At the family’s request, this eulogy was prepared for and given in writing to mourners at James Buckley’s August 24, 2023, funeral in Sharon, Conn.

One of nature’s grand illusions involves the sizing of trees. Ask a man in the street, “What’s the biggest tree in the global forest?” He’s likely to name a towering redwood or stout sequoia.

We know better. The biggest tree, it turns out, is Pando, the shimmering aspen stand that looks for all the world like a forest but is in fact an individual tree. Pando sprawls across 100 acres of south-central Utah. Pando weighs 6,000 tons. It took Pando ten thousand years and more to attain her titanic dimensions.

Throughout almost all of those many millennia, human observers did not know Pando as an individual. Only by the lights of genetic science do we see each of Pando’s shoots or stalks, many 100 feet tall, some 150 years old, as genetically identical. Only by the lights of modernity do we see Pando knitted together by a single vast, nourishing network of roots.

One of public life’s grand illusions involves the sizing of politicians. Ask a man in the street, “Who’s the biggest political tree in the forest of our times?” You are unlikely to hear the name James Lane Buckley.

And yet we, gathered here today, know better. The most significant individual in the public life of our times is in fact our dearly departed Jim.

Bear with me, please, as we take a moment and appreciate shoots thrown up, Pando-like, by Jim’s five and a half decades at or near the eye of political storms.

It was Jim Buckley who gave parents a right-of-access to their children’s school records;

It was Jim Buckley who transformed opposition to Roe v. Wade into an affirmative, affirming pro-life movement;

It was Jim Buckley who cemented the Pakistani alliance that paved supply roads to the guerillas fighting the Red Army in the decisive military engagement of the Cold War;

It was Jim Buckley who jealously guarded the credibility of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in the ideological theater of the Cold War;

It was Jim Buckley who resuscitated structural constitutionalism by bringing the Valeo case;

It was Jim Buckley who played godfather to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and the enactment of the landmark environmental legislation of the 1970s;

It was Jim Buckley who fostered a new paradigm of Native American rights;

It was Jim Buckley who wrote a ruling in favor of First Lady Hillary Clinton so persuasive that litigants challenging Mrs. Clinton, although they prevailed below, declined to seek Supreme Court review;

It was Jim Buckley, statesman and student of history, who spent his “retirement” spinning out essential constitutional reforms;

It was Jim Buckley, statesman and student, who identified erosion of constitutional morality as the great problem we face today;

And, yes, it was you-know-who who gracefully pushed Richard Nixon over the edge and out of the Oval Office.

Friends, this is not normal. This is not normal human performance.

We do great injustice — not to a dead man but to ourselves — if we subjectively regress Jim Buckley’s public life and contributions back to some kind of mean standard.

Neither Jim’s true, sincere regard for us; nor his mirth and charm; nor his deep humility should beguile us into underestimating this unobtrusive giant of our times.

Jim Buckley combined virtue on the order of Lincoln with collegiality on the order of John Marshall with a far-sightedness advantage over contemporaries to rival that of Hamilton and Madison.

If we are to pull ourselves out from today’s constitutional death spiral — I believe we can — it will be because, like naturalists appreciating the holistic unity and sheer magnitude of Pando, we sequence Jim’s personal, political, and constitutional DNA and build the next phases of history on Jim’s philosophical root system.

I venture to say the man we bury has a brighter future than any living politician.

And so comes the sad part. This is the part where we pronounce testament on the lone survivor from the family that decided to rearrange history — and succeeded.

I think Jim would want us to close with thoughts drawn more from the Old Testament than the New; more from elder brothers and sisters in the faith than from us younger siblings.

I offer you thoughts from a eulogy filed away years ago by a lovely, now elderly, Jewish woman, delivered first in different form at Springfield, Ill.

“Who is strong?” the Rabbis asked: the person who can exercise self-control. It is not the physically powerful individual who is strong, but the one who can prevail over forces within.

“Who is wise?” the Rabbis asked: the person who learns from all people.

It is not the person who knows everything who is wise, but the one who realizes he still has much to learn and there is something to be learned from everyone.

James Lane Buckley was a very great man. Hebraically speaking, he was gibor, courageous; he was chacham, wise. Through the mercy of God, may he come to his eternal resting place in peace.

Robert R. Gasaway is an attorney in Washington D.C., lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School, presidential fellow in Law and Economics at Chapman University, and James L. Buckley fellow at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy.