James L. Buckley Predicted and Shaped a Conservative Future – The American Spectator

Fifty-three years ago, Life magazine proclaimed them “The Buckleys: A Gifted American Family.” The passing of James L. Buckley at 100 means that all eight of the surviving Buckley siblings who appeared on that memorable magazine cover are, like Life magazine, gone.

James Buckley’s surprise election to the United States Senate as a member of the Conservative Party of New York — the first truly third-party candidate to win election to the upper house since Wisconsin reelected Bob La Follette, scion of another famous family, in 1940 — served as the reason the Buckleys appeared on Life. For perhaps the first time, the “quiet” Buckley attracted more ears and eyes than his famous younger brother Bill.

“I was in a hospital in Libya,” he told this writer about the circumstances of his failed 1968 run. “I got a telephone call from brother Bill, who informed me that [Conservative Party of New York founder] Dan Mahoney had asked him to pass on the information that they wanted me to run for the Senate against Jacob Javits. Obviously, I had no chance of winning or anything of that sort. I was doing jury duty for the organization that was trying to keep the Republican Party in New York honest.”

But in garnering 17 percent of the vote, Buckley regarded victory in 1970 as at least “plausible,” and F. Clifton White, after conducting polls, labeled the seat as “winnable.”

He ran against Democrat Richard Ottinger, an underwhelming congressman representing just north of New York City, and Republican Charles Goodell, the father of the current NFL commissioner who displayed a ghoulish habit of winning appointment to elective office after the deaths of predecessors.

“You had the crazies taking over — student rioters, flag burners, and so forth,” Buckley told this writer two years ago regarding the conditions in which he ran. “That triggered an awful lot of concern.”

With Goodell and Ottinger offering differences in emphasis rather than real disagreements on Vietnam and other issues of the day, Buckley capitalized.

“I preached the traditional Republican approach to the issues, which happened to coincide with what a lot of blue-collar New York people were concerned about,” he explained. “I couldn’t have won without that vote.”

President Richard Nixon’s approach to the race, which Buckley labeled as “benign neutrality,” also helped him capture 39 percent of the vote to the Democrat’s 37 percent and the Republican’s 24 percent. Mostly his likeable personality, so endearing all these years later that even the New York Times printed an even-handed and even kind obituary, catapulted him to Capitol Hill.

There, New York’s junior senator introduced a Human Life Amendment, opposed with just seven other senators the Equal Rights Amendment, and famously filed suit along with allies Left and Right to strike down limits on campaign expenditures in the successful Buckley v. Valeo.

Though Nixon generously stepped out of his way during his 1970 Senate run, Sen. Buckley became the first conservative figure of import to call for his resignation. In the April 12, 1974, issue of his brother’s magazine National Review, he wrote: “The Watergate affair can no longer be thought of as merely a troublesome episode such as occurs from time to time in the political history of every country. It had its faint origin in what was itself a trivial and foolish incident. But from this minor incident, as has often happened before in history, Watergate has expanded on a scale that has plunged our country into what historians call a ‘crisis of the regime.’”

Without endorsing the idea of Nixon’s guilt on any accusation, he urged him to leave office for the good of the country. Four months later, the president did just that.

Buckley lost to Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his 1976 reelection bid. In subsequently serving in the Reagan administration and becoming a federal judge, he laid claim to working in all three branches of the government — a feat on which he did not get started until after his 47th birthday.

When I spoke to him two months after his 98th birthday in 2021, he struck as not the wise old man but the with-it old man. The phone call, despite taking place at my end on a windy day on a mountain, did not include any “say that again” or “can you speak up” language that inevitably colors conversations involving nonagenarians. His intact memory and quickness of thought indicated a mind clearly operating on a higher level than the one possessed by his conversation partner less than half his age. One gleaned the impression that he really was a young 100.

Life listed his interests as birdwatching, ecology, and Eskimos, for whom he helped round up musk oxen for breeding to provide a sustainable source of meat. He also took an interest in conservatism. At the first Conservative Political Action Conference, Buckley predicted “that any political party that forthrightly builds its platform on the bedrock on conservative principle will be the majority party of the 1980s.” Like all the best prophets, he did not merely see the future he envisioned; he shaped it as well.