On my watch – A Tale of the Titanic and My Ties with the Life of William F. Buckley, Jr.
By Anne W. Semmes
Before telling this tale, I must express my gratitude that my great great uncle Thomas J. Semmes, a railroad builder in Mexico City and his wife Margaret held that dinner party that would connect William F. Buckley Sr. to the woman he would marry Aloise Steiner of New Orleans. Thus, bringing into the world the subject of my story, William F. Buckley, Jr.
The story shared by my distant cousin Shelby Semmes was the senior Buckley and a brother both in the oil business were invited, and arriving with guns on their hips, were told before sitting at table “to put their guns on the piano.” Also present was Aloise’s visiting married sister Vivian Steiner who upon learning of William Buckley’s planned trip to New Orleans would recommend he look up her sister Aloise.
Fast forward to November 2021 to my invite to visit Stockton Rush’s submersible “Titan” parked at the Greenwich Water Club he wished to take four paying guests down to the RMS Titanic each for the price of a quarter of a million dollars. I sat inside that submersible with Rush and three curious others. A year and a half later – in June of 2023 – that submersible imploded arriving at the Titanic site killing all five including Stockton Rush.
That Titanic wreck, by the way, was first found in 1985 by US Navy oceanographer scuba diver Bob Ballard, of Lyme, CT, via his deep sea underwater robot craft, the Argo, searching the ocean floor two plus miles below. Its discovery would lead to a bevy of explorers.
By 1987 the numbers of those exploring the Titanic site would cause U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker to bring forth legislation stating, “Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no object from the RMS Titanic may be imported into the customs territory of the U.S. for the purpose of commercial gain after the date of enactment of this act.”
Enter Stamford resident William F. Buckley, Jr. protesting that legislation with a column in his “National Review” magazine. “If the Weicker vow were to be universalized, would we need to return to the Pyramids everything that has been taken from them? Some of the treasures from the Pyramids reside in museums. I for one admire the enterprise of the consortium that is spending much of the summer retrieving from utter uselessness artifacts that for some people exercise an alluring historical appeal.” He’d added, “Wouldn’t want one myself…”
Soon after expressing these sentiments in his column that appeared in August of 1987 William F. Buckley Jr. would surprisingly be invited down to the Titanic via the Nautile, “a little submarine” built of titanium, of “six feet in diameter at its widest point and weighing only 18 tons.” He being the only passenger with the pilot and co-pilot! At no charge!
Buckley would write a memorable, if meandering piece, “Down to the Great Ship” of that voyage in the “New York Times” in October of 1987. He described entering the Nautile, “The chief pilot occupies the berth on the port side. Behind him, sitting on an abbreviated chair, is the co-pilot. The starboard berth is for the ‘observer,’ in this case me. Each of us has a porthole built of one-foot-thick plastic.”
He continued, “The co-pilot has two sets of 8-inch television screens. The first set looks ahead via remote video, one camera video trained to look dead ahead, the other, to pivot. The second set of videos portrays at close range and at longer range the exact operation of the mechanical arms operating from the side of the Nautile, designed to pick up objects from the seabed. With aid of the video, the operator can exactly instruct the arms.”
“The overhead hatch is now tightly sealed, and as you look about you, you close your eyes slowly, hoping this will not be the moment you contract claustrophobia…The descent begins….To descend two and a half miles to the ocean floor, the Nautile takes 90 minutes, which means a descent at just less than 1.66 miles per hour. You try to sit up, which requires you to raise your knees six inches or so – there is no room to stretch them out. You have been advised not to eat breakfast, and dutifully you have not.”
And then, “We are in place, standing guard by our portholes. The lights flash on. Nothing to see, though the water is startlingly clear, diaphanous to the extent of our light’s beam, an apparent 25-to-30 feet ahead, never mind that it is pitch dark out there… Then gradually, it happens: We descend slowly to what looks like a yellow-white sandy beach, sprinkled with black rocklike objects. These are pieces of coal. There must be 100,000 of them in the area we survey, between the bow of the ship and the stern. On my left is a man’s shoe…of suede of some sort…. And then, just off to the right a few feet, a snow-white teacup.”
And so, as a writer-producer on the NBC Today Show in 1987 I had the great pleasure of inviting William F. Buckley Jr. to the Show, after learning of his extraordinary travel.
When Buckley arrived, he was full of mischief as he had brought with him a curious item that appeared to be a toothbrush holder. He was most secretive and said he would not reveal what he had brought until he was on camera with host Bryant Gumbel.
Camera! Action! Buckley, with his mischievous smile, opened the toothbrush holder and presented a pencil! Found at the Titanic site, the French divers wished to reward the famed (and brave) writer he was!
Buckley now possessed an artifact from the Titanic! And now with Buckley no longer with us, what has happened to that pencil? “For several years the pencil resided atop the mantel, in a little lucite case, with a caption, ‘Found aboard the RMS Titanic,’’’ shared Buckley’s son, Christopher, in a recent email. “He was very proud of it.”
Years later Christopher would be gifted the pencil. And then, “I re-gifted it to my young daughter, who’d been smitten, and then some by the “Titanic” movie.”
More years later Buckley wished for Christopher “to give it back…So I sent it back, and he put it back on display on the mantel.” But “Shortly thereafter, a contractor working in the house stole it. WFB told his boss that he knew very well that he’d taken it. But the contractor denied it. Gone. Like the Titanic!”
