Jim Buckley Was among the Best of Us

Sharon, Conn. — “The Founders were not afraid of religion,” James L. Buckley explained in a reflection in his book Gleanings from an Unplanned Life. Buckley was a one-term senator from New York. He was elected on the Conservative Party line. His funeral Mass was the morning after the first Republican presidential debate this year, and just about everything about that liturgy seemed to contrast with much of our politics today. Buckley was a public servant in the most noble sense, serving in, unusually, all three branches of the federal government. And the way he lived his life — he has been called “sainted,” and his daughter gave testimony to that in her eulogy of him — calls all of us, and also our politics, to our better angels.

When we hear about religion in politics today, it is all too often someone insisting that God endorses his politics or candidate. Buckley was allergic to that. He worked to be the man God would want him to be. So much so that over the years he publicly reflected on the temptations of reelection and why, maybe, given that humans are as we are, term limits are necessary for public office.

About the Founders and religion, he explained that “they thought it essential to the success of their fledging government.” Because they “understood the links between religion and virtue and responsible citizenship, they emphasized throughout their writings that the Republic’s survival, and the liberties it was intended to protect, ultimately depended on the morality of its citizens.” He added, “We live in a society in which the importance of religion has always been recognized, and while the First Amendment forbids laws ‘respecting an establishment of religion,’ it has never required that the state be isolated from exposure to religious influences.”

The bad witness of us sinners might make this seem unbelievable, especially to people who are not believers. But Jim Buckley showed something different.

“He was a saint,” his daughter said in her her remarks at the end of the funeral Mass. “Really, he was a saint. He tithed. He prayed daily and attended Mass. His humility belied his accomplishments. It was unthinkable that he would cheat, lie, or manipulate. Money was unimportant to him — except as a means to provide for his family. He was respectful of people of every background or inclination.”

That last reflection was my first and every experience with him. I met him in college, at the coffee hour after Mass at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in D.C. Like his brother, National Review’s founder William F. Buckley Jr., he had a love for the traditional Latin Mass. But he had even more of a love for seeing God in others. You could be a media professional, college sophomore, or homeless man — he treated us all with equal respect. He explained to me that we are all equal at the altar rail and that guided by that knowledge is how we must live. His eyes glistened with a radiance that seemed evidence of the divine spark within. You don’t always see that in Washington, D.C.!

His Priscilla shared that her widowed father “never complained” and “was so so sweet.” And: “His niece Aloïse called him every day to chat and pray.” Who does that? (More of us should!) He cultivated that. Something so different from our culture. And especially our political culture.

“The last time he told me he loved me was a week ago in the hospital,” She also told those who had gathered. “By then he couldn’t even swallow or speak. His eyes were closed. He was in great pain. I was holding his hand and reading Psalm 23 aloud. The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.”

He once told Democratic senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan that he had “long taken comfort in having lost to a man of your quality.” That was the kind of politics he wanted for America. In reflecting on his time in the Senate, he worried about the harried culture that had lost its intended call for citizen legislators, who instead had devolved into a professional political class.

Buckley dedicated Gleanings to his beloved wife, the mother of their children, saying she made his “unplanned” life possible. In it, he reflected on some of the best of the Senate and how some of it has been lost: “The Senate I knew . . . did retain one characteristic of its glory days, and that was a palpable civility. I was struck by it on entering the Senate; and it went deeper than such statements on the Senate floor, as ‘Unfortunately, the honorable Senior Senator from North Carolina, whom I greatly admire, has misstated every fact’ as a substitute for a more direct ‘Senator So-and-so has lied to us.’ There were occasional lapses, of course, but this civility permeated every relationship on and off the floor and created an atmosphere that made it easier to conduct business on highly emotional issues in a reasonably civilized way. I am told that this too has been in retreat under the unrelenting pressures encountered today.”

In 1995 he wrote, “I can’t help wondering what changes there might be in the quality of public life today if more of our officeholders could be persuaded to take a truly scrupulous view of the responsibilities they assume when, with hands placed on Bible, they swear to faithfully discharge all the duties of their offices, according to the best of their abilities and understanding, so help them God.”

Rather than be a cynic about politics — a state that a lot of us have understandably fallen into — Buckley knew it could be better. We have firm foundations. And with men and women rooted in something other than party politics, civic virtue could be revived.

A Republican debate. The current presidency. The former president’s fourth indictment. We can choose depression and indignance. Or we can challenge ourselves to witness, in our own spheres of influence, to what the best of the American Founding makes possible. There’s good there. Even if it is often forgotten. And not only in politics.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.