Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

First, a necessary admission: Bill Buckley, Jim Buckley’s brother, was a good friend of long standing. Bill had a genius for friendship, as anyone who knows him – including his political enemies -- will readily attest. For about ten years, letters passed between us. I sent him columns occasionally, and he returned this insufficient gesture by sending me books: collections of his columns, longer pieces he had written for one or another of his semi-autobiographical books such as “Miles Gone By” and “Nearer My God To Thee,” novels and reminiscences he had written, an unending stream of literary delicacies. It seems an odd arrangement, I wrote him once: I send you a letter; you send me a book. I was sure he was being shortchanged in the transaction. I don’t think I ever met Bill’s brother Jim, the sainted senator from New York, as Bill playfully called him, but Chris Powell, the Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer, has a lively recollection of Jim in a campaign mode. “I got to kn...