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Still, as anyone who has dealt with the SEC or become involved with it (as I protractedly was during 1977-79) knows, ethical criteria for conducting publicly owned companies are an evolving moral art, and that which was altogether okay in 1950 would not necessarily get by in 1980.

When it files its complaints under Rule iob-5, its most infamous weapon, the SEC Enforcement Division can elect to allege a violation of clause 1, or 2, or 3—or all of said regulations that fall under Rule iob-5. But only the first and third clauses speak of "fraud." Now "fraud," as used by intelligent and cosmopolitan men and women, has a pretty nasty connotation. The SEC in recent years has tended to use the word with abandon, cunningly calculating that although a
securities
"fraud" is very different from garden variety fraud, the use of the word has considerable intimidating power if the people against whom it is used are prominent other than in the securities business, as of course was the case with Catawba.

Steve Umin, the learned family attorney in Washington, was greatly gratified that the SEC, when finally it framed its complaint against Catawba, did
not
use the first or third clauses. In not doing so, it acted conspicuously—i.e., it said in effect: Although certain practices followed by Catawba we allege to be in violation of the Securities and Exchange Act and the regulations promulgated under its authority, we specifically do not include, as among those violations, any intent to defraud.

When the complaint was issued, together with the consent decree signed by my brother John (the only Buckley directly concerned with the litigation), what one might call the professional business press, most conspicuously
The Wall Street Journal
, gave it a routine story (the
Journal
ran it on page 17). But because my brother Jim and I are public figures and are stockholders of Catawba, notwithstanding that Jim has been essentially unaffiliated with Catawba since he was elected to the Senate in 1970, and that I hadn't had anything to do with Catawba since a brief spell in 1954, the New York
Times
gave the consent decree front-page treatment. It was hard, reading the story, to understand why it rated such prominent attention. (A headline accurately communicating its news might have said: "COMPANY OF WHICH JAMES AND WILLIAM BUCKLEY ARE STOCKHOLDERS/SIGNS THROUGH BROTHER WHO ONCE WAS COMPANY'S PRESIDENT/CONSENT DECREE WITH SEC AGREEING TO KEEP SEVERED/CATAWBA TIES WHICH WERE SEVERED IN 1978.")

But a young reporter for
Time
mag, hoping for much much more, had devoted a great deal of effort to the whole complicated business, and when the SEC declined to move in a more stentorian mode, he undertook to do so himself, and persuaded his superiors to go along. Accordingly, two weeks ago
Time
devoted an entire page—not even in the business section, but under National News—to Catawba. The story said:

. . . the Securities and Exchange Commission, after a 3-1/2 -year investigation of Buckley-controlled oil and gas companies, last week portrayed the family's own business practices as unethical and even unlawful. In effect, it accused the companies of having defrauded stockholders to feather the family's nest.

Now that story had an extraordinary effect on the new director of the Enforcement Division of the SEC. John M. Fedders had been for a number of years a securities lawyer, and had clients who had suffered from the arbitrariness of Fedders' predecessor, Stanley Sporkin—gone now, after Reagan's election, to the CIA, as chief counsel, where, one hopes, he will be instrumental in doing as much damage to the Soviet enterprise as he did to American enterprise. John Fedders, shown by Umin the article in
Time
magazine, joined in Umin's indignation and undertook to do something absolutely unprecedented in the history of the SEC. Fie wrote a letter and addressed it "To the members of the Buckley family." (It is perhaps prudent to add here that Mr. Fedders, unknown to me, is also unknown to my brothers and sisters—i.e., his spontaneous action was not motivated by particular attachments.) Fedders' letter read: "Your counsel have expressed to me their displeasure with the article in the November 16 issue of
Time
magazine. I am concerned with the impression left by the article that the Commission's complaint alleges that the Buckley family 'defrauded stockholders to feather the family's nest.'

"Although the Commission's complaint alleges violations of Rule 10b-5 (2) under the 1934 Act and Section 17 (a) (2) of the 1933 Act, it does not allege that the described transactions were 'fraudulent.'

"It is important that the results of the Commission's work not be misunderstood."

What then happened is in part reconstruction, in part 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, and it is the burden of my unpublished book that a) no one appears to care; but b) people should care. And when
Time
suggests my brother committed fraud, I care enough to risk receiving a scathing letter from the managing editor to set the record straight. So there we are, my friend. . . . There was a day, and I genuinely regret its passing, when people genuinely guilty of fraud were ostracized. The dissipation of the social sanction has its convenience but I doubt that it is altogether healthy.

In New York, we live uptown, on Seventy-third Street, and Jerry got me there only minutes before our six guests convened for a drink and sandwiches (we would dine later). We piled into the car to go hear Rosalyn Tureck perform the second of her three scheduled fall concerts at Carnegie Hall. I have managed over the years to hear her perform publicly a dozen times (she presumes to perform even when I am out of town). For one whole season she stayed abroad, doing her scholarly editions; another season, for a month or so, she was ill. Two years ago she played five concerts, repeating works she had performed forty years back when, as a young woman, she began her New York career. I met her nearly twelve years ago, when I asked her to do a program with me for "Firing Line" at which we would explore the question, "Why are they afraid of Bach?"

I tease her sometimes, because it's fun to do so when two people absolutely agree on the same proposition, in this case that she is the best piano interpreter of J. S. Bach at large. She likes to hear a compliment, but is never quite surprised by it. I suppose in this respect she is like many artists. I remember returning from our honeymoon in 1950 and finding that my father's graduation present, a Challis clavichord, was—I feared fatally—constipated by the moisture in northwest Connecticut where I had left it. In desperation I took it to the house of the legendary harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, off neighboring Lakeville Lake. I had never met her, but assumed she would share my distress and give me counsel. She palmed off the instrument on Denise Restout, her musician-assistant, and proceeded to chat with me, her very first question being, Had I heard her new recording of
The Well-Tempered Clavier?
I was able truthfully to reply, Yes. She closed her eyes, and said: "Magnificent, no?" I agreed.

Rosalyn combines self-esteem with great artistic maturity. I think it safe to say that if she were
not
good, she wouldn't think she
was
. Along the line, sometime in the late thirties, she resolved to abandon her vast repertory and play only the work of Johann Sebastian Bach. I read somewhere that the great Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau once calculated that he held in memory enough music to play forty two-hour concerts. That would be eighty hours. It is only a guess, but it is reasonable to assume that it would take about forty hours to play all the works of Bach written for keyboard, but some of these works are of absolutely terrifying complexity. It is one thing to commit to memory Grieg's Concerto, another to remember a couple of Bach's English Suites. Or, for that matter, the first six preludes and fugues in the second volume of the forty-eight preludes and fugues. The problem is that the story line is totally polyphonic, with two, three, and four melodies pursued in counterpoint. To play romantic music can be horrifyingly difficult (one thinks of the Transcendental Etudes of Liszt), but I think that memorizing them would be easier than memorizing much of Bach.

In any event, it isn't a secret that there is a certain amount of professional resentment of Tureck because of her single-minded focus on one composer. Her reputation as an artist in other literatures was well established, and I have heard cassettes of her doing remarkable things with Paganini, Chopin, Liszt. But her devotion to a single composer, while certainly idiosyncratic, can hardly be judged as narrow, for the reason that we are dealing with Bach. No more would an actor be judged narrow who determined to act only in the plays of Shakespeare. We might regret the decision, even as I regret that Rosalyn doesn't play the other composers—unless I thought that were she to do so, she would dilute her talent, playing Bach less magnificently than she does.

Her second offense against the professional world of music is that she elected, somewhere along the line, to perform not only on the piano, but also on the harpsichord. Moreover, she plays the harpsichord with stunning effect, though in that instrument she has competitors. "They" don't like it when you perform on more than one instrument. Rosalyn rubbed it in by deciding a few years ago to do something probably never before done, namely to play the Goldberg Variations on the harpsichord before dinner, and on the piano after dinner. When she does the Goldberg she takes all the repeats, and it clocks in at about one hour and twenty minutes of the most exacting keyboard work imaginable, evoking every mood, every technical problem, including the musical problem of cohesion. And it takes the concentration required to play without any interruption for twenty-five minutes longer than it takes to perform Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

She invited Pat and me to her apartment three days before the double Goldberg and played the thing through for us on her harpsichord, a marvelous experience. And then a year later Pat told me that Rosalyn had a present for my birthday. She was scheduled to play at Carnegie Hall the following Tuesday. On Saturday she would give the same concert at our home in Stamford. We invited about twenty guests, and she came down from upstairs with consummate presence (she doesn't like to be introduced to people individually
before
she plays). I presented her at the piano by recalling an old story I heard at college, about the boy who, weary of the school band, says to the girl, "Let's go to my car and listen to Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians." She says, "I didn't know you had a radio in your car!" He says, "I don't. I have Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians." "I feel," I said proudly, "as though I have here Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians!"