Not too many people can have a personal hero while in college, and continue to maintain that admiration and friendship for over 50 years. I was blessed with such a bond, with Jim Buckley, one of the great statesmen of our era. He is gone at age 100 and five months, but will remain an inspiration to millions, especially my family and me, forever.
I am far from alone in declaring that Jim Buckley was the role model we would choose for children and for ourselves.
When he died in Washington’s Sibley Hospital last week due to a fall, he was still in “senior judge” status on the nation’s second-highest court, the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
I met candidate Jim Buckley when I was a teenager, during Jim’s first run for U.S. senator from New York. A registered Republican, Buckley’s first two runs were as the nominee of the N.Y. State Conservative Party. His previous political experience had been as campaign manager for his younger brother Bill’s 1965 campaign for mayor of New York City.
Even as a lowly teen volunteer in 1968, I admired Jim greatly. He blended conservative principles, searing intelligence, humility, wholesome good looks, and generosity in a truly unique package for a major candidate. In 1970, I was tapped to become state chairman of “Youth for Buckley.”
This was the experience of a lifetime, and I was given too much credit for recruiting thousands of young volunteers to the Buckley campaign. Sure, I gave it my all (while being a full-time student), but it was the beaming, inviting, incorruptible Buckley persona, and his issues, that sold the candidate and the campaign to young and old alike. The 300-watt Buckley smile didn’t hurt, either.
Busloads of student volunteers paid their own way to New York from Yale in New Haven and from Princeton, to spend a weekend campaigning for our champion.
As October polls revealed that Jim Buckley could win, our Youth for Buckley troops became even more energized, with many cutting classes to campaign door-to-door and on the streets of Manhattan, where commuters arrived daily from more than a dozen suburban counties. Then, finally, came Election Night 1970, and the ebullient celebration of Jim’s victory. The New York Times reported that the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria was filled with a “sea of young people,” not the blue-haired ladies they were expecting.
Also making an appearance in the ballroom was liberal actor Robert Redford, resplendent in a suede frill western jacket, apparently prepping for his starring role in The Candidate, which was to begin filming in 1971. Redford chose an excellent victory celebration to visit.
While declaring that he was a voice of a “new politics,” Senator-elect Buckley was typically humble in his victory speech, thanking everyone who made this once-implausible, third-party victory a reality. Present on that triumphant stage — aside from brother Bill, wife Ann, and other Buckley family members — were leaders of New York’s police, fire officers, and construction unions.
Aside from elected Republicans around the state, Jim Buckley was even endorsed by prominent Queens Democratic Congressman James Delaney that year. Former NYC comptroller Mario Procaccino, the Democrats’ nominee for mayor just a year earlier, endorsed Buckley and joined him on election night.
The shocking-to-some Buckley victory was a lead story on the CBS Evening News, anchored by Walter Cronkite.
Importantly, Jim’s landmark campaign was a key development in the careers of future state senators, assemblymen, local electeds, candidates for Congress, journalists, educators, attorneys, business executives, and appointees in various administrations.
In the U.S. Senate, James L. Buckley legislated and served as he campaigned (a rarity right there). Widely admired for his cordiality and self-effacing camaraderie among fellow senators and staff, the junior senator from New York held to his beliefs and principles, supporting limited government, law enforcement, national defense, anti-Communism, pro-life initiatives, the First Amendment, and presciently, Taiwan, even when it became apparent that Red China would supplant the free island nation in the United Nations and as the government officially recognized by the United States.
Never elbowing colleagues away from a news-conference microphone, Senator Buckley always shared credit for his accomplishments.
James Buckley is one of the very few Americans to have served in the upper echelons of all three branches of our national government. After his term in the U.S. Senate, he served as undersecretary of state and then president of Radio Free Europe in the Reagan administration, followed by his service on the nation’s second-highest court, the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the D. C. Circuit.
Judge Buckley was widely admired for his collegiality on the appeals bench, including expressions from those who went on to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. A chief judge praised Buckley for his judicial writing skills as “unexcelled as a stylist and craftsman.”
Buckley authored books on reforming government, writing Saving Congress from Itself while in his 90s.
Drawing together a slide show of Jim Buckley moments in my mind, I see scores of young volunteers in 1970, funneling friendly, patriotic World Trade Center construction workers to shake hands with candidate Jim at a crowded Wall Street rally.
A private memory epitomizing the sainted senator took place in 1985. My wife and three-month-old son were in Munich, visiting the president of Radio Free Europe, James L. Buckley. On our walk from his home to the restaurant, Jim unpretentiously took over pushing baby Matt’s kinderwagen, being a semi-professional at such things by then. He was a key player in helping President Reagan to break up the Soviet empire, but there were no airs about him.
Buckley’s World War II naval service transported him to important Pacific battles, including Okinawa. His devotion to his wife Ann and their six children was obvious, and when Ann was terribly disabled in a car accident, it was Jim himself who was her primary caregiver.
Senator Buckley’s aversion to self-promotion may be a primary reason why, unlike other U. S. senators from New York in my lifetime, there has been no official tribute to him, in the form of naming a park, public-works building, school, etc. for him.
However, Republican representative Nicole Malliotakis (who represents Staten Island and part of Brooklyn) has introduced a bill to rename the Staten Island portion of the Federal “Gateway National Recreation Area” (which was co-created by Buckley in the 1970s) the “James L. Buckley National Seashore.” The bill is co-sponsored in the upper house by a geographically distant legislator, U. S. Senator Dan Sullivan (R., Alaska). It turns out that, as a young D.C. law student, Senator Sullivan interned in Judge Buckley’s appellate offices, and admired him greatly.
Let’s hope that the Malliotakis–Sullivan bill passes to recognize, in a small way, the life and career of James L. Buckley, and plants ideas for more tribute and much-deserved recognition in the future.
It is telling that the farewell for Jim Buckley will be a funeral mass at the small Catholic church where the Buckleys worshipped in Sharon. Jim surely chose that venue, near the ancestral home where his young self prepared to become an unassuming country lawyer.
But the voters of New York and the nominations of a visionary president had much more in store for him, and to the benefit of us all.
We have lost a great conservative and an irreplaceable patriot, a man who never disappointed us in his extraordinary service to the United States, nor in the example of his private life.
R.I.P., James L. Buckley (1923–2023)