Patrick “Pat” Joseph Buchanan

• Patrick “Pat” Joseph Buchanan
• Born: November 2, 1938

Is a journalist, political commentator, speech writer, presidential advisor, and he ran for president three times. As the co-creator of two cable news shows, he contributed to the transformation of news coverage toward the adversarial and entertainment-focused shows of today. As a political operative, he helped develop a conservative nationalist rhetoric that was the precursor to the 2016 presidential election.

Patrick Buchanan was born in 1938 in Washington, D.C., to a middle-class Catholic family of nine children. Although money was tight for the children, Buchanan was able to attend college because he earned a full academic scholarship to Georgetown University, graduating with honors in 1961. He then attended the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia and received his master’s degree in 1962. After graduation, Buchanan accepted a position as a business reporter for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, a well-known conservative paper. He started as a cub reporter, but after five weeks of working there, an editorial writer position opened up. Buchanan became the youngest editorial writer at a major newspaper in the nation at just 23 years of age. He worked at the Globe-Democrat until 1965, when he met Richard Nixon.

In 1965, it seemed as if Richard Nixon’s political career was over. He failed to defeat Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kennedy in 1960 and failed to win the California governorship in 1962. By 1964, Republican activists associated Nixon with the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration that they claimed was too moderate and had let the Soviets take the upper hand in the Cold War. Buchanan saw something different in Nixon and helped the politician rehabilitate his reputation. He pushed for a job in Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign and crafted the populist rhetoric of the “Southern Strategy” for Nixon.

From 1969 to 1974, Buchanan served as a special assistant to President Nixon as a speech writer, writing some of Nixon’s most famous phrases. In 1969, Buchanan sought to find a populist phrase that would resonate with Conservative voters who were opposed to the social changes of the 1960s and the seemingly unending student protests. He came up with the phrase “the great silent majority.” As a special assistant, Buchanan traveled with Nixon on nearly all of the president’s foreign trips. He was with the president in China in 1972 when the U.S. restored diplomatic ties. After Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974, Buchanan continued in the Gerald Ford administration, but decided to leave after a few months.

After leaving White House politics, Buchanan returned to journalism and became a nationally syndicated columnist. He was a founding co-host of CNN’s Crossfire in 1982. He also co-founded the The McLaughlin Group, a public affairs show that also went on air in 1982. He was a host in the early years of cable news, when the industry was still trying to find a way to fill their air time. Buchanan’s aggressive, combative, sensational style drew viewers to both his shows. It was a style that was more entertaining than the serious tone of nightly news. Buchanan’s penchant for cable news and his enthralling delivery was telling of the future of the news industry.

In 1985, President Ronald Reagan asked Buchanan to serve as his White House Communications Director. He served for two years before leaving in 1987. After leaving the White House, Buchanan returned to journalism and became one of the most popular and widely recognized voices on the Right as a featured commentator in print and on television. Many Republican insiders began to suggest that Buchanan run for president. In anticipation for a presidential run, he wrote an autobiography called Right from the Beginning in 1988. He did not run in 1988, and the nomination went to former Vice President George H.W. Bush.

The Republican presidential primary for the election in 1992 would be controversial. Buchanan declared his candidacy and openly challenged the sitting presidential incumbent of his own party, believing that Bush and the Republican Party had strayed from their principles toward a globalist world where economic elites came before American citizens. He coined his campaign slogan: “America First.” Free trade, lower tariffs, and open borders were destroying America, according to Buchanan. He declared in a 1991 speech: “So today we call for a new patriotism where Americans begin to put the needs of Americans first for a new nationalism. . . . When we say we will put America first we mean also that our Judeo-Christian values are going to be preserved and our Western heritage is going to be handed down to future generations not dumped on to some landfill called multiculturalism. . . . We can win the future and we can hand to our children and grandchildren a country as grand and great and good as the one that was given to us. But, first we must take America back.”

Buchanan lost the Republican primary, failing to win a single state, but his insurrection gained so much momentum that he was invited to speak at the Republican National Convention in 1992. There, he gave perhaps his most famous speech in which he announced that while the U.S. had won the Cold War, the nation was now engaged in a critical “culture war:” “Friends, this is radical feminism. The agenda Clinton & Clinton would impose on America–abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat–that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God’s country. . . . My friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side. And so, we have to come home, and stand beside him. . . . we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country. God bless you, and God bless America.”

Buchanan ran for president again in 1996, taking Alaska, Louisiana, New Hampshire, and coming within three points of Bob Dole in Iowa. This would be the high-water mark for Buchanan’s presidential aspirations. He lost the primaries to Bob Dole and Dole would lose to Bill Clinton.

After failed runs in 1992 and 1996 and increasingly extremist rhetoric, Buchanan was not welcomed as a Republican insider. In 2000, he ran for president on the Reform Party ticket. In that election, Donald Trump, then a millionaire mogul with name recognition considered entering the race. The two exchanged attacks and insults and Trump decided not to run. Buchanan’s 2000 campaign was more than a long shot. It was a quixotic campaign with no hope of winning. He garnered fewer than 500,000 votes across the nation. But, the presidential run played a key role in electing George W. Bush. In Florida, an unclear ballot confused many older liberals in the Jewish community who accidentally cast their votes for Buchanan. In a heavily Democratic district, Buchanan garnered 3,407 votes, an unusually high number. Bush won the 2000 election by only 537 votes.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Buchanan was on the margins of conservative politics. While he continued to write commentary and give interviews in conservative organs, the titles of his books (Death of the West, State of Emergency, Day of Reckoning) indicate his belief that the nation was in decline, primarily because of demographic changes. In 2012, he wrote Suicide of a Superpower where he announced that nation was dead, done in by its own hand, unmade by its diversity. He wrote: “For what is a nation? Is it not a people of a common ancestry, culture, and language who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, share the same music, poetry, art, literature, held together, in Lincoln’s words, by ‘bonds of affection . . . mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living hear and hearth stone’? If that is what a nation is, can we truly say American is still a nation?” Because of the extremism of his views, he was dismissed as a commentator from MSNBC.

The Republican Party owes Patrick Buchanan a political and ideological debt. Buchanan penned the lines that resonated with their changing base, beginning in the late 1960s. He helped develop the rhetoric that made the Southern Strategy possible. After disenchantment with the Reagan Revolution and the Clintonian appropriation of economic globalization, Buchanan gave voice to the resentments of working-class whites who had lost their economic and social position. Buchanan and others helped transform the Republican Party from the party of cold warriors to the party of culture warriors. If Goldwater begot Reagan in 1980, Buchanan gave birth to Trump in 2016. As he told Politico, “the ideas made it, but I didn’t.”

Patrick Buchanan has written extensively. See the texts mentioned in the above entry. See also his memoir, Patrick J. Buchanan, Right from the Beginning (1988). For profiles of Buchanan’s later career see Tim Alberta, “The Ideas Made It, But I Didn’t,” Politico Magazine (May/June 2017), and Sam Tanenhaus, “When Pat Buchanan Tried to Make America Great Again,” Esquire (April 5, 2017).