NIXON’S WHITE HOUSE WARS
The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Illustrated. 436 pp. Crown Forum. $30.
The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever
By Patrick J. Buchanan
Illustrated. 436 pp. Crown Forum. $30.
Patrick J. Buchanan is a merry troglodyte, a naughty provocateur. He still calls homosexuality “sodomy,” just to get the goat of a community he will only reluctantly call “gay.” He writes that he wanted to be named ambassador to South
Africa by President Ford so he could support the apartheid government. He thinks public television is “an upholstered playpen” for liberals. He considers “The New York Times” an epithet. His stump appearances in his outlaw 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns were a guilty pleasure for the reporters who followed him, a hilariously clever, and prescient, exhibition of right-wing populism. “Buchanan,” Richard Nixon once told him, “you’re the only extremist I know with a sense of humor.”
And it is Buchanan, not Nixon, who emerges as the central — and most intriguing — character in “Nixon’s White House Wars,” an entertaining memoir of that benighted presidency. Buchanan’s Nixon is a familiar figure: distant, awkward, smart, defensive and damaged, caring a bit too much what the Establishment — a word Buchanan uses frequently — thinks of him. The not-so-tricky president is a policy moderate; he has surrounded himself with brilliant, if mainstream, experts like Henry Kissinger and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. There is also a retinue of traditional moderate Republican aides like Ray Price and Leonard Garment, and technocrats like H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Buchanan, the house wing nut, finds all this moderation frustrating; he began as a peripheral figure in the Nixon White House, a political gunslinger perhaps a bit too hot for the high-rent nuances of governance. Over time, however, Nixon realized that the “liberal establishment” was unwilling to cut him a break — even as he created the Environmental Protection Agency and maintained many Great Society programs — and a gunslinger could have his uses. Buchanan’s pen provided the ammunition for Vice President Spiro Agnew’s attacks on the media (which seem downright civilized compared with current presidential standards). But Nixon sensed that Buchanan was onto something much bigger than vitriol, a new grand strategy for the Republican Party, a new majority anchored by the white working class, not just in the South, but also in the Northern ethnic, mostly Catholic, enclaves. This philosophy has been the driving vision of Buchanan’s life. It has made him one of the most consequential conservatives of the past half-century. Indeed, he’s a reactionary who was also an avatar: the first Trumpist.
Buchanan was born in Washington, D.C., in 1938, although his family’s roots are in Mississippi. He celebrates ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, but his most enduring loyalty is to the conservative Catholic Church of the 1950s — the church schools he attended, the Knights of Columbus, the Legion of Decency, Sodality and the Holy Name Society. His people are the white ethnic “unfashionable minorities,” as opposed to the “media minorities.” He was kicked out of Georgetown University for a year after a drunken fight with the Washington police: “I was ahead on points, until they brought out the sticks.” But he attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism — one of his few Eastern elitist credentials, which he used to become an editorial polemicist for the conservative St. Louis Globe-Democrat. He was astonished by the 1960s. Well-off draft dodgers offended him; the New York construction workers who beat up the protesters were his team. Teddy Kennedy’s ability to “survive” Chappaquiddick was a confirmation of Buchanan’s worldview. Nixon, he believed (correctly), would have been crucified if he’d done something similar. He and Nixon “were like working-class kids in an elite university who, caught smoking pot in the dorm, would be expelled and disgraced for life, while the legacy students would be confined to campus for the weekend.”
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It was the “legacy” students in the C.I.A. and on John F. Kennedy’s staff who had started the war in Vietnam — and “legacy” students who opposed it; the children of Irish pipe fitters had to fight it. Despite the war’s provenance, Buchanan was an unabashed hawk who believed Vietnam was necessary to stem the tide of Communism. He continued to believe this even as Nixon proved that Communism wasn’t monolithic by embracing the Russians in détente and going to China — Buchanan was along for the Beijing trip, appalled. Still, Buchanan’s assessment of the impact of the defeat in Vietnam on American society has real power to it: “The American establishment that led us to victory in World War II … would never recover from Vietnam, never regain the confidence of the nation. For Vietnam was not an unwinnable war for a country that had reduced the Japanese empire to smoldering ruins in four years. … The simple truth is the American establishment lost the war in Vietnam because it lacked the will to win it.”
This is where Buchanan’s philosophy begins. The country that Nixon inherited in 1969 was “no longer one nation and one people, but a land divided by war and race and culture and politics.” The Establishment was feckless, guilt-driven, hypocritical. Buchanan saw school busing to achieve racial integration as a domestic Vietnam. It was social engineering imposed by a liberal judiciary upon white ethnic communities — the Irish, Italians, Poles — who had nothing to do with slavery. Once again, the rich kids weren’t drafted to ride the buses. Buchanan advised Nixon that the administration’s position should be: “outlawing all segregation, but not requiring racial balance.” This line extends to affirmative action, which he calls “racial injustice.” These are the opening battles of Buchanan’s culture war. His case is primal and compelling. These issues are not merely about tribal racial prejudices; they are about class.
Buchanan’s political calculus is that the “silent majority” is larger than the “fashionable minorities,” who include violent antiwar protesters — nearly five bombings a day in 1971-72! — racial agitators, limousine and lifestyle liberals. In fact, the only real weapon that the counterculturalists have is the elite media, which he described, in a memo to Nixon, as their true adversary: “The Nixon White House and the national liberal media are as cobra and mongoose.” Does any of this sound familiar?
Nixon won the 1972 election in a historic landslide, using Buchanan’s strategy, but lost the war. Buchanan was boggled by Watergate, which he considered stupid. Why bug the Democrats when Nixon’s new majority is about to win bigly? Somehow he managed to skate through the scandal, compartmentalized, kept out of the loop, but asked for cleanup advice — and famously told Nixon to “burn the tapes.”
It is easy to be horrified by Buchanan’s gleeful excesses, but that is the reaction he’s hoping to elicit. Humorless upper-crust liberalism is the fattest of targets. Beneath the vitriol, though, Buchanan has spent his career raising important questions that our society has never seemed willing to discuss forthrightly. What should be the limits of identity politics? In a democracy, should courts or legislatures decide basic policies like abortion, busing and campaign finance? Should we trade the higher prices that will come from protectionism for the increased stability that might come from keeping more blue-collar jobs at home? These are the issues that Buchanan has been thumping for the past 50 years, and that Donald Trump exploited in 2016. They cannot be dismissed. We are, for the moment, living in Pat Buchanan’s world.
I have never read a book by Pat B that wasn't extremely interesting. But the best book was his autobiography "Right From the Beginning". It was an interesting, funny, and heart warming telling of his early life. Well worth it. On the darker side his "Death of the West" was an eye opener on the destruction of European America through immigration.
ReplyDeleteBuchanan opened my eyes to the Frankfurt School and the death of the west. Sadly our politicians are not aware of the evils of critical theory. They have been seduced, conned and bought. Witness the support this fraud Obama received by these people.
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