Washington • At 96, James Buckley still is, like good cheddar, sharp and savory. Buckley, whose life has been no less accomplished than his brother Bill’s, recently said at a National Review gathering that his speech there would be his last public appearance. Let us hope not.
He adorned all the government’s branches — senator; undersecretary of state for international security affairs; judge on the nation’s second-most important court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Shortly after his 1970 election to the Senate (as a member of New York’s Conservative Party; the age of miracles had not yet passed) he was handed a recent study showing that “the work of the average congressional office had doubled every five years since 1936.