Buchanan, Patrick J. 1938- (Patrick Joseph Buchanan)

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Buchanan, Patrick J. 1938- (Patrick Joseph Buchanan)

PERSONAL:

Born November 2, 1938, in Washington, DC; son of William Baldwin (a partner in an accounting firm) and Catherine Elizabeth (a nurse) Buchanan; married Shelley Ann Scarney, May 8, 1971. Education: Georgetown University, B.A., 1961; Columbia University, M.A., 1962. Religion: Roman Catholic.

ADDRESSES:

Office—American Cause, 501 Church St., Ste. 202, Vienna, VA 22180.

CAREER:

Writer, columnist, political commentator. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, St. Louis, MO, reporter and editorial writer, 1962-64, assistant editorial editor, 1964-65; speech writer for Richard Nixon, 1966-68; special assistant to President Richard Nixon, 1968-74; adviser to President Gerald Ford, 1974; syndicated columnist and lecturer, 1974-85; commentator on National Broadcasting Corp. (NBC) radio, 1978-82; cohost of Buchanan-Braden Show, 1978-83; cohost, Crossfire, Cable News Network (CNN), 1982-85, 1987-91, 1993-95, 1999; panelist, The McLaughlin Group, NBC and Public Broadcasting System (PBS), 1982-85, 1988-92; communications director for President Ronald Reagan, 1985-87; moderator, Capital Gang, CNN, 1988-92; editor-in-chief, PJB: From the Right (newsletter), 1990-91; ran for Republican Party presidential nomination, 1992 and 1996; host, Pat Buchanan and Co. radio show, Mutual Broadcasting System, 1993-95; chair, The American Cause, 1993-95, 1997—; Reform Party presidential candidate, 2000; cohost, Buchanan & Press, MSNBC, 2003. Member, President's Commission on White House Fellowships, 1969-73; vice president, American Council of Young Political Leaders, 1974-75, 1976-79.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Named Knight of Malta, 1987.

WRITINGS:

Conservative Voices, Liberal Victories: Why the Right Has Failed, Quadrangle (New York, NY), 1975.

Right from the Beginning, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1988.

The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1998.

A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny, Regnery (Washington, DC), 1999.

The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 2002.

Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2004.

State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2006.

Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2007.

Also author of The New Majority, 1973, Barry Goldwater: The Conscience of a Conservative, 1990, and America Asleep: The Free Trade Syndrome and the Global Economic Challenge. Author of blog Right from the Beginning.

SIDELIGHTS:

Patrick J. Buchanan has long been involved in American politics as a media commentator, government official, and presidential candidate. His strongly conservative political stance—combining traditional social values, nationalist foreign policy, and protectionist trade policies—has led him to twice vie for the Republican Party presidential nomination and, in 2000, to run on the Reform Party ticket for president.

After earning a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1962, Buchanan began his career as a reporter with the conservative St. Louis Globe-Democrat. He quickly became the paper's editorial writer. At age twenty-three, he was the youngest editorial writer on any major American newspaper of the time. Although he was promoted in 1964 to assistant editorial editor, Buchanan left the newspaper in 1965 because his chances for becoming the newspaper's editor seemed to him to be years away.

In 1966 Buchanan arranged a meeting with former vice president Richard Nixon, who was impressed with the young man's political savvy and conservative outlook and hired Buchanan as an assistant. Nixon was then in private legal practice, working on behalf of others in various Republican Party campaigns, and planning a possible run for the presidency himself in 1968. Buchanan found himself on the ground floor of the upcoming campaign, for which he served as Nixon's speech writer. Following Nixon's election, Buchanan was named special assistant to the new president. In this position, he wrote speeches for both Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew, as well as serving as a campaign strategist in the 1972 reelection campaign.

In 1973 Buchanan was appointed a special consultant to President Nixon. He devoted his attention to the Watergate crisis, which revolved around alleged political sabotage in the 1972 campaign. He testified before the Senate Watergate Committee later that year. Buchanan was not accused of any wrongdoing by the committee members.

After Nixon's resignation in August, 1974, Buchanan worked for several months as an advisor to President Gerald Ford before moving on to become a syndicated newspaper columnist and lecturer. He has since become a familiar commentator on a number of television talk shows as well. In 1982 he became the cohost of the popular Cable News Network (CNN) television show Crossfire, a position he held until 1995. He was also the moderator for Capital Gang, another CNN talk show, from 1988 to 1992, and was one of the original panelists on The McLaughlin Group, a series which has been broadcast on the National Broadcasting Corp. (NBC) and the Public Broadcasting System (PBS).

On several occasions, Buchanan has interrupted his career as a journalist to re-enter the political fray. In 1985 he returned to the White House as director of communications for President Ronald Reagan. (Buchanan's sister, Angela Marie Buchanan-Jackson, served as treasurer of the United States during Reagan's first term.) He left again in 1987 to return to broadcasting, writing, and lecturing.

In 1992 Buchanan declared his candidacy for the Republican Party presidential nomination, running against President George Bush, who sought reelection. Campaigning on a strongly conservative platform which called for a scaling-back of American involvement in foreign affairs, curbs on illegal immigration, and an end to legal abortion, Buchanan called his approach "street corner" conservatism, appealing to working people who were dissatisfied with liberal programs and policies which cost jobs, raised taxes, and fostered immoral social behavior. In the New Hampshire primary that year, Buchanan won a surprising thirty-seven percent of the vote. Unfortunately for his efforts, that primary was the best of the campaign. With the loss of the nomination to President Bush, Buchanan returned again to being a television commentator.

But in 1996, with the Republican Party nomination an open race, Buchanan again announced his candidacy, facing off against frontrunner Senator Bob Dole. Appealing to those workers who had been downsized out of jobs during the supposedly prosperous 1990s, Buchanan called for stricter controls on illegal immigration, the enactment of stiff tariffs, and a stop to corporations closing American factories to open cheap-labor factories overseas. Free trade was a particular issue with Buchanan, who blamed an increasing corporate globalization for lowering the living standards of working Americans. This time around, Buchanan and his message won the New Hampshire primary and went on to finish second to Dole with three million votes.

Buchanan reemerged in 1999 as a candidate for the Republican nomination, but fared so poorly in a nonbinding straw poll in Iowa that he decided to rethink his strategy. By the fall of 1999 he had stunned his followers by leaving the Republican Party and announcing his candidacy for the Reform Party's presidential nomination. Founded by Texas billionaire Ross Perot, the Reform Party shared many of Buchanan's long-held beliefs, especially a concern with the damaging effects of free trade. Buchanan's move led to a months-long battle with Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, who led the Reform Party, and New York real estate developer Donald Trump, who seriously considered a run for the party's nomination himself. By February, 2000, Ventura had left the Reform Party and Trump had turned down the idea of running for president, leaving Buchanan as the Reform Party's most likely candidate in November of 2000.

But Buchanan's party switch had led him to make decidedly unlikely political allies, including Lenora Fulani, a Marxist black activist in the Reform Party who nonetheless shares Buchanan's resistance to free trade. The relationship is what David Grann, writing in the New Republic, called "one of the strangest couplings in the history of American politics." Emphasizing the issues of free trade and illegal immigration, and seeking to capture the votes of union workers and social conservatives, Buchanan's populist campaign attracted support from both the political right and left.

Over the years, Buchanan has detailed his political views in several best-selling books, including Right from the Beginning, The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy, and A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny. Buchanan's Right from the Beginning is "a memoir of his formative years, [and] explains how he came to be the man he is," according to Joseph Sobran in the National Review. Recounting his upbringing in a staunchly Catholic family, Buchanan reveals that the political, social, and religious values he still cherishes were instilled in him during his boyhood. "Buchanan isn't out to make converts or even to justify himself," noted Sobran. "He explains why he's a conservative, not why Ramsey Clark should be one too." Even his political opponents found Buchanan's memoir to be enjoyable. James Fallows, contributing to the Washington Monthly, described the book as "a good-humored, childhood-to-early-manhood memoir that humanizes the famous attack dog of the right, making him more understandable, likable, even endearing."

In The Great Betrayal Buchanan lays out his objections to trade agreements like NAFTA and the growing globalization of the world economy, while making the case for strong tariffs and the need for economic nationalism. Buchanan's book, according to David Corn in the Nation, "opens with a volley of buckshot-stats exposing the dark underside of the supposedly rip-roaring U.S. economy." Average American wages have fallen in recent decades, Buchanan argues, partly because many American jobs have been sent overseas to be done at lower wages, while free trade allows products made in foreign countries by cheap labor to compete unfairly with American-made goods. Buchanan's book calls for American corporations to keep their factories in America and for the establishment of trade barriers to shut out cheap foreign products. Corn called The Great Betrayal "a hard-edged volume loaded with populist invective."

While Buchanan tackled the issue of trade in The Great Betrayal, in his A Republic, Not an Empire he examines American foreign policy, arguing for a more isolationist role which would keep America from getting entangled in foreign wars. Booklist critic Ray Olson explained that "Buchanan urges that self-interest drive U.S. foreign policy." Among the book's suggestions are for America to stop defending allies wealthy enough to take care of themselves, focus its military efforts on defending American borders, and avoid involvement in foreign wars with little or no direct impact on American vital interests. "Buchanan makes a stirring and entertaining argument," noted a critic for Publishers Weekly. But Andrew J. Bacevich, writing in the National Review, while agreeing with much that Buchanan presents, nonetheless found that since America has accepted a global role, "we cannot simply quit as if walking away from an irksome summer job." More negative is John B. Judis, writing in the New York Times Book Review, who claimed to find "a dark side to Buchanan's politics and view of history." Olson summed up: "With his vivid columnist's prose, [Buchanan] produces a read as riveting as it is provocative."

Buchanan continues to focus on American foreign policy in his 2004 title, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency. Here Buchanan argues that the neoconservatives in the Republican party turned the Bush presidency from traditional Goldwater and Reagan conservatism into a more Wilsonian internationalism. Buchanan even questions Bush's "war on terror" as a manifestation of a new trend toward imperialism by the United States.

With the 2006 work, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, Buchanan turns his attention to immigration, contending that the "West is nearing death by drowning under a torrent of non-Westerners," as Booklist contributor Ray Olson noted. Buchanan holds up the example of Europe as a cautionary tale, arguing that the new immigrant class in the United States is not integrating into "American" culture, with disastrous socially fragmenting results. Paul Gottfried, writing in National Observer—Australia and World Affairs, termed the book "an exhaustively documented and historically contextualised brief," as well as "a factually compelling case against America's present immigration practices."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd edition, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Grant, George, Buchanan: Caught in the Crossfire, Thomas Nelson (Nashville, TN), 1996.

Newsmakers 1996, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1997.

PERIODICALS

American Spectator, August, 1988, review of Right from the Beginning, p. 46.

Booklist, August, 1999, Ray Olson, review of A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny, p. 1980; September 1, 2006, Ray Olson, review of State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, p. 26.

Business Week, April 6, 1998, review of The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy, p. 18.

Challenge, November-December, 1998, Murray L. Weidenbaum, review of The Great Betrayal, p. 121.

Commentary, June, 1988, review of Right from the Beginning, p. 62; December, 1999, Gabriel Schoenfeld, "Buchanan as Historian," p. 54.

Economist, September 12, 1998, review of The Great Betrayal, p. 10.

Foreign Affairs, July, 1998, review of The Great Betrayal, p. 120.

Human Events, April 30, 1988, review of Right from the Beginning, p. 12.

Insight on the News, February 9, 1998, James P. Lucier, "Whether Talk Host or Candidate, Buchanan Seeks Middle America," p. 22.

Library Journal, November 1, 1975, Kenneth F. Kister, review of Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories, p. 2057.

Nation, May 25, 1998, David Corn, review of The Great Betrayal, p. 25; September 20, 1999, Doug Ireland and Micah L. Sifry, "Buchanan Breaks Ranks," p. 5; November 1, 1999, Bruce Shapiro, "Buchanan-Fulani: New Team?," p. 21; November 22, 1999, Monte Paulsen, "How Pat and Bay Built an Empire on Our Money—Buchanan Inc.," p. 11; March 6, 2000, Doug Ireland, "Party of One," p. 8.

National Observer—Australia and World Affairs, spring, 2006, Paul Gottfried, review of State of Emergency, p. 61.

National Review, March 19, 1976, Kevin Lynch, "Attack!," pp. 282-283; July 8, 1988, Joseph Sobran, review of Right from the Beginning, p. 44; October 11, 1999, Andrew J. Bacevich, "Nativist Son," p. 58; October 11, 1999, Ramesh Ponnuru, "A Conservative No More: The Tribal Politics of Pat Buchanan," p. 34; October 25, 1999, Lance Morrow, "The Brawlers: Ventura, Buchanan, and America," p. 20.

New Republic, May 2, 1988, Garry Wills, review of Right from the Beginning, p. 32; June 22, 1998, Robert J. Samuelson, review of The Great Betrayal, p. 27; December 13, 1999, David Grann, "What You Don't Know about Lenora Fulani Could Hurt You: Coming Soon to a Presidential Campaign Near You," p. 20.

Newsweek, February 21, 2000, Matt Bai, "‘The Body’ Slams His Party: Ventura Storms out, Leaving Buchanan as the Front Runner in a Deeply Divided Reform Movement," p. 28.

New York Times Book Review, November 23, 1976, William V. Shannon, review of Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories, p. 4; October 3, 1999, John B. Judis, "The Buchanan Doctrine," p. 16.

Publishers Weekly, July 26, 1999, review of A Republic, Not an Empire, p. 70.

Reason, July, 1998, Brink Lindsey, review of The Great Betrayal, p. 62; December, 1999, Virginia Postrel, "Reactionary Running Mates," p. 4.

Reference & Research Book News, November, 2005, review of Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency.

Time, February 26, 1996, Richard Stengel Littleton, "The Making of Pat Buchanan," p. 32.

Washington Monthly, April, 1988, James Fallows, review of Right from the Beginning, p. 42.

Washington Post, September 25, 2006, Steven A. Holmes, review of State of Emergency, p. A19.