Overdrive by William F. Buckley Jr. Read Free Book Online Page A

narrative contributed by participants. Time magazine, confronted with this challenge, told the young reporter to justify what he had done, by God, or — . . . John Fedders was thereupon approached by the reporter.
    Informants do not reveal whether the reporter wept at that meeting. But either Fedders authorized the researcher to report back to New York that Fedders had changed his mind; or, more likely, the researcher improvised a retraction by Fedders. At any rate, the issue this morning, its unpleasantness for my brother John aside, makes an absolute fool of poor Fedders. FI ere we all had, over his signature, the flat statement that the SEC did not allege fraud. And now Time prints, "Mr. Fedders told Time his letter was not intended to address the question of whether Time's , interpretation of the transactions was accurate." What then was it intended to address? Why had Fedders written that he was "concerned" with the "impression" left by the article that the SEC's complaint "alleges" fraud?
    I was angered by what Time had done, the more so on learning from Steve Umin over the telephone that three times the reporter, having first asked for the opportunity to hear the case against concluding "fraud," had not availed himself of that opportunity, presumably to guard against seeing evidence that might cripple his beloved story, which was no story at all in the absence of fraud, the story's vertebral column. I wrote a violent letter to the managing editor of Time (whom I have never met, and about whom I hear only pleasant things; and in the interval that has gone by I concede that, after all, one should understand ... If the director of the Enforcement Division of the SEC can be made to look contortionate by the writhings of a reporter, why not also Time's managing editor? Editors necessarily rely on staff).
Dear Sirs [I wrote to Time ]:
    Having surveyed not a few of the nests provided by the stockholders of Time Inc. to executives of Time , my comment is that that which my father created, ex nihilo , he was modestly compensated for. You hide behind the term "in effect"; your use of the word "defraud" was explicitly declined by the SEC, whose standards are severe. In effect , you have demeaned your responsibility to weigh the evidence and speak the truth with verbal precision. That calling is higher than any dumb loyalty to subordinates whose demonstrated misjudgment you are evidently too insecure to disavow.
    A mutual friend subsequently wrote me:
I dissuaded [the managing editor of Time ] from sending a rather scathing two-page reply to your very trenchant note. [His] draft said in part, and I quote for your amusement and with his permission: "I cannot comment on the living standards of Time executives or the Buckley family. This T ime executive lives in a 2-1/2-room Manhattan apartment which you have not had an opportunity to survey because I fear the appointments would strike you as distasteful and the company boring."
    I cannot say what would be my reaction to the former, but I doubt the latter. I replied to my friend:
I have a book-length manuscript describing the outrages attendant on my own brush with the SEC three years ago. I haven't published the book because my friends tell me it is too goddamn boring, and that part of me which is an editor agrees. But I don't really understand why [Time's managing editor] should want to send me a scathing reply. After all, the SEC did not allege fraud, [Time's] writer did; the SEC dissociated itself from [Time's] interpretation, and then [Time' s] writer, having told the SEC his job was on the line, reported verbally that the SEC had contradicted itself, and Time —again without consulting the Buckley lawyer, or the language used by the SEC—went on to reaffirm a charge. You and I and, I expect [the managing editor], know that civil fraud [as the term is used by the SEC] . . . needn't be all that grave. That is the[ir] technical use of the word, but the layman's use is different,