The Other Buckley

He wears a flag pin on his Brooks Brothers suits. Policemen, American Legionnaires and hardhats love him. In 1960 he wrote: "Communism is the greatest threat which Western civilization has ever known . . . Destiny continues to place in our hands the survival of Western civilization." He sees no reason to change that judgment now. Ask which politicians he most admires and he replies: "Ronald Reagan, George Bush, John Tower."

Yet liberals who talk with James L. Buckley come away mildly dazed by his charm and intelligence. They may also wish that he were one of them. As the somewhat improbable candidate of New York's growing Conservative Party, Buckley, 47, the elder brother of Polemicist William F. Buckley Jr., has begun to glimpse the possibility that he might be sitting in the U.S. Senate next January.

For all the woebegone history of most third-party movements in the U.S., the leftward alignments of Buckley's two opponents offer him a rare chance to recruit support from both Republican and Democratic conservatives. Incumbent Senator Charles Goodell was a moderate-conservative upstate Congressman when Governor Nelson Rockefeller appointed him to the Senate after Robert Kennedy's assassination.

In the two years since then, Goodell, for all his mild, pipe-smoking manner, has infuriated many G.O.P. leaders by becoming an insistent crusader in the antiwar movement. Such Republicans see virtually no choice between Goodell and Democratic Representative Richard Ottinger, who is similarly opposed to the war. Aggressively liberal, Ottinger has pulled ahead of Goodell and Buckley in early polls.

Buckley's conservatism and personal appeal may attract many organization Democrats fed up with "permissive liberalism." Buckley and his party, however, still have very far to go. In the 1968 Senate race on the Conservative ticket, he pulled 17% of the vote in New York, where politics for decades has generally been centerleft.

Apart at the Seams. Buckley's basic message is clear enough: "Education, not revolution," on the campuses, "peace, not surrender, in Viet Nam." Cambodia, he says, "was a damn successful operation." Buckley is, as he often points out, the one candidate who backs the President on the war.

"New Yorkers are no different from anyone else in the country in their concern for the state of the U.S.," he states, "their concern with how we are going to survive as a nation, whether our institutions are going to fall apart at the seams. This year the basic issue is confidence in the country. We need a reaffirmation of faith--we have a tendency to become paralyzed by self-doubt. There was a time when it was the conservatives who were utterly predictable. Now the old fogies are the liberals who have lived too long with their verities."

Buckley's ideas are more complex than a simple law-and-order slogan. Explaining his support for the President's District of Columbia anticrime bill, he argues: "There must be a constant balancing--we must remember the people who are the victims of crime as well as the criminals." Buckley subscribes to "subsidiarity" in government--solving problems at the lowest level possible. The doctrine is not so far removed from the New Left's idea of community control. He has somewhat complicated his Viet Nam position by arguing that U.S. troops there should be volunteers. He is also a serious ecologist who has made expeditions to the Arctic and once considered becoming an ornithologist. The environmental crisis, he believes, is one issue that the Federal Government must tackle itself.

Best Man. Perhaps his most potent weapon is his considerable charm. A handsome man with a graying crew cut, Jim Buckley is affable and deferential, intelligent without the public hauteur of his brother Bill. "Jim is as firm as I am," says Bill, "but he never offends. I couldn't imagine Jimmy receiving a bad book review. Between the ages of 20 and 34, it was impossible to get my brother on Saturday--he was best man in more weddings than anyone in history."

A Yale graduate, Jim is vice president of the family's Catawba Corp., a firm providing expertise for companies engaged in oil and mineral exploration. He first entered politics as campaign manager during Bill's quixotic run against Lindsay for the New York mayoralty in 1965. Bill recalls that when Jim accepted the Conservatives' senatorial nomination in 1968, "his knees were shaking as he read the prepared text. He reminded me afterward that that was the first time he's spoken in public in 17 years--since he spoke before the ornithological club of Millbrook, N.Y."

Disreputable Class. The fourth of William F. Buckley's ten children, Jim inherited his millionaire father's passion for intellectual excellence and rigorous honesty. When he was 16, his father wrote him a note at school: "Your mother and I remarked Sunday afternoon that we were very pleased at the seriousness with which you take your debts. She said you had paid her everything you owed her." Unlike Bill, Jim Buckley and his wife Ann are somewhat shy and private. To date, the candidate has devoted most of his campaign to meetings with political leaders and editors around the state. He has yet to test his talents at marathon speaking and handshaking.

One of Buckley's assets is his campaign manager, F. Clifton White, a savvy Republican organizer who engineered Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential nomination. In addition, Bill has scheduled at least eight days of campaigning for his brother in October. Buckley's crucial problem may well be money, since he needs to raise about $1,500,000 in order to make himself known throughout the state.

The odds against Buckley are still quite high; his major hope is a three-way deadlock with a few votes to spare on his side. Should he lose, the Buckley family might not be entirely distressed. "My father thought politicians disreputable as a class," Bill observes, "but I think he would have been enthusiastic about Jim's candidacy."

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