Free The Rake by William F. Buckley Page A

“it just doesn’t matter what the strain on you may be of waiting to organize your office. If she says yes, then you’ll have the best office manager in Washington, D.C.”
    She did say yes. And now, six years later, it was Susan Oakeshott, not the senator, who was approached about an utterly secret meeting between Castle and the quiet kingmaker, Harold Kaltenbach.
    What Kaltenbach wanted to deliberate was whether Castlewould make a good presidential candidate five years down the line. “The Republicans are going to take the White House in 1988,” he told Susan. “I’m deciding who to back for 1992.”
    Whom Harold Kaltenbach would back in 1992 was a matter of critical importance to the contending parties. Kaltenbach was from Nebraska. He loved politics, and politics loved him. He loved his money and his network of friends, and he was doggedly attached to the Democratic Party. Susan, of course, knew all this, knew all about Kaltenbach, and she knew that her senator would appreciate the importance of meeting with him as a petitioner, and would agree to have such a meeting on Kaltenbach’s terms.
    By noon the next day Susan had cleared the Augusta weekend. Working at his end, Kaltenbach had managed an invitation from Hank Wright. The senator would be, unofficially, Wright’s guest at Augusta, and would attend as much of the tournament as he could. Kaltenbach would decide—there was plenty of time; the tournament was four weeks off—whether it would be useful to have the senator say a word or two at any of the official functions.
    Their actual meeting would be at a golf course—but not the Augusta National. Instead, they would go to nearby Aiken. Kaltenbach and the senator would both be dressed as golfers. Susan had made a reservation at the club dining room in the name of Hank Wright.
    The table was at a well-removed corner of the dining room, and they met at eleven-thirty, a half hour before many other patrons would gather.
    Harold Kaltenbach was very quiet, embarked on his super-charged mission. Reuben was acutely aware that he was being examined through the special microscope of a true political professional. The questioning was deceptively orthodox: name, rank, and serial number, like a form for a bank loan.
    Reuben found his doughty self-confidence strangely useless. He knew that anything that smacked of rodomontade would be…silly. Maybe even fatal. A demonstration of confidence in his political future was of course useful, but it mustn’t be superficial. If Reuben Castle was going to talk persuasively about his strengths, he could do so plausibly only by communicating strengths that were not obviously visible to Harold Kaltenbach. But what wasn’t visible to Harold Kaltenbach? And would the impression be damaging if Reuben miscalculated?
    Probably the thing to do was to act absolutely natural. He had this difficulty, which many first-rate politicians caught up in the theater of politics have, namely that he wasn’t sure what was in fact natural. Reuben knew that he was attractive to men, even charming; and he could not remember a time when he had failed at ingratiation with women, communally and individually. He had those advantages at the outset.
    He braced himself for two questions. How was it that, in fifteen months in Vietnam, he had avoided combat entirely? (He had a pretty satisfactory answer to that one, he thought—he didn’t control the combat assignments, after all.) And the second: Why was it that he hadn’t finished law school? Complying with the Buckley Amendment of 1974, college administrators were required to make available to students or ex-students any official reports written about them or their work. And ex-students could requisition these, in later years, removing themfrom the university’s files. Why had Reuben done exactly that with his professors’ reports from the University of Illinois?
    He had an answer,