Father’s first meeting with Pancho Villa took place when he was riding a railroad train on a mission to deliver the payroll of a big U.S. company. Dust, coal smoke, and cinders blew in through the open windows, stinging eyes and covering the passengers. Pancho Villa had been regularly raiding and robbing and killing in the area, causing Father to wonder where he could hide the payroll should Villa, exalted by revolution to the status of patriot, have gotten wind of the loot. This was in the form of gold coins, rolled tightly in paper. After thinking hard on the problem, Father got up from his seat and, heavy satchel in hand, walked toward the back of the car, where the evil-smelling men’s room was located.

Satisfying himself that the chamber was empty, he began dropping the rolls of coins one by one into the wide, dish-shaped mouths—stained with spittle and tobacco juice, never mind—and down the hollow tubes of their stands. Should Villa’s brigands board and search the train, surely they would never think of the cuspidors.

Satisfied with his stratagem, he washed his hands and took his seat on the aisle. He had fallen half asleep when shots rang out, people screamed, and the thundering of horses’ hooves burst upon his ears. The locomotive’s brakes screeched and sizzled with a series of jolting stops that knocked people half out of their seats.

In poured the bandits, Villa at their head, pistols smoking, demanding wallets, gold watches, women’s cameos and hat pins. “Where is it?” demanded Villa. He turned on the terrified conductor, who was dragged toward him by two bandits. He drew his pistol, placing its long barrel flat against the poor man’s brow.

“We know the gold is on this train. Be quick, tell me, or you are a dead man.”

As the conductor pleaded ignorance, there came a shout from the back of the car, and bandits burst from the men’s room, declaring that they had found the gold. At this, Villa raised the pistol, cocking the hammer, pointing it at the conductor’s skull. But Father called out in a loud voice, in Spanish, “Do not hurt that man. I hid the gold. He knew nothing about it.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Guillermo Buckley. I was bringing the payroll for Company X, and I hid it without this man’s knowledge.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you,” the conductor cried at these words, writhing on the floor.”

“Shut up, you disgusting worm,” said Villa. “I am going to shoot you anyhow.” The conductor began begging for pity. Father came within a few feet of Villa: “I know you won’t shoot that miserable man.”

“Who are you to say that, Ojos Azules [blue eyes]? You will be fortunate if I do not kill you, too.”

“Because you are too great a man to shoot a wretch like this conductor. Pancho Villa has become famous in Mexico. Children all over the country are being taught to respect and revere his name. Pancho Villa stands for justice to the poor. You would never waste your reputation on such a wretch as this.”

Villa swelled visibly with gratification as Father continued extolling his reputation and began glancing down at the conductor benevolently.

“Get up,” he said at last. “Don’t grovel. I have no intention of hurting you.”

“Are we through here, caballeros?” he shouted to his men, who indicated that they had pried the last gold tooth out of the last mouth. “Good. And you, Guillermo Buckley, come see me at a better time. I respect courage.”

The young Texan was nothing if not brave. Starting from scratch, using his lively imagination and happily accepting risk, Will Buckley had made a name for himself and had attracted to his side lifelong friends, Mexican and American. He was incorruptible and outspoken and did not mind angering people who were neither. He had been threatened with death and expulsion and had avoided both, refusing to change his ways or moderate his opinions. He had been abducted by bandits and escaped. He had founded Pantepec, the company that he would eventually ride to great riches.

He had discovered oil, not yet the black gold itself, but the lure and excitement. He had been appointed counsel for the Mexican government to the ABC Conference. He had exposed himself to the fire of Mexican snipers to save U.S. Marines and sailors from being shot. He had refused the civil governorship of Veracruz and watched U.S. gunboats weigh anchor after six desultory months in the harbor, bearing away General Funston and 5,000 troops, who had accomplished an obnoxious mission ordered by an erratic old fuddy-duddy of a U.S. president. Mexico continued in a state of turmoil, but this was a land of opportunity for a person willing to work hard and who possessed the necessary grit.

These experiences shaped my father’s character and beliefs and indelibly stamped the attitudes and political inclinations of his children. His revolutionary Mexico was a lawless mess in which the norms of society had disintegrated and the lowest human passions were rampant, half the nation living in a state of fear and exposed to the most brutal oppression. Hence, we learned:

1. Government is necessary. Its function is to prevent anarchy and antisocial tendencies. Government exists to defend the society against enemies abroad, to protect liberties at home, and, when necessary, to impose order.

The arteriosclerotic Porfirio Díaz regime accomplished some of these objectives, but at the expense of liberty and democracy and in service of an arrogant plutocracy. Mexico’s subsequent revolutionary regimes accomplished almost nothing other than to deceive the people, fuel chaos, corrupt society further, and condemn the pitiable people to a decade of blood-letting, which was followed by seven decades of exploitation, peculation, embezzlement, robbery, and political impotence.

Long before his years in Mexico, my father knew that:

2. Government is always dangerous.

Every schoolchild in the Southwest had had drilled into him that government, like fire, is a wonderful servant but a fearful master. In those days, even in such a remote corner as San Diego, Texas, Americans were instructed in their heritage. They committed to memory the Declaration of Independence and at least the Preamble of the Constitution. They could quote the Bill of Rights. When they grew old enough, they studied the Federalist Papers and were familiar with the opinions and statements of the founders, whose counsels they took seriously.

Schoolchildren still receive instruction in the charters of their founding, but one senses with a lot less reverence. They may be more likely to hear about raunchy Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings than about his sage warning that a government possessing the power to do something for its citizens possesses the power to do something to them.

This maxim wasn’t deprecated when our father was a child, and experience confirmed it. In Mexico, the post-Díaz revolutionary regimes all promised to endow Mexico with prosperity as well as egalitarian justice, neither of which goals is within the capacity or proper to the function of government. Hence:

3. Citizens of a republic must make do without government whenever possible.

Back then, in the United States, politicians of whatever tint paid homage to a “rugged individualism” that is regularly mocked by the media today. Our father called it character. His first employer was, by his account, “crooked,” and when he quit the man’s firm, having earned his enmity, he did not find work for a year, which must have been a desperate 12 months for the young adventurer with almost no social, business, or political connections.

The West, though acknowledging the value of an honest sheriff—of law and order—was natively distrustful of government. This was a political wisdom natural to Will Buckley. Our father learned from his father, and the wisdom was reinforced by his experience in Mexico, that:

4. Government, unless bound strictly by laws, unless kept humble, contains within it an ever immanent menace of despotism, often accompanied by grandiose proclamations that disguise naked ambition.

The New Deal. The Fair Deal. The Great Society. Compassionate conservativism. In Mexico, the revolution fed fat on its promises to the poor, to which all the revolutionary leaders, to some degree with the honorable exception of Pancho Villa, were faithless. Drummed into our father by extrapolation from the Mexican experience was that:

5. Citizens must keep government disciplined within constitutional limits lest it threaten the freedom and security of the people it was created to protect.

From what our sire learned of the Juarez regime, and of the Díaz regime personally experienced, he culled that the tendency of government is always to expand its power, and that the tendency of strong men is always to arrogate to themselves more authority. This tendency may be benevolent, the strong man may be bursting with goodwill, but it is subversive of the people’s rights. Concentration of power in the center is the historical dynamic of all governments and all strong men, without exception. And once powers are surrendered, they are rarely, if ever, recovered.

6. The natural dynamic of government is to absorb power at the expense of the citizens, usurping both the independence and the social responsibilities that must be expected of citizens if a republic is to work.

Big government is always overbearing. It weakens the populace by assuming responsibilities properly charged to the individual—their health and welfare—and invites corruption of all kinds.

7. Corruption is a pathological condition of big government, not accidental. Corruption under the aegis of big government pervades society and infects every citizen with disrespect for truth and with a weakness for falsehood.

Father detested lies. I don’t think any peccadillo among his children aggravated him more. And one fully understands why. Lying is moral cowardice. A national fault of Mexicans, at least since the revolutionary period, is the incapacity to answer truly. Ask a humble Mexican if it is raining outside, and he will answer not necessarily or even, though rain may be hammering against the window panes, that it is sunny. He does not want to be held responsible. If the irate policeman charges you with speeding, deny it. Deny anything with which you may be charged by anyone in authority, even though you were so fast that you slammed into the cop’s rear bumper.

The truth Mexicans tribally know not. The truth will not set them free; it will get them into trouble. This is the inheritance of revolution coupled with increasingly despotic government. The truth could get one shot.

A Mexican child is taught today to revere the revolutionary leaders who were patently crooks and murderers, who lied to the people time and again. Two full generations of Mexicans have grown up under the lies sown by big government and its minions, and they have been corrupted.

8. Government is by its very nature inefficient.

Our father was able to observe this firsthand in every business activity in which he was engaged in Mexico. Nothing worked—the police, system of justice, sanitation, or mail. Our father would have blinked his blue eyes in amazement at the astonishment of the American public at the bumbling response of local, state, and federal governments in the Hurricane Katrina disaster. A Third World response, shouted many, to which the answer is, just so, and the more responsibilities we saddle the federal government with, the more Third World it will get.

Bureaucracies are hostile to efficiency, which, if practiced, will put them out of business. When two huge government agencies, the CIA and the FBI, failed to warn us about Sept. 11, what did we do? We instituted a super intelligence agency on top of the other two. This is a peculiar form of American madness, which supposes that bigger in government is better, whereas all history is a lesson to the contrary.

Moreover, the more powers that are invested in government, and the more powers that are wielded by government, the less well does government discharge its primary responsibilities, which are (1) defense of the commonweal, (2) protection of the rights of citizens, and (3) support of just order.

9. When permitted, government encroaches on individual responsibilities and freedom, and the succeeding generations are successively less free.

My father was freer than his children, as he remarked to me a few days before he died. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. We got that back. But will we ever again board a plane without being submitted to the indignities of security lines made excessively insupportable thanks to the ideological idiocy that insists my snowy-haired, 85-year-old sister with two hip transplants be held under the same suspicion as the swarthy 20-year-old with shifty eyes, a pilot’s license, and an unpronounceable name beginning al-Fatah Something?

Though in the 21st century we may not be able to avoid government encroachment in all respects, we must remember to despise it. Father, in revolutionary Mexico, lived in a society where freedom of movement, of action, and of conscience were severely curtailed. Education was run by the militantly secularist state. He knew how easily cherished liberties and human dignity can slip through the fingers, and how vigilant a people must be to preserve them.

10. Political rhetoric is the enemy of democratic government. It is the enemy of truth.

Father learned this in Mexico, too, from the several high-flown proclamations that were issued by one revolutionary brigand after another, which may have had the virtue of emotional sincerity but were deceptions where they were not, in their militant Marxist secularism, malign. Anyone living in Mexico during those times would have agreed that wisdom and reality are not supplanted by good intentions, even assuming that these are genuine, which in politics is rare and in Mexico was nonexistent. That wisdom tells us:

11. Not all peoples are able to bear the burden of democracy.

Some societies contain within them destructive ideologies—fascism in Germany, communism in Russia, Islamic terrorism all over the Middle East, or, as in Mexico, a history of autocratic rule and a temperamental affinity for anarchy and banditry.

That not every nation easily takes to democracy is a historical fact the denial of which is ignorant, panglossian, or stupid. In order to fortify civil peace, avoid anarchy, preclude terror, contain theft, and secure individuals in their most basic human rights, some peoples under some circumstances require rule by a strong man.

Authoritarian rule is not desirable. It is in almost every instance detestable and is always fraught with abuse of basic human dignities and tends always toward tyranny. But it is crassly self-righteous, vainglorious, and impractical to oppose it everywhere that we Americans encounter it. Weaning a society from the habit of authoritarian rule is the most dicey of political adventures. People can be bought. People accustom themselves to injustice.

12. Americans should stay clear of foreign entanglements.

Our sire would have been inclined to this attitude from Washington’s Farewell Address, but it was in Mexico that he was confirmed in his isolationism.

Americans tend to be well-meaning democratic ideologues who wish to impose their principles of self-government on nations whose societies either are not ready for self-government or are outright hostile to it. To make matters worse, Americans are often ignorant and intolerant of the customs and history of other lands, and display themselves in foreign affairs most often as hopelessly provincial. Further, lurking in the American character is an unfortunate universalist reformism deriving from Calvinist intolerance. It’s a handsome paradox: the more secular we become as a nation, the more Americans desire to establish the city of God on earth.

After their initial encounter, Will Buckley’s future relations with the hero of the revolution would not be cordial. One afternoon, in the early 1950s, when Father was presumably dying, his friend Cecilio Velasco took me aside and described their last meeting.

Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, riding at the head of 50,000 troops, took Mexico City of Dec. 4, 1914, and met that evening to celebrate in the floating gardens of Xochimilco. A banquet had been prepared. Villa and Zapata were heroes, mind neither liked or trusted the other. They were political rivals. Pancho Villa was, besides, envious of the slim physique of this fellow from the no-account hamlet of Anenecuilco in the remote southern latitudes of Mexico, and of Zapata’s fame as a horseman. Everybody was joking and drinking—except Pancho Villa, who never touched a drop—but every man at the table had his pistol in front of him, by his plate. It was into this jolly gathering that Father introduced himself.

He was mad, truly angry, and, to a self-imperiling degree, out of control. Velasco told me that they had been having trouble with drunken Villa guerrillas, who were raiding property that Father owned—stealing, molesting women, frightening children. Father, disregarding his customary prudence, confronted Pancho Villa at his first opportunity. He walked to the head table, where Villa was pretending to be affable to Zapata.

Villa glanced up, “Ah, Señor Ojos Azules, what brings you here? What can I do for you?

“You can keep you men off my property,” Father answered.

Villa, Señor Velasco told me, smiled, but his eyes flicked toward Zapata, whose eyebrows were cocked. What—Pancho Villa was asking himself—would Zapata be thinking of the presumptuous attitude by a gringo?

“And why should I do that, Guillermo Buckley?”

Here I do not credit my memory. Yet sticking to it like a cocklebur is that Father answered: “Because the next time one of your men puts his foot on my property, he will be shot.”

I blush. This is (a) too melodramatic for our father to have uttered, out of character entirely; (b) too threatening, and thus foolish. Yet he answered something—whatever his actual words were, they were firm enough—for Pancho Villa’s cronies to place their hands on their pistols, gazing at their chief.

Then Pancho Villa laughed, “My men won’t be bothering you, Señor Ojos Azules, I promise you. Come see me sometime.” Father turned and without a word walked back between long tables containing Villa and Zapata guerreros.

“He could have been shot at any moment,” Velasco said to me emphatically. “Villa was always unpredictable. But we never again had trouble with his bandits.” On some level, these very different men—both of whom despised cowardice and admired courage—understood each other. 
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Reid Buckley is founder of the Buckley School of Public Speaking. This essay is adapted from An American Family: The Buckleys, Copyright 2008 by Reid Buckley. Used by permission from Threshhold Editions, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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