{"id":126907,"date":"2017-05-01T19:35:18","date_gmt":"2017-05-01T23:35:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/buchanan.org\/blog\/?p=126907"},"modified":"2017-12-13T18:50:56","modified_gmt":"2017-12-13T23:50:56","slug":"pat-buchanans-white-house-battles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buchanan.org\/blog\/pat-buchanans-white-house-battles-126907","title":{"rendered":"Pat Buchanan’s White House Battles"},"content":{"rendered":"

By James Rosen at The National Interest…<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I DID not understand then, nor do I now, why we did what we did,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d writes Patrick J. Buchanan towards the end of Nixon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s White House Wars<\/a><\/strong>, the second of two volumes chronicling the decade he spent with the thirty-seventh president as a speechwriter, political adviser and confidant.<\/p>\n

In this instance, Buchanan was referencing a tactical blunder committed during Watergate, the denouement of the Nixon presidency. But the author\u00e2\u20ac\u201da pugnacious visionary who believed conservatives could recast the electoral map by peeling off key constituencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s New Deal coalition\u00e2\u20ac\u201dcould just as easily have been summarizing Richard Nixon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s five and a half years in the Oval Office, which repeatedly found Buchanan baffled by the steady leftward drift of a president he knew to be instinctually conservative. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Why we were doing this,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the author complains ninety-three pages earlier, about something else, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I did not know.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Time and again, as Nixon and his men deliberated the conduct of the Vietnam War and the threats posed by the radical Left, school desegregation and affirmative-action programs, Supreme Court nominations and Great Society funding, Buchanan struggled to understand why the Nixon he knew intimately from 1965 onward, the wily politician whose worldview aligned so squarely with the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Silent Majority\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of Americans\u00e2\u20ac\u201da phrase Buchanan himself had coined\u00e2\u20ac\u201dhad embraced the policy prescriptions of his political opponents.<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Why did the conservatives, who had so influenced the policy positions that Nixon had adopted during his comeback, fail to play a comparable role in the transition and the administration?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Buchanan asks. At one point, he even plaintively wonders \"The<\/a>whether the president and his key aides\u00e2\u20ac\u201dprincipally, Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman and domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman\u00e2\u20ac\u201dentertained an \u00e2\u20ac\u0153inherent suicidal tendency or death wish.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

This lamentation, exposing the inner workings of the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153troubled marriage\u00e2\u20ac\u009d between Richard Nixon and conservatism and drawing on a thousand memoranda Buchanan exchanged with the president, many previously unpublished, provides the chief value of Buchanan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s book. Witty and well documented, rich with insights into Nixon, the nation and a cast of colorful characters\u00e2\u20ac\u201dfrom Henry Kissinger to Hunter S. Thompson, Ronald Reagan to Coretta Scott King\u00e2\u20ac\u201dWhite House Wars succeeds simultaneously as history and autobiography, polemic and portraiture, elegy and entertainment. In this and the first installment of his Nixon memoirs, The Greatest Comeback<\/strong><\/a>, which chronicled Nixon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s wilderness years and capturing of the presidency in 1968, Buchanan has made an indispensable contribution to the literature of Cold War America.<\/p>\n

BUCHANAN\u00e2\u20ac\u2122S CONFLICT endures to this day. His dismay over Nixon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s liberal domestic policy is tempered by a reflexive impulse to defend the man, both because he had all the right enemies\u00e2\u20ac\u201dvirtually all of academia, the news media, and the civil- and foreign-service bureaucracies\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand because Nixon was subjected, across three decades on the national stage, to an unrelenting double standard. (Case in point: the same New York Times that in 1962 denounced publication of Cuban Missile Crisis secrets, to preserve \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the integrity of the National Security Council,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d could, by 1971, when Nixon and Kissinger were running the NSC, spend three months grooming the Pentagon Papers for publication.) Thus, Buchanan today can praise Nixon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153willingness to set aside political differences and past battles and cross party lines to select the best to serve the nation\u00e2\u20ac\u009d while deploring the fact that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153there was not an ideological conservative among Nixon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s West Wing assistants or Cabinet officers.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

The nadir of Buchanan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s disaffection was Nixon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s historic trip to China in February 1972. Traveling on Air Force One back from Shanghai, Buchanan read the communiqu\u00c3\u00a9 drafted, on the U.S. side, by Kissinger, and instantly became \u00e2\u20ac\u0153angry, disgusted, and ashamed.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I was ill,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he writes, over the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sellout of Taiwan.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d There in the aisle a shouting match ensued. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Bullshit!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Buchanan screamed at the national security adviser…<\/p>\n

Read much more at: The National Interest…<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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By James Rosen at The National Interest… \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I DID not understand then, nor do I now, why we did what we did,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d writes Patrick J. Buchanan towards the end of Nixon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s White House Wars, the second of two volumes chronicling the decade he spent with the thirty-seventh president as a … <\/p>\n

Read more…<\/a><\/p>\n

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