Former US Senator James Lane Buckley died on August 18 at the age of 100. In 1970 he ran for the Senate as a candidate for the Conservative Party of New York, which had been founded in 1962 by local dissatisfied Republicans; an improbable victory after his opponents split the liberal vote made Buckley the first third-party senator since Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin was elected on a Progressive ticket in 1940.
Analysts called Buckley the architect of a pragmatic new conservatism; in the Senate he joined the Republicans and generally supported the Nixon administration, although he wanted the Vietnam War to be fought by volunteers and voiced alarm when Nixon made overtures to Communist China. When it became clear that the Watergate scandal had politically crippled the president, Buckley publicly urged him to resign.
Buckley had none of the polysyllabic pyro- technics of his younger brother William F Buckley Jr, the conservative author and commentator who founded National Review and hosted the PBS programme Firing Line. But he was a patient, tenacious voice in a tumultuous era of racial violence, campus unrest and protests against the war in Vietnam.
After he had served a single term, President Ronald Reagan appointed Buckley to a State Department post in 1981 and made him president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in 1982. In 1985 Reagan named him to the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit; in another first, no one else had served in all three branches of the federal government since John Quincy Adams.
The son of an oil tycoon, Buckley was born in Manhattan on March 9, 1923, the fourth of 10 children of William and Aloise Buckley, née Steiner. His father was an Irish American lawyer and businessman and his mother a Southerner of Swiss and German descent.
Buckley later talked about what he called his parents’ “unusual history – unusual, at least for Americans”. They had witnessed relig- ious persecution and had made sacrifices for their faith; his father had lived in Mexico, where he practised law and engaged in oil and land development. At that time priests were being executed, and the celebration of Mass was forbidden. His mother would receive tele-phone calls to say that a plumber or carpenter would be visiting the house, which was code for a priest coming to say a clandestine Mass. William Buckley Sr spoke out against the persecution, knowing the risks; he was expelled and had his property confiscated.
After graduating from Yale in 1943, James Buckley joined the American Navy and saw service at Leyte, Lingayen and Okinawa. He enrolled at Yale Law School in 1946 and after qualifying three years later he practised law in New Haven, CT, for several years. In 1953, he married Ann Frances Cooley. They settled near the family estate in Sharon, in northwest Connecticut.
Ann died in 2011, and he is survived by six children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Buckley’s daughter Priscilla recalled in her eulogy at his funeral that “We saw very little of our father when we were young. If he wasn’t in New York, he was out of the country. I remember thinking that he was like God – we never saw him but we knew he loved us.”
Buckley was also a naturalist and a bird-watcher – he once even considered ornithology as a profession – and went on two scientific expeditions to the Arctic. But in 1953 he joined the family business, the Catawba Corporation, as vice president and director. He travelled around the world, developing oil and mineral resources.
He wrote four books: If Men Were Angels: A View From the Senate (1975); a memoir, Gleanings From an Unplanned Life: An Annotated Oral History (2006); Freedom at Risk: Reflections on Politics, Liberty, and the State (2010); and Saving Congress From Itself: Emancipating the States & Empowering Their People (2014).
One of his abiding convictions was his belief in subsidiarity, not only as a theolog-ical concept but also in the public square. He consistently maintained that political issues should be resolved at the lowest local level possible, and as seldom as possible by the Federal government.
This inevitably caused him to turn his attention to the Supreme Court’s controvers-ial 1973 abortion-rights decision in Roe v Wade.
Buckley, a Catholic from New York, and Jesse Helms, a North Carolina Baptist, were the first two senators to introduce Human Life Amendments designed to overturn Roe v Wade. Criticising Roe, Buckley wrote that “The Court’s opinions in these cases requires that one attempt to follow a labyrinthine path of argument that simultaneously ignores or confuses a long line of legal precedent and flies in the face of well-established scientific fact.”
At the beginning of an almost half-century slog until a majority of the Supreme Court reversed Roe, Buckley presciently foresaw much of how that decision would acclimatise America to a culture of death. His consistent stand on this issue in and out of office resulted in his being named the Human Life Review’s Great Defender of Life in 2012.
Catholics in the United States owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude.
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