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papers. But the difference between this machine and others is that unless you actually depress the microphone button and talk into the machine, it does not expend battery energy. This is a datum of huge importance. For the sake of experiment, last spring I took a measurement. During five hours of uninterrupted work flying to San Francisco, I accumulated only eighteen minutes of dictation. Five hours—three hundred minutes—divided by eighteen. That adds up to one minute of dictation for every sixteen minutes of standby. I then calculate: the Japanese machines, which burn up energy once you've turned them on, whether you're talking or not, use up batteries sixteen times as fast as my beautiful Dictaphone which, I suppose it is fair to add, costs about six times as much.
    I'd have written to Dictaphone to volunteer a testimonial, save for my experience with Smith-Corona. That was seven or eight years ago when we reached Switzerland, as usual, at the end of January. I lugged out a Smith-Corona I keep there, having bought it ten years earlier—a $170 portable electric. I turned on the power switch, and as ever it performed perfectly. I was seized by the moment, stuck in a sheet of yellow paper and wrote to the president of Smith-Corona, "Dear Sir" (not knowing his name): "I wish to advise you that your portable electric model so and so is the most wonderful electric typewriter I have ever experienced, having given me no trouble whatever during ten years. You may use this tribute in any way you desire, so long as you make clear that I was not paid for it." The letter was never acknowledged. Five years later, an advertising agency most decorously approached my secretary to ask whether Mr. Buckley ever gave testimonials to a commercial product? His client, Smith-Corona, was interested. (Mr. Buckley does not.)
    On the seat between me and Rebeca is a briefcase, and I take a plunge. The Public Agenda Foundation desires me to serve as a member of its Policy Review Board. Ugh. But careful—it is my old friend Frank Stanton, longtime president of CBS, who suggested my election; mustn't hurt his feelings. I read about the duties of the Policy Review Board I am asked to join. It "serves a critical function in this work. The Board, consisting of leading citizens with many different backgrounds, philosophies, and experiences, functions to guarantee the objectivity of the Public Agenda's work. Board members review Public Agenda projects, publications, and other materials to insure that they are free of ideological bias, that they are balanced and thoughtful, and that they represent the highest level of analysis and research." Prose like that gags, doesn't it? I mean, if leading citizens with different backgrounds, philosophies, and experiences guarantee objectivity, then why isn't the United Nations objective? And are we so sure we want to be free of ideological bias? Isn't a hierarchy of values valuable? And if so, do we then not inherit a working bias of sorts, susceptible of rearrangement—e.g., when we elect to go to war?
    And just when is a bias "ideological"? Is ours for democracy ideological? And in order to be balanced, does this mean that every time we make the case for human freedom, we need to present the other case? I do not tire of quoting Randall Jarrell in Pictures From An Institution who spoke of the professional toleration of Flo, the wife of the professor of sociology . . . "If she had been told that Benton [College], and [her husband] Jerrold, and [her son] John, and [her daughter] Fern, and the furniture had been burned to ashes by the head of the American Federation of Labor, who had then sown salt over the ashes, she would have sobbed and sobbed, and said at last— she could do no other—'I think that we ought to hear his side of the case before we make up our minds.' "
    But these are well-meaning and gifted people, and the organization no doubt does good, whatever exactly it does; but would it do better for my