James L. Buckley

James L. Buckley

SHARON - James L. Buckley, who spent most of his life in Sharon, Connecticut, died in Washington, D.C., on Friday, August 18th. He was 100 years old. He died of natural causes.

Mr. Buckley was born in New York City on March 9, 1923, the fourth of the ten children of William F. and Aloise Steiner Buckley.
He was the husband of the late Ann Cooley Buckley and the father of six children.

He grew up in Sharon, received his undergraduate degree from Yale in the fall of 1943, was commissioned as a U.S. Naval Reserve officer the following April, and served in the Pacific theater in World War II. Following his discharge, he entered Yale Law School from which he graduated in 1949. He then worked for four years with the New Haven law firm of Wiggin & Dana and the next seventeen with a family corporation that provided a variety of services to a group of oil and gas exploration companies operating outside the United States.

In 1968 he was asked by the Conservative Party of New York to serve as its pro forma candidate for election to the United States Senate. Although he ran on a shoestring budget, he received more than a million votes. As a result of this experience, he sought the party's nomination in 1970 and succeeded in winning election with 40 percent of the vote in a three-way race, the first third-party candidate to be elected to the Senate in 40 years.

During his six years in office, he was a member of the Republican caucus and was particularly active in the areas of the environment, foreign affairs, and energy. In 1974, he managed to upset his conservative base by calling for President Nixon's resignation during the course of the Watergate hearings; and in 1975, he outraged his constituency by opposing a federal bailout for New York City when it was facing bankruptcy. In 1976, he lost his bid for reelection to Daniel Patrick Moynihan.


Mr. Buckley returned to public life in 1981, when President Reagan asked him to serve as Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, a position concerned with the administration of military- and economic-assistance programs. He left the State Department in December 1982 to assume the presidency of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Inc. in Munich, West Germany. Those radios broadcast in 21 languages to the Communist nations of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In December 1985, Mr. Buckley was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which made him one of the few individuals to have held high office in all three branches of the federal government. He continued to serve in that position until 2000.

Mr. Buckley had a lifelong interest in birds and natural history, and for many years participated in the Sharon Audubon Center's annual Christmas and spring bird counts. In 1982, he received the United Nations Environment Programme Award for Outstanding Environmental Leadership.

In the late 1970s, he served as a radio commentator for the Westinghouse radio syndicate and National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" program. He was also the author of four books: "If Men Were Angels: A View from the Senate" (1974), "Gleanings from an Unplanned Life" (2006), "Freedom at Risk" (2010), and "Saving Congress from Itself" (2014).

Mr. Buckley is survived by his daughter, Priscilla, sons Peter, Jay, Bill, David, and Andrew, eight grandchildren, and two great grandchildren. His funeral mass will be held at St. Bernard's Church in Sharon at 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, August 24th. There will be a memorial service in Washington, D.C, to be scheduled at a later date.

Contributions in his memory may be made to the Sharon Audubon Society or the Sharon Historical Society.