Free Overdrive by William F. Buckley Jr.

foreign policy should have happened. Put it this way: If the Scotch tape at Watergate had stuck, maybe there wouldn't have been any boat people.
    The business about who in the CIA, past or present, can write what, came up as a First Amendment case when 1) Frank Snepp, formerly with the CIA, wrote a book about his last days in Vietnam; 2) he didn't show the book to Stansfield Turner, director of the CIA; 3) Turner asked the Justice Department to sue, adducing Snepp's pledge not to reveal any information developed while at the agency without first clearing it; 4) the court found in favor of the CIA, penalizing Snepp the whole of his income from royalties; upon which he appealed, and 5) ultimately the Supreme Court refused to overturn.
    Snepp accosted me at a social function a few months ago, asking how it was that I could write novels that contained knowledge gotten while I was at the CIA, and he couldn't. The differences struck me, then and now, as obvious: i.e., my CIA stories are imagined, save only an account of the training I received in 1951, which was accurately transcribed in Saving the Queen; while Frank's disclose events, during the months in 1975 preceding the great exodus, which enmesh dozens of people and, arguably, reveal CIA habits. Abstractly, however, he has a point.
    I told him so, and gave him a useful episode for his complaint inventory, even while acknowledging that clearly the context was humorous. I was lecturing to the CIA at Langley (I have done this only once), and was introduced, with some wit and jocularity, by Snepp's nemesis, the director, Admiral Turner, part of a small group with whom I had in 1972 traveled to the South Pole, so that it happened we were friends. I replied to his spirited introduction by revealing to the audience that our most recent exchange of communications had taken place only a month or two before. I was in Hawaii, and wrote to Turner, "Dear Stan: I seldom join committees, but this one, in which I was offered membership yesterday, I simply couldn't resist. I'm writing to ask whether you yourself shouldn't join it? It is called 'The Pearl Harbor Committee to Keep One's Eyes on the Russian Fleet.' " Admiral Turner replied that ex officio he was a member of that committee. "But I am also a member of another committee, which you presumably have never heard of. It is called 'The Committee to Keep One's Eyes on Former CIA Agents Who Write Spy Novels Without Having Them Checked for Security.' "
    Malum prohibitum , non malum in se— a distinction I cherish. Is it really wrong to go through a red light when there isn't a soul within miles of the intersection? I favor the rule that says you must stop anyway, because the habit of self-discipline can save your life, and more importantly, others' lives; but if I were a judge I'd hand down a lesser sentence than I'd have done to a man who went through the red light when there were children running about.

    Last spring, from Switzerland, I was moved to repay the debt I have felt to peanut butter. "I have never composed poetry [I wrote in my syndicated column], but if I did, my very first couplet would be:
    "'I know that I shall never see/A poem lovely as Skippy's Peanut Butter.' "
    My addiction is lifelong, and total. I reminisced. "I was hardened very young to the skeptics. When I was twelve, I was packed off to a British boarding school by my father, who dispatched every fortnight a survival package comprising a case of grapefruit and a large jar of peanut butter. I offered to share my tuck with the boys who shared my table. They grabbed instinctively for the grapefruit—but one after another actually spit out the peanut butter, which they had never before seen and which only that very year (1938) had become available for sale in London, at a store that specialized in exotic foods. No wonder they needed American help to win the war."
    The volume of mail attracted by this column was extraordinary, most of it from p/b addicts, come out of