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greatly to have resented my declaration; and now he was calling.
    I greeted him. He answered amiably and told me that he had just come from a press conference at which he had announced that he was reentering politics and would be a candidate in 1982 for his old seat. "Someone asked me, 'What does Buckley think of this?' and I said 'I don't know, I'll call him and ask.' So this is that call." I told Bob that if he thought himself cured, by all means he should do what he wanted to do, and if it meant anything, I was with him all the way.
    The phenomenon of the sometime homosexual, wholly cured, is not one with which most of us are familiar. I am not talking about men who had an experience as schoolboys, or even at college, of the kind intimated with such taste in Brideshead .
    I remember being stunned when in 1976 I read that Professor Allen Weinstein, who was then preparing the definitive book on the Hiss case (Perjury , A. Knopf, 1978), had got hold of a handwritten letter to the FBI volunteered by Whittaker Chambers disclosing preemptively (lest Hiss's lawyers came up with it at the trial, which they never did) that Chambers had been an active homosexual during five years in the thirties. But that, since leaving the Party (he wrote), he had been cured, being a faithful husband, and father. My astonishment was at learning that the man I had known so well had ever been a homosexual. I have probably known ten people who knew Chambers extremely well, dating back many years before the year I met him (1954), and none of them had any intimation of this chapter in Chambers' history. It is fashionable nowadays to say that a person's sexual "preference" is not a datum of any consequence. That question is best saved for another exploration. My point here is the discrete one, that the assumption that homosexuality is an enduring condition (like alcoholism) is simply mistaken, by the evidence of anyone who knew Chambers; and, as of now, presumably by anyone who knows Bob Bauman.
    Frances brought me the issue of Time magazine, just out. What they have done is as bad as could be.
    Several years ago the Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation of the Catawba Corporation, founded by my father in the late forties, and owned by his ten children. The idea of Catawba was simple enough, namely to set up a service organization which by commanding top administrative, geological, financial, and legal talent could offer the best service to small exploratory companies which, dependent on their own resources, would not have been able to come up with quality service. For thirty years, Catawba in effect managed six exploratory oil companies founded by my father. What was wrong, though neither illegal nor immoral in the circumstances, was that the same people who decided, in their capacity as officers of Catawba, what Catawba should charge its client companies also approved, in their capacity as officials of the serviced companies, Catawba's charges. What made the relationship substantively defensible was the reasonable fees and royalties charged, the performance of Catawba over the years, and the disclosures regularly made in public documents of Catawba's role.
    Still, as anyone who has dealt with the SEC or become involved with it (as I protractedly was during 1977-79) knows, ethical criteria for conducting publicly owned companies are an evolving moral art, and that which was altogether okay in 1950 would not necessarily get by in 1980.
    When it files its complaints under Rule iob-5, its most infamous weapon, the SEC Enforcement Division can elect to allege a violation of clause 1, or 2, or 3—or all of said regulations that fall under Rule iob-5. But only the first and third clauses speak of "fraud." Now "fraud," as used by intelligent and cosmopolitan men and women, has a pretty nasty connotation. The SEC in recent years has tended to use the word with abandon, cunningly calculating that although a securities "fraud" is very