One candidate looks like a smalltown professor, vintage 1956: the haircut is modified crew, the clothes drab and slightly ill-fitting, the rhetoric sparing and precise. The other candidate actually is a professor, but with his practiced flamboyance, a wardrobe of elegant mismatches and a manner that oscillates from pixie to pedagogue and back within a 60-second monologue, he comes across more like a ripe character actor in search of his next role. The contrast is appropriate because rarely do voters get a chance to choose between candidates for the Senate—or any other office—who differ so clearly in persona and policy as New York Senator James Buckley and his Democratic challenger, Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Buckley, 53, grew up a rich man's woodsy son who preferred bird watching to baseball. As a youngster he considered ornithology as a career and as a Yale undergraduate he kept a boa constrictor for company. But after Yale Law School he ended up a vice president of his family's oil-exploration business, where he indulged his love of travel (visiting both polar regions) and his interest in environmental problems.
Like his famous younger brother, polymath Polemicist William F. Buckley Jr., Jim always stood far to the right politically. But he did not get into politics until the late '60s, when the New York Conservative Party—a predominantly Catholic faction that had sprouted from right-wing disgust with the liberal leanings of both major parties in the state—began to make waves. In 1968, without having given a formal public speech in 17 years, he took his castle-Irish dignity and shy grin into the Senate campaign. To everyone's surprise, he rolled up 17% of the vote.
Two years later, when both Democrats and Republicans again nominated liberals, Buckley won 39% and a ticket to Washington. The Republicans took him back, but on his own independent terms. Whether being ahead of the pack in calling for Richard Nixon's resignation or as a stubborn opponent of federal aid sought by Northeastern Republicans, Buckley went his own way.
Moynihan, 49, came out of a bro ken home and Irish poverty in Hell's Kitchen. Thanks to City College, Tufts and the London School of Economics, Moynihan propelled himself into an episodic academic career (Syracuse University, Harvard) that he constantly interrupts by sprints down the corridors of power. No subject—traffic safety, crime, black mores, welfare reform, the future of democracy—is beyond his ken or pen. Always a Democrat, he has fraternized with the party's reform and regular factions in New York just as he has served with equal panache each President—Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford—who offered to employ him.
Whether at a small dinner party or a formal campaign appearance, Moynihan is always on. Inflection and voice register change like a barometer in the monsoon season. Two long index fingers simultaneously punch holes in the issue of the moment. Or he puts on his leprechaun's phiz to explain pragmatism with a parable from Gulliver's Travels, recalling the Lilliputians who signified political faction by the height of heels and others who fought over opening the big end or the little end of a boiled egg. "Happy is the political society," he concludes with obvious delight, "whose issues are in fact adjustable, as is the height of a heel."