We are fighting in Korea so we won’t have to fight in Wichita, or in Chicago, or in New Orleans, or in San Francisco Bay.
— President Harry S Truman, 1952
Why has this tiny nation of 24 million people invested so much of its limited resources in acquiring nuclear weapons? North Korea is universally condemned as a bizarre and failed state, its nuclear posture denounced as irrational.
Yet North Korea’s stance cannot be separated out from its turbulent history during the 20th Century, especially its four decade long occupation by Japan, the forced division of the Korean peninsula after World War II, and, of course, the subsequent utterly devastating war with the United States from 1950-1953 that ended in an armistice in which a technical state of war still exists.
Korea is an ancient nation and culture, achieving national unity in 608 CE, and despite its near envelopment by gigantic China it has retained its own unique language and traditions throughout its recorded history. National independence came to an end in 1910 after five years of war when Japan, taking advantage of Chinese weakness, invaded and occupied Korea using impressed labor for the industries Japan created for the benefit of its own economy. As always the case for colonization the Japanese easily found collaborators among the Korean elite Koreans to manage their first colony.
Naturally a nationalist resistance movement emerged rapidly and, given the history of the early 20th Century, it was not long before communists began to play a significant role in Korea’s effort to regain its independence. The primary form of resistance came in the form of “peoples’ committees” which became deeply rooted throughout the entire peninsula, pointedly in the south as well. It was from these deeply political and nationalistic village and city committees that guerrilla groups engaged the Japanese throughout WWII. The parallels with similar organizations in Vietnam against the Japanese, and later against the French and Americans, are obvious. Another analogous similarity is that Franklin Roosevelt also wanted a Great Power trusteeship for Korea, as for Vietnam. Needless to say both Britain and France objected to this plan.
When Russia entered the war against Japanese in August of 1945 the end of Japanese rule was at hand regardless of the atomic bomb. As events turned out Japan surrendered on 15 August when Soviet troops had occupied much of the northern peninsula. It should be noted that American forces played no role in the liberation of Korea from Japanese rule. However, because the Soviets, as allies of the U.S., wished to remain on friendly terms they agreed to the division of Korea between Soviet and American forces. The young Dean Rusk, later to become Secretary of State under Kennedy and Johnson, arbitrarily drew a line of division across the 38th Parallel because, as he said, that would leave the capital city, Seoul, in the American zone.
Written reports at the time criticized Washington for “allowing” the Red Army into Korea but the fact was it was the other way around. The Soviets could easily have occupied the entirety of Korea but chose not to do so, instead opting for a negotiated settlement with the U.S. over the future of Korea. Theoretically the peninsula would be reunited after some agreement between the two victors at some future date.
However, the U.S. immediately began to favor those Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese in the exploitation of their own country and its people, largely the landed elites, and Washington began to arm the provisional government it set up to root out the peoples’ committees. For their part the Soviets supported the communist nationalist leader, Kim Il-Sung who had led the guerrilla army against Japan at great cost in lives.
In 1947 the United Nations authorized elections in Korea, but the election monitors were all American allies so the Soviets and communist Koreans refused to participate. By then the Cold War was in full swing, the critical alliance between Washington and Moscow that had defeated Nazi Germany had already been sundered. As would later also occur in Vietnam in 1956, the U.S. oversaw elections only in the south of Korea and only those candidates approved by Washington. Syngman Rhee became South Korea’s first president protected by the new American armed and trained Army of the Republic of Korea. This ROK was commanded by officers who had served the Japanese occupation including one who had been decorated by Emperor Hirohito himself and who had tried to track down and kill Kim Il Sung for the Japanese.
With Korea thus seemingly divided permanently both Russian and American troops withdrew in 1948 though they left “advisers” behind. On both sides of the new artificial border pressures mounted for a forcible reunification. The fact remained that much of rural southern Korea was still loyal to the peoples committees. This did not necessarily mean that they were committed communists but they were virulent nationalists who recognized the role that Kim’s forces had played against the Japanese. Rhee’s forces then began to systematically root out Kim’s supporters. Meanwhile the American advisers had constantly to keep Rhee’s forces from crossing the border to invade the north.
In 1948 guerrilla war broke out against the Rhee regime on the southern island of Cheju, the population of which ultimately rose in wholesale revolt. The suppression of the rebellion was guided by many American agents soon to become part of the Central Intelligence Agency and by military advisers. Eventually the entire population was removed to the coast and kept in guarded compounds and between 20,000 and 30,000 villagers died. Simultaneously elements of the ROK army refused to participate in this war against their own people and this mutiny was brutally suppressed by those ROK soldiers who would obey such orders. Over one thousand of the mutineers escaped to join Kim’s guerrillas in the mountains.
Though Washington claimed that these rebellions were fomented by the communists no evidence surfaced that the Soviets provided anything other than moral support. Most of the rebels captured or killed had Japanese or American weapons.
In North Korea the political system had evolved in response to decades of foreign occupation and war. Though it was always assumed to be a Soviet satellite, North Korea more nearly bears comparison to Tito’s Yugoslavia. The North Koreans were always able to balance the tensions between the Soviets and the Chinese to their own advantage. During the period when the Comintern exercised most influence over national communist parties not a single Korean communist served in any capacity and the number of Soviet advisers in the north was never high.
Nineteen forty-nine marked a watershed year. The Chinese Communist Revolution, the Soviet Atomic Bomb, the massive reorganization of the National Security State in the U.S. all occurred that year. In 1950 Washington issued its famous National Security Paper-68 (NSC-68) which outlined the agenda for a global anti-communist campaign, requiring the tripling of the American defense budget. Congress balked at this all-encompassing blueprint when in the deathless words of Secretary of State Dean Acheson “Thank God! Korea came along.” Only months before Acheson had made a speech in which he pointedly omitted Korea from America’s “Defense perimeter.”
The Korean War seemed to vindicate everything written and said about the” international communist conspiracy. In popular myth on June 25, 1950 the North Korean Army suddenly attacked without warning, overwhelming surprised ROK defenders. In fact the entire 38th Parallel had been progressively militarized and there had been numerous cross border incursions by both sides going back to 1949. On numerous occasions Syngman Rhee had to be restrained by American advisers from invading the north. The Korean civil war was all but inevitable. Given postwar American plans for access globally to resources, markets and cheaper labor power any form of national liberation, communist or liberal democratic, was to be opposed. Acheson and his second, Dean Rusk, told President Truman that “we must draw the line here!” Truman decided to request authorization for American intervention from the United Nations and bypassed Congress thereby leading to widespread opposition and, later, a return to Republican rule under Dwight Eisenhower..
Among the remaining mysteries of the UN decision to undertake the American led military effort to reject North Korea from the south was the USSR’s failure to make use of its veto in the Security Council. The Soviet ambassador was ostensibly boycotting the meetings in protest of the UN’s refusal to seat the Chinese communists as China’s official delegation. According to Bruce Cumings though, evidence exists that Stalin ordered the Soviet ambassador to abstain. Why? The UN resolution authorizing war could have been prevented. At that moment the Sino-Soviet split was already in evidence and Stalin may have wished to weaken China, something which actually happened as a result of that nation’s subsequent entry into the war. Or he may have wished that cloaking the UN mission under the U.S. flag would have revealed the UN to be largely under the control of the United States, which indeed it was. What is known is that Stalin refused to allow Soviet combat troops and reduced shipments of arms to Kim’s forces. Later, however Soviet pilots would engage Americans in the air. The Chinese were quick to condemn the UN action as “American imperialism” and warned of dire consequences if China itself were threatened.
The war went badly at first for the U.S. despite numerical advantages in forces. Rout after rout followed with the ROK in full retreat. Meanwhile tens of thousands of southern guerrillas who had originated in peoples’ committees fought the Americans and the ROK. At one point the North Koreans were in control of Seoul and seemed about to drive American forces into the sea. At that point the commander- in-chief of all UN forces, General Douglas MacArthur, announced that he saw unique opportunities for the deployment of atomic weapons. This call was taken up by many in Congress.
Truman was loathe to introduce nukes and instead authorized MacArthur to conduct the famous landings at Inchon in September 1950 with few losses by the Marine Corps vaunted 1st Division. This threw North Korean troops into disarray and MacArthur began pushing them back across the 38th Parallel, the mandate imposed by the UN resolution. But the State Department claimed that the border was not recognized under international law and therefore the UN mandate had no real legal bearing. It was this that MacArthur claimed gave him the right to take the war into the north. Though the North Koreans had suffered a resounding defeat in the south, they withdrew into northern mountain redoubts forcing the American forces that followed them into bloody and costly combat, led Americans into a trap.
The Chinese had said from the beginning that any approach of foreign troops toward their border would result in “dire consequences.” Fearing an invasion of Manchuria to crush the nascent communist revolution the Chinese foreign minister, Zhou En-Lai declared that China “will not supinely tolerate seeing their neighbors invaded by the imperialists.” MacArthur sneered at this warning. “… They have no airforce…if the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang there would be a great slaughter…we are the best.” He then ordered airstrikes to lay waste thousands of square miles of northern Korea bordering China and ordered infantry divisions ever closer to its border.
It was the terrible devastation of this bombing campaign, worse than anything seen during World War II short of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that to this day dominates North Korea’s relations with the United States and drives its determination never to submit to any American diktat.
General Curtis Lemay directed this onslaught. It was he who had firebombed Tokyo in March 1945 saying it was “about time we stopped swatting at flies and gone after the manure pile.” It was he who later said that the US “ought to bomb North Vietnam back into the stone age.” Remarking about his desire to lay waste to North Korea he said “We burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea too.” Lemay was by no means exaggerating.
On November 27, 1950 hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops suddenly crossed the border into North Korea completely overwhelming US forces. Acheson said this was the “worst defeat of American forces since Bull Run.” One famous incident was the battle at the Chosin Reservoir, where 50,000 US marines were surrounded. As they escaped their enclosure they said they were “advancing to the rear” but in fact all American forces were being routed.
Panic took hold in Washington. Truman now said use of A-bombs was under “active consideration.” MacArthur demanded the bombs… As he put it in his memoirs:
I would have dropped between thirty and fifty atomic bombs…strung across the neck of Manchuria…and spread behind us – from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea- a belt of radioactive cobalt. It has an active life of between 60 and 120 years.
Cobalt it should be noted is at least 100 times more radioactive than uranium.
He also expressed a desire for chemicals and gas.
It is well known that MacArthur was fired for insubordination for publically announcing his desire to use nukes. Actually, Truman himself put the nukes at ready and threatened to use them if China launched air raids against American forces. But he did not want to put them under MacArthur’s command because he feared MacArthur would conduct a preemptive strike against China anyway.
By June 1951, one year after the beginning of the war, the communists had pushed UN forces back across the 38th parallel. Chinese ground forces might have been able to push the entire UN force off the peninsula entirely but that would not have negated US naval and air forces, and would have probably resulted in nuclear strikes against the Chinese mainland and that brought the real risk of Soviet entry and all out nuclear exchanges. So from this point on the war became one of attrition, much like the trench warfare of World War I. casualties continued to be high on both sides for the duration of the war which lasted until 1953 when an armistice without reunification was signed.
Of course the victims suffering worst were the civilians. In 1951 the U.S. initiated “Operation Strangle” which officialls estimated killed at least 3 million people on both sides of the 38th parallel, but the figure is probably closer to 4 million. We do not know how many Chinese died – either solders or civilians killed in cross border bombings.
The question of whether the U.S. carried out germ warfare has been raised but has never been fully proved or disproved. The North accused the U.S. of dropping bombs laden with cholera, anthrax, plague, and encephalitis and hemorrhagic fever, all of which turned up among soldiers and civilians in the north. Some American prisoners of war confessed to such war crimes but these were dismissed as evidence of torture by North Korea on Americans. However, none of the U.S. POWs who did confess and were later repatriated were allowed to meet the press. A number of investigations were carried out by scientists from friendly western countries. One of the most prominent concluded the charges were true. At this time the US was engaged in top secret germ-warfare research with captured Nazi and Japanese germ warfare experts, and also experimenting with Sarin, despite its ban by the Geneva Convention. Washington accused the communists of introducing germ warfare.
Napalm was used extensively, completely and utterly destroying the northern capital of Pyongyang. By 1953 American pilots were returning to carriers and bases claiming there were no longer any significant targets in all of North Korea to bomb. In fact a very large percentage of the northern population was by then living in tunnels dug by hand underground. A British journalist wrote that the northern population was living “a troglodyte existence.”In the Spring of 1953 US warplanes hit five of the largest dams along the Yalu river completely inundating and killing Pyongyang’s harvest of rice. Air Force documents reveal calculated premeditation saying that “Attacks in May will be most effective psychologically because it was the end of the rice-transplanting season before the roots could become completely embedded.” Flash floods scooped out hundreds of square miles of vital food producing valleys and killed untold numbers of farmers.
At Nuremberg after WWII, Nazi officers who carried out similar attacks on the dikes of Holland, creating a mass famine in 1944, were tried as criminals and some were executed for their crimes.
So after a horrific war Korea returned to the status quo ante bellum in terms of political boundaries but it was completely devastated, especially the north.
I submit that it is the collective memory of all of what I’ve described that animates North Korea’s policies toward the US today which has nuclear weapons on constant alert and stations almost 30,000 forces at the ready. Remember, a state of war still exists and has since 1953.
While South Korea received heavy American investment in the industries fleeing the United States in search of cheaper labor and new markets it was nevertheless ruled until quite recently by military dictatorships scarcely different than those of the north. For its part the north constructed its economy along five-year plans and collectivized its agriculture. While it never enjoyed the sort of consumer society that now characterizes some of South Korea, its GDP grew substantially until the collapse of communism globally brought about the withdrawal of all foreign aid to north Korea.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, as some American policymakers took note of the north’s growing weakness Secretary of Defense Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz talked openly of using force finally to settle the question of Korean reunification and the claimed threat to international peace posed by North Korea.
In 1993 the Clinton Administration discovered that North Korea was constructing a nuclear processing plant and also developing medium range missiles. The Pentagon desired to destroy these facilities but that would mean wholesale war so the administration fostered an agreement whereby North Korea would stand down in return for the provision of oil and other economic aid. When in 2001, after the events of 9-11, the Bush II neo-conservatives militarized policy and declared North Korea to be an element of the “axis of evil.” All bets were now off. In that context North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, reasoning that nuclear weapons were the only way possible to prevent a full scale attack by the US in the future. Given a stark choice between another war with the US and all that would entail this decision seems hardly surprising. Under no circumstances could any westerner reasonably expect, after all the history I’ve described, that the North Korean regime would simply submit to any ultimatums by the US, by far the worst enemy Korea ever had measured by the damage inflicted on the entirety of the Korean peninsula.
Pat Buchanan won after all. But now he thinks it might be too late for the nation he was trying to save.
His first date with his future wife was spent in aNew Hampshire motel room drinking Wild Turkey into the wee hours with Hunter S. Thompson. He stood several feet away from Martin Luther King Jr. during the “I Have a Dream” speech. He went to China with Richard M. Nixon and walked away from Watergate unscathed. He survived Iran-Contra, too, and sat alongside Ronald Reagan at the ReykjavÃk Summit. He invaded America’s living rooms and pioneered the rhetorical combat that would power the cable news age. He defied the establishment by challenging a sitting president of his own party. He captured the fear and frustration of the right by proclaiming a great “culture war” was at hand. And his third-party candidacy in 2000 almost certainly handed George W. Bush the presidency, thanks to thousands of Palm Beach, Florida, residents mistakenly voting for him on the “butterfly ballot” when they meant to back Al Gore.
If not for his outsize ambition, Pat Buchanan might be the closest thing the American right has to a real-life Forrest Gump, that patriot from ordinary stock whose life journey positioned him to witness, influence and narrate the pivotal moments that shaped our modern world and changed the course of this country’s history. He has known myriad roles—neighborhood brawler, college expellee, journalist, White House adviser, political commentator, presidential candidate three times over, author, provocateur—and his existence traces the arc of what feels to some Americans like a nation’s ascent and decline. He was 3 years old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and 6 when Harry Truman dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now 78, with thick, black glasses and a thinning face, Buchanan looks back with nostalgia at a life and career that, for all its significance, was at risk of being forgotten—until Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States.
A quarter-century before Trump descended into the atrium of his Manhattan skyscraper to launch his unlikely bid for the White House, Buchanan, until then a columnist, political operative and TV commentator, stepped onto a stage in Concord, New Hampshire, to declare his own candidacy 10 weeks ahead of the state’s presidential primary. Associating the “globalist” President George H. W. Bush with “bureaucrats in Brussels” pursuing a “European superstate” that trampled on national identity, Buchanan warned his rowdy audience, “We must not trade in our sovereignty for a cushioned seat at the head table of anybody’s new world order!” His radically different prescription, which would underpin three consecutive runs for the presidency: a “new nationalism” that would focus on “forgotten Americans” left behind by bad trade deals, open-border immigration policies and foreign adventurism. His voice booming, Buchanan demanded: “Should the United States be required to carry indefinitely the full burden of defending rich and prosperous allies who take America’s generosity for granted as they invade our markets?”
This rhetoric—deployed again during his losing bid for the 1996 GOP nomination, and once more when he ran on the Reform Party ticket in 2000—not only provided a template for Trump’s campaign, but laid the foundation for its eventual success. Dismissed as a fringe character for rejecting Republican orthodoxy on trade and immigration and interventionism, Buchanan effectively weakened the party’s defenses, allowing a more forceful messenger with better timing to finish the insurrection he started back in 1991. All the ideas that seemed original to Trump’s campaign could, in fact, be attributed to Buchanan—from depicting the political class as bumbling stooges to singling out a rising superpower as an economic menace (though back then it was Japan, not China) to rallying the citizenry to “take back” a country whose destiny they no longer dictated. “Pitchfork Pat,” as he was nicknamed, even deployed a phrase that combined Trump’s two signature slogans: “Make America First Again.”
“Pat was the pioneer of the vision that Trump ran on and won on,” says Greg Mueller, who served as Buchanan’s communications director on the 1992 and 1996 campaigns and remains a close friend. Michael Kinsley, the liberal former New Republic editor who co-hosted CNN’s “Crossfire” with Buchanan, likewise credits his old sparring partner with laying the intellectual groundwork for Trumpism: “It’s unclear where this Trump thing goes, but Pat deserves some of the credit.” He pauses. “Or some of the blame.”
Buchanan, for his part, feels both validated and vindicated. Long ago resigned to the reality that his policy views made him a pariah in the Republican Party—and stained him irrevocably with the ensuing accusations of racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia—he has lived to see the GOP come around to Buchananism and the country send its direct descendant to the White House.
“I was elated, delighted that Trump picked up on the exact issues on which I challenged Bush,” he tells me. “And then he goes and uses my slogan? It just doesn’t get any better than this.” Buchanan, who has published such books as The Death of the West, State of Emergency, Day of Reckoningand Suicide of a Superpower, admits that November’s election result “gave me hope” for the first time in recent memory.
But none of this means he’s suddenly bullish about America’s future. Buchanan says he has “always been a pessimist,” and despite Trump’s conquest, two things continue to color his dark forecast for the nation. First, Buchanan harbors deep concerns over whether Trump, with his off-topic tweeting and pointless fight-picking, has the requisite focus and discipline to execute his nationalist agenda—especially over the opposition of a media-establishment complex bent on his destruction. Second, even if Trump delivers on the loftiest of his promises, Buchanan fears it will be too little, too late. Sweeping change was needed 25 years ago, he says, before thousands of factories vanished due to the North American Free Trade Agreement, before millions of illegal immigrants entered the country, before trillions of dollars were squandered on regime change and nation-building.
He has lived to see the GOP come around to Buchananism and the country send its direct descendant to the White House.
He’s not unlike the countless Trump voters I met across the country in 2016, many of them older folks yearning for a return to the country of their youth, a place they remember as safer, whiter, more wholesome, more Christian, more confident and less polarized. The difference is that Buchanan refuses to indulge in the illusion that a return to this utopia of yesteryear is even possible. Economically and demographically and culturally, he believes, the damage is done.
“We rolled the dice with the future of this country,” he tells me. “And I think it’s going to come up snake eyes.”
***
The living room of Buchanan’s home in McLean, Virginia, a wealthy suburb of Washington, could be mistaken for a museum. Between this wood-paneled space and his red-carpeted basement there must be 3,000 books on the shelves, meticulously categorized by genre, author or time period, a classical backdrop to Buchanan’s extensive collection of historical guns (including a rare replica of Robert E. Lee’s revolver) and a lifetime’s accumulation of family photographs, newspaper clippings, campaign keepsakes and miscellaneous relics.
His house is a monument to failed uprisings against the political establishment. Above the mantel rests a spectacular painting of Buchanan gazing out a bus window during a ride through scenic Iowa. Across the room, encased in wood and glass and standing some 4 feet tall, is the gilded pitchfork he received from “the Buchanan Brigades,” a group of campaign supporters, symbolic of his populist insurgency (and, unintentionally, of his paradoxical existence as a Georgetown-educated tormentor of the Washington elite). Resting on the coffee table is the most delicate souvenir of all, a piece of pristine stained glass gifted to him by a New Hampshire voter. The size of a nightstand surface, its craftsmanship is immaculate, with a dove’s red-and-white tail weaving through blue scrawl in memory of the year, 1992, and the motto of his presidential campaign: “America First.”
It all feels like ancient history, and Buchanan himself these days looks, well, rather ancient; the wrinkles run deep across his brow, and untamed wisps of gray hair shoot divergently from the back of his head. This aging exterior should not fool anyone. He is as mentally agile and rhetorically sharp as he was during his heyday on CNN and PBS, before the star commentator turned into a presidential candidate. As we talk for hours, Buchanan recalls those three campaigns—and the rest of his half-century in public life, not to mention his childhood, adolescence and early career—with a vivid clarity and a command of detail.
Buchanan has had plenty of titles over the years, from spokesman to candidate, but his favorite is historian. He cherishes history not just for its drama but for the lessons bequeathed and the parallels he can extract: the seductive appeal of populism, the rising tide of nationalism, the similarities between the current president and the two he worked closely alongside. Above all, Buchanan loves history because, in his mind, it contains our civilizational apex; he treasures the past because he is convinced that his beloved country, these United States, will never again approach the particular kind of glory it held for a middle-class family in the postwar years.
Such assured pessimism is somewhat surprising, given that Buchanan’s boldest achievement—and perhaps the most lasting aspect of his legacy—was being Trump before Trump was Trump.
“The ideas made it,” Buchanan tells me, letting out a belly laugh. “But I didn’t.”
There is some sad irony in the fact that Buchanan, whose vision is finally penetrating and driving the uppermost echelons of government, has seen his public profile diminished to an all-time low. This is somewhat intentional: Since being fired from MSNBC in 2012, he has hunkered down, content to make occasional Fox News appearances, write two columns a week for Creators Syndicate and spend more time at home with his wife, Shelley, binge-watching television shows such as “24” and “Homeland.” (“I dated a girl who reminded me of Claire Danes,” Buchanan grins. “She was crazy as a hoot owl.”) The couple doesn’t get out too often. They attend 9 a.m. Sunday Mass at Saint Mary Mother of God Church near Capitol Hill, then shop at their local Safeway and settle in for the coming week. They have an occasional dinner out at J. Gilbert’s steakhouse in McLean but mostly have simple meals at home; when it’s not Lent, Buchanan has two glasses of Grgich Hills Chardonnay each night. The slower pace suits a man who has battled heart problems and had several hospital stays in recent years.
His intellectual metabolism, however, remains turbocharged. After he walks a half-mile each morning around his neighborhood, Buchanan and his wife—Nixon’s former secretary, whom he calls “junior” and “kiddo” despite the fact that she is slightly older than he is—brew eight cups of coffee in a pot that is often finished by noon. In those intervening hours, Buchanan reads and annotates copious amounts of news; he begins with Drudge Report and AntiWar.com—two aggregators of reporting and opinion, one from the right and one from the libertarian-leaning left—before weaving his way, red markup pen at the ready, through the print editions of his five preferred newspapers: the New York Times, Washington Post, Washington Times, Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. (He used to read USA Today, too, but recently canceled the subscription.) This daily intake informs Buchanan’s well-considered stances on every current event we discuss during our conversation and provides fodder for his columns, which, however distasteful they may be to many on the left (and some on the right), cannot possibly be mistaken for material poorly researched.
Buchanan loves to write; he spends more time on his columns today than ever before, he says, about five hours on each one. The rest of his time, in recent years, has been consumed by books. He offered an ode to his former boss Richard Nixon in 2014 with The Greatest Comeback, an unappreciated tale of Tricky Dick’s political resurrection, and this May will release his 13th book, Nixon’s White House Wars, which is something of a sequel, offering a thorough and mouthwatering insider’s account of one of history’s most bellicose presidencies. “The first one had a happy ending,” Buchanan says. He shrugs his shoulders. “The second one, not so much.”
The path Buchanan took to becoming one of Nixon’s key loyalists was unusual, to say the least. Raised in a middle-class Roman Catholic family of nine children in Washington—back when the District of Columbia was “a sleepy and segregated Southern city,” he once wrote—Buchanan excelled in his parochial-school education and, despite an appetite for troublemaking and partying while he was a student at Gonzaga High School, he earned a scholarship to attend Georgetown University a few miles away. When Buchanan was expelled from Georgetown in his senior year for hospitalizing two D.C. cops during a traffic altercation that degenerated into fisticuffs, he and his father successfully petitioned the university to reduce his expulsion to a one-year withdrawal. Buchanan went to work in his father’s accounting firm during the suspension, began rethinking his life ambitions and, upon returning to finish college, decided to pursue a career as a columnist. (He had developed an interest in journalism as an 11-year-old boy, when he wound up in a full-body cast thanks to a football injury and spent four months doing nothing but reading newspaper and magazine coverage of the Korean War.) After Georgetown, Buchanan won acceptance to Columbia University’s journalism school, where he was surrounded by brilliant liberals who would go on to populate the nation’s most prominent newsrooms—an experience that shaped Buchanan’s distrust of the media’s objectivity. Upon earning his master’s, he sent out 17 job applications and fielded offers from three other newspapers—the New York Daily News, Charlotte Observer and Albuquerque Journal—before packing his bags for the Globe-Democrat, a conservative newspaper in St. Louis.
His break arrived quickly. After five weeks of reporting for the business section, an editorial writer position opened, and Buchanan never looked back. Three-and-a-half years later, in 1965, when Nixon came to town for a local party function, Buchanan cornered him in a kitchen and offered his services ahead of Nixon’s imminent 1968 campaign. “The Old Man,” as Buchanan still calls Nixon—“He was like a father to me at times”—hired him, and they became conjoined: Buchanan was a speechwriter, political adviser and special assistant in the White House. He gave famously defiant testimony in front of the Senate Watergate Committee and remained loyal to Nixon until the end, yet somehow emerged with his reputation enhanced even as, in his own recollection, “All those friends of mine went to the penitentiary.”
For all the comparisons of Trump to his own campaigns, Buchanan argues the more relevant parallels are between the 45th and 37th presidents. “They both confronted bureaucracy and a hostile media that hated Nixon and hates Trump,” he says. “The ‘deep state’ wants to break Trump’s presidency, just like it tried to break Nixon’s.” One difference between the two men is restraint: Whereas Trump appears consumed by “irrelevant things and peripheral attacks,” Buchanan says, “Nixon told me, ‘Don’t ever shoot down. Always shoot up.’” He lets out a sigh. “I feel for the guys that are in there,” Buchanan says of Trump’s team. “The problem is the president is distracted—and his adversaries know it. If I were them, I’d keep egging him on.”
Certainly, though, Nixon—and nearly every other former president—benefited from the absence of social media and the insatiable, 24-hour news cycle. Buchanan remembers his old boss occasionally calling him late at night, raving about some perceived slight and asking him to write and distribute something in response. By the next morning, Nixon had cooled off. “You didn’t do that, did you?” the president would ask him. (Buchanan recalls a former colleague once joking, “Watergate happened when some damn fool came out of the Oval Office and did exactly what Nixon told him to do.”)
Buchanan says Trump has “tremendous potential,” but adds, “This is my great apprehension, that the larger issues—the taxes, the Obamacare thing, the border security agenda, the trade agenda—could be imperiled by unnecessary fights.” He thinks for a moment. “It’s not a bad instinct to be a fighter. But sometimes you have to hold back.”
When it comes to Trump’s fight with the news media, however, Buchanan wants the president to keep swinging. Not only is it justified, he says, based on recent coverage, but Buchanan—a journalist by training—believes undermining the media’s legitimacy is essential to winning popular support for the president’s agenda. Here again, he speaks from firsthand experience in yet another American political war, the Nixon administration’s assault on the Fourth Estate. After the president’s November 1969 speech responding to nationwide protests against the Vietnam War was panned by all three major television networks, Nixon asked Buchanan to craft a memo detailing the president’s successes in his first year; instead, the young speechwriter advised the White House to wage “an all-out attack on the media.” Nixon liked the idea, but he didn’t want to be the messenger. Buchanan drafted the speech, and 10 days after Nixon’s nationally televised address, Vice President Spiro Agnew, an imposing figure who was then one of the most popular Republicans in America, delivered his now famous speech in Des Moines slamming “a small and unelected elite” who possess a “profound influence over public opinion” without any checks on their “vast power.”
It’s not a bad instinct to be a fighter,” Buchanan says of Trump. “But sometimes you have to hold back.”
Conservatives loved it, especially on the heels of Nixon calling them “the great silent majority,” a phrase Buchanan had coined. The entire sequence remains one of Buchanan’s career highlights—“it was a sensation,” he says of Agnew’s speech—and he says it holds important lessons for Trump. For starters, the president needs a strong and reliable surrogate. “Nixon would give Agnew all the lines he wanted to say, but couldn’t say because he was the president. Trump needs somebody like that—he’s doing it all by himself,” Buchanan says. He smirks. “Is Mike Pence going to do that?”
Moreover, Buchanan argues, calling out media bias has consistently worked in the 48 years since Agnew’s speech—and still does. “What we did was call into question their motives and their veracity. We said they are vessels flying flags of neutrality while carrying contraband,” Buchanan tells me. “And that’s a message that is still well received today, because people know it’s true.”
***
The architect of Nixon’s “all-out attack on the media” never strayed far from the media himself. He went on to became one of the best-known television personalities of the modern political era, a celebrity pundit who parlayed his popularity and visibility into a presidential bid two-and-a-half decades before Trump did the same.
After a brief stint as a holdover in President Gerald R. Ford’s administration, Buchanan returned to writing, pouring himself into a syndicated column that quickly became an acerbic must-read on the right. Radio opportunities weren’t far behind, and after five years of co-hosting a D.C.-based program alongside liberal journalist Tom Braden, the two took their act to CNN for an experiment called “Crossfire.” It was a hit, and so was “The McLaughlin Group,” an argumentative public affairs panel show that also began airing in 1982. Buchanan, suddenly the star conservative on two of political television’s premier programs, had emerged as one of the most influential media voices in the country. There was a vacuum of compelling content in those early days of always-on news—and Buchanan eagerly filled it with forceful opinions that were encouraged by producers who discouraged compromise and common ground. It’s the one element of his legacy to which he attaches some regret, repeatedly citing the poisonous tone of cable news discourse as a culprit in our societal and cultural disunion.
A decade after Buchanan left, the White House again came calling. This time, Ronald Reagan wanted him to serve as communications director. Buchanan had no choice but to accept—“the Gipper himself!” he recalls of receiving the offer—and spent two years, starting in the winter of 1985, steering the 40th president’s press operation. Buchanan sees fewer parallels between Reagan and Trump, though he offers two cautionary notes from his experience in that administration. First, he says, Trump must be “conscious of the coalition that brought him here” the way Reagan was responsive to the concerns of working-class cultural conservatives; Buchanan is particularly concerned that Trump, in addition to not following through on border security and protectionism, could hurt his own older and blue-collar voters with any type of dramatic health care overhaul. Second, Buchanan, in a nod to Trump’s testy public demeanor, remembers that Reagan’s famously sunny disposition wasn’t always on display—he just made it seem that way. “I saw Reagan explode a number of times in private. He was an Irishman, and you could see that temper go off,” Buchanan tells me. “But he never let the anger show in public.”
Eleanor Clift, the liberal longtime Newsweek journalist, first met Buchanan while covering the Reagan White House. “Everybody knew where he was ideologically,” Clift recalls, “and he was far to the right of President Reagan, and you could get him to tell stories about Reagan making fun of him and tasking him with selling things to conservatives.” She says Buchanan wasn’t much of a source for mainstream reporters because most of his energy was spent wooing the right. It was several years later, when the two began sharing the set on “The McLaughlin Group,” that Clift realized Buchanan’s gift for framing a political argument. “When he puts his analyst hat on, there’s nobody better,” she says. (Clift and Buchanan are in talks with television executives to bring “The McLaughlin Group” back on air, they tell me, but decline to elaborate.)
Buchanan was such a lucid communicator, in fact, that some conservatives wanted him to run for president. Having remarked shortly before leaving the White House in 1987 that “the greatest vacuum in American politics is to the right of Ronald Reagan,” Buchanan re-entered the media realm—resuming his roles on “Crossfire” and “The McLaughlin Group”—only to face mounting pressure from the right to enter the race for the Republican nomination in 1988. He ultimately declined, but published a page-turning autobiography in that presidential year, Right From the Beginning, that seemed a preliminary step toward a potential run for something, someday. The book is fascinating for its glimpse at Buchanan’s idyllic America, the earnest age of sprawling middle-class families and booming church attendance and fistfights at the local hangout after one six-pack too many. What it barely mentions, in making the case for a return to this safer and gentler society, are the dangers of trade and immigration—two issues that would animate Buchanan’s campaign against George H.W. Bush four years later.
“Between the years on ‘Crossfire’ and the years he ran for president, he was conservative but became very protectionist and nationalist, and that was of course a surprise,” Kinsley tells me. “The Republican Party stood for free markets completely and the Democratic Party stood for protectionism, and the idea that Pat Buchanan, who had worked in the Nixon and Reagan White Houses, would become an ardent protectionist was shocking.”
When I ask about the transformation, Buchanan tells me the story of his uncle, a Republican activist who hailed from industrial Pennsylvania, confronting him at the 1976 GOP convention. “Free trade is killing us, Pat,” he told him. Buchanan says the incident “planted a seed in my mind,” but that a decade later he was still an avowed free-trader working in the Reagan White House. It was the winding down of the Cold War in the twilight of Reagan’s presidency that Buchanan says refocused his attention away from international dilemmas and toward those at home. Free trade had never seemed problematic; nor had Reagan’s 1986 amnesty that legalized some 3 million undocumented immigrants. The more he studied domestic policy problems, though, the more convinced Buchanan became that the country needed a drastic course correction. “We had carried the load for the West all throughout the Cold War. All of these allies had been essentially freeloading off the United States,” he recalls thinking. “And I said, ‘If the Russians are going home, it’s time for us to come home and look out for our own country first.’”
His only regret is that he didn’t take up the fight sooner, when he could have had a greater impact, and maybe could have headed off some of the decline he sees when he gazes across the modern American landscape. “Look at Detroit in 1945 and Hiroshima in 1945. And look at the two of them today,” Buchanan says. “Something went wrong.”
***
By 1992, the evolution was complete—“I was a full-fledged economic nationalist,” Buchanan says—and his crusade against the embodiment of globalism, President George H. W. Bush, became a surprise 10-week proxy war for the future of the Republican Party. Buchanan’s allies held out hope he could pull a historic upset in New Hampshire that would throw the entire nominating process into turmoil. But they knew it was terribly unlikely, and were thrilled when Buchanan captured 37 percent of the vote, even though it was still a double-digit defeat. He wound up winning nearly 3 million votes nationwide against Bush, and though he carried no states, was invited to speak at the party convention. When he delivered his fire-breathing “culture war” speech, urging Republicans to “take back” the country from the alien forces of militant secularism and liberal multiculturalism, Democrats said it was proof of a GOP tacking hard and fast to the right. That was the whole idea: Buchanan, unlike Trump 25 years later, was a committed social conservative who saw crusades against gay rights and abortion as part of the campaign to restore his ideal America. But they also limited his appeal, and some in the party establishment hold a grudge to this day, convinced Buchanan scared off independents and jump-started the Clinton dynasty. Buchanan dismisses this notion, but long ago made peace with the fact that he would need to damage Bush in order to shape the future of Republicanism. “He wasn’t going to remove the sitting president from winning the party’s nomination,” says Terry Jeffrey, Buchanan’s research and policy director that year. “But the question was: Which direction is the party going to go?”
It was an open question in 1996, when Buchanan mounted a second and more viable campaign, this time against establishment favorite Bob Dole, as well as Southern son Phil Gramm and publisher Steve Forbes, among others. Doubling down on the nationalist rhetoric—which, unlike Trump, Buchanan continued to combine with heaping doses of social conservatism—he carved out his role at the far right of the field. Things looked good when he won a nonbinding contest in Alaska and even better when he upset Gramm in the first official contest in Louisiana. Dole edged him by 3 percentage points in the much-anticipated Iowa caucuses, but eight days later, Buchanan’s political career climaxed with a 1-point win in the New Hampshire primary. “We’re going to recapture the lost sovereignty of our country,” Buchanan cried in a victory speech, “and we’re going to bring it home!”
It was the closest he would ever come to the presidency. Buchanan won just one of the remaining contests as Dole coasted to the nomination. Four years later, Buchanan broke from the GOP after years of tension with its establishment wing and sought the Reform Party nomination. He won it, over the objections of some activists, but bombed in November, winning fewer than 500,000 votes nationwide. (Ralph Nader’s Green Party tallied roughly 2.5 million votes more.) Buchanan, however, once again put his imprint on history: He won 3,407 votes in Palm Beach County, Florida—a liberal, heavily Jewish community—thanks to the “butterfly ballot” famously confusing many voters. George W. Bush won Florida by 537 votes, and Buchanan makes no bones about what happened. “The Lord intervened,” he says, grinning. “We sunk Al Gore and won the election for Bush.”
Less memorably, the 2000 campaign also brought Buchanan into contact for the first time with Trump. The New York real estate tycoon and tabloid favorite was also mulling a run for the Reform Party’s nomination at the urging of Jesse Ventura, the former professional wrestler who had won Minnesota’s governorship on the third-party ticket in 1998. Trump never followed through, but true to the form he would display 16 years later, the future president took pleasure in brutalizing his potential competition. Trump devoted portions of a book to highlighting Buchanan’s alleged “intolerance” toward black and gay people, accused him of being “in love with Adolf Hitler” and denounced Buchanan while visiting a Holocaust museum, telling reporters, “We must recognize bigotry and prejudice and defeat it wherever it appears.”
The irony today is unmistakable. “What Trump said about Pat at the time is precisely what Trump’s opponents are saying about him now,” says Justin Raimondo, editorial director of AntiWar.com, who gave a nominating speech for Buchanan at the Reform Party convention.
His only regret is that he didn’t take up the fight sooner, when he could have had a greater impact.
Trump’s attacks stemmed from Buchanan’s suggestion in a book that year that World War II had been avoidable and that Hitler did not want conflict with the United States or its Western allies. Buchanan, who loathes international aggression—he vigorously opposed George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, further distancing himself from the GOP—has written and repeated similar sentiments about World War II over several decades, which, on top of his criticisms of Israeli influence over U.S. foreign policy, have led to charges of anti-Semitism. (Most damaging was William F. Buckley writing in National Review, shortly before Buchanan joined the 1992 race, that he could not defend his fellow conservative against such accusations. That said, some Jews in the media who are critical of Buchanan’s politics, including Kinsley, have defended him on this front.)
Buchanan has faced his share of critiques, but no one has hit him harder than Trump. In retrospect, it’s astounding that the man who used Buchanan’s playbook to win the White House had previously bashed him in the most ruthlessly ad hominem terms imaginable—yet Buchanan used his columns to cheerlead Trump’s 2016 candidacy from Day One. The explanation for this became clear once I accepted that Trump had done something entirely out of character: According to multiple sources, Trump called Buchanan out of the blue some five years ago, when the former candidate was a regular guest on “Morning Joe,” and apologized for all of the hurtful things he had said. “He made amends,” Bay Buchanan, Pat’s sister and former campaign manager, says of Trump. “Long before he got into the presidential [race], he reached out to Pat and apologized for what he’d done, realizing it had been wrong. … My brother is a very forgiving guy, and if someone asks for forgiveness, he’s going to deliver it.”
Buchanan himself refuses to comment on private conversations with Trump but does tell me the president would call occasionally during the 2016 primary to thank him for kind words during a TV appearance or make small talk about the campaign. Buchanan also says Trump mailed three “Make America Great Again” hats to his home—two of which he gifted to childhood friends, while keeping the other one for his extensive collection of presidential memorabilia.
“Did you ever offer him any advice?” I ask.
Buchanan begins to shake his head no, then stops himself. “I gave him some advice once,” he says, a smile spreading across his face. “I think he took it.”
***
Controversy has been a constant in Buchanan’s life, and will surely be part of his legacy. Buchanan, his friends say, suspected that powerful people at MSNBC were looking for a reason to fire him from the day he started there in 2002, reuniting with liberal commentator and former “Crossfire” co-host Bill Press for a similarly formatted program, “Buchanan & Press.” Ultimately Buchanan lasted a full decade at the left-wing cable news outlet before he published the book that would, finally, end his national broadcast career. In early 2012, months after Buchanan published Suicide of a Superpower, MSNBC fired him over provocative passages in the book relating to demographic change in America. Officials at 30 Rock were exceptionally disgusted with one chapter, “The End of White America,” in which Buchanan warned of the dire consequences brought on by what he had often called the “mass invasion” of immigrants from poor countries.
“Can Western civilization survive the passing of the European peoples whose ancestors created it and their replacement by Third World immigrants?” Buchanan wrote in his column the day of the book’s release, pre-emptively defending what he knew would be a polarizing thesis. “Probably not, for the new arrivals seem uninterested in preserving the old culture they have found.”
Of course, Buchanan’s views were well known by that point; he had presented identical arguments in several previous books, which explains why some of his highest-profile colleagues were furious with MSNBC’s decision. “Morning Joe” co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski issued a statement saying that they “strongly disagree” with Buchanan’s firing, and that his statements “should have been debated in public.” Chris Matthews dedicated a segment of “Hardball” to Buchanan in the wake of his dismissal, saying, “I miss him already,” and adding: “To Pat, the world can never be better than the one he grew up in as a young boy. … No country will ever be better than the United States of America of the early 1950s.”
Buchanan will go to his grave believing exactly that. He swears he has no personal animus toward people who don’t look like him; in fact, he says, the immigrant groups he interacts with in northern Virginia are “always smiling” and seem like wonderful members of the community. “Obviously they love America,” Buchanan tells me. “The question is, what is it that holds us together? The neocons say we’re an ideological people bound together by what Lincoln said at Gettysburg and what Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, and that’s what makes us one nation. But my tradition of conservatism says it’s not; it’s the idea of culture and faith and belief and history and heroes and holidays.”
He takes a long pause. “Can you have a nation that consists of all the people in the world—and be one people?”
Buchanan has spent decades researching and thinking and writing about the threat he believes recent immigrants pose to America’s identity, and he comes to the subject armed with reams of statistics and arguments grounded in his reading of history. There are three main problems with the latest immigration trends, he says. First, whereas the Europeans were “never going back” and therefore put down permanent roots, millions of recent immigrants in the United States hail from Mexico and Central America and have easy access to their original home. Second, the vast numbers of new arrivals are stifling opportunity and mobility for the waves of immigrants who came before. And third, that stifling of opportunity and mobility causes prolonged concentration in closed-off communities, which robs those immigrants, Buchanan argues, of the chance to work their way out of ghettos and assimilate into American culture.
“This is why we argued in 1990 for a moratorium on immigration—those folks coming in poor could have been like the ethnic Irish and Italians and German,” Buchanan says. Instead, “they keep coming, and now you’ve got 60 million Hispanics living here, many of them in enclaves that can sustain themselves culturally and economically and socially. And it’s like they’re at home. A little piece of Mexico has been moved over here. … You look at the 24 counties from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas: Are they part of the United States or part of Mexico?”
A minute later, Buchanan adds, “You think you can go to Tucson, to what they call ‘Little Mexico,’ and ask them what the Constitution says? You think they know what the Constitution says?”
Can you have a nation that consists of all the people in the world,” Buchanan asks, “and be one people?”
It’s this type of talk that has earned Buchanan the ugliest of labels—racist, bigot, xenophobe. He says it used to bother him but doesn’t anymore. “Everybody’s a racist. The curse words of the left [are] losing their toxicity from overuse,” Buchanan says. “Those accusations used to be cause for a fight. Now they’re just tossed out.” What’s interesting is that his many friends on the left have grown similarly numb to the hullabaloo. At this point, they are resigned to rejecting Buchanan’s views while remaining convinced of his inherent respectability as a person.
“I’ve learned to live with the fact that Pat has some very abhorrent views, which I strongly, strongly object to, while at the same time I know him to be a very good, very solid, decent man, who is loyal to his friends and loves his country,” Press, his former MSNBC co-host, tells me. “I know that may be an impossible distinction, but I really don’t think Pat has a racist bone in his body. I think he just gets carried away with his view about threats to Western civilization.”
Kinsley recalls his old colleague renting a vacation home on Maryland’s Eastern Shore that had an extra bedroom, where Buchanan could store boxes of books he would read while there. “Pat might be a nut, but he’s not a con man. Trump is both a nut and a con man,” Kinsley tells me. “You have to give Pat a certain amount of credit for intellect. He really thought through policy problems, and that’s where he’s not like Trump at all.”
Trump or no Trump, Buchanan has only become more alarmed about America’s political trajectory. The Republican Party is “running out of white folks,” he says, and historically immigrant groups have voted overwhelmingly Democratic. “If you bring in 100 million people and they vote 60 percent Democratic and 40 percent Republican, you’re buried,” Buchanan tells me. “What I’m saying is the America we knew and grew up with, it’s gone. And it’s not coming back. Demographically, culturally, socially, in every way, it’s a different country. And I think it’s come to resemble more of an empire than a nation and a people.”
Buchanan’s friends say that deep down he wants to be wrong about these predictions. And he admits that sometimes his pessimism gets the better of him: He never believed Trump would win in November. On Election Day, in fact, he bumped into Virginia Congresswoman Barbara Comstock’s mother at the polling station and suggested that her daughter would soon be running for higher office—to replace Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential nominee, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine. Instead, he found himself up at 3 in the morning celebrating, basking in congratulatory emails, and convincing himself that maybe, just maybe, America isn’t doomed yet.
“But this,” Buchanan tells me, “is the last chance for these ideas.”
