Former US Senator James Lane Buckley died on August 18 at the age of 100. In 1970 he ran for the Senate as a candidate for the Conservative Party of New York, which had been founded in 1962 by local dissatisfied Republicans; an improbable victory after his opponents split the liberal vote made Buckley the first third-party senator since Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin was elected on a Progressive ticket in 1940.

Analysts called Buckley the architect of a pragmatic new conservatism; in the Senate he joined the Republicans and generally supported the Nixon administration, although  he wanted the Vietnam War to be fought by volunteers and voiced alarm when Nixon made overtures to Communist China. When it became clear that the Watergate scandal had politically crippled the president, Buckley publicly urged him to resign.