"Galbraith was about to pass Bill the salt when I adroitly stabbed his hand with my butter knife and completed the transfer to WFB's refined hand"

Jeffrey Hart contributes another dish to the groaning-board of "famous-people-I met-having- dinner at William F. Buckley's houses" literature. A few paras opening and closing to credit WFB for being against the Middle Eastern Adventure, then a long retailing of People meets Town & Country:

"Social life at the chalet resembled that at Buckley’s 73rd Street apartment in New York: interesting people, usually accomplished in a variety of ways, seldom political and not all conservatives or even many conservatives. Kitty and Ken Galbraith; David Niven; Taki Theodoracopulos, a glamorous millionaire, a great skier and good enough tennis player to have played at Wimbledon; an actor who was playing James Bond in a movie; “Swifty” Lazar the agent and Arthur Schlesinger, neither of whom skied. Once I asked Arthur about Kennedy’s womanizing, really to see how he would handle that question, aware as everyone was that Kennedy pushed the envelope and would have made the then unknown Bill Clinton look like a monk. Arthur professed to know nothing about it. Polite."

Reading the expanding oeuvre, it's as if Buckley's lieutenants are scrambling to place themselves in the closer orbits of the great man. Hart takes the interesting leap of one-upping one his own children:

"Matthew Hart, the youngest of my four children, is Buckley’s godson and now lives near Lake Tahoe in California. When he heard that Buckley had died he sent me an e-mail:

"'I just wanted to send you my condolences about Mr. Buckley...I’ll always have the memories of Switzerland and skiing with the A-team and being reminded not to pass the leader but [being] led off into some sort of gulch that we had to hike out of in three feet of snow. Well, what can you do? We did make it out after all. That’s what happens when you leave the trail I guess. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere…'"

Dad then adds:

"Matthew was in Gstaad only once. I went several times beginning in the 1970s—I had been a senior editor at National Review since 1969—and a glimpse of life there provides a sense of the joi de vivre that was characteristic of Buckley’s life."

And people say the Kennedys were competitive.