And, Bill--thanks, too, for all the fun.

God bless you.

WILLIAM BUCKLEY

EXPRESSIONS OF gratitude can be most awfully trying to the ear of an audience, generally captive. But the act of gratitude nowadays is probably more often neglected than overdone. We published recently, NATIONAL REVIEW, an essay on patriotism, in which the author made the same point rather more ornately than Edmund Burke did when he observed that a country, in order to be loved, must be lovely. Professor Thomas Pangle concluded that there is plenty in the Constitution of America that merits love of country; and, indeed, if the life we live here is not significantly different from the life they live over there, then George Kennan and Company are correct that we oughtn't to keep nuclear weapons in our deterrent inventory.

Jonathan Schell shocked the moral-literary world two or three years ago when he counted up and advised us that the explosive energy of the combined nuclear resources of the super-powers amounts to eight hundred million times the power of the bomb that went off over Hiroshima forty years ago. I remember that when I read that figure it conjured to my mind not so much the awful destructive potential of man as the infinity by which we measure the value of what we have, over against what it is that, otherwise, we would not have. The President, speaking at a great graveyard in Germany last May, reminded us forcefully of the terminal consequences of engaging, whether willingly or by conscription, in massive, ugly efforts to take from others their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

A year before NATIONAL REVIEW was founded, I spent an evening with Whittaker Chambers, and he asked me, half provocatively, half seriously, what exactly it was that my prospective journal would seek to save. I trotted out a few platitudes, of the sort one might expect from a 27-year-old fogy, about the virtues of a free society. He wrestled with me by obtruding the dark historicism for which he became renowned. Don't you see, he said, the West is doomed, so that any effort to save it is correspondingly doomed to failure? I drop this ink stain on the bridal whiteness of this fleeted evening only to acknowledge soberly that we are still a long way from establishing, for sure, that Whittacker Chambers was wrong. But that night, challenged by his pessimism, I said to him that if it were so that Providence had run up our license on liberty, stamping it as expired, the Republic deserved a journal that would argue the historical and moral case that we ought to have survived: that, weighing the alternative, the culture of liberty deserves to survive. So that even if the worst were to happen, the journal in which I hoped he would collaborate might serve, so to speak, as the diaries of Anne Frank had served, as absolute, dispositive proof that she should have survived, in place of her tormentors--who ultimately perished. In due course that argument prevailed, and Chambers joined the staff.

To do what, exactly? The current issue of NATIONAL REVIEW discusses of course the Summit conference, the war in Afghanistan, Sandinista involvement in Colombia; but speaks, also, of the attrition of order and discipline in so many of our public schools, of the constitutional improvisations of Mr Rostenkowski, of the shortcomings of the movies Eleni and Macaroni, of the imperatives of common courtesy, of the relevance of Malthus, of prayer and the unthinkable, of the underrated legacy of Herman Kahn. Some of these subjects are greatly attenuated from the principal concerns of NATIONAL REVIEW. Attenuated yes, but not disconnected: because freedom anticipates, and contingently welcomes and profits from, what happens following the calisthenics of the free mind, always supposing that that freedom does not lead the mind to question the very value of freedom, or the authority of civil and moral virtues so to designate themselves. There are enough practitioners in this room to know that a journal concerned at once to discharge a mission and to serve its readers needs to be comprehensively concerned with the flora and fauna of cultural and political life. We have done this in NATIONAL REVIEW, and because we have done this, you are here--our tactical allies, most of you; our strategic allies, all of you.

How is our cause being handled by our guest of honor? Two or three years ago I was asked by the Philadelphia Society to speack on the theme, "Is President Reagan doing all that can be done?" It was a coincidence that my wife, Pat, and I had spent the weekend before with the President and Mrs. Reagan in Barbados, and I remembered with delight a conversation I had with my host on the presidential helicopter taking us to our villa the first evening, befor the two days reserved for bacchanalian sunning and swimming on the beach in front of Claudette Colbert's house, where we would spend the day. I leaned over and told him I had heard the rumor that the Secret Service was going to deny him permission to swim on that bach because it was insufficiently secure, and asked whether that were so.

Helicopters, even presidential helicopters, are pretty noisy, but I did hear him say, "Well, Bill, Nancy here tells me I'm the most powerful man in the Free World. If she's right, then I will swim tomorrow with you."

Which indeed he did. I digress to recall that during one of those swims I said to him, "Mr. President, would you like to earn the NATIONAL REVIEW Medal of Freedom?" He confessed to being curious as to how he would qualify to do this, and I said, "Well, I will proceed to almost drown, and you will rescue me." We went through the motions, and I have conferred that medal on him, in pectore.

I told the Philadelphia Society that the most powerful man in the Free World is not powerful enough to do everything that needs to be done. But I speculated on what I continue to believe is the conclusive factor in the matter of American security against ultimate Soviet aggression, which is the character of the occupant of the White House, the character of Ronald Reagan. The reason this is so, I argued, is that the Soviet Union, for all that from time to time it miscalculates, has never miscalculated in respect of matters apocalyptic in dimension. And the Soviet Union knows that the ambiguists with whom it so dearly loves to deal are not in power at this time. So that if ever the Soviet Union were tempted to such suicidal foolishness as to launch a strike against us, suicidal is exactly what it would prove to be. The primary obstacle to the ultimate act of Soviet imperialism is the resolute determination--to repeat my own formulation--to value what we have, over against what they do not have, sufficiently to defend it with all our resources.

Ronald Reagan, in my own judgment, animates his foreign policy by his occasional diplomatic indiscretions: because, of course, it was a diplomatic indiscretion to label the Soviet Union an "evil empire." Ce n'est que la verite qui blesse: It is only the truth that wounds. And he correctly switches gear, as required, when wearing diplomatic top hat and tails. He did not talk the language of John Wayne--or of Thomas Aquinas--while in Geneva. But how reassuring it is for us all, every now and then, to vibrate to the music of the very heartstrings of the leader of the Free World, who, to qualify as such, has after all, to feel a substantial commitment to a free world. When the President ventures out to exercise conviviality with the leader of the Soviet Union, the scene is by its nature wonderful, piquant. It brings to mind the Russian who, on discovering that his pet parrot is missing, rushes out of the KGB office to report that the parrot's politcal opinions are entirely unrelated to his own.

Mr. President, 15 years ago I was interviewed by Playboy magazine. Toward the end of the very long session I was asked the question, Had I, in middle age, discovered any novel sensual sensation? I replied that, as a matter of fact, a few months earlier I had traveled to Saigon and, on returning, had been summoned by President Nixon to the Oval Office to report my impressions. "My novel sensual sensation," I told Playboy, "is to have the President of the United States take notes while you are speaking to him."

You need take no notes tonight, Mr. President. What at NATIONAL REVIEW we labor to keep fresh, alive, deep, you are intuitively drawn to. As an individual you incarnate American ideals at many levels. As the final responsible authority, in any hour of great challenge, we depend on you. I was twenty years old when the bomb exploded over Hiroshima. Last week I became sixty. During the interval I have lived as a free man, in a free and sovereign country. I pray that my son, when he is sixty, and your son, when he is sixty, and the sons and daughters of our guests tonight will one day live in a world over which that awful shadow has finally dissipated. Then they will be grateful that, at the threatened nightfall, the blood of their fathers ran strong.

MSGR. EUGENE CLARK

Lord, our gratitude is flawed. We ever ask for more. Thank You, Lord, we say, for thirty years; may we have thirty more. But You, Lord, know this completely. You allow us to thank You in prayer; but to console us, You graciously allow us to thank You through delight in Your gifts.

David danced for joy. Joshua reveled in victory. The Book of Wisdom celebrates inspiration, and the Song of Songs, sensuous beauty--all saying thank You by loving the gift.

Lord, we have these thirty years loved those in NATIONAL REVIEW who led us through our desert and cheered us with their legend-making round-table. They kept our minds and spirits high.

Lord, bless every one of them, those with us and those with You; prosper NATIONAL REVIEW for another generation; bless Bill Buckley, our founder, and all those who have sustained him these thirty years. Give him and them grace, joy, and protection.

Bless especially our President, who knows how much he needs Your guidance and help, to fulfill the noble purposes of his splendid service to the nation.

We pray this, secure and happy in Your providence.

Amen.