Christopher Buckley, son of conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr., discusses his satirical works like The White House Mess (1986) and Thank You for Smoking (1994), which parodied Reagan’s memoirs and Trump’s staff, respectively. He dismisses wit as teachable, crediting personal quirks over formal training, while praising biography—like his father’s 1970 support for an African-American president or drug law reform. Buckley’s upcoming Decatur House tour follows Jackie Kennedy’s 1961 legacy, saving White House buildings despite JFK’s opposition and her later fight to preserve Grand Central Station. The episode hints at broader themes: satire thrives on insider perspective, while cultural preservation often clashes with political pragmatism. [Automatically generated summary]
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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 Rubinstein.
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.
unidentified
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.
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.
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 ago.
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.
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?
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?
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, remember, 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.
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 confirm.
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 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?
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, and my uncle Jimmy, maybe, are the two finest men I've ever known.
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, you know, 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.
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.
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.
Well, I don't want to give away the plot of a 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'd 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.
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.
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'Teal, O'Toole, if you were any better looking, you'd be Florence of Arabia.
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?
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?
October of 1996, I'm on my way on the not the Sela 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 tug at 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.
But as I wrote in that book, the height of vanity to quote once in the book, you know, 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 about Pop.
He was always pushing.
I guess Tom Wolfe in his magnificent book on the astronauts called it Pushing the Envelope.
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.
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 flashed 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.
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?
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?
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.
unidentified
Thank you.
Thank you, Doug.
After the interview, Christopher Buckley and David Rubenstein toured the historic Decatur House.
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.
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 to build those buildings.
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.
unidentified
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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Then White House reporter for The Hill, Julia Manchester, previews the week ahead at the White House.
And global affairs correspondent for The Guardian, Andrew Roth, and North America editor for Velt Stephanie Bolzon on U.S.-European relations in the Trump administration.