What makes Pat so sore? He is a soul from the ’50s, permanently at war with the ’60s, and now reaching for power in the ’90s. He likes playing the role of a conservative Saint Sebastian, pierced by arrows from the left for thinking so far right. The only problem is that in his hot-button word-work for three presidents, his electroshock newspaper columns and his sumo-wrestler sound bites on TV, he has so often perforated himself. He once described Adolf Hitler as “an individual of great courage … extraordinary gifts.” He has accused an American Jewish “amen corner” of conspiring with Israel to drum up war in the Middle East. He has called AIDS “nature’s retribution” on gays. “Why are we more shocked when a dozen people are killed in Vilnius than [by] a massacre in Burundi?” he told the London Sunday Telegraph. “Because they are white people. That’s who we are. That’s where America comes from.”
The words sound at first blush like something from David Duke cleaned up and stuffed into Buchanan’s size-101/2 brogues; but the wordman isn’t that simple. A gap yawns between Buchanan the public creature and Buchanan the private man. Those who know him-and many of those who spar with him-say he is no bigot; that however steamy some of his ideas may be, he acquired them honestly; that in an era of mush-mouthed, blow-dried, careerist pols, he is shrewd, nervy and candid. “Give Buchanan this,” writes Michael Kinsley, a liberal columnist who has boxed with him on “Crossfire.” “Unlike his rival George Bush, he’s got principles. True, they’re mostly the wrong principles. But Bush vs. Buchanan is a tempting illustration of the maxim that in some ways the wrong principles are better than no principles at all.” To the dismay of White House image managers, Buchanan sharpens debate where others would skirt it; his combativeness can show up the twerp in a quieter man.
Buchanan coined the negative term “instant analysis”-and in his life and style, he has always defied it. Off-guard, or off-screen, he can be warm, polite, likable. “He is not angry-‘passionate’ is a better word,” says Bay Buchanan, his sister and campaign manager. Early campaign profiles have played up some of the darker influences he told on himself in his autobiography, “Right from the Beginning”: his father’s hero worship of Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator; Westbrook Pegler, the fanged columnist, and Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin Red-baiter. But they also left a few things out. In 1964, while Pat was hustling votes for Barry Goldwater, Buchanan senior probably voted for Lyndon Johnson. “He would never admit it to us,” Bay Buchanan recalls with a distinctly unfanatic laugh. “Mother told us, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it’.” She stood by Goldwater, pairing her vote to neutralize Pop Buchanan. Right alongside the true faith, the conscience of an iconoclast has always run in the family.
Contradiction, inconsistency, paradox do not daunt Buchanan. He is a wealthy man. He owns a house with pillars in front, a swimming pool out back and a Mercedes in the garage. Yet he is running as a populist. He was born in Washington’s old Providence Hospital, where his mother once worked as a student nurse. He grew up in Blessed Sacrament Parish in the northwest hinterlands of what is now Chevy Chase. He went to grammar school, Gonzaga High School, Georgetown University in the District. He served three presidents downtown at the White House. He courted his wife, Shelley, in the city. Yet he has cast himself as an outsider in the tradition of Ronald Reagan. “An act of remarkable chutzpah,” reflects columnist Mark Shields, another friend from the left. “An irony bordering on whimsy.”
The reality goes deeper than the surface irony. To be Scots-Irish, a parochial-school kid, not an Ivy League-bound preppy, a college “day hopper,” not a flush boarder from New York or New Jersey, was to be part of the politically outcast in Washington 40 years ago. When he looked down-town, what he saw was fecklessness and godlessness in the federal government, a sump of liberal Democrats and the GOP’s WASPish, Wall Street establishment. As he watched these groups combine to shoot down his hero, Tailgunner Joe McCarthy, and to ridicule Barry Goldwater, Washington became the belly of the beast.
Lost causes were part of Buchanan’s birthright; they appealed to him. His great-great-grandfather fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War, and he keeps a picture of Robert E. Lee in his study. But the Roman Catholic Church was far more important in shaping his mind and values. The Jesuits of Gonzaga High School rescued his father, a child whose own father had deserted him. The church offered help, security, certainty, in return for loyalty and faith. The older Buchanan was shirtsleeve Scots-Irish, not castle Irish like the Buckleys of Sharon, Conn., or the Kennedys of Boston, Mass. Four of his children were in the audience when he finally finished college. Unlike Joseph Kennedy, he didn’t shag after actresses with long legs and short attention spans. Family meant something to him. The Buchanans weren’t fancy, and they didn’t fake social values.
Along with the strengths came a marked weakness: a self-righteous aggressiveness that could well into violence. It began innocently enough. When Pat was a toddler, he bellowed Hail Marys so loudly in his playpen one day that one of his brothers smashed him on the head with a baby bottle to make him shut up. His father bought a punching bag and hung it in the basement. Buchanan senior made his boys hit 100 lefts, 100 rights and 200 “one-twos” every session, and he beat them with his leather belt the day they lied to him about finishing their exercise. To correct Pat’s vision, he had two operations before he was 7; he competed to outdo his more athletic brothers. Describing his first schoolyard fight, he wrote, “I turned and hit him in the face with everything I had, bloodying his nose, smashing his glasses in the asphalt, leaving him crying.” The nun who witnessed the encounter was horrified. “Which didn’t bother me in the least. I knew Pop would be elated … and Mom would have no complaints.”
The punch-out transferred to the world of ideas was uglier. Pop Buchanan used to tell his children a parable about a “game rooster” who strutted the barnyard, scaring off young chickens until some got big enough to fight. Then the rooster would kill them one by one. At dinner, Buchanan recalls, “The Autocrat sat at the head of the table and carved; and he instructed us ex cathedral on history, politics, sports, faith and morals … We were all taught not to back down. Whatever our positions lost in logic might be recovered with invective.” It wasn’t quite that bad, says Bay Buchanan. She defends Pop Buchanan against stories that have made him out to be an amateur fascist. “He didn’t wear an armband.” He didn’t suppress dissent. “You had to come up with your own ideas,” she remembers. “You fought him. That’s where ‘Crossfire’ began-he loved a good argument.”
Buchanan grew into a significant rumbler, a lover of every form of combat from boxing to debate. One day when he was an undergraduate at Georgetown, Father Stephen F. McNamee, a professor of ethics who taught him the morality of the reasoned choice, took him aside and said, “Patrick, what is the matter with you?… Every time I look in your direction, you look as though you’re going to explode … Why are you so angry?” Buchanan said he didn’t really know. After a fight with a couple of policemen, he had been suspended from Georgetown for a year. He returned, graduated cum laude and went on to the Columbia School of Journalism, where he became famous for his “sucker punch.” One day Kim Willenson, a liberal classmate, was standing in the school library when Buchanan walked up in a fury, perhaps over a perceived slight to a friend, perhaps over a woman, and belted him. “It was a Pearl Harbor attack,” Willenson recalls. And in that frame of mind, Buchanan moved on to more significant politics.
To the green conservative operative, the enemy was anyone who disputed his own belief in Catholic fundamentalism and anti-communism-the Faith as applied to political and moral salvation. On picking up his first copy of William Buckley’s National Review, he writes, he felt like John Keats on first looking into Chapman’s Homer. But the Young Americans for Freedom, founded by Buckley, struck him as an assemblage of Ivy League nerds. So he set off for St. Louis in 1962, where he wrote editorials for the Globe-Democrat and struck up a friendship with Don Hesse, the right-wing cartoonist who drew antiwar protesters as hippies with flies buzzing around their heads. Hesse introduced him to Nixon.
When Nixon became president, Buchanan was a made man. He joined a White House speechwriting triumvirate. When Nixon wanted vision, he called on Ray Price. When he wanted finesse, he got William Safire. And when he wanted blood, he summoned Buchanan, the man who contributed “pusillanimous pussyfooters” to Spiro Agnew’s assault on liberals in the media. “He was a damn good, slug-em-right-between-the-eyes speechwriter,” Safire recalls. His 1972 campaign memos mixed hardball with dirty tricks. In one he suggested that the Nixon team leak word that one of George McGovern’s chief financial backers was a homosexual. He also sent a young operative to New Hampshire to stage and embarrass the campaign of Sen. Edmund Muskie, the Democratic front runner, with a tainted “contribution.” His first candidate for the rigged gift was the Gay Liberation Front; in the end, the Young Socialist Alliance got the nod. Buchanan became Nixon’s young pit bull.
After Watergate spoiled the game, Buchanan served Gerald Ford briefly, then turned himself into a newspaper commentator rising with the Reagan tide. Oddly enough, as Reagan’s director of communications, he was indulged more as a sop to the far right than as a power broker. Nancy Reagan blocked his efforts to ratchet up the rhetoric on abortion and school prayer. One day chief of staff Donald Regan encountered the First Lady in a waiting room at Bethesda Naval Hospital, where the president was recovering from surgery. According to Regan she doubted Buchanan’s loyalty and considered his presidential ambitions ludicrous. “Don’t you let Pat have a single thing to do with writing Ronnie’s State of the Union speech,” she said. “His ideas aren’t Ronald Reagan’s ideas.”
Under the circumstances Buchanan’s dream of picking up Reagan’s mantle has not gone unchallenged. “Not the same mantle,” shrugs Michael Deaver, the Gipper’s old image man. Cynics think Buchanan is running only to improve his lecture fees. That’s not like him. More plausibly, he saw the vacuum left by Reagan and had the ego to think he could fill it, wangling the nomination by 1996 or winding up, even in defeat, as a significant, perhaps independent, force on the right.
Whatever the case, he is sure to have problems. It was Reagan’s genius to put a smile on the face of conservatism. Buchanan would restore the traditional nose out of joint. With communism out of the game, it is not unthinkable to propose reducing U.S. commitments overseas. Yet who but Buchanan would make “America First,” with its antique connotation of rigid isolationism and footsies with the Nazis, his slogan for the job? Still, Buchanan does come out of the mainstream of Goldwater-Reagan conservatism. If his base is weak, he is more limber than many neoconservative, paleoconservative and libertarian rivals. “He has evolved in a world where events have altered,” argues Bay Buchanan. “It’s difficult for some conservatives to change with the times and keep up with him.”
So what is it going to be with Buchanan: Pat the Hun or Pat the Huggie Bear? After spending 40,000 words in the National Review, Buckley concluded that he had said and done things that could be read as anti-Semitic. Buchanan denies it. He does admit that some of his newspaper columns have been “rough as a cob.” But he attacks critics who ignore all his qualifiers and then give him “a barbed-wire enema.” One moment he is charming, the next he is off on his latest tear about Englishmen doing better than Zulus in Virginia, or the need to keep the Judeo-Christian heritage from being dumped on “some landfill called multi-culturalism.” The lurches are not harmless. “To Pat, the diversity of America is not a strength,” observes Shields. That is the heaviest rap against him. And if Buchanan doesn’t come around on it, it’s hard to see how he will ever become president.
Photo: The politics of rage: Sharpening the debate where others would skirt it (ENRICO FERORELLI)
Photo: Hot-button wordwork: In New Hampshire: “I have been called an anti-Semite, a homophobe, a racist, a sexist…a social fascist…I am none of the above. –Pat Buchanan (ROBERT MAASS-SIPA)
Pat Buchanan yearns for a lost “world of clarity and absolutes” when America was God’s country, there was no conflict between nation and church and the moral dilemma of the conservative was to determine “the difference between being tough and being mean.”
