James L. Buckley, who won a three-way U.S. Senate race in 1970 as the nominee of the Conservative Party of New York State, died Friday at age 100. Buckley, who was the brother of the National Review founder William F. Buckley, had scored a notable 17% of the vote two years earlier against liberal Republican Sen. Jacob Javits, but he had even better luck against appointed GOP Sen. Charles Goodell.
Goodell (the father of current NFL commissioner Roger Goodell) had been a loyal conservative in the House, and Gov. Nelson Rockefeller chose him to replace Robert Kennedy in the upper chamber following Kennedy's assassination in 1968. Goodell, though, went on to infuriate the Nixon administration by opposing the Vietnam War, a position he shared with his Democratic opponent, Rep. Richard Ottinger, when he sought a full term two years later. (Ottinger was also from a prominent family: His late uncle, Republican Attorney General Albert Ottinger, narrowly lost the 1928 race for governor to none other than Franklin Roosevelt.)
It was against that backdrop that Buckley ran as a pro-Nixon alternative in 1970. As Grantland's Bryan Curtis documented in a detailed 2013 look at this race, Goodell railed against the "hardhatted political militants in the White House," which was almost certainly a reference to the Hard Hat Riot in New York City led by pro-Nixon construction workers that year. Vice President Spiro Agnew, meanwhile, likened the senator to the first American known to have received gender-affirming care by attacking Goodell as "truly the Christine Jorgensen of the Republican Party."
Buckley ultimately beat Ottinger 39-37 with Goodell taking just 24%, a win that made him the first third-party candidate elected to the Senate since former Wisconsin Republican Robert La Follette Jr.'s 1940 reelection as a member of the Progressive Party. Buckley ran as a Republican in 1976 but lost his seat 54-45 against Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had actually been a Nixon adviser.
Buckley did enjoy one final success that year, though, as the U.S. Supreme Court sided with him in a lawsuit that struck down some of the new campaign finance laws that Congress instituted after the Watergate scandal, a move that eventually set the stage for the 2010 Citizens United decision.
Buckley later returned to his home state of Connecticut and ran for the Senate once more as a Republican in 1980, but Democratic Rep. Chris Dodd beat him 56-43. Buckley never again sought elected office, though he'd hold posts in the Reagan administration and as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.