Remarks To the New York Police Department Holy Name Societ y

April 4, 1965-Wm. F. Buckley Jr.

In appearing before you today, in th e
general atmosphere of hostility to wards the police force, I feel a littl e
like the man in Madrid a few years
ago who was asked at a sidewalk cafe ,
"What do you think of Franco? "
"Come with me," he spoke mysteriously . The questioner got up and followed his quarry, who led him silen t
through the streets, past the park, t o
the shore of a lake . Wordlessly h e
drew up a rowboat, beckoned the ma n
in and rowed silently to the middl e
of the lake, looked suspiciously abou t
him, and whispered : " I like him . "
(laughter )
We liveas all men have ever live d
in two worlds . Roughly speaking ,
it is the world that makes the news papers, and the world that doesn't.
The world of the unusual and th e
world of the usual. In the journalisti c
world they define a news story a s
man bites dog, that is . the revers e
of what is normal . In the plain and
ordinary world, dogs bite men . In the
newsworthy world, the man bites th e
dog. A world structured on commo n
senserecognizes the difference between the two acts, ignores the one
as commonplace, remarks the othe r
as an occasion worth commenting on .
Something special is happening in ou r
world that blurs the old distinction s
between the commonplace and th e
unusual . We are departing from rea-

lism so much as to make one wonde r

whether we are not entering an ag e
of surrealism. An age when it is considered far more remarkable that a
dog should bite a man than vice versa .
An age, here in New York, where i t
is considered far less extraordinary
that a criminal should break a law ,
than that a criminal should be apprehended for doing so . (laughter )
The moment a criminal is apprehended, the noisiest forces of moder n
society seem to go into a co-ordinate d
act of resentment and suspicion . The
doctrine that a man is innocent unti l
proved guilty seems to have been
stretched to mean that the apprehending officials are guilty unles s
proved innocent. (laughter) The
members of the community who control the newsand I speak here, no t
only of the news that makes th e
newspapers, but of the news that get s
into the thought, and forms the opinion, of the intellectuals, those whos e
reactions dominate the thought of societythe members of the communit y
who control the news in this broade r
sense seem to be, in respect of crim e
and punishment, infinitely more concerned to do away with the latter ,
than with the former. (laughter)
They justify that concern on any
number of grounds : all of them ,
needless to say, of impeccable moral
breeding . (laughter) They care greatl y
that injustice be not committed. They

care greatly that brutality be avoided .

They care infinitely that a man' s right
to dissent be not curtailed . I care to o
about these things . So do you . But
I care as a citizen, and you care as
those who devote your lives to guarding the rights of citizens, for the corresponding rights of the party of th e
first part ; the party of the first par t
being, in a civilized society, thos e
who abide by the law, and succeed ,
without external pressure, in disciplining their lawless impulses sufficiently to respect the rights of others .
Those men and women who are killed ,
mauled, and molested on our street s
are, unlike those who are arraigned
and charged with having committed
the offenses, victims of injustice beyond a reasonable doubt . The man
on whom brutality has been inflicted ,
in a subway car, in a silent street ,
in the darkness of the park, is a man
condemned to brutality beyond th e
powers of any of us to set right. Th e
republic whose vital secrets are stolen
by the dissenter, or whose good fait h
is broken by him, is weaker on tha t
account beyond the capacity of an y
judge or jury to redress .
. Here is where one sees, with a n
alarm that borders on panic, how the
concern of the most outspoken members of our society, the concern ove r
the privileges of the suspected male factor rather than over the violated
privileges of the law-abiding citizen,