“Ideas rule the world and its events. A revolution is a passage of an idea from theory to practice. Whatever men say, material interests never have caused and never will cause a revolution.”
—Mazzini
My grandmother, the daughter of a Confederate “high private,” always said that if someone had done something particularly good, you could be sure he had Southern ancestry somewhere. I first heard this during the latter days of World War II in connection with General Patton, who at that time, with the help of a couple of uncles, was Clyde Wilson is planning to devote the second Tuesday in November to his compost heap. spectacularly chasing the Hun across his own territory.
Like everything else my grandmother told me, this has nearly always proved to be true. Therefore, I was not surprised to learn from Pat Buchanan’s memoirs that he—the favorite TV personality at our house—was descended from the Buchanans and Baldwins of Mississippi. In Right From the Beginning, Buchanan has given us a lively and good-spirited account of his background and early career, up to the time he went to work for Richard Nixon in 1966, describing by the way how he was on the “Right From the Beginning.”
Pat Buchanan is not ashamed of these Southern origins and knows that he owes something to them (would that a few more of his tepid fellow conservatives had the same Southern “Celtic” spirit), yet the predominant, immediate force in his background was the confident and principled Irish Catholicism of the post-World War II era. One of nine children of an uppermiddle-class Catholic family, Buchanan grew up in what was then the sleepy, decent Southern town of Washington (the one our forefathers called “the federal district”), a town which has now disappeared beneath the weight of the cosmopolitan capital of the flabbiest empire in world history.
His education was entirely Catholic (except for one year at the Columbia Journalism School), academically and morally religious, and reinforced by a robustly healthy and uncomplicated family life in which tradition, faith, common sense, and patriotism were reflexive values. To this he attributes his ability to cut through the multiplying webs of cant and pseudo-sophistication that tie down modern public discourse and to rely upon fundamental principles in his columns, speeches, and television appearances. For this we should be eternally grateful. Buchanan tells us that while serving in the White House he ghostwrote Nixon’s “Silent Majority” speech and Vice President Agnew’s famous illumination of the sinister power of the media. These, so far, were certainly the high points of American rhetoric in the second half of the 20th century, though they have as yet borne no fruit in policy.
Buchanan gives us occasional tidbits like these from his years seated near the mighty. His recollection of his first two meetings with Nixon, for instance, should be of interest to every future student of that phenomenon. However, those who hope for a political insider’s memoirs of 20 years (on and off) in the Nixon and Reagan White House—including the explosions of Watergate and Iran-Contra—will be disappointed by Right From the Beginning. That, Buchanan tells us, is for the next book. This is not a politician’s show-and-tell but a conservative’s Bildungsroman.
He does give us two concluding chapters of political prescription for the future, beginning with an account of his brief presidential precampaign in 1987, humorously entitled “Is That Churchill Under the Bed?” Buchanan withdrew, he tells us, because he could not hope to win and would only have detracted from the strength of Kemp and Robertson. Those words were written before Pat Buchanan’s beloved conservative movement was left with a choice between a Rockefeller Republican and a Ford Republican (both, as he comments in another context, cowboys who are all hat and no cattle).
I wonder if he thinks differently now? What might a principled and hard-hitting conservative candidacy have done to transform the campaign into something from which some hope or value might have been salvaged? Buchanan, it is true, has no political base in the traditional sense. He has made his career in the media, and as an appointed official in the executive branch. He does not come, except spiritually (which is after all the most important way), from the grassroots. It is amazing how old-fashioned and backward our political party system is. Our society is now almost totally centralized and consolidated in every sphere, and it is nearly impossible to rise or to have any influence unless you begin near the top, whether in business, professions, culture, or communications. Only in the instance of the political parties (and organized crime) does one still have to begin near the ward-heeler level to build a “base.”
Without such a political base, Pat Buchanan was justified in his hesitation. On the other hand, as he clearly recognizes, the key to political leadership today is communication. Buchanan is certainly able to communicate, not because of some magic articulateness, but because he has something honest and deeply felt to say (like Ronald Reagan before he began to sound like Ike or Gerald Ford).
He is probably the only person in sight who could really carry out his prescription for the next Republican President: to accept the need for a continuing principled confrontation with the media and their Democratic allies. We do not know if this will work because it has never been tried with perseverance. Why is it that whenever it has been tried and seemed to work it was hastily abandoned for a policy of “go along and get along”? That—the avoidance of principle except on the hard left—is, I suppose, a part of the much-touted “genius of American politics.”
These are my conclusions, not Pat Buchanan’s, but he ought to agree with them. He is loyal to his former bosses, Nixon and Reagan, a loyalty quite old-fashioned and commendable under the circumstances. I would not have it any other way. But it takes only a little reading between the lines to cull out of Right From the Beginning an indictment of stupendous and tragic failures of principle by these flawed leaders, despite protestations to the contrary.
Our era is not like the 50’s, he observes, rightly. “Our political and social quarrels now partake of the savagery of religious wars because, at bottom, they are religious wars. The most divisive issues of American politics are now about our warring concepts of right and wrong, good and evil. In a way the Kerner Commission never predicted, we have indeed become ‘two nations.'” Not much headway will be made, Buchanan implies, until we accept that. But, alas, it seems as if the whole history of American politics is made up of the avoidance of issues, not their confrontation.
If he ever had any future aspirations to elective office, he probably abandoned them with this book. Right From the Beginning is personally frank. Not only frank about youthful admiration for Joe McCarthy and Goldwater but frank about his own hell-raising youth and young manhood. Frank, but not graphic: ladies are referred to respectfully and mostly only by first names. I am nearly of Pat Buchanan’s age, and I find his hell-raising youth familiar and refreshing. Those of us who grew up through the 50’s and early 60’s can remember when hellraising was exuberantly barbaric and enjoyable, but not mean-spirited and decadent. Those days left a lot to be desired, but we are justifiably nostalgic comparing them with the pall that began to descend on American life when Kennedy and his “best and brightest” took over, shortly followed by the blossoming of drugs, promiscuity, and perversion. My chief regret is that my hell-raising career did not last as many years as apparently did Buchanan’s.
This is not a great memoir, but an interesting one that does succeed in invoking, vividly and memorably, a real segment of American life in the 50’s and 60’s. It ought to be enjoyed by those who had similar experiences and to have a minor but secure place as a historical document. We all know a great deal more than we need to about the heroic youth of that era and their noble struggle for civil rights, peace, freedom, snottiness, drugs, degeneracy, terrorism, and treason. It is good to have on record some account of those who were young in that day and on the other side of the barricades.
Pat Buchanan suggests that the young conservatives of the period can be understood in terms of the aftermath of World War II. I think he is right and would carry the observation even further. How we split in the 60’s depended upon which war we inherited. If our people were in the trenches (figuratively speaking) in order to make the world safe for decency, we became “conservatives.” Those from Washington bureaus who saw the war as a great social welfare project—to make the world safe for Eleanor Roosevelt and Uncle Joe—begat the radicals of the 60’s. James Could Cozzens foresaw it all in Guard of Honor. The same fault line decided Vietnam and will dictate the loss of Central America. There are too many Americans in high places who cannot accept an effective, reasonably decent, anti-Communist regime. They have to have an imaginary and impossible “democracy” in places where it never has nor ever will exist.
Perhaps Right From the Beginning was originally to be a campaign autobiography. If so, it evolved a great deal. It ends where such a biography would begin, with Buchanan at 28, about to start his career as a draftsman for the mighty. His last two chapters, however, appear to be a campaign platform, full of worthwhile plans for specific action. He is, however, neither shallow nor optimistic enough for the hustings.
He begins with T.S. Eliot’s observation, almost a half century ago now, that democracy is not enough. Democracy is fine and necessary (and the only possible arrangement for Americans, Mr. Buchanan adds), but it is only a method—it does not have enough content to sustain us. “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God),” said Eliot, “you should pay your respects to Hitler and Stalin.”
“The hard truth,” glosses Buchanan, “with which conservatives must come to terms is that the resolution of America’s social crisis may be beyond the realm of politics and government, in a democratic society.” “Democracy really has no answer to decadence. . . . ” “Naiveté is not our problem; the West’s problem is willful self-delusion. The reason that we do not learn from history is that we do not wish to learn from history.” No faithful reader of Chronicles will disagree.
Nevertheless, the government must do what it can. Buchanan proposes a 10-plank platform, which is as much populist as Republican, and therefore will never be adopted by any party politician. Aside from the balanced budget, much of it has to do with repairing the havoc wrought by the Supreme Court in the issues of unborn life, religion, reverse discrimination, and the like. The only social concern omitted is immigration. Yet Pat Buchanan should know that there is no point in getting tough with the Chinese government while they are busy colonizing our country.
Buchanan is ready to go for national initiative and referendum, repeal of the two-term amendment, and limited terms for federal judges including the Supreme Court. The standpat conservatives will be shocked by his willingness to push this program through a new constitutional convention. This goes against the accepted wisdom, but as Buchanan points out, all proposed amendments would have to be approved by three fourths of the states—as good a guarantee as we could hope for. I agree. Constitutionally speaking, we could not be any worse off than we are. The work of our Founding Fathers cannot be endangered by a Constitutional Convention. It has already been destroyed. Such a convention might work, especially if there were a concerted effort to elect decent citizens to it and to ratifying conventions—people who had not been previously corrupted by public office.
All in all, Pat Buchanan’s ideas would have made a great agenda for a Reagan administration in 1981—if there had ever been one.
[Right From the Beginning, by Patrick J. Buchanan (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown) $18.95]
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