My book review of Patrick J. Buchanan's "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles that Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever"

Washington, DC, a go-go.

When are we going hear in the news about a call from President Trump announcing a Presidential Medal of Freedom, an ambassadorship to the Holy See, and an honorary day for Patrick J Buchanan as president flown in by Army helicopter to hold court in the Oval Office?

It’s the least that one could ask for America’s leading conservative, New Hampshire Primary winner, and speechwriter, special adviser, confidant to three presidents.

Patrick J. Buchanan’s “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles that Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever” is the continuing autobiography of Paddy Joe as much as it is Nixon biography.

Where can this dynamo with a weekly column, appearances, books, and Church life find the time to get over to a Wegman’s or the Delmarva?

My compliments to the book editors for its clean layout, ample and easy-to-revisit bold face subtitles, rising tension and nice wind-down as the story zips to the departures we knew coming.

“Nixon’s White House Wars” was neatly preceded by “The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority.”

Did you know?

Buchanan writes:

“On January 27 [1973], New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger, saying he had been looking for a conservative columnist for some time, announced he had hired William Safire of the White House staff. On top of the news summary item reporting the selection, Nixon scrawled, ‘H [Haldeman] & Buchanan – Safire a Conservative? Be sure to inform Human Events!’”

My thought: Safire wore it well. I for one saw him slip into liberal mode only once in a column.

Buchanan’s the man.

Buchanan as a father of modern conservatism was the beleaguered priest keeper of the flame inside the center of the world, the White House, itself surrounded by a mean, unsmiling, eastern liberal establishment that holds commoners in contempt.

He had a vision for Nixon and the country just as he does today.

The “Silent Majority” and “Southern Strategy” were Buchanan originals, leading Nixon by the time of the 1968 presidential campaign to capture votes of the many northern Catholics, blue-collar workers, and southerners outraged over an Asian war we weren't allowed or supposed to win, and the spiraling violent, leftward, hate-America tilt.

Buchanan -- who had stood aside Norman Mailer in Chicago -- eye-witnessed a sea of radicals attacking their fellow Democrats, Mayor Daley’s police, at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Buchanan himself many times faced  anti-war protesters then coming after Nixon who was just getting started healing the land.

Just before the “silly, unnecessary” Watergate break-in by a handful of Nixon people, Buchanan had strongly advised against doing it. (Then again, previous presidents had their wiretappers and bag men.)

For Nixon -- who in 1960 against Kennedy lost the closest presidential race of the century; lost the California governor’s race in 1962 and felt politically dead; came back to life to lose in the 1964 presidential primary but campaigned with abandon for nominee Barry Goldwater which would pay conservative dividends; then won at last in 1968 by driving a wedge between rad-libs and conservatives of the Democrat party; won reelection by a 49-state landslide in 1972; brought a conclusion to the Civil Rights era; bombed the hell out of Hanoi and VC sanctuaries to ease us out of the war; clamped down on organized anarchists; went on a journalistic and Agnew offensive against an increasingly hostile media – winning big should have been enough.

“Buchanan, you’re the only extremist I know who has a sense of humor,” said Nixon. Inside a White House surrounded by lib-mods he survived partly because most of the time he had direct access to an open-minded president.

Nixon most important political figure of the 20^th century.

Buchanan writes to us conservatives about Nixon: “He is not one of us.” A genuine moderate perhaps?

Raised in a liberal-leaning household with Quaker roots, Nixon, regardless of human inconsistencies, sought world peace through strength.

It was high stakes in 1948 while nailing Soviet agent Alger Hiss and a courageous Congressman Nixon of the House Committee on Un-American Activities would enjoy farmhouse conversations near Westminster, Maryland, with the ex-communist turned Quaker, Time magazine editor, the witness Whittaker Chambers.

Nixon used the “big tent” philosophy in place since Vice-President under Eisenhower (an apolitical Eisenhower by choice could have run as Republican or Democrat) loading up on liberals as well as conservative Democrats for campaigns and later administration. Henry Kissinger became Secretary of State. John Connally, Nixon’s personal hope for next president, Treasury.

Douglas MacArthur, we needed you.

Buchanan points out that the same crowd who got us into Vietnam tried to make it all Nixon’s war. Buchanan, as adviser to the president, wouldn’t have it. 

Nixon succeeded in massive US troop withdrawals at the same time he went big across the South Vietnam border into Cambodia and Laos by 1970 and cleaned out the VC sanctuaries. US special operations of course had already been slugging it out in those neighboring countries since the 1950's. (As a youth I remember the torrents of praise on the streets of Pennsylvania for Nixon. I recall his remarkable commanding image on TV using wall maps as he spoke to the nation.)

Vietnam veterans over the years I have heard question why we didn’t bomb out Hanoi and mine Haiphong much earlier.

Buchanan quotes Nixon in an interview, “I remember a conversation I had with [Johnson] back in 1969 at breakfast, and he was berating Harriman. He said, ‘That son-of-a-bitch Harriman told me twelve times when I stopped the bombing that if we’d only stop it he knew that the Russians would help and the Vietnamese would cooperate, and it didn’t do any good. Every single bombing halt was a terrible mistake.’” 

Too bad Johnson didn’t ignore Harriman after one or two halts.

Halt … mistake… Where else have we seen that series of Washington-directed slow-down-the-advance orders? With George Patton in Germany, Mark Clark in Italy, Chiang Kai-Shek in China.

Averell Harriman. Former ambassador to Moscow.

Harriman, at the Yalta summit sellout, alongside Alger Hiss and the enfeebled President Roosevelt had facilitated Stalin’s Far East expansion plans giving Stalin our continuing Lend-Lease foreign aid which also helped plunder Manchuria and assist Mao by the backdoor.

Harriman negotiated the 1962 Laos Agreement nonsense in which the US would respect "neutrality" of Laos and Cambodia while the US fought in the artificial country of south Vietnam bordering on the 17^th parallel (DMZ).

Red China opening 1972! Taiwan betrayed, again.

(How many plane loads of cash and bonds to Peking did it cost us?)

Buchanan, who was there:

“Believing we had thrown a friend and ally over the side to fraternize with enemies of all we believed in, with some of the greatest mass murderers in human history, I made up my mind on the plane to resign.” [Thankfully he didn’t.]

“Reading the joint communique Henry had negotiated, I was angry, disgusted and ashamed. In stating the US position, Henry had begun with such milquetoast as “No country should claim infallibility for itself and each country should be prepared to re-examine its own attitude for the common good.”

Look, I understand that when you stand in the light of great worldly powers, you can get giddy.

Nixon, theatrically not unlike Churchill at Yalta, toasted and said: “let us start a long march together. . .

There is no reason for us to be enemies. Neither of us seeks the territory of the other; neither of us seeks domination over the other; neither of us seeks to stretch out our hands and rule the world.

Chairman Mao has written: ‘so many deeds cry out to be done, and always urgently.  The world rolls on. Time passes. Ten thousand years are too long. Seize the day. Seize the hour.’

This is the hour. This the day for our two peoples to rise to the heights of greatness which can build a new and better world.”

If only The Monkees would have been there to sing Neil Diamond’s “A little bit me, a little bit you.” (Season 1,episode 31.)

Chiang Kai-Shek’s free Taiwan lost our US recognition as a sovereign nation. It lost its seat on the UN Security Council, was expelled from the General Assembly. 

Bring it back.

Nixon got us out of Johnson’s war, let Trump get us out of Nixon’s China “Frankenstein.”

With the coronavirus upheaval, now is the time to bring manufacturing home.

Get Buchanan over to the White House.


Abraham Lincoln would be proud.