My entry into America was a breeze. I debuted as an underground writer in the Commie Poland and our ethnic émigré elite in New York gave me a nepotic hand. They set me up with an American family on the Upper East Side.
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| E 72nd St, the brownstone on left under tree |
It was a power node alright. My host was a Princeton professor, his brother was J.F.K.’s speechwriter. A couple blocks west by Madison Ave was a co-op whose occupants refused Richard Nixon as a tenant, when he and his ailing Pat sought a pad near NYC hospitals. A block up north from that post-HUAC clash, modern patrician William F. Buckley Jr. had a duplex, where he threw his famously eloquent dinners and power proms.
It was the time of his life for Buckley, as a devoted browser of his National Review and a pal was doing two terms in the White House. Buckley was the father of so-called modern American conservatism, one of the great American loser-ideas of the second half of the 20th century.
