James L. Buckley, Conservative Party nominee elected in three-way Senate race, dies at 100

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."