James Buckley’s Conservative Century

With sadness I received the news Friday that my friend James L. Buckley had died. Sadness but not surprise. Anyone who has joined the 100-year-old club, as he did in March, can no longer surprise us by his passing. Jim was an amazingly spry member of that select club: ever buoyant, even boyish, in his quiet and disarming friendliness almost to the end.

I met Jim Buckley around the turn of the millennium at his younger brother Bill’s Manhattan home at 73 East 73rd Street. The occasion was a party for the publication of one of Jim’s books. He was modest, decorous, exuding an air of faint surprise that so many people should be congregated at his celebrated brother’s house to celebrate him, a former U.S. Senator (1971-77), undersecretary of state (1981-82), and judge of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (1985-96).

The vicissitudes of life in New York and Sharon, Conn., where Jim grew up and lived until a few years ago, threw us together often, and we became friends. I published two of his books, “Freedom at Risk: Reflections on Politics, Liberty, and the State” (2010) and “Saving Congress From Itself: Emancipating the States and Empowering Their People” (2014). I kept angling for another, but it was not to be.

Jim’s extensive experience with Leviathan equipped him well for his authorial tasks, for he knew firsthand the workings, not to say the depredations, of government in all its aspects. Over the years he watched as an insatiable bureaucratic apparatus gobbled up one province of individual initiative after the next.

Jim was a modern-day Alexis de Tocqueville, warning about what Tocqueville called “democratic despotism.” Unlike tyrannies of old, Tocqueville wrote, modern despotisms tended to infantilize citizens, not terrorize them outright. They turned people into sheep with the government as the benign-seeming but implacable shepherd.

Both those books are part pathologist’s report, partly tocsin warning us to slough off our dogmatic slumbers and seize our birthright as free citizens of a self-governing republic. Most of our conversations over the years were status reports on the progress of this malady. Jim remained cheerful, but he wasn’t sanguine about the future of America’s bold experiment in liberty.

Jim and I were both founding board members of the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale. He saw from the beginning that its ambitions had to be free of the university’s parochialism, and it was his idea that we change the name, and the course of the enterprise, by rebaptizing it the Buckley Institute, something we finally got around to doing this year, not long after Jim took emeritus status.

I last saw Jim about a year ago for lunch in Washington, a city he cordially disliked. He was somewhat hampered by back trouble but inveterately serene. His passing leaves a large hole for his many friends and admirers. I know I speak for many when I say that I shall miss him, his day-brightening smile, his reticent but sure-footed wisdom.

Mr. Kimball is president and publisher of Encounter Books, editor and publisher of the New Criterion and chairman of the Buckley Institute.