Over the course of this year, the centenary of William F. Buckley’s birth, we will republish an article by him weekly. In this week’s featured column, Buckley takes the Ford administration to task for its failure to celebrate the great Russian writer and humanitarian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn while having no issue meeting with and publicizing Communists and their anti-American views.
The very worst part of it is that Gerald Ford has a certain reputation for spontaneous goodwill. There probably isn’t a bureaucracy surrounding any leader anywhere in the free world who would recommend to a chief of state that he give an audience to anybody whose ties to politics are closer than Charlie Brown’s. But Ford struck us as someone powerful enough to wrest his leg up through the cobwebs of the Lilliputians to do the natural thing. Perhaps it was all those months without a swimming pool that made him flaccid. For a horrible moment one was tempted to wonder whether Mr. Ford knew who Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was.
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