On the anniversary of his death last August, a few who knew ‘the sainted junior senator from New York’ remember his legacy.
On the anniversary of his death last August, a few who knew ‘the sainted junior senator from New York’ remember his legacy.
A year ago today, James L. Buckley, deemed the ‘sainted junior senator from New York’ by his brother William F. Buckley Jr., passed away at age 100. His was a remarkable life, consisting of, among other things, service in all three branches of the federal government. Shortly after his death (as well as before), National Review ran many tributes to him; you can find them here. You can find other tributes here, here, and here. Below are four more from people who knew him well and also wished to memorialize him.
Daniel Oliver
There’s so much to say about Jim Buckley — and so much has already been said. I will add only a single vignette.
During the 1970 U.S. Senatorial campaign, we were driving somewhere in New York City: Jim and the driver in the front seat, his wife, Ann, and I in the back seat. We were, perhaps, in Queens. I don’t recall for certain, but it’s really not important where we were exactly, except that it was not Manhattan (where I grew up: I knew Manhattan).
It had been a long day — again, I can’t possibly remember, now 53 years later, what all we had been doing; only that we had been doing a lot of it.
Ann and I were looking out the windows and making . . . well, not exactly caustic comments about the denizens of Queens (if it was Queens), and not exactly snide comments either: just comments to pass the time and relieve some of the strain of a long campaign day.
As you drive through places where other people live, you tend to notice how they are different from you and from the friends you know in the places where you live. People are different, of course: They dress differently, they act differently, they look different, and well, they are different, at least in some or perhaps many respects. They’re not necessarily inferior just because they’re different; one should be sure of that. Still, it’s worth noticing not only that people are different but also noticing what those differences are.
That is, roughly — if memory serves — what Ann and I were doing in the back seat. With, if memory serves, a certain amount of laughter.
Until Jim turned around and told us, rather startlingly severely, that the people we had been talking about were precisely the people whom he hoped would vote for him and become his constituents and that, even if they didn’t, they were still entitled to their own lives and their own customs and beliefs and that we should be rather more respectful of them.
Well.
That was a showstopper.
It was the only time I ever saw Jim . . . angry isn’t quite the right word . . . “concerned” (perhaps), very concerned, that the people in Queens (if it was Queens) weren’t getting the respect they deserved, the respect that all people deserve, at least until they do something that indicates they don’t deserve respect.
For all of his patrician upbringing, Jim was a man of the people: He cared about people.
And he sought, as a senator, to do things — to make public policy — that would help those people to have better lives . . . or at least not have worse lives because of the myriad silly, awful, terrible, outrageous things that selfish, preening, media-hound senators in Washington usually do and have done for decades and continue to do with a vengeance.
Jim cared about all those people in Queens and everywhere else, and he wanted to do something to better their lives — even if that meant just getting out of the way.
That was not/is not the Washington way. Jim was simply . . . different.
Maybe he was not unique: Perhaps others like Jim will come along.
But then again, perhaps they won’t. Perhaps no one like Jim will come along in our lifetimes. Or the lifetimes of our children. Who knows?
One thing we do know: Jim was different, and that difference made him a better man than many.
Daniel Oliver was the director of research for Senator Buckley’s 1970 campaign.
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Alvin Felzenberg
When I first met James Buckley, little did I know that what I had envisioned as a brief interview for a book I was writing about his brother Bill would evolve into a sustained friendship. I was hoping that Jim could fill in gaps that appeared in the public record and provide the “backstory” for much that existed in the voluminous archives Bill left behind. I came away with so much more.
In addition to his many other roles, Jim acted as the “unofficial” historian for the Buckley family. Jim had a way of making prior generations of Buckleys, especially his father, grandfather, and uncles, come alive. I recall coming away from what would be several conversations over several months wondering how readers would react to the knowledge that the grandfather of Bill and Jim once served as sheriff of Duval County, Texas, at the turn of the last century. Sheriff John Buckley did battle with the notoriously corrupt “Archie Parr machine” and its “enforcers,” who intimidated Mexican Americans at the polls every Election Day. Or how they would take the news that their father, William F. Buckley Sr., a wildcat oilman, had for decades been hounded by operatives from both the “Seven Sisters” oil companies and revolutionary Latin American governments. Both groups tried to assassinate him.
As Jim regaled me with their stories, I developed the sense that I was listening to the voice of history. It was also evident that this man felt a responsibility to his forebears and to history to relate their stories accurately. When the conversation turned to Bill, Jim took on the tone of a witness. It would be hard to think of anyone whose advice Bill valued more or who observed so many critical turning points in the lives of William F. Buckley Jr. and of the post-war conservative movement. Not once did I sense any attempt on Jim’s part to influence my conclusions about what he related. “Spin” was as foreign to Jim Buckley’s nature as integrity was central to it.
Jim provided me with color and texture to events I had observed at a distance while coming of age in Northern New Jersey in late 1960s. Given the absence of a commercial network television in my home state, it had become a running joke that more residents in the state could identify more New York officials than they could any in their own state. And what a colorful cast the New Yorkers made. Their governors, whether named “Dewey,” “Harriman,” or “Rockefeller,” seemed always to be seeking their party’s presidential nomination or planning another go at the top prize. In their choices for U.S. senators, New Yorkers developed the habit of electing non–New Yorkers with a famous last name. Robert F. Kennedy set the precedent. Hillary Clinton followed suit a generation later. In the years in between their tenures, James Buckley served in the same seat as had they.
Jim Buckley’s introduction into New York politics occurred when Bill asked him to serve as campaign manager to his third-party campaign for mayor of New York City in 1965. Bill’s reasons for running were twofold: (1) to demonstrate that conservative principles might find an audience in the nation’s most liberal city; and (2) to hold down the vote of the Republican mayoral nominee, liberal Congressman John V. Lindsay. Bill feared that, should Lindsay prevail in the heavily Democratic city, the Republican Party would select him as its presidential nominee. That would leave the country with two left-of-center parties and deny conservatives a voice in shaping public policy.
In accepting the Conservative Party’s nomination for mayor, Bill Buckley provided a public face and a voice for conservative ideas he had been promulgating on the pages of National Review and in highly publicized debates. The Conservative Party, founded in 1961, took as its mission pushing the state’s Republican Party to the right of its most visible figures: Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller and U.S. Senator Jacob K. Javits. The template for how they might take them to task was the New York Liberal Party. The successor to the old Labor Party, this group of union leaders and intellectuals exerted leverage upon the Democrats to nominate candidates committed to New Deal principles. Many Democrats often found that failure to obtain the Liberals’ support could cause their defeat.
Bill Buckley’s relative youth, charisma, and sparkling wit acted as a magnet for young conservatives across the country. Jim saw his role as channeling their energy and idealism into constructive endeavors and maintaining order in a freewheeling, understaffed, and underfunded campaign. Jim found that he enjoyed the political world. The rough-and-tumble and more than occasional drama were far afield from the quiet life he had led as counsel to his family’s closely held oil business.
Bill received 13.4 percent of the vote, an all-time high for a third party in New York City. To the surprise of his initial backers, Bill’s best showings occurred not in well-heeled Republican precincts but in the outer boroughs, which were home to much of the city’s blue-collar workforce and blue- and white-collar city employees, most of them Democrats.
Three years later, after Bill declined to wage another “paradigmatic” campaign, this time against Javits, the Conservatives approached Jim about running for U.S. senator. He accepted, likening the task before him to “jury duty.” Jim worked hard to pull Republicans away from Javits and competed with Javits, the Republican and Liberal nominee, for the votes of Democrats. Many Democrats found their party’s nominee, the ultraliberal Paul O’Dwyer, not to their liking. Jim received plaudits from nonconservative circles for his advocacy of a strong federal role in combatting air and water pollution, externalities which, he noted, did not respect state boundaries. Jim carried 17.31 percent of the vote. He had repeated at the state level what Bill had done citywide. He received 1,139,402 votes.
In 1970, the Conservatives again rallied around Jim as their choice in another three-way race. He and his backers reasoned that changed political circumstances had rendered possible the chance, however slight, that he might win. In 1969, Rockefeller appointed Republican representative Charles Goodell (father of current NFL commissioner Roger) to serve out the term of Robert F. Kennedy, who had been assassinated. Goodell, a native of Jamestown, N.Y., was regarded as a centrist, not a conservative. He shocked the political establishment when, shortly after taking office, he moved legislation calling for the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. His actions angered the Nixon administration, antagonized much of his party, and loosened his ties to Rockefeller, his principal patron.
With prominent Republican donors abandoning the appointed senator, Jim proved an effective fundraiser. By the campaign’s end, he would spend nearly as much as his Democratic and Republican opponents combined. (Jim spent $1,129,654. Democratic nominee Representative Richard Ottinger spent $728,795 and Goodell spent $516,187.) Jim had set a limit on how much of his personal funds he would invest in his campaign and emerged from the race free of debt.
To run his campaign, Jim retained F. Clifton White, Goldwater’s former delegate recruiter and convention manager. White brought in political consultant and pollster, Arthur Finkelstein. The latter coined the campaign’s slogan, “Isn’t it time we had a Senator?” That phrase signaled Jim’s orientation toward a myriad of issues on voters’ minds: rising crime, the war in Vietnam, and student protests. With his opponents splitting the liberal vote, Jim, with conservatives behind him, set out to rally centrists to his side. His campaign message was simple and direct. He spoke up for “hard-pressed” and “ordinary New Yorkers” who paid the price for failed liberal policies. In one ad, depicting construction workers pressing back on student demonstrators, Jim, speaking slowly and in a soft voice, lamented the decline of civility in the public square and called for a return to law and order. In another, he decried rising crime. He again made environmental protection a priority.
Jim prided himself in having attracted more youthful volunteers than had his opponents. For the first time in their histories, both the state’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association and the Uniformed Firefighters declined to endorse the Democratic Party’s nominees for high office. Both endorsed Buckley.
Behind the scenes, Jim’s brother Bill and top Nixon aides, including Henry Kissinger, negotiated an informal “entente” between Rockefeller, seeking his fourth term as governor, and Jim Buckley’s campaign. Rockefeller made no effort to “discipline” Republican candidates for lower offices who endorsed Jim or county party organizations who helped get out the vote for him. While officially backing Goodell, Rockefeller made noticeably smaller financial contributions to him than he had to past candidates.
Buckley and Rockefeller discussed the possibility of the Conservative Party endorsing Rockefeller but agreed that this would be too problematic given past tensions between the Republican and Conservative parties. Yet, mysteriously, within days of their conversation, bumper stickers proclaiming the names “Rockefeller” and “Buckley” appeared in party headquarters across the state. Just in case any of Jim’s most ardent, steadfast supporters failed to pick up on these signals, National Review ran a piece of doggerel, penned by W. H. Von Dreele, that purported to be mutterings of its editor. It said, “And so, despite the trauma and the shock, November, I’ll be voting for the Rock.”
The Nixon White House began dropping not-too-subtle hints of where it stood on the New York race. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew spoke at a well-attended Conservative Party fundraiser and posed for pictures with its Sensate candidate. Elsewhere, along the campaign trail, Agnew referred to Goodell as the “Christine Jorgensen of the Republican Party.” (Jorgensen, a male military veteran, attained fame for having undergone one of the first successful sex-change operations.) By pre-arrangement, President Richard Nixon, on a campaign swing for candidates in Connecticut, crossed the state line into Westchester County, N.Y., and posed with young volunteers waving Nixon and Buckley placards.
When the votes were counted, Jim polled 38.75 percent of the vote to Ottinger’s 36.77 percent and Goodell’s 24.29. Shortly after the election, Life magazine ran a cover story on America’s newest “political dynasty.” The only sour note was sounded by Javits, who tried unsuccessfully to bar Jim from the Republican senatorial caucus on the grounds that he had not been elected as a Republican. (The senior senator’s resolution was defeated 33 to three.) Javits and Jim reached an accommodation on nominations they made to the White House regarding federal appointments for New York. On matters of policy, they two frequently went in opposite directions.
Buckley was appointed to the Air and Water Pollution, Roads, and Economic Development subcommittee of the Environmental Protection and Public Works Committee. He won plaudits from civil libertarians across the country for his sponsorship of the Family Education and Rights and Privacy Act and the Pupils Rights Act, which passed the Senate 57 to 43 en route to becoming law. The measures allowed students and their families to review records school administrators sent to third parties. He was unsuccessful in his attempts to amend the U.S. Constitution to extend rights to human embryos that the 14th Amendment guarantees to all persons.
Viewers of the movie Midnight Express learned of Jim’s efforts on behalf of a New York college student who had been sentenced to years in a Turkish prison for attempting to smuggle hashish out of the country. While working through conventional channels, Jim also reached out to Secretary of the Navy John Chafee, a Yale classmate of his. Whenever National Review made mention of Jim, it referred to him as the “sainted junior senator from New York,” often not mentioning his name.
In 1974, Buckley became the second Republican U.S. senator to call upon Nixon to resign the presidency. He suggested that such an action would not necessarily be seen as an admission of guilt but as an act of courage and sacrifice taken to assure the survival of programs and policies that had been part of Nixon’s legacy.
In 1976, Buckley became the lead petitioner of the Supreme Court case Buckley v. Valeo. The Court defined campaign contributions as a form of “free speech” and struck down limits on amounts candidates and political action committees could spend on political campaigns.
As Jim declared for reelection, running on both the Republican and Conservative Party lines, he expected to oppose the front-runner for the Democratic senatorial nomination, feminist icon Congresswoman Bella Abzug. She was expected to run poorly among blue-collar voters and Catholics. The landscape changed dramatically the day after the primary, when former United Nations ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan placed first in a primary field of five, one percentage point ahead of Abzug.
Jim defended President Gerald R. Ford’s initial decision not to “bail out” the City of New York, which was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. He argued that the city had brought its problems upon itself through mismanagement and that the city’s advocates had exaggerated the ill effects that would follow federal inaction. Buckley’s Burkean courage and candor, suggesting that he owed his constituents his judgment while respecting theirs, proved not to sit well with either the press or the public. Moynihan defeated Jim 54.17 percent to 44.89 percent.
When I told him that an acquaintance of ours noted said that Jim compiled the most consequential record of any modern-day senator who served a single term, Jim joked that he had come to believe that no incumbent should be allowed to run for reelection. He recalled hearing Nixon tell George Shultz, who served both as Nixon’s secretary of labor and as his director of the Office of Management and Budget, that “Milton Friedman does not have to worry about running for reelection.” (Friedman, who in 1976 would win a Nobel Prize in economics, had opposed Nixon’s imposition of wage and price controls.)
Jim’s tenure in public service did not end with his exit from the U.S. Senate. President Ronald Reagan brought him back into government as undersecretary of state, responsible for national security, and, later, as president of Radio Free Europe. In 1985, Reagan nominated Jim for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The Senate’s 84–11 vote to confirm him made Jim one of the few people in American history to serve in the top ranks of all three branches of the U.S. government. He was all that and more. And to me, he was a friend.
Alvin S. Felzenberg is the author of A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr. and The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn’t): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game. Felzenberg served in two administrations and as official spokesman for the 9/11 Commission.
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Fred J. Eckert
I was blessed to be good friends with Jim Buckley — for more than half a century.
When I called Jim on his 100th birthday, I did what I had long been doing on his birthday: The instant he picked up his phone, I began singing “Happy Birthday,” and he did what he always did: laughed and laughed while listening to a voice we agreed had to belong to the world’s worst singer.
Jim was among few family and friends who knew that when the nuns at the Catholic grammar school I attended forced every student to audition for the choir, I was only seconds into my turn when the nun in charge loudly shouted, “Next!” He also got it that my subjecting people to my performing “Happy Birthday” went with my odd sense of humor. I especially enjoyed doing this to Jim because he had once briefly set aside his characteristic humility and admitted I was correct in guessing that, unlike me, he had been a standout singer as a youngster.
Jim Buckley was better than me at pretty much everything. This never bothered me, my consolation being that I viewed this remarkable great man as better than just about everyone at pretty much everything.
When in 1970 Jim ran for the U.S. Senate in New York, I was a 28-year-old newly in-office Republican town supervisor (elected CEO) of the Town of Greece, Rochester’s largest (pop. 75,000) suburb. One of the first things I did after being sworn in was endorse long-shot Conservative Party candidate for senator James L. Buckley, a move not properly appreciated in Republican circles.
When Jim was elected to the U.S. Senate, I was ecstatic. So was I when in 1972 he came to Rochester to campaign for me and cut glowing TV and radio endorsement ads for my long-shot campaign for state senator.
Shortly after I arrived at the state capital, the New York State Department of Education advanced the nitwitted idea that school curricula on China should be developed by a genuine Chinese Communist. U.S. Senator James L. Buckley led, and I followed in teaming up, the effort to expose and denounce this absurdity. I loved being Jim’s ally.
A few years later, when it was obvious that freshwater-wetlands legislation would be enacted, I managed to grab control of the state-senate companion bill and worked to make it more reasonable by incorporating Jim’s ideas on environmental conservation. The staff member so ably assisting me was Buckley for Senate youth director Herb Stupp, whom I had hired at Jim’s recommendation.
When I resigned from the state senate to accept President Reagan’s appointment as a U.S. ambassador, who better to deliver the remarks at my State Department swearing-in ceremony than a mutual friend we each admired so much: Undersecretary of State for International Security Affairs James L. Buckley? Family and friends in attendance enjoyed Jim’s humorous teasing of me during his remarks.
Jim had a wonderful sense of humor. No surprise — he was such a wonderful person, blessed with self-effacing humor and so many of the other finest ingredients God can choose to instill in one of His premier works: rock-solid character, morality and integrity; stratospheric intelligence; charismatic personality; awesome authenticity; genuine humility and generosity; natural friendliness; wholesome, lifelong, boyish good looks; and so much more, including a grin and smile so warm I wouldn’t be surprised if they melted some of the icebergs in the Arctic and Antarctic the great naturalist Jim loved to visit.
Honored though I am that National Review invited me to be among Jim’s friends to write a tribute to this hero of mine, I know I cannot do it justice. Sure, I could mention how significant it is that Jim is one of but few Americans of not just our time but in American history to serve in the highest echelons of all three branches of our federal government, but mere mention falls far, far short.
It would take much more space than I’m allotted to communicate what an admired and effective senator he was and how smartly and determinedly he battled for limited government, a strong national defense, law and order, the unborn, etc., always while treating opponents with the civility that was among his many fine traits.
Courage was another quality Jim had. He was a genuine profile in courage when he put country first by standing against the federal government’s bailing out New York, rewarding it for its staggering reckless spending. This great statesman did it again when he put country first and, with characteristic intelligence and graciousness, called upon Watergate-scandal-plagued President Richard Nixon to resign.
When President Reagan drafted Jim to be his administration’s undersecretary of state for international security affairs, his many qualifications for such a top-level executive-branch position included decades of pre-political, international business experience. And when President Reagan later named him president of Munich-based Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Jim’s lifelong anti-communism made him an ideal choice.
President Reagan next wisely nominated Jim to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, considered the nation’s second-highest court. Judge Buckley had no equal when it came to reverence for the law and the Constitution and a deep understanding thereof. As usual, he was highly respected and greatly admired by his judicial colleagues, staff, and court scholars, one chief judge praising his judicial writing skills as “unexcelled as a stylist and craftsman.”
See what I mean when I say I can’t do Jim justice? I’m not sure anyone can. But perhaps all the National Review tributes combined can come close, especially since they include such a great one by Jack Fowler. Jack’s includes a link to the C-Span video of Jim’s last public address, given at age 96 at the National Review Institute Ideas Summit.
Amazing! But, then, this is a man who at age 91 wrote the superb book Saving Congress from Itself: Emancipating the States and Empowering Their People. You know what else? He did every bit of its research himself. Each of his books is well worth reading, as are the articles he wrote for National Review.
Never once did I ever feel disappointed in Jim, not in his service to the country he loved so much nor in his private life in which he was a perfect role model.
God, how I wish I could have been just like him!
Among the hundreds of public officeholders I came across at all levels of government during my many years in office, there is no one for whom I had greater admiration and affection than Jim Buckley. No one.
Jim was the best.
Fred J. Eckert twice served as a U.S. ambassador under President Ronald Reagan, who called him “a good friend and valued adviser.” He also served as a member of Congress and a New York state senator and was elected CEO of a midsized municipal government. He is the author of a comic political satire novel that Library Journal called “one of the best political spoofs since The Mouse That Roared.”
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William Levin
An essential part of James Buckley can be summed in a sentence. The day he took senior status on the D.C. Circuit, he declined thereafter to be addressed as “judge.” “The name is Jim.”
Jim’s humility reflected a lifelong act of grace, in the love for his family and faith, spreading to everyone lucky enough to share in some part of his incredible American journey.
On the campaign trail for the Senate, an aide suggested they stop at McDonald’s. Jim agreed even though he had never been before. He strode confidently to the counter to order a Big Mac and a glass of red wine.
In part, Jim accomplished so much in life because his interest in sports and popular culture approached zero. One day in judge’s chambers he digressed to observe, akin to an alien, that son David greatly enjoyed music by a band called the Dead. Never has a musical reference sounded so out of place.
Jim more than compensated with his passion to restore the musk ox to health. He lovingly recounted his arduous journeys to Alaska. To this day, when I visit the magnificent musk-ox diorama at the Museum of Natural History, I feel Jim’s passion wash over me.
While clerking for Jim, a heavy snowstorm shut down Washington and of course the federal courthouse. Not a car was on the road, not a soul at work. As an afterthought, I called chambers. When Jim answered the phone, I stammered and ran to chambers from Dupont Circle. Jim barely nodded when I arrived, out of breath. No need to point out the obvious that duty is not a choice.
The case we discussed for years after clerkship independently changed the course of my own life, for which I am forever grateful.
At the beginning of every month, briefs for cases on the docket were deposited on our desks. Because the D.C. Circuit hears so many regulatory cases, the briefs were thick. Yet this month contained two sliver-thin submissions. One was from a citizen claiming he had been defamed by Congressman Don Sundquist (R., Tenn.), a friend of Jim’s, while campaigning in Tennessee. The other was from the chief counsel for the House, seeking summary affirmance that members of Congress enjoy immunity from any such claims.
Jim ultimately persuaded Judge Williams to change his initial vote at conference. The opinion held that members of Congress had absolute constitutional speech or debate immunity in Congress but none beyond. It was a novel ruling and led to an immediate and furious response from the House, which unanimously petitioned the Supreme Court to reverse the ruling, which was denied.
In time-honored fashion, members of Congress thereupon immunized themselves by statute from liability for defamation. The so-called Westfall Act went further and in so doing mooted a case for a woman I wanted to date, an assistant U.S. attorney. My call happened to coincide with her reprieve, and, mixing the two subjects, she lightheartedly agreed to have dinner with me. We are now happily married for 34 years with four children.
I owe beyond words to my beloved friend Jim.
After clerking for Jim Buckley and working in the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel, William Levin pursued a career in investment banking and writes for conservative online journals.