Notes & Asides

Remarks by WFB at a dinner honoring Firing Line producer Warren Steibel on his 70th birthday, at the Four Seasons restaurant, Manhattan, September 6, 1995.

THIS is a happy occasion remarking a melancholy development, which is of course the passage of time. The days and weeks and months and years creep along, without our noticing it very much while it happens. We have a sense of the magnitude of it all only by projecting backward, which is easy to do. What was going on seventy years before Warren et al. were born? Well, Franklin Pierce was President of the United States. The Kansas-Nebraska Act had just been passed. Anthony Trollope published the first of his Barsetshire novels, and Berlioz composed Les Troyens. Seventy years is a good spell of time. If we measure back from 1925 to 1855, we are six years back before the Civil War began.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

Remarks by WFB at a dinner honoring Firing Line producer Warren Steibel on his 70th birthday, at the Four Seasons restaurant, Manhattan, September 6, 1995.

THIS is a happy occasion remarking a melancholy development, which is of course the passage of time. The days and weeks and months and years creep along, without our noticing it very much while it happens. We have a sense of the magnitude of it all only by projecting backward, which is easy to do. What was going on seventy years before Warren et al. were born? Well, Franklin Pierce was President of the United States. The Kansas-Nebraska Act had just been passed. Anthony Trollope published the first of his Barsetshire novels, and Berlioz composed Les Troyens. Seventy years is a good spell of time. If we measure back from 1925 to 1855, we are six years back before the Civil War began.