Francis R. Valeo

Who was Francis R. Valeo?

Francis Ralph Valeo was the Secretary of the United States Senate and ex officio member of the Federal Election Commission. He was the defendant/appellee for the Federal government of the United States in Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, in which the Supreme Court of the United States upheld federal limits on campaign contributions.

Francis Valeo was the son of a shoe factory foreman. He was born in Brooklyn, New York. He was a 1936 political science graduate of New York University, where he also received a master's degree in international relations in 1942. He served in China during World War II.

After the war, he was a foreign policy specialist for the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress, and was loaned to the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He traveled repeatedly to Southeast Asia with Montana Senator Mike Mansfield. In 1963, after the Bobby Baker scandal shook the Senate, Mansfield appointed Valeo to replace Baker as Majority Secretary, a position he held during the long filibuster over the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 1965 he was elected Secretary of the Senate.

Valeo's books include The Japanese Diet and the U.S. Congress; and Mike Mansfield, Majority Leader: A Different Kind of Senate, 1961-1976.