James L. Buckley was dear to National Review, dear to the conservative movement, and dear to the American idea, if you will. He was a staunch defender of that idea: the rule of law; individual opportunity; personal and civic decency; etc. JLB died this morning at 100.
He was an older brother to WFB — to William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review. They were two among ten siblings. Jim was Child No. 4. Bill was No. 6. Priscilla Buckley — who for years served as NR’s managing editor — was No. 3. Some referred to the Buckleys as “the conservative Kennedys.” Jim was the last surviving sibling.
He and Bill were different — each his own man. Jeffrey Hart, our late senior editor, once described Bill as “Wildean” whereas Jim was “Capraesque.” And yet, as the New York Times observed early on, Jim had “some of his brother’s characteristics: much of the same flashing humor; a gift of language and facility of expression; the grand manner engagingly wed to a natural friendliness.”
That was very well put.
James L. Buckley was born on March 9, 1923. He went to the Millbrook School, in New York. He then went to Yale College, where he majored in English and belonged to the Skull and Bones society. He served in the Navy, while the war was on, fighting in the Far East. He went to Yale Law School. He became a corporate lawyer — later, a U.S. senator, a federal judge, and other things.
People like to deride the “East Coast establishment.” But out of that environment, many good and valuable men grew.
In 1953, Jim Buckley married Ann — Ann Frances Cooley. She was beautiful within and beautiful without. She died in 2011.
JLB stuck a toe in politics — stubbed a toe? — when he managed the 1965 campaign of Brother Bill. That is, Bill’s campaign for mayor of New York. In 1968, Jim himself was the nominee — the nominee of the Conservative Party for the U.S. Senate. Like Bill, he did not win. He tried again in 1970, when he was once more the Conservative nominee for Senate.
On that campaign were many young and eager volunteers. One of them was Dusty Rhodes — Thomas L. Rhodes — who would later have a career in international finance, winding up a partner at Goldman Sachs. His career was crowned, however — at least as we tell it — when he became the president of National Review (unpaid).
Reminiscing about the 1970 campaign decades later, JLB said,
I found that, when I had to go somewhere in Westchester County, there at the airport would be this splendid guy, with a wonderful smile — so intelligent, so bright. I remember telling him that businessmen, as a rule, are cowards when it comes to politics. They go with what will give them an immediate advantage, without thought to principle. Dusty, of course, has always been different.
Mirabile dictu (as WFB would say), JLB won that 1970 race. After the votes were counted, the senator-elect said, “The American people want a new course. They want a new politics. And I am the voice for the new politics.”
WFB had to decide how to handle the new senator in his column. It would be awkward to say, every time, “Senator James L. Buckley, who, by the way, is my brother” — so Bill habitually referred to Jim as “the sainted junior senator from New York.”
In the Senate, JLB went about doing the things he regarded as important. He introduced a human-life amendment to the Constitution. As Watergate deepened, he called on President Nixon to go. In April 1974, he published a piece in National Review, in which he discussed “what historians call a ‘crisis of the regime.’” He explained,
A crisis of the regime is not like a political confrontation or labor dispute or economic recession or any other specific and limited difficulty. A crisis of the regime is a disorder, a trauma, involving every tissue of the nation, conspicuously including its moral and spiritual dimensions.
Senator Buckley went on to say:
Inevitably the president is the focus, the essence of the crisis of the regime; the linchpin of its entire structure. It could not be otherwise. The character of a regime always reflects and expresses the character of its leader.
Thanks to the collapse of Republican support, Nixon resigned in August.
In 1976, JLB lost his bid for reelection, to Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In 1980, he tried once more. This time, he was the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut. He lost to Chris Dodd. But Ronald Reagan was elected president that day — and Jim was soon in the State Department.
He was the undersecretary for international security affairs. After about a year and a half, Reagan made him president of the “radios” — Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, then based in Munich. (Since the end of the Cold War, RFE/RL has been based in Prague.) Reflecting on this experience a few years ago, Buckley said that the émigré journalists of the radios did “a superb job.” They “were able to transmit information that was regarded by the recipient as the most authoritative available from anywhere.” Just the same is true today, as it happens.
Buckley’s career — careers? — took a turn in 1985 when Reagan nominated him for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Judge Buckley was on that bench — on active duty, so to speak — until 1996, when he assumed senior status. His place was taken by John Roberts, who in 2005 would become chief justice of the United States — a job that JLB, come to think of it, would have done very well.
So, Jim Buckley had significant roles in all three branches: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. Our Neal B. Freeman has long described him as “America’s most distinguished public servant since John Quincy Adams.”
JLB never stopped thinking, writing, engaging. In September 2016, he was interviewed by William Doyle — a former intern of his in the Senate — for USA Today. The presidential campaign that fall was “too depressing to contemplate,” he said. But he did some contemplating, and commenting, anyway.
He also spoke pointedly about the nominating process. “I never liked primaries,” he said. “They attract people on the fringes of each party.”
Jim was a cherished guest at various National Review and National Review Institute events: always gracious, insightful, and amusing. He spoke in that warm burr that many of the Buckley sibs had.
He liked nature a lot, Jim did. Once, he missed an NR anniversary party, and WFB observed that his brother “had a date with some penguin somewhere.”
James L. Buckley was a gent, a thinker, a patriot. His like is rare. His like is good. He will not be the last — there must not be a last. But, oh, he was good, setting an example that none who knew him can ever forget.