Sam Tannenhaus

giants there.

You'd see Norman Mailer sitting at a table just reading a book.

You just couldn't believe what you would see back then.

And those are the days, you know, they dig the stuff out of the archive and they send a tube.

They bring up the book.

That's where I first read Bill Buckley's magnificent essay on Whitaker Chambers in the New York Public Library.

Nothing was digitized.

It was in Esquire magazine.

And I'll tell you something.

You're asking me, why do I do this stuff?

I grew up in a household that didn't think a lot of Bill Buckley.

And then a couple of things turned me around on him.

And one was when I was working on Chambers, I went to the New York Public Library and I read an essay in Esquire magazine.

It was actually the first piece Bill Buckley published there, though I didn't learn that much later, called The End of Whitaker Chambers.

It was a memoir about him interspersed with letters.

And I realized, this guy's like an exquisite writer.

Why didn't anybody tell me this?

And you sort of get mad in retrospect.

There's nobody in front of a classroom who's going to say, by the way, you know, I might want to look at Bill Buckley's memoir, Cruising Speed, to see what great journalism is like.

Nobody says this.