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Envy is one of the seven deadly sins but ever present among the writing classes. One would think they’d fake it, but envy, like unrequited love, cannot be easily hidden. I recently read a review of a Bill Buckley biography, one that pricked my fairness button despite the writer’s pretense of objectivity. It was a not-so-subtle attack on my onetime mentor William F. Buckley, but the more the hack tried to hide his envy of the great conservative icon, the more it stuck out, like a giant pimple on the tip of the nose of a handsome woman.

But before I go on about an envious bum called Louis Menand, I’d like to tell you a little bit about how it was back in rainy old London when I started a column in The Spectator, the world’s oldest weekly—a column that ran for 46 years, to be exact. A female journalist came to my London house having asked for an interview after a few months of my column appearing each week. I was 39 years of age and had recently moved to London from Paris. I had covered wars in Vietnam and the Middle East and had decided to settle down in London. My father had bought me a nice house with a double garden in a chic section of town, and word had gotten out that I was a generous party giver.

“The more the hack tried to hide his envy of the great conservative icon, the more it stuck out.”

On the morning of the interview, I was suffering from a hangover and happened to mention it to the rather unpleasant female reporter. She asked me about the house, how I could afford it on my Spectator salary, and that’s when the penny dropped. Her disapproving look got to me. Who the hell, I thought to myself, does this woman think she is? Doesn’t a father have the right to gift his son with a house after the son’s close to ten years of wartime peregrinations? Her face contorted even more when I happily told her that my father had also gifted me with a beautiful sailing boat and some other things I simply invented. By the time I finished, the deformity of her face would have intrigued a thousand plastic surgeons, but I was just starting.

For any of you Takimag readers, I did this because I smelled envy and jealousy the moment the woman walked into my house. So instead of playing it down, I amped it up, something I have done ever since only for the benefit of jealous journalists. And boy, was she jealous! She did a thoroughly good hatchet job on me, one that bothered the then editor of the magazine I wrote for, until I let him in on my little secret. I had entrapped that ghastly woman who had come into my house under false pretenses of objectivity, and had made her hate me to the point where she looked even uglier than she already was.

This all took place close to fifty years ago. Bill Buckley was the man who gave me my first break in journalism, but he was also a close friend to me and my wife, a skiing and sailing companion with whom I skied every winter for thirty or more years in Gstaad and sailed around Europe on my boat with his and my family. His son Christopher was best man when I married my wife Alexandra. Sadly, when Bill’s wife Pat died, Bill called me and asked me to come to his Stamford house, which I did, along with another friend and Bill’s brothers and sisters. For any of you who might not be familiar with his work (he died in 2008), Bill was the modern father of conservatism, a syndicated columnist, a TV host, a writer of fifty-some-odd books and novels, a great debater, the founder of a national magazine, a spellbinding orator…you name it, he did it—excellently. He was also a generous host, owned two beautifully kept houses, and played the harpsichord almost professionally. His “patrician manner, salon wit, and gold-plated vocabulary” stood out when debating or interviewing lesser beings. This angered hoi polloi like Menand and many others. Buckley also was among the first to point out that “newspapermen, publishers, commentators, and professors” imposed their left-wing views on an unwary public that saw them as unbiased.

What Menand found to attack Buckley with writing in The New Dentist was what the magazine, back then known as The New Yorker, had printed. It was Bill’s book called Overdrive, a journal covering a week in Buckley’s very, very busy schedule. The envious hack did not like Buckley’s mention of his sailboat, his limo, or his swimming pool. I could feel the hack’s envy slowly seeping out, green and foul-smelling. And the envious one brought up Bill Buckley’s father’s anti-Semitism. What he didn’t mention was Bill’s philo-Semitism, one that made him believe the lies of Israel agents like the Podhoretzes, Kristols, and Wolfowitzes. See what I mean by envy and jealousy? What did Bill’s father have to do with his son except having given him an excellent education and a comfortable home? Envy should be a punishable offense, but there are not enough jails, alas.