“I was born in an elevator in New York City’s Women’s Hospital in the early hours of March 9, 1923,” begins James L. Buckley’s memoirs. “That was the first of a series of unplanned, unanticipatable events that have shaped my life.”
Buckley served in the Navy, became a lawyer, worked in the energy industry, served in all three branches of government, won a Senate election in New York as a Conservative, directed Radio Free Europe when antidotes to Soviet lies were especially vital, upheld the rule of law as a constitutionalist federal judge, and was a man of integrity through all of it. For nearly all of his 100 years, he was active and lively, delivering a powerful address to the National Review Institute Ideas Summit in 2019 at the age of 96.
Many will celebrate his life on the website today and in the coming days. Many of them will have far longer memories than I do of Buckley’s legacy. I just thought it was worth highlighting some of the campaign ads from his 1970 Senate campaign in New York.
His campaign slogan was legendary: “Isn’t it about time we had a senator?” He was capitalizing on the fact that both the Democrat and the Republican in the race were seen by voters as out of touch. The radical leftism of the late ’60s was fresh in everyone’s minds, and a Democrat or a squishy Rockefeller Republican wasn’t going to get the job done.
Crime was a major issue, and Buckley focused on the same law-and-order message conservatives have touted for decades. This video contains three ads, one on urban crime, one on campus radicalism (which sometimes included terrorism in the late ’60s), and one on drugs. You can see the then-in-progress original World Trade Center in the background:
Here’s an ad with a “concerned citizen,” TV host Art Linkletter:
This one has the campaign theme song (which used to be common for campaigns to have) and displays the entirely lost men’s fashion trend of wearing short-sleeve dress shirts with ties:
Buckley was also deeply concerned with environmental protection, an issue he discusses in his memoir, Gleanings from an Unplanned Life. None of that Green New Deal stuff, mind you, just a more sensible approach to pollution, which has improved greatly in the U.S. since 1970. This ad probably helped his appeal with more moderate New York voters:
All the ads come back to that same line: “Isn’t it about time we had a senator?” Buckley’s tough-love, common-sense conservatism won him a plurality of the vote in the three-candidate race, and he served for six years as a Conservative Party senator from New York. Excluding Joe Lieberman’s 2006 reelection where he switched from Democrat to third-party, it’s the last time a third-party candidate has ever won a Senate election.
Speaking to the timelessness of Buckley’s conservative principles, many of the messages from these ads could, without much adjustment, still be applied today. I highly recommend Gleanings from an Unplanned Life, in which he discusses how his life’s events influenced those principles and vice-versa. Rarely do men of such great stature conduct their lives with such humility. R.I.P.