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Jan. 25, 2026 18:00-19:01 - CSPAN
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America's Book Club Christopher Buckley
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William Buckley's Background 00:15:18
Back to it again.
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Thank you, you've been watching.
America's BOOK CLUB is brought to you by these television companies and is supported by the FORD Foundation.
From the nation's iconic libraries and institutions, America's Book Club takes you on a powerful journey of ideas, exploring the lives and inspiration of writers who have defined the country in conversation with civic leader and author David Rubenstein.
As a young boy growing up in Baltimore, I went to my local library and was inspired to read as many books as I could.
Hopefully people will enjoy hearing from these authors and hopefully they'll want to read more.
Now from the historic Decatur House in Washington, D.C., best-selling author of more than a dozen books, including his deeply personal Losing Mom and Pup, son of conservative writer William F. Buckley.
Christopher Buckley.
Well let me just welcome Chris Buckley to America's Book Club.
We are at the Decatur House, which is an historic house right near the White House.
And thank you for coming down from your home in Connecticut to do this.
I'm delighted to be here and I came on the brand new Acella.
And just as I was writing my wife to say how cool it was, it moved sideways.
But here I am.
Okay.
All right, you've survived.
No, it's a lovely, lovely train, and I'm very glad there's a lot of people.
So you have written 20 books, many of them satires.
Satire is a lost art a bit.
I don't see that many satirists that are best-selling authors.
Oh, oh, oh, there are.
Carl Hyas and Dave Barry, although they might be more classified as humorists.
The difference between a satire and a humorist, you would say, is hundreds of thousands of sales.
George Kaufman, the great Broadway empressario and writer, I think, defines satire as the thing that opens on Saturday and closes on Sunday.
So you think satire doesn't sell as much as humor?
I think humor, oh, I think there have been some hugely successful humorists.
Here we are in Washington, once the home of Art Buchwald, who banged out one bestseller after another on top of his daily column in the post, Irma Baumbach, I'm sure you all remember.
People of that caliber, bless their hearts, they just minted money.
I'm a rounding, my sales amount to a rounding error.
Well, I don't think that's true.
Your books were bestsellers, and we'll go through some of them in a moment.
I'd like to go through your background, though, for a moment.
Some people would say you had a complicated background to be a satirist, because usually satirists come from, let's say, the bottom part of society, and maybe they see the humor of life as they work their way up.
But you came from really the top of society.
Your father was William F. Buckley, Jr., one of the most famous people in our country, the latter part of the 20th century, famous political commentator, Republican leader, thought leader, writer, 57 books I think he wrote, and several, I think 30-some years.
57 books, 1,504 episodes of Firing Line, which he was the, he had the record as the longest-running single host of a program.
Six, seven, eight, thousand syndicated columns over the years, innumerable essays.
And yet he still, you know, every Friday night would find him on his boat out for a sail on Long Island Sound.
So you were your parents' only child.
Your mother was from Canada?
She was from, yes, Vancouver, British Columbia.
She was a, she was sort of, she was an orchid.
She was a debutante.
Her father was an old-fashioned industrialist.
You know, he race horses, gold mines, you know, the whole works.
And she, well, I remember Henry Kissinger at her memorial service said, Pat Buckley used to say, I'm just a simple girl from the backwoods of British Columbia.
And all I can say is, if Pat Buckley was a simple girl from the backwoods of British Columbia, I would tremble to meet a complicated one.
She became a sort of, she was like a character in a noel coward play, crossed with a snapping turtle.
So she's a remarkable woman.
One of the great fashion leaders in New York society, I guess it's fair to say.
And your father was one of the great intellectual leaders in the country.
And you were their only child.
Now, I'm an only child.
My parents did not graduate from high school.
But you've done rather well.
But it's working your way up from that background is actually probably easier than having a famous father who's an intellect and a mother who's loved by everybody in New York.
So how did you develop your own style to write satire where I wouldn't have thought that your background would have led you into satire?
I don't, it's a perfectly good question, David.
I don't really quite have an answer.
I didn't, there was no point in my youth when I woke up one morning and said, I'm going to be a satirist.
Were you funny?
Did you tell jokes?
Did you see, how did you get this sense of humor that you obviously have?
My mother was a very, very witty woman.
One of her last bonos before she died in 2007, where she was talking about someone, said, that person is so stupid, he ought to be caged.
That was very, very mum.
She was an extraordinarily witty person.
If she had taken up a pen and written, she would have been a sort of a Park Avenue Dorothy Parker, if you will.
And Pop, my father had the second best sense of humor.
So when you're growing up, whether or not, I mean, yeah, I suppose you absorb certain traits from your parents, but it's not a direct transplant.
When you have a famous father, as famous as William F. Buckley, Jr., and he was known for being very conservative, when you're a child, can you avoid the challenge of being his son?
I mean, in other words, smoking drugs.
drinking alcohol, doing things that might be considered inappropriate for a teenager of William F. Buckley.
Was that a problem for you, or you had that perfect perfection?
I managed to have my cake and eat it too.
Fortunately, there were no disasters of the type that, you know, very often.
When you started writing, did you show your work to your father?
And did he say, this is brilliant, I'm really proud of you, or not so much?
No.
You know, if it was good, I would get a pat in the back.
He was the most supportive father anyone could have dreamt of.
But he was incorruptible.
You know, he would, if he, and this was fairly late in life, too, and I had written some piece that did not please him.
And I walked into his study and he said, oh, well, I don't suppose we'll be reading that in one of your anthologies.
But he was, you know, he always impressed upon me and others, that it would be terribly unfair to encourage someone in writing who did not have the talent.
Were you as politically conservative as your father was?
He was the leader of the conservative movement to some extent.
Oh, very much.
I mean, George Will credits, George Will does a sort of reverse engineering.
If it hadn't been for Ronald Reagan, we wouldn't have won the Cold War.
If it hadn't been for Barry Goldwater, there wouldn't have been a Reagan.
If there hadn't been a Bill Buckley, there wouldn't have been a Goldwater.
Therefore, Bill Buckley won the Cold War.
And, you know, I. When you were growing up, you went to a boarding school.
Did your father?
No, I was sent to a boarding schooling school.
There's a difference.
You were sent to a boarding school.
But when you went there, did people say, well, you're William F. Buckley Jr.'s son?
You have to be very conservative.
Or were you not known at that time for that kind of parentage?
Kids are kids, and they sense vulnerabilities.
There was an upperclassman.
I don't think I can say this word on C-SPAN, but he was not a pleasant fellow.
And he would do things like take a newspaper photograph of my father with a swastika drawn on the forehead and paste that to my door.
So you, you know, there are experiences that you're writing.
Were you a writer when you were in prep school?
Did you start writing then?
I did.
I did.
I wrote short stories for the school literary magazine that I could not bear to reread.
But I was, I think it's safe to say I was an overachiever, overachiever, which is to say I was, you know, punching, you know, below my weight.
I very, very much wanted to write.
And so I wrote.
You applied to many colleges.
I think you got in everywhere you applied.
But why did you go to Yale?
Because your father was famous for being a Yaley who didn't really like Yale.
Was that going to be difficult for you?
No, he loved Yale.
He never stopped loving Yale.
He wanted you to go to Yale?
He never said a word.
And then when it came time to choose, and I chose, I remember his face sort of lit up and he said, we spoke in Spanish when we had something interesting to conversation.
My father's first first language.
He said, me a legre.
That makes me happy.
Well, your father's first language was Spanish.
His first language was Spanish.
His second language was French.
And he learned English in London, age seven.
So a lot of people, when people said, why do you sound the way you do?
He would tell them that and say, how am I supposed to sound?
It was an unusual accent.
Well, and I'd also point out his mother was from New Orleans.
And his father was from Texas, whose father had been a sheriff of Duval County.
So he grew up in a culturally southern city.
Did he walk around with a dictionary all the time?
He had all these big words he always was using, or was that part of his?
No, he wasn't, he wasn't, he wasn't pedantic.
I mean, he didn't, I never saw him sort of memorizing the Oxford English Dictionary.
He, you know, he and he was often berated, which I think was, well, inappropriate, but people say, you know, why do you use such long words?
And he said, well, I use words that were invented because at the time they were invented, there was a precise need for that word.
And I think that's a perfectly valid point.
I mean, it would be, an analogy would be saying to a painter, you know, why do you use all those colors?
Why can't you just use primary colors?
Why do you need, you know, green cyanothine?
So you would go to Yale.
Were you a writer at Yale?
I was on the Yale Daily News.
Okay, so did you write humor then or satire?
No.
Well, I didn't write humor, but the magazine that I edited with John Tierney, we sort of worked to the side of the Yale Daily News.
We edited the Yale Daily News magazine, whose staff consisted of me, John Tierney, Mishiko Kakutani, Lloyd Grove, Jackson Deal, and Jane Mayer.
That's a pretty good bench.
And we had a lot of fun doing it.
So when you graduated from Yale, what did you decide to do?
From Yale to Esquire 00:15:21
I went to work as a junior editor at Esquire Magazine.
Okay, and were you writing humor on the side?
No.
No, the humor didn't.
The humor didn't come until later.
Later.
So knock, knock.
Well, you did.
Eventually, you got a job working as a speechwriter for Vice President Bush.
I did.
What was that like?
And how did you get that job?
Well, you know, life is often a series of accidents.
Some happy, some less happy.
I had written a, I was writing now for Esquire, and I'd written a straightforward journalistic piece on Mexico's oil boom.
And a guy named Pete Tealy, who was Mr. Bush's press secretary, had read it.
I had met him once at a party.
Now, Pete, who is the best of his breed of political press operators, Pete was not the kind of guy to launch a six-month talent search for Mr. Bush's speechwriter.
He had a cold typewriter and he needed someone to warm it.
And my phone rang.
And he said, you know, how'd you like to, how'd you like a job?
And, you know, how do you turn down a job at the White House?
I had never written a speech.
But it.
So it worked out?
Apparently.
You were there for two years?
I was there for two years.
Yeah.
I went, one night threw all my possessions in the back of my Volkswagen Red Rabbit Convertible.
I drove down to start my life in Washington.
And I got lost.
I took the wrong exit off the beltway.
And I came in on New York Avenue.
And suddenly I look up and there's the white dome of the Capitol gleaming.
And it really, you know, I hope it doesn't sound mawkish, but you know, it was, I still get choked up thinking about that.
It was sort of like a, you know, it was a Mr. Smith goes to Washington.
How do you like writing speeches for Vice President Bush?
And when he became president, why didn't you stay with him?
Well, because I never didn't look at speechwriting as a life pursuit.
And I had no intention of going into politics, which is to say, you know, starting out as a speechwriter, and then you're, you know, you're a deputy assistant undersecretary for cleaning ashtrays in the interior department.
And then, you know, 40 years later, you're ambassador to Cape Verde Islands.
So that was never, you know, one of my while I worked for Mr. Bush for two years, and I came to revere George Bush.
He and my father, my uncle Jimmy, maybe, are the two finest men I've ever known.
When you left, did you go back to writing for Esquire or other members?
No, well, I did.
I did, yes.
But I also, while I was at the White House, I became fascinated by the White House memoirs that everyone who has worked in the White House for more than 10 minutes writes.
Generally, they're 500 pages, and they have the words power and principle in the title, power, principle, and parking.
And anyway, so I became sort of fascinated by this, and it occurred to me to write, this would be the first, the appearance of humor, this humor that you're so obsessed with.
And I thought it would be fun to write a parody of a White House memoir.
And I did.
And it's called The White House Mess.
And it came out in 1986.
It got a very nice review from Jonathan Yardley of The Post.
So this was a very big, big deal for me.
It starts, it came out in 1986.
The novel starts on January 20th, 1989, when the new president is pulling up to the White House to escort the outgoing President Reagan to the Capitol for the inaugural ceremony.
But it turns out there's a problem.
Mr. Reagan is still in his pajamas, and he just doesn't feel like leaving.
So it falls to the very resourceful press secretary named Mike Feely, carefully disguised, to figure out a way to get Mr. Reagan to leave without injecting him with a sleeping agent.
And that scene sort of caused the book to catch on.
Did Reagan want to stay in the White House or he was?
He was justn't being defiant.
He just didn't feel, he was getting a little bit dotty, and he just didn't feel like leaving.
And so in 1986, when the book came out, the notion of a U.S. president refusing to leave was a quaint notion.
That was then.
So when you write satire and it becomes actually real history, you realize you've got to write something else.
But let me ask you, after that book, you then wrote a couple other satires?
I wrote, yeah, I wrote the book that I suppose I wrote a novel called Thank You for Smoking.
Now that was made into a movie.
That was made into a movie.
Yeah.
And Thank You for Smoking is the premise of the book is that you have a lobbyist for smoking, and then what happens?
Well, he's an anti-hero.
I mean, he's likable, but he's, you know, he works for the Tobacco Institute.
The idea occurred years ago, I was watching the McNeil Lehrer News Hour, as it was then called, and they had on a scientist who had just come up with the 999th bit of scientific evidence establishing that smoking is not good for you.
But for balance, they had on this very attractive woman who worked for the Tobacco Institute.
Anyway, she was sort of the chief lobbyist.
And she was, she sort of looked like Lauren McCall.
She was very, very attractive.
Every time the scientist adduced something scientific, and this is a guy with so many PhDs at the end of his name, they wouldn't all fit on a business card.
And every time he said, well, there's, you know, we did the coalictin receptor number 19, she would go, oh, please, as if he was, you know, and I fell in love.
You know, I thought, what a fascinating job that must be.
So what's the premise of the book?
Well, sales are in decline, and so he comes up with the idea of going out to Hollywood and basically bribing producers and directors to have more smoking in their films.
And his name is the tobacco lobbyist, his name, Nick Naylor, and his two best friends are the spokesman for the liquor industry and the spokesman for the NRA.
And they get together once a week and sort of tell war stories and sob on each other's shoulders.
And they call themselves the Mod Squad, which stands for Merchants of Death.
What ultimately happens to this smoking advocate?
Well, I don't want to give away the plot of the book that was published in 1994.
But there's a scene where he is kidnapped, Nick, by we don't know who, and they cover him head to toe in nicotine patches.
I called a doctor friend of mine at the time when I was writing that scene, and I said, I've covered him with nicotine patches, but I need him to live.
Would he live?
He said, absolutely not.
I said, well, how many nicotine patches would it take?
He said, three, four.
So I had to change that scene.
In the movie, he escapes and ends up deranged in the lap of the statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial, covered head to toe in nicotine patches.
Who played this character in the movie?
Aaron Eckhart.
The movie was adapted by a guy named Jason Reitman, who's the son of Ivan Reitman of Animal House and Ghostbusters fame.
And Jason, he was 27 years old at the time, and he's gone on to very, much, much bigger things.
And if you look at the credits of Thank You for Smoking, you'll see three interesting names in the executive producer line.
Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
Do you have any contact with them?
No.
No, it was produced, a guy named David Sachs, whose name now appears quite regularly, made the movie happen.
Mel Gibson had bought the rights and sat on it for 10 years while he made box office duds like Brave Heart and Passion of the Christ, which I hear both tanked.
But you didn't write the script for the movie.
No, I didn't write the script.
Now, I've never really wanted to write a script.
But David Sachs, it took him 18 months, but he wrested the rights away from Mel Gibson and then made the movie.
And David is a, he and Elon Musk and Peter Teal and a couple of others invented PayPal and they sold it to eBay for $1.4 billion.
And David Sachs is now at White House advisor.
He's our crypto czar.
So let me ask you about another book you wrote, Florence of Arabia.
Is that right?
Now, what was that about?
Well, that was my 9-11 novel.
I was filled with anger, rage, as we all were.
And I thought I have to write about this somehow.
So the conceit of the book is a young woman who, formerly of the State Department, comes up with the idea of changing the entire Middle Eastern mindset by empowering women.
So she goes over there and with sort of a hand-picked posse, attempts to do that.
But I came up really with the title.
Once I had that title, I figured I have to write the book.
At the premiere of the movie Lawrence of Arabia, Noel Coward said to Peter O'Teo, O'Toole, if you were any better looking, you'd be Florence of Arabia.
So when you write a book, how long does it take you to actually do the writing?
And do you know how the book's going to turn out when you start?
Well, I had a couple of early disasters with the, oh, let's not plot this.
Let's just let our characters, you know, let's see what they do.
And, you know, that can turn out well, or it can turn out not well.
Where you, you know, you find yourself in a terminal called a SAC or whatever.
But when you're writing, you know pretty much how you want it to come out.
Well, I then started plotting very closely.
I mean, my outlines would be 90 to 100 pages long.
So when you write, you write on a computer, right?
You use a computer to write it.
And then how long does it take you to typically finish one of your satires?
Is that a year?
64 Years Of Plotting 00:05:01
73 years.
I'm plagiarizing a Winston Churchill anecdote, and I'm in no way comparing myself to Winston Churchill.
But he gave a very good speech, as he was wont to do.
And someone went up to him afterwards and said, Winston, that was bloody marvelous.
How long did it take you to write that?
And his reply was 64 years.
So you would say, well, your experience goes into it, but you typically take how long?
If you don't say this.
Well, call it a year.
My father used to write his books in six weeks, which is one reason I should hate him, but I don't.
Did you ever criticize your father's book?
Did he ever show you the books and say, what do you think of them?
Sure.
And would you tell him?
Well, I would, you know, I would be as honest as I could.
He wrote some really great books.
Some of the novels I don't think qualify as literary gems.
So I would be gentle.
One day I remember he said, oh, for my next book, I'm going to write a book about Elvis Presley.
And I should have said, no, but I didn't.
It ended up being called Elvis in the Morning.
One time you wrote your father, you wrote a book and you showed it to your father and he came back with one sentence saying, it doesn't do it for me.
Wasn't that kind of deflating?
It was a PS in a letter.
It said, sorry, this one didn't work for me.
Isn't that kind of deflating to get that from your father?
Well, it didn't fill me with joy.
But, you know, it wasn't a book he was going to love.
Now, you wrote a book that is a non-fiction book, but it's very funny, called Losing Mom and Pup, which is about the period of time when your mother died and then your father not too long after died.
Was that very hard to write that book about your parents?
And were you criticized by your parents' friends for telling secrets of a family that probably nobody but you knew and nobody would ever know if you hadn't written that book?
It's not a book I ever planned to write.
I did not know the night before I started writing it the next day that I was going to write that book.
But yeah, I watched my parents died within 11 months of each other.
And I just started writing it.
And it's the only book of mine that I could say wrote itself.
I looked at my calendar after and noted that it had taken 40 days, by which I don't imply any biblical meaning.
But I say somewhere early on in the book, you know, if for better or for worse, I'm a writer.
And if the universe hands you material like this, as the son of two, suffice to say, larger-than-life characters, not telling that story would seem almost to be an act of denial.
And here's the thing about the book, because it's ironic.
All my life, David, I have tried to be something other than just Bill Buckley's son.
But that book sold like hotcakes, and it's still selling.
Well, maybe like crepes.
But it's, I mean, it's my best-selling book so far, hundreds of thousands of copies.
And so the joke may be on me that, I mean, this, to the extent I'm remembered at all 50 years from now, this might be the book they remember me for, the book about being built.
In the book, you talk about how your father loved to sail across oceans, not just around lakes, across oceans, even if it was a storm coming or he knew it was going to be terrible, and you went with him.
Did you ever think you were going to lose your life in some of these things?
And do you ever tell your father this isn't going to work?
Stanford Cruise Prelude 00:09:38
And what did he say?
Oh, I think you're overreacting.
I'll give you an instance.
October of 1996, I'm on my way on the not Vacella to Stanford because we're going to, it's October, we're going to go have a cocktail cruise on his 36-foot sailboat.
From the, as I look out the window of the train, the landscape begins to resemble more and more the opening of The Wizard of Oz, you know, objects flying through.
I mean, I swear that I saw a cow go by.
And so we pull into Stanford, and there's Pop sort of standing on the platform to wait, and he's kind of holding on to a stanchion or something.
This was, you know, seeing my dad waiting for me at the station was always a sight to target my heart.
So the window, the doors open, you know, sound, and I was practically blown back into the plane, into the train, by the wind.
And so I sort of crawled out, and he says, we'll have a brisk sail.
And I said, we're going out in this?
He said, sure, why not?
Winds gusting 55 miles an hour.
We get out there and barely make it to Oyster Bay and barely make it back.
And my mother, we get to the house, my mother's on the phone.
She said, I've been on the line to the Coast Guard for the last three hours.
And they keep saying, but Mrs. Buckley, we don't understand.
What is he doing out there?
To which the answer is, good question.
He was great men are complicated.
Was he a good sailor, actually?
He was a very, that's a complicated question.
Yes, he was a good sailor, but he was reckless.
I mean, I wrote him the most furious letter I've ever written him after that.
I said, we had no business being out there.
When we got back to Connecticut, everyone was without power.
750 homes in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York were out of power.
The governors had declared a state of emergency.
But you also...
It made no sense.
But as I wrote in that book, the height of vanity to quote once in the book, great men, my father's a great man, great men always have too much sail up.
You know, timorous souls like myself, they see a storm on the horizon.
They take in sail.
Not Pop.
He was always pushing.
I guess Tom Wolfe in his magnificent book on the astronauts called it Pushing the Envelope.
So when you were growing up, I assume you had the most famous people in the United States coming over for dinner every night.
Were you in all of some of these people, or you didn't really care?
Norman Mailer came to dinner once.
I guess I was 11.
With the wife he subsequently stabbed with a penknife.
I don't know why I laughed.
It's not particularly funny.
It certainly wasn't much fun for Mrs. Mailer.
And poor Norman Mailer was made to read my two-page school paper on Benjamin Franklin.
It wasn't my idea.
Pop said, oh, why don't you show this to me?
And so somewhere in the garage is that paper signed by Norman Mailer to Christopher Buckley, a promising young writer.
I should use it as a blurb.
But yeah, there were a lot of the king of Spain came to spend the weekend.
Well, I say king of Spain.
He was the pretender, but if his father hadn't abdicated, he would be the king.
So he came to spend the weekend.
I was five.
I'll just tell it real quick.
And so my mother went into a frenzy of redecoration and redid the guest room with framed things that looked like they had come from 15th century Spain.
The basic statement, decorative statement, was, this is where our kings sleep.
And the next morning early, my mother is walking by his bedroom, Juan Carlos' bedroom.
And she hears a plaintive cry, but Christopher, we have already read Donald Duck twice.
And I had gotten all my comic books and crawled into bed with him.
And so I perhaps one of the few people who could say he had Donald Duck read to him by the King of Spain.
One of your father's very good friends was Henry Kissinger.
Did he come over the house very much?
Or did you get to know Henry Kissinger?
I did.
And he gave your father a eulogy.
He did.
He did.
At St. Patrick's Cathedral.
He did.
Is it hard to get a funeral at the memorial service at St. Patrick's Cathedral?
Well, I also gave a eulogy, and it opened by saying that Pop and I had talked about this day.
And he said, if I'm still famous, see if the Cardinal will accommodate you.
But if not, just tuck me away at St. Mary's in Stanford.
I then said, well, Pop, I guess you're still famous.
And 2,200 people agreed.
Your father wanted to be cremated and his ashes put with your mother in a cross on your front lawn.
How come you didn't follow their wishes?
Pop commissioned a beautiful bronze crucifix, really quite stunning by the Connecticut sculptor Jimmy Knowles.
And yes, the idea was mum would be in a canister in one arm and he would be, his ashes would be a canister in the other.
Now, it's a few months before, Pup is dying, and we're having the conversation.
And I had no intention of living in the house in which I grew up, where the cross was.
I foresaw selling it.
So I said to Pup, well, Pup, you know, in the event of a sale, the new owner might not, you know, want a seven-foot-high crucifix in the garden.
He said, why not?
I said, why not?
Well, he said, it's a work of art.
I said, yes, yes.
So I could imagine, I flash forward imagining giving the tour to the prospective owners and say, now, Mr. and Mrs. Birnbaum, about the crucifix.
So he, but there the story doesn't quite end because so he dies and I bury him in corpore in a coffin with mom's ashes on his lap in the Buckley family plot in Sharon, Connecticut, where he grew up.
And I moved the cross up there so the cross overlooks the plot.
I then ended up keeping the house.
So you're living there now?
I'm living there now.
And the place where you're...
And Pop, that humming sound you hear is Pop centrifuging in his coffin.
But honestly, my intentions were to sell the house.
What's it like to, you're working in the garage your father had as his office?
Is that your office now?
What's it like to be in the same place he wrote 57 books and did all those other things?
Intimidating And Humbling 00:11:53
Intimidating.
And indeed, where he died.
He died at his desk.
It's humbling.
It's humbling.
I am not 150th, the man my father was.
But, you know, I need an office and it's available.
You know, I find that parents don't mind if you move back in as long as they're dead.
So you've written a book called Make Russia Great Again.
What was that about?
Where'd you get the idea for that title?
It's another parody White House memoir.
This one by Mr. Trump's seventh or eighth chief of staff, a guy named Herb Nutterman.
And his prior experience was been, he was the food and beverage manager at Mr. Trump's Hotel Farago-sur-Mer.
And he's called in.
So it's a it's it's comic.
The Washington Post paid it a very nice compliment in its review by Ron Charles saying, Buckley has done the impossible.
He has made politics funny again.
So if you like that.
Somebody's watching and says, I want to be Christopher Buckley.
I want to be able to write.
My advice would be don't.
Somebody would like to.
You've written 20 books, bestsellers.
You're a well-known writer, reconteur, good speechmaker, speechwriter.
Somebody says, I want to have the wit that he has.
Where do you develop wit?
Is that a matter of living a certain experience, or do you kind of just dream it up as you're sitting there writing away?
How do you get wit?
And how do you recommend somebody who writes these kinds of books that you wrote?
How would you recommend somebody do that?
Well, you're overly generous.
To the extent that I have, as you say, wit, I'm not sure it's something you can sort of, I don't think, I mean, the idea of taking a course at college and, you know, how to be witty, I would probably flunk that course.
I think it's a, it's, it's, it's not a very good answer to your good question, but I think it's just a way of looking at the world.
And in my case, probably based mostly on deficiencies in everything else, you know, math scores, you know, getting your facts straight.
I don't, you know, I don't, it's not a talent I particularly esteem.
I would much rather be Walter Isaacson or John Meacham or Evan Thomas.
I regard biography as probably the highest of the literary arts.
Well, if you had to live your life all over again, would you do some, would you go into politics or would you want to go into something important like private equity?
I would, you know, you asked me outside if I would ever encourage someone to be a writer.
You have three children.
You want them to be writers?
No, but none of them want to be writers.
So I've been spared that.
I would say to a young person who I would encourage a young person who had some recognizable, just a speck of actual talent.
I would never say, oh, you too, you know, you can be a writer.
But I would also say do it.
Make the writing your side hustle.
Because if you want to live at all well, writing is a highly, highly, highly speculative way to earn a living.
When you're reading somebody, let's suppose who do you like to read?
You mentioned a couple authors, but when you read, whose books do you like to read?
Well, I read a lot, and more and more I listen to books.
You know, book sales are down, but audible books are on the rise.
And I wish it had been, remember books on tape where you would get 12 cassettes and if you flip the box over, it had return postage.
I read, well, yeah, I would say, I read all the time.
I read widely.
You like fiction or nonfiction works?
I read mostly nonfiction.
But I've just discovered the Irish writer Sebastian Barry.
And this guy is so good, it takes my breath away.
And for, you know, Amor Tolls, Coulson Whitehead.
No, I do read fiction, but I probably read seven or eight nonfiction books to every.
If you could meet any author you've ever read the books of, living or not alive now, what author would you like to actually meet, your most respected author?
Herman Melville.
Moby Dick is one of my, is probably the only 600-page book I've read ten times.
I think he was the, you know, Hemingway famously said that all-American writing comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
I would flip that.
I think Melville is our great literary.
He couldn't sell any copies of Moby Dick initially.
No, it didn't sell out.
It was botched.
He made a total, his lifetime earnings from Moby Dick for $536.
We don't know where the manuscript is.
But it's a book that even on the 9th, 10th, 11th reading doesn't fail to raise the hairs on my arm.
I'm not talking about the 400 pages on blubber.
You can do a little skipping.
But to me, that's the American literary cathedral.
So a final question about your father.
What would you like people to know about him that maybe they didn't know?
You put some of that in your book.
I have enough time to go through it all now.
But the thing about your father that people didn't know that you think people should know about your well-known father?
That he was a Christian gentleman of the highest order.
He was the most generous, forgiving, tolerant, and fun man I've ever known.
And, you know, I mean, a lot of people sort of think he was some Attila the Hun of politics.
But if you look at his record, you'll find some anomalies.
He was agitating for an African-American U.S. president back in 1970.
He was for the early on, he called for the decriminalization of the drug laws.
In many areas, his thinking was unconventional and not classically conservative.
Well, look, I think we're out of time, but I want to thank you for coming down and talking about your own writing career, talking about your parents as well.
And, you know, it's a pleasure to talk with you, and I hope you write some more satire soon.
After the interview, Christopher Buckley and David Rubenstein toured the historic Decatur House.
So what they've tried to do, this is really operated by the White House Historical Association, which was created by Jackie Kennedy in 1961.
And at the time, it was very controversial to create that, and nobody had done that before.
And what they wanted to do was to have a pamphlet that says, here's what the White House is like, here's how we restored it.
And the President of the United States, John Kennedy, said, no, we shouldn't do that because it'll look like we're commercializing the White House.
It was sold for 50 cents.
It was a gentler touch.
50 cents is what it cost.
And it was very difficult to get the president and his staff to agree.
Finally, they relented.
They did it.
But President Kennedy did not actually support preserving this as much as you might think because he actually signed an executive order taking all these townhouses which were run down and basically tearing them down and they were going to be new buildings.
After he died, Mrs. Kennedy persuaded Lyndon Johnson to reverse the executive order that President Kennedy had signed and he preserved all these buildings so they were restored and so forth and that's why they're still here.
Well God bless Jackie Kennedy.
She also saved New York's Grand Central Station.
Believe it or not, there were developers who wanted to tear it down.
And she and Brendan Gill of the New Yorker magazine organized and stopped it.
She also tried to keep the tall buildings from having their shadow on the Central Park, but that didn't work eventually after she passed away from those buildings.
My mother used to call problems of the idle rich.
So Jackie Kennedy was hard to believe, but she, you know, we were younger, but she died at just 64 years old.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Far too soon.
She was quite a lady.
And this would be Mr. Decatur.
Yes.
And so what they've tried to do is restore this to, if not the furniture that was here then, furniture that is of that period.
Right.
Would that be a, well, I guess that's a harpsichord.
Right, correct.
Rather than a clavichord.
My memory, David, is that he died.
Joining The Conversation 00:03:43
They moved him to the ground floor after he was mortally wounded.
Do we know which room you're standing in it?
One could only have reverence standing in this room.
See more with Christopher Buckley at Decatur House and watch past episodes of America's Book Club at C-SPAN.org slash ABC and C-SPAN's YouTube page.
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