Notes & asides.(William F. Buckley, Jr.'s acceptance speech of Alexander Hamilton Award)(Transcript)

* WFB's remarks on accepting the Manhattan Institute's Alexander Hamilton Award, April 29, 2004

Mr. Chairman, David [Brooks]:

I am glad that I was able, as host of a dinner three years ago, to record full-throatedly my admiration for Robert Bartley--and my confidence in his successor--just after he stepped down as editor of the Wall Street Journal. When I heard the awful news of his death, my impulse was that of George Ade. When he saw, on the bulletin board of his club in Indianapolis, the notice that a dear friend had died, he scrawled over it, "It's always the wrong person who dies."

Which reminds me that, per impossibile, Peter Flanigan, who shares this year's Alexander Hamilton Award with Bob Bartley and me, is also mortal. The death knell for him sounded one year ago, when my 20-year-old sloop, Patito, defeated his boat in our annual race across Long Island Sound. My Patito having then nothing further to prove, I sold her. I recall that Thoreau refined his pencil factory until it produced the perfect pencil. Then he sold it.

Paul Gigot and David Brooks, young and brilliant members of our fraternity, are dear friends and sometime apprentices at NATIONAL REVIEW. I am reminded that the Manhattan Institute, reciting with justified pride its achievements over 25 years, calls to our attention that it is substantially responsible for welfare reform, for supply-side economics, and for school choice. Up against that, what can I say or do? All that NATIONAL REVIEW did was discover America.

Time passes and there are setbacks. When entering these hospitable quarters here at the Pierre Hotel, I recalled passing by this hotel in mid November, 1968. An entire floor of it was set aside for Richard Nixon, who had just been elected president of the United States, and would plot his administration in this building. No floors, here or anywhere, were set aside for Richard Nixon when he ended his term of office, which calls to mind that he had weaknesses, in his case, finally disabling. It is, I think, an insight of the Manhattan Institute that the weaknesses of the human race are always sad, and sometimes mortal, and that we need a public alert to the political implications of those weaknesses. On the matter of such ...