By Tom Brennan

L. Brent Bozel IV was convicted last week for his part in the storming of the U.S. Capitol, as part of an effort to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 presidential election. It was a large mob, and such trials have become commonplace. Sadly, so is our acceptance of this profoundly unAmerican turn in our politics.  What  makes the Bozel verdict notable is who his great uncles were.

A month before the Bozel verdict, on August 18th, former U.S. Senator James L. Buckley died. He was 100 years old. He was a star on the national political stage briefly, but notably. His more flamboyant younger brother, the late author and magazine publisher William F. Buckley Jr. occupied center stage for half a century.

The Senator  adhered to hard line conservatism but was renowned for his personal civility.  New Hampshire’s William Loeb once advised young Bill  Buckley to make the cerebral National Review a bit more like Loeb’s Manchester Union Leader,  to put the hay down where the goats can get at it. Loeb was a friend of William F. Buckley Sr., and an early backer of young Bill’s conservative publication. Publisher Bill could be pugilistic, as the novelist Gore Vidal could attest, but he also had a gift for friendships with adversaries. “Guess who my new best friend is,”  Bill said late in his life. “It turns out George McGovern is one of the nicest human beings I ever met.”  There are many such stories about the two great uncles of Brent Bozel IV. Their era was marked by riots, deep cultural divisions, and political assassinations. The example set by his great uncles does not seem to have gotten through to 44 year old Brent IV.

Jim Buckley’s single  six year term in the United States Senate derived from a rare third party general election triumph in 1970, all the more notable in that the third party was the New York State Conservative Party.  Bill ran a less serious race for Mayor of New York City in 1965. Jim managed the campaign. Asked what he would do if he won, Buckley famously quipped “demand a recount.” Bill’s magazine, newspaper columns,  and TV appearances established him as a key gatekeeper for the modern American conservative movement, guiding it as much as any one person could, from marginalized status to dominance.

Bill Sr. Was the son of a late 19th century sheriff of the notorious DuVal County Texas. The Sheriff’s reformer bent, and close ties to the Mexican population down there, resulted in his eventually losing reelection. DuVal County is best known for “finding” the votes that propelled Lyndon Johnson to the U.S. Senate in 1948.  LBJ didn’t have to make a phone call. The Sheriff’s son made it big in oil, and moved his family to Connecticut, where the future publisher and Senator grew up, steeped in conservatism and Catholicism.

Boomer Buckleys will tell you that if you wanted good sober advice, you went to uncle Jim. If you wanted to have fun you hung out with Bill. Jim Buckley passed quietly through Yale Law school. He also quietly delighted in his younger brother’s mischief at Yale. Bill was editor of the Yale Daily newspaper, working against the establishment of an elected student government, in part to preserve his own influence. Recall Jefferson’s preference for newspapers over government, if he had to chose just one. Buckley also believed an elected student government would be liberal. After losing the mayoral race in New York, Buckley said he would only run for office again “if voting were by invitation only.”  The Buckleys were not populists.

Bill’s big splash came with his book, God and Man at Yale, published in the autumn of 1951, and whose upshot was that Yale served neither satisfactorily. In his old age, Buckley was rueful about the book.

At Yale, Buckley’s best friend was Brent Bozel Jr. He and Buckley were champion members of the Yale debating team. Bozel grew up in Omaha Nebraska, son of a successful advertising executive. A Protestant, and liberal  World Federalist, Junior became a militant Catholic conservative at Yale. A unusual result of time at Yale. Converts are often  the most zealous, and Bozel’s flaming red hair added to his angry prophet persona. He would marry  Buckley’s sister Patricia, best know for taking a swing at feminist activist Ti-Grace Atkinson for dissing the Virgin Mary.

While Jim Buckley worked as a lawyer, and saw after the family oil interests, Brent and Bill leading lights of the resurgent mid twentieth century American conservative movement. They co-authored a book defending the censured red hunting Senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy. Bozel worked for McCarthy for a time. He helped Buckley found Young Americans for Freedom in 1960, lost races for Maryland state legislatures in 1958, and congress in 1964. He was an early supporter of Barry Goldwater, and ghost wrote Goldwater’s classic The Conscience of  a Conservative.

In the mid to late 1960s, as the conservative tide rose, the Buckley brothers moved onto a more mainstream path.  Bozel drifted from conservative politics to militant, and in America somewhat marginal Catholic orthodoxy. Bozel moved to Spain, still run by the Franco dictatorship. “You could really breathe the Catholic thing in Spain,” said Bozel. He would frankly express his skepticism about American democracy, and founded Triumph magazine, a kind of National Review for conservative Catholics, which he published from 1966 to 1976.

Bill Buckley founded National Review in 1955. In his nationally syndicated column, in 1966, Buckley wrote that Catholics like himself ought not impose by law their view that abortion was murder. Bozel wrote a letter to National Review that denounced the column he said “reeks of relativism.” It precipitated a break with Buckley that deeply pained him. Bozel maintained that “conservatism is no substitute for Christian Politics.” He would flirt with Distributism, have a hand in the first Operation Rescue, regularly visit inmates of the Lorton Correctional Facility in northern Virginia, and battle bipolar disorder. He died in 1997.

If William F. Buckley made his mark as a gadfly,   James Buckley possessed skills that made for a more viable reach for electoral success. His first run for the senate drew 17% on the Conservative Party line, double the usual strength. Two years later, in 1970, a remarkable confluence of event’s propelled him to victory from a third party.  Governor Nelson Rockefeller appointed Charles Goodell, a moderate GOP congressman from Jamestown, to fill the seat of the assassinated Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Goodell moved sharply left, “sporting sideburns and bell bottoms” as one Conservative Party official groused. He took the lead in opposition to the Nixon  policy on Vietnam.

Rockefeller, long a liberal GOP mainstay, had sufficient strength in the state party to prevent a primary challenge to Goodell. But Rocky had a difficult reelection fight, and had to watch his own right flank. Goodell was on his own. Meanwhile the Democrats nominated Richard Ottinger, a popular but somewhat colorless liberal congressman from Westchester County, lifted from obscurity by skillfully crafted TV spots. Polarization abounded in 1970, not unlike now. Buckley was better funded than either of his major party opponents. He had the charisma to make good use of the money advantage. “He’s more sexy-square than Reagan, more elegant than a Kennedy, he could be president” gushed a staff member to a state Senator from Rochester. Finally, Vice President Spiro Agnew, the point man for Nixon’s “Silent Majority” politics of right wing resentment, denounced Goodell (whose son later ran the NFL). This drew sympathetic liberal votes from Ottinger to Goodell, allowing Buckley to edge out Ottinger by 2%, with less than 40% of the vote.

Senator Buckley was a superstar for six years. He was widely respected for his integrity and civility. He clung to conservatism in impolitic ways, opposing assistance to stave off the bankruptcy of New York City. His privacy legislation would be invoked by liberal student rights activist. He teamed up with the old liberal Catholic pol, Gene McCarthy to take a challenge the post Watergate Federal Election Commission to the Supreme Court. His call for Nixon’s resignation was an early sign Nixon would not survive Watetgate. “I propose an extraordinary act of statesmanship,”  an act at once noble and heartbreaking,” Buckley said of his benefactor.

Before Reagan emerged in 1975, it was Senator Buckley who said that since President Ford and Vice President Rockefeller were appointed rather than elected, uncontested GOP re-nomination ought not be assumed. Had Reagan taken Ford’s offer of a cabinet post, or had Nancy been beguiled by an appointment of Ronnie as ambassador to the Court of Saint James, we might be talking about the Buckley Revolution of the 1980s. Buckley flirted with a run at the 1976 convention, in event of a Reagan/Ford deadlock that never emerged.

That autumn, the natural order of thing political returned to New York. Buckley lost reelection to a centrist Democrat, Pat Moynihan, best known then for his feisty defense of America as ambassador to the United Nations.  Friendly rivals in a way unimaginable today, Buckley chided Moynihan as a “professor.” Moynihan said of Buckley, “he acts as if he does not live in this century — certainly doesn’t approve of it.” Ever the libertarian, Buckley conceded the race praising Moynihan as an eloquent  fighter for “freedom in the world.”  He then added the hope that he would as ardently support “freedom in the United States.”

In endorsing Moynihan, the Rochester Gannett newspaper said New York needed “not the gentlemen from the lawns of Connecticut, but the brawler from Hell’s Kitchen” in New York. Buckley would again seek a senate seat,  in 1980, this time from Connecticut. It was a carpet bag too many. Reagan would put Buckley in charge of Radio Free Europe, and later make him a federal judge.

Brent Bozel IV went to his bench trial wearing a hoodie touting his alma mater, a Christian school in Hershey Pennsylvania. He took a lead role in breaching the Capital. He was part of the mob chased a Capital cop, who lured them away from public officials the mob was looking to lynch. He turned CSPAN cameras around. He looted souvenirs from Speaker Pelosi’s office. His father, Brent Bozel III, also a conservative activist, insists the election was stolen, but won’t condone the violence. Sentencing is scheduled for January 9th.

In appreciating James Buckley,  whether you are left or right; in recalling how his upbeat March for America in 1970 scored an unlikely victory in the democratic process; we mourn the march on the Capital that turned into a mob that sought to end democratic process. All a story of one family’s tragedy, and one nation’s.