It was such a pleasure to be with Jim Buckley — who was so civilized, judicious, and amusing. After Bill passed away, it was doubly nice to be with Jim because he reminded you of Bill — in speech, in certain mannerisms, etc. He “spoke in that warm burr that many of the Buckley sibs had,” as our editorial said.
And by “our,” I mean National Review’s, of course.
Jim and Bill were different, mind you. Again, I will quote our editorial: “Jeffrey Hart, our late senior editor, once described Bill as ‘Wildean’ whereas Jim was ‘Capraesque.’”
Let me give you the fuller quote — a fuller version of what Jeff said: “Bill was a gorgeous, Wildean figure. Jim was Capraesque — with an ingenuous, aw-shucks, all-American quality.”
I have paraphrased, but pretty closely.
Jeff’s use of that familiar word “gorgeous” is interesting. Here is how Merriam-Webster defines it: “splendidly or showily brilliant or magnificent.”
• There were ten kids in that family. Bill and Jim had eight siblings — including Priscilla, who for years was the managing editor of National Review. At a dinner one night, someone asked Priscilla where she stood in the family — where she stood in the birth order. “I’m three,” she said “I’m six,” Bill piped up. I got the impression that they had been saying those things their whole lives.
Doing a public Q&A with Jim once, I asked him, “So, where do you stand?” “I’m four,” he said.
• I told a story during that Q&A. When Jim was elected to the Senate in 1970, he said, “I am the new politics.” Bill, in the audience, was heard to say, “La nouvelle politique, c’est goddamn well moi.”
Jim corrected me, gently, saying, “I said, ‘I am the voice of the new politics.’” Ah!
• Have I said that Jim Buckley — James L. Buckley — passed away last week, at 100? He did. When he turned 100 last March, Neal B. Freeman wrote an appreciation, saying,
Jim has survived his nine siblings . . . He has outlived the shipmates — all of them, as far as I can tell — with whom he sailed into the Battle of Leyte. Late in life, after taking on the correspondent job for his Yale class, he duly recorded comings and goings for the alumni magazine until he noticed to his considerable embarrassment that his column had become highly autobiographical.
Ha.
Before continuing with Neal B., I’d like to mention another Buckley sib — Reid. Oh, was he interesting. Wonderful correspondent, for example. When Reid died in 2014, I sent Jim a note, and he replied, “Reid was indeed an enormously gifted spirit and a tremendous amount of fun. He will be sorely missed.”
More from Neal’s appreciation last March:
How has [Jim] used all of that extra time, those 30 years beyond his allotted three score and ten? In a Jim Buckley kind of way. By committing a few acts of patriotic virtue and a thousand acts of private generosity. Into his hundredth year, he writes letters of reference, connects friend with friend, consoles the aggrieved, counsels the confused, and, always and everywhere, rises eloquently to the defense of his family, his country, and his Faith.
• James L. Buckley had many jobs. Among them were U.S. senator and federal judge. But one of Jim’s most interesting jobs was president of the “radios” — RFE/RL, which combines Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. He served in that position from 1982 to 1985. Later on, when Putin was busy re-Sovietizing Russia and menacing the neighbors, RFE/RL was once again of critical importance.
In 2018, I wrote a piece about the radios: “Still Broadcasting Freedom.” Let me post a paragraph concerning Jim, and his tenure:
He loved the project, and he loved the job. There were headaches, though. One of them was infighting. The Polish émigrés might fight with the Romanian émigrés over grievances “that went back to the year 1112,” says Buckley. Also, you had politics back in Washington to contend with. (The radios were based in Munich.) But the people working at RFE/RL did “a superb job,” says Buckley. “They were able to transmit information that was regarded by the recipient as the most authoritative available from anywhere. Often, people in one part of Poland, let’s say, were totally unaware of what was happening in another part of Poland, a hundred miles away” — shipyard strikes, for example. And the radios let them know.
• Our editorial appreciation of Jim quoted an interview he gave in 2016 — in September of that year. Talking with him was William Doyle, who, many years before, had been an intern in Jim’s Senate office. Doyle wrote up their conversation for USA Today.
The article began,
An elder statesman of American conservatism says the current presidential campaign is “too depressing to contemplate.” Of the choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, James L. Buckley confesses, “I am in somewhat of a despair.”
This is very interesting, in retrospect (as it was at the time):
Of Trump, Buckley says, “It seems to me that he is emotionally a narcissistic guy. I have no idea what guiding principles he has that would lead him to adopt sensible policies if he was in office.” Calling Trump “a total wild card,” Buckley adds, “He’s never given any clue as to whether he believes that he should observe the Constitution or if he knows what the Constitution requires. Where I’m most worried about Trump is in the area of foreign policy. He shoots from the hip without thinking things through. He could create real damage among our friends and encourage our enemies.”
There was a “but”:
But Clinton, in Buckley’s view, is an equally dangerous choice for president. Her Supreme Court nominees, he suspects, would be people “who believe in a living Constitution rather than the one that was actually written and understood by the ratifiers.”
And so on.
The following paragraph touches on something very important — something that has been on many minds in recent years:
Buckley blames the primary process in part for what he calls the current “dysfunctional mess” and “awful tone” of national politics. “It’s wild that he (Trump) should have been nominated. It basically points to a real weakness in the way we are selecting presidential candidates these days. I never liked primaries. They attract people on the fringes of each party. You have a plurality of that fringe deciding who the candidate is for the majority.” The process, he argues, inflames emotions rather than thought.
In 2019, I had a long talk with Mitch Daniels, which resulted in a series here at National Review Online. Let me quote a portion:
[Daniels] puts in a good word for the smoke-filled room, that much-scorned venue of yore. (In recent years, I too have seen that room in a different, more positive light.) “Why were people in those rooms?” Daniels asks. “What were they doing there? They were trying to pick someone who could win, and that meant someone who would have broad appeal.”
(For the relevant installment of my series, go here.)
Mitch Daniels has a lot in common with Jim Buckley. Birds of a feather — in politics and temperament both, really.
Now, back to William Doyle and his USA Today article, which concluded,
There are at least two other spirits in the conservative pantheon whom Buckley suspects might share his disgust with the Republican candidate for president.
One is his late younger brother, conservative uber-mandarin and media powerhouse William F. Buckley. “I suspect ‘the Bill’ would have been utterly appalled” by Trump, he says.
How about his old boss Ronald Reagan?
“Oh my Lord,” says Jim Buckley. “I think he’d despair. He’d despair.”
• Let me tell you something about the Mehtas: Zubin Mehta is a conductor, now in his late eighties. For decades, he was almost impossibly glamorous — like a movie star — and he is, of course, supremely talented. His brother Zarin is talented too, though differently. He spent his professional years as a CPA and orchestra administrator. For example, he was the executive director and president of the New York Philharmonic (of which Zubin had been the music director).
In a public Q&A — another one of those — I said to Zarin something like this: “I imagine that being Zubin’s brother has had its pleasures and pains. Which predominates? The pleasures or the pains?” Smilingly and graciously, Zarin answered, “It has been a pleasure to be Zubin’s brother.”
Well, in one of my public Q&As with Jim Buckley, I put essentially the same question. This was after Bill’s passing. And he answered in just the same way as Zarin: “It has been a pleasure to be Bill’s brother.”
• Bill once told me a story about William F. Buckley Sr. — who liked Chantilly cream. The story went that WFB Sr. imported Chantilly cows to his estate in Connecticut, so that he could have the cream (the genuine stuff) whenever he liked. But there was a problem: The cream did not taste in Connecticut as it tasted in France — because of the grass the cows ate.
I related this story in a Paris diary of mine, published on this site. That was in 2013. Subsequently, I received a letter from Jim, who wrote,
Dear Jay,
In correcting the record on crème Chantilly, I do not intend to cast a shadow over brother Bill’s reputation for absolute accuracy. I merely point out that our father’s importation of cows and love of this cream all date back to years when Bill was ages four and six — too young to get all his facts straight. I am the reliable chronicler as I was almost three years older.
For reasons exotic, our family moved to Paris in 1929. Even though this was the home of Pasteur, pasteurized milk was unavailable there at the time. As a result, we were condemned to drinking a miserable powdered substitute called “KLIM” (the real thing spelled backwards). After watching his children suffer for almost a year, our father traveled to the Isle of Jersey, where he purchased a disease-free cow for importation to Paris, where it was stabled in a garage. The cow remained in France when we returned to the United States a couple of years later.
(While in France, my father did fall in love with fraises des bois slathered over with crème Chantilly. On returning to Sharon [Connecticut], he imported fraises des bois seeds, not a cow. Although in time the seeds produced reasonably tasty fruit, he was never able to recreate a proper crème Chantilly from milk produced by our American cows.)
As you can see, our father was a perfectly normal American parent, not exotic at all.
Respectfully yours,
Jim
There is so much James L. Buckley in that letter. Bless that man, forever and ever.
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