IF MEN WERE ANGELS . . . A View from the Senate

As the only Republican Conservative in the U.S. Senate, placed there no less by the electorate of ""the heartland of liberalism""--the junior Senator from New York is a singular, some might say cranky, voice in American politics. Bill is the writer in the family; Jim's lawyerly prose can't hold a candle to big brother's verbal gymnastics. Still and all, his credo is a sort of pedestrian translation of the Bucldey line you already know so well, with overtones of Goldwater and Edward Gibbon. Senator Buckley lives in a country which is ""drifting from crisis to crisis"" as ""private initiative"" is encroached upon by the federal bureaucracy. Fiscally, he's a ""statesrights"" man; economically, a champion of ""free, competitive enterprise."" In matters of civil rights from day care to fair employment legislation, he's a ""strict Constitutionalist."" He opposes excessive federal taxation and budgetary waste but supports the military establishment because it ""deters war."" Reactionary, yes. Anachronistic? Not really. This political philosophy has its place next to Nixon's as the rhetoric of the contemporary Right. You recognize it through a smokescreen of patriotic high sentiment.