Patrick Joseph Buchanan

BUCHANAN, PATRICK JOSEPH

Political commentator, White House appointee, and presidential candidate Patrick Joseph Buchanan is a leader of far-right conservatism.

From modest beginnings as a journalist in the early 1960s, Buchanan became an influential voice in the REPUBLICAN PARTY. He served in a public relations capacity under three presidents—Richard M.Nixon, GERALD R. FORD, and Ronald Reagan—before running for president himself in 1992. His hard-line positions on ABORTION, immigration, and foreign aid, as well as his battle cry for waging a “cultural war” in the United States, failed to wrest the nomination from George H.W. Bush. Buchanan tried for the presidency twice more, in 1996 and 2000, but again failed to gain support of his party. Often the subject of controversy for his writings and speeches, Buchanan is the founder of a political organization called the American Cause, whose slogan is America First.

Born November 2, 1938, in the nation’s capital,
Buchanan was the third of nine children of
William Baldwin Buchanan and Catherine E.
Crum Buchanan. He grew up under the resolute
influences of Catholicism and conservatism,
both the hallmarks of his father, a certified public
accountant. Buchanan’s brilliance at the
Jesuit Gonzaga College High School earned him
the honor of class valedictorian and a scholarship
to Georgetown University. In his senior year
of college, the English and philosophy major was
already developing the sharp, confrontational
style that would mark his professional life. He
broke his hand scuffling with police officers over
a traffic incident and was suspended from
Georgetown for a year. He nonetheless finished
third in his class in 1961. He received a master’s
degree in journalism from Columbia University
in 1962.
Like other conservative politicians of his
generation, notably Senator JESSE HELMS (RN.
C.) and President Reagan, Buchanan began
with a career in the media, which led into politics.
He spent three years writing conservative
editorials for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat
before being introduced to Nixon at a dinner
party. The politician soon hired the 28-year-old
as an assistant in his law firm. Buchanan wrote
speeches for Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign,
worked as his press secretary, urged him
to choose Spiro T. Agnew as a running mate,
and, after the election, became his special assistant.
This last position involved reporting on
what the news media said about the administration.
It was an increasingly thankless job.
Buchanan believed that bad news about the
VIETNAM WAR, youth protest, and the WATERGATE
scandal was the work of a biased liberal
media. He fought back, and is widely thought to
have written Vice President Agnew’s famous
antipress speech in 1969 attacking the “small
and unelected elite”whose opinions were critical
of the president.
Buchanan escaped the taint that brought
down Nixon, in part because he refused to help
Nixon aides in their so-called dirty tricks campaign.
Buchanan declined to smear Daniel Ellsberg—
the former defense analyst who leaked the classified documents known as the Pentagon
Papers to the New York Times, and whose
psychiatrist’s office Nixon aides broke into,
helping to set in motion the Watergate scandal.
In fact, Buchanan later strongly defended the
president and denounced the conspirators at
U.S. Senate hearings. This testimony saved his
career: he was seen as loyal and, more important,
as evidently knowing little about the vast
extent of the administration’s illegalities. Unlike
other Nixon insiders, he did not need to rehabilitate
his reputation after Nixon left office. He
remained in the White House under President
Ford until 1975.
Between 1975 and 1985, Buchanan established
a national reputation. He wrote a syndicated
column that criticized liberals, gays,
feminists, and particularly the administration of
President JAMES (JIMMY) CARTER. He also made
forays into radio and television broadcasting,
founding what would later become the political
debate program Crossfire on the Cable News
Network (CNN). He rarely pulled punches; liberals
and even some conservatives regarded him
as a reactionary, but he won an audience with
his appeals to traditional values.
Although he was earning a reported annual
income of $400,000 for his writing and work in
radio and television, Buchanan jumped at the
offer to serve as director of communications
during the second term of President Reagan.
The job was a conservative activist’s dream:
besides shaping Reagan’s public image,
Buchanan had constant access to the president’s
ear. Buchanan reportedly used this access to
spur Reagan on to taking tougher positions—
such as vetoing a farm bailout bill and lavishly
praising the anti-Sandinista Contra rebels fighting
in Nicaragua as “the moral equal of our
Founding Fathers.”
Presidential aspirations drew Buchanan into
the 1992 race.He was even better known than in
the 1980s as the result of his nightly appearances
on CNN’s Crossfire, where he sparred with his
liberal colleague Michael E. Kinsley. President
George H.W. Bush’s popularity among Republicans
was waning, especially in light of a sluggish
economy. Moreover, Buchanan offered a clearly
tougher platform than Bush, whom he considered
a tepid moderate. “It seemed to me that if
we’re going to stand for anything,” he told the
Washington Times, “conservative leaders had to
at least raise the banner and say, ‘This is not conservatism.’”
Buchanan’s campaign combined populism,
nationalism, and social conservatism: he advocated
limits on immigration, restrictions on
trade, and isolationism in foreign policy, while
opposing abortion rights, GAY AND LESBIAN
RIGHTS, and federal arts funding. As he always
had in his role as a pundit, the candidate provoked.
He ran TV ads featuring gay dancers, and
he toured the South criticizing the VOTING
RIGHTS ACT (42 U.S.C.A. § 1971 et. seq. [1965])
and reassuring southerners that hanging the
Confederate flag from public buildings was
acceptable free expression.
Buchanan’s critics did not pull their
punches. Liberals accused him of xenophobia,
racism, and homophobia. Conservatives sometimes
came to his defense, but not always.
Michael Lind, editor of the conservative journal the National Interest, wrote that Buchanan represented
“conservatism’s ugly face.” Charges of
anti-Semitism followed Buchanan’s use of the
phrase “Israel and its amen corner” in attacking
U.S. intervention in the Persian Gulf War, and
among those critical of him was the prominent
conservative author and Catholic William F.
Buckley Jr. Buchanan denied the charges: he said
he was being tarred for supporting John Demjanjuk,
who was accused, then later cleared, of
being the Nazi war criminal Ivan the Terrible.
Small flaps attended the Buchanan campaign
regularly—one day he was announcing
that English immigrants would assimilate better
than Zulus, and the next calling for beggars to be
removed from the streets. The most severe criticism
came in August 1992 after his speech at the
GOP national convention. First he knocked the
Democratic Party’s convention as a gathering of
“cross-dressers.” Then he called for a “cultural
war” in which U.S. citizens, like the NATIONAL
GUARD putting down the Los Angeles riots,
“must take back our cities, and take back our
culture, and take back our country.”
Typical of the liberal response was an editorial
in the New Republic criticizing Buchanan for
advocating “militarized race war” (Washington
Times 19 July 1993). Mario M. Cuomo, former
governor of New York, confronted Buchanan on
the CBS program Face the Nation, asking, “What
do you mean by ‘culture’? That’s a word they
used in Nazi Germany.”William J. Bennett, former
secretary of education, accused him of
“flirting with fascism.” Buchanan defended himself,
blaming secular humanism, Hollywood, the
National Endowment for the Arts, and public
schools for creating an “adversary culture” contrary
to traditional values.
Despite Bush’s winning the nomination
handily, Buchanan’s influence did not wane.
Two years later, the themes of his candidacy
found expression in the Contract with America’s
insistence on a constitutional amendment
allowing school prayer and in a call for a crackdown
on immigration. Moreover, in 1995, his
“cultural war” message could be heard from
nearly every Republican presidential candidate,
especially BOB DOLE. Meanwhile, Buchanan
announced a second run for the White House
campaigning on the same strong conservative
positions he had advanced in his campaign in
1992. Though he stayed in the race until the end,
Buchanan lost the Republican nomination for
president to Dole by a large margin.
In 2000, Buchanan made a third run for the
presidency running on the Reform ticket with
Ezola Foster, an African American woman.
Buchanan’s capture of the REFORM PARTY nomination
caused a split with supporters of party
founder Ross Perot who then ran their own candidate.
Both candidates did poorly at the polls
winning less than one percent of the votes.
Buchanan continues to be a prolific writer.
He has written numerous articles and writes a
nationally syndicated newspaper column. His
books include Right from the Beginning (1988),
A Republic Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s
Destiny (1999), and The Death of the West: How
Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions
Imperil Our Country and Civilization (2001).
Buchanan also remains a prominent figure in
the media as a commentator, and as a cohost
with liberal reporter Bill Press on their daily
program, which airs on MSNBC.

FURTHER READINGS
The American Cause.Available online at (accessed June 19, 2003).
“Patrick J. Buchanan.” MSNBC News. Available online at
(accessed June
19, 2003).