Chris Matthews on the Buckley Mystique

The MSNBC host celebrates Christopher Buckley’s lively tribute to his parents—and says Losing Mum and Pup answers JFK’s key question about biography: What were they really like?

Jack Kennedy once said that the reason people read a biography is to answer one question: What was he like?

What was the late William F. Buckley Jr. really like? And what of his wife, Pat, that formidable New York socialite? What could a son make of her? And what were those two, Bill and Pat, like together? What on earth was it like growing up in the middle of all that?

Novelist Christopher Buckley spends every page of Losing Mum and Pup spelling out the lively answers. He told one reporter it’s the best thing he’s ever written. And if he left some things out as he takes us through his parents’ last months, it’s like one of those plays by Harold Pinter. What he doesn’t say says a lot.

Certainly, it’s the best material any author could want. “Is it name-dropping,” Buckley asks, “when they’re your own parents?”

Certainly, it’s the best material any author could want. “Is it name-dropping,” he asks, “when they’re your own parents?”

And what of the world these three shared? The Park Avenue social whirl, Christmas sailing in the Caribbean, then off to Gstaad and drinks with David Niven?

If Losing Mum and Pup reads as debonair as the settings, there’s toughness as well.

Here’s a Bill Buckley you never met on Firing Line.

“Why don’t we agree that the next call you get from me will be when she’s dead.” He’s telling Chris that he, a man as in love with his wife any man could be, simply cannot bring himself to see his dying, comatose wife one more time.

Or this snappy little note from the father on his son’s most recent novel, which had elsewhere been extremely well received. “This one didn’t work for me. Sorry.”

Pretty tough. Then again, if you know fathers of that generation, not at all surprising. The Greatest Generation was tight with its trophies.

And what a life the old man shared with his boy. “My father had always had the notion of sailing across the Atlantic, and this we did in 1975. We set off from Miami on June 1. A month and 4,400 miles later, we dropped anchor in the shadow of Gibraltar.”

Buckley writes about “Mum,” who died first and not by that many months before “Pup,” with more exuberance. She had come dashing into Bill Buckley’s heart as a Vassar roommate of his sister’s. Despite all the spats and all the years, she never left it.

What a glow she left in these pages. “I’ve got the best legs in the business.” What other son can claim to have heard his mother drop that baby?

Among those hundreds of photos, he writes, there wasn’t one bad one. “She made love to every camera that came her way.”

Now try putting all this together.

“I don’t think I once heard Mum utter a religious or spiritual sentiment.”

Yet here is the portrait he paints of the great American Catholic’s wife visiting the Vatican. “She wore more black lace than a Goya duchess; the effect is that of the Magdalene, as dressed by Bill Blass.”

“Generally, she was defiant—almost magnificently so—when her demons slipped their leash.”

And yet, what a sport she could be when she, Patricia Buckley, decided to be.

“My mother deserves a word of appreciation here. She was the dutiful yachtsman’s wife. Lord, how she worked at it. In earlier times, the term for this occupation was 'galley slave.' She had been raised as a debutante, a beautiful, delicate orchid from Vancouver, Canada. Now she found herself cooking for eight men and scrubbing the toilet aboard a small boat with no hot water. She would mutter darkly, ‘I was made for better things.’”