James L. Buckley, RIP

Unlike many of the people who are writing encomiums to James Buckley (see here and here, for example), who died yesterday at age 100, I didn’t know him.

But I still remember sitting in my Winnipeg apartment with some libertarian friends and watching U.S. election returns on November 3, 1970. The media showed James Buckley’s victory speech and I still remember his words: “How sweet it is.” Buckley, running on the Conservative Party ticket in New York state, was running against Richard Ottinger, the Democratic candidate, and Charles Goodell, the Republican candidate and incumbent whom Governor Nelson Rockefeller had appointed to the U.S. Senate after Senator Robert F. Kennedy was murdered in June 1968.

Goodell, by the way, was the father of Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the National Football League.

It’s not often that one has reason to remember a one-term U.S. senator. The reason I do remember is the case he brought, on First Amendment free-speech grounds, against the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act. The case, which made it all the way to the Supreme Court, was Buckley v. Valeo. This link gives a nice summary. Buckley prevailed on a few key points but not on all.