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.

Historian David A. Nichols left out the real Joe McCarthy in "Ike and McCarthy." Read the Book Review on Amazon by Peter B. Hrycenko

Why would expert historian David A. Nichols in his “Ike and McCarthy: Dwight Eisenhower’s Secret Campaign against Joseph McCarthy,” avoid acknowledging the finest book ever written on McCarthy? That is M. Stanton Evans’ “Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies.” A slight oversight perhaps?

What about the vast liberal network of NGO’s, of Big Education, of Big Media that worked hand in glove with Ike’s liberal confidants to prod a Republican president to attack a great American patriot, a Republican champion in McCarthy? Nichols doesn’t bother with those important details.

Let me be clear; headlines of that day show many media and education people just the same supported McCarthy and his work. He would not have gained such power without them.

Before anyone endeavors to read the entire “Ike and McCarthy” hoping for historical truth, please start elsewhere. Yet I have some good things to say about this book as we go.

What we don’t read in the book is that McCarthy’s primary goal was to rid the federal payroll of Reds and fellow travelers which since Roosevelt were subverting foreign policy and ultimately empowering Stalin and Mao to imprison and kill our people overseas.

Consider the backdrop of McCarthy’s early 1950’s. Severe economic recession. A million casualties from WWII. A see-saw bloodbath in Korea raging, 37,000 American men and women to die, and another 100,000 wounded in a “conflict” we weren’t supposed to be seen as winners lest we offend Stalin.  Thanks, Truman-Acheson.

There were some men coming home from overseas, couldn’t find a job, so re-enlisted rather than starve.

These same Americans had been reading the newspapers and listening to radio. Nasty Joe McCarthy dared to expose the Truman White House, State and Treasury country-clubbers who created a policy of appeasement and squandered our wealth.

Nichols writes that the Left never forgave Eisenhower for defeating Adlai Stevenson in 1951.

Well, Eisenhower was a product of the New Deal Roosevelt-Truman continuum, a consensus man and he aimed to please. He could have run as Democrat or Republican, indistinguishable. He was drafted by the Establishment, the reluctant old soldier, and groaned throughout “Ike and McCarthy.” Surrounded by a staff of lib-mods with the best of intentions.

Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy burst onto the scene with his 1950 Wheeling WV about 57 red security risks in the U S State Department. Detractors to this day try to change 57 to 81 or 205, to confuse us. Eyewitnesses never recalled a number. There is no existing record of the number other than McCarthy’s personal statement. Two of those numbers originated in State Department security risk findings from 1946.

The State Department, later investigating itself – yes, investigating itself -- agreed in the end McCarthy was right and that State was loaded with subversives needing immediate attention.

Meanwhile, Democrat Senator Pat McCarran’s own committee would go over the same charges and more, forcing out 81 security risks from State by 1954.

A Truman-controlled Millard Tydings senate committee began an investigation that turned against McCarthy, slandering him, white-washing some big-name subversives, declaring there were no communists in government.  Maryland’s Tydings was soon voted out of office but not before the Democrats began an illegal overreaching investigation into McCarthy’s life that would go on for years.

 Nichols sets the tone in his Preface with “Beginning in 1950, Wisconsin’s junior senator, Joseph R. McCarthy, threw the United States into turmoil with his reckless, unsubstantiated charges that a variety of citizens, especially government employees, were Soviet agents. McCarthy’s disregard for the truth, his insatiable appetite for headlines, and his willingness to damage reputations turned ‘McCarthyism’ into an enduring epithet in our political language.”

He has it wrong. Not surprising, the last thing the Eastern Establishment wants broadcast is that Joseph R. McCarthy is truly America’s Cold War Conscience.

Biographies on McCarthy usually admit that McCarthy, on the social scene off the political stage, was liked by many, owing to his wit and surprising gentleness. Historian Nichols doesn’t mention that.

What historian David A. Nichols does abundantly reveal, most likely unintentionally, through many of McCarthy’s own words, is a shrewd and eloquent speaker with delicate humor, hardly a raving caveman. Something of a Patrick J. Buchanan of old White House fame.

The conventional notion, the news soundbite, that McCarthy called everybody who opposed him a communist is not true. On television and radio, he was clear to praise rank and file Democrats as good Americans in general.  Yet, like any fighting politician, he used hyperbole, particularly in response to vicious colleagues.

McCarthy ruined no innocent people. Rather, in his short time, he kept the nation safer. That’s why he carried the 50-29 Gallup approval into early 1954.

Real history now shows McCarthy was right.  We know this from the Army’s Venona ultra-secret decrypts of USA-Russian-Chinese cable traffic, Russian defectors, the FBI, a brief opening of the KGB archives, communist party escapees, executive session senate hearings releases. Further, a treasure trove of hidden notes and stories guarded by their retired US investigators came to light only a few years ago.

Pat Buchanan's cousin Meredith Gardner (far left) renowned code breaker

US government secrecy shrouded that extensive record, warping the vital understanding of our nation at war with communism.

Establishment types would have us believe McCarthy cooked up charges on the run. Hardly. Whistleblowers came to McCarthy. His subcommittee work -- which lasted less than two years and ended when the Democrats seized Congress in 1954 -- as well as the work of other committees like McCarran (who died in 1954), used carefully examined evidence covered up by the Establishment.

Regarding George C. Marshall, Eisenhower’s former mentor and boss. A number of observers have called Ike a “coward” and “yellow belly,” for several things,  most notably for not speaking up for Marshall.

On June 14, 1951 McCarthy in a rambling 70,000 word senate speech exposed “Yalta” Marshall for his role in giving Eastern Europe to Stalin and China to Mao. Right away, the news wire gatekeepers in The Swamp had in a number of instances passed along false reports on the speech, further outraging the American reader. Further, who would take the time to read the whole speech.

Yet anti-McCarthy historian Richard Rovere had to concede that most of it was true.

An absolute must read: to enlighten the public on the above, McCarthy spun off that speech with books “America’s Retreat From Victory” and “The Fight For America” which expanded the speech with superb documentation.  Of course, both books are out of print.

An open question: how many McCarthy critics have actually read the entire speech and the McCarthy books?

Russians in Korea

Facts are, Marshall was on the ground during the Marshall Mission to China, executing foreign policy, sabotaging nationalist Chiang Kai-Shek repeatedly and building up comrade Mao.  US Lend-Lease funds were going to the Russians, funding the Siberian Soviets who swept Manchuria and Korea. What a marvel to see the 1949 victor’s parade of Russian-trained Red Chinese, Manchurian, Korean and Japanese enter Beijing in US vehicles.

Historian David A. Nichols mentions several times Eisenhower worried about having mingled with communists in Berlin (after Patton was held back from taking it) after the war, with political insiders warning that McCarthy might use the red card on him. I don’t know what details Nichols had on that, he didn’t elaborate.

We do know by way of history, that Marshall was warned in early 1945 in a letter signed by 50 US military intelligence officers with rank of colonel and above, to not follow through with the then-secret Yalta accords which favored Stalin at every turn, including Manchuria.

Both Generals Marshall and Eisenhower executed parts of Yalta in 1945, Marshall in China later.

Eisenhower nervous? He was less than honest in 1945 to inquiries about the estimated 20.000 US servicemen and women then in Russian captivity. Again, not to upset the Russians. Reports from survivors decades later placed a number of the forgotten victims in Siberia having mined radioactive ore and mercury by hand.

General Eisenhower launched “Operation Keelhaul” which forced up to 4,000,000 anti-communist men, women and children mainly in Europe back to Joe Stalin at gun and bayonet point. There was even a bloody fight at Fort Dix and refugees were buried there. Although Marshall and Eisenhower were following orders from above, the record shows thank God that some US Army officers on the ground opposed it and rescued refugees by hiding nationality.

McCarthy talked about the war crime of Operation Keelhaul in his June 14, 1951 speech.

I had wanted to elaborate much on Nichol’s handling of the saga of the Chip Bohlen confirmation Ambassador to Moscow hearing before the senate. I’ll leave out extensive detail on what the FBI had on Bohlen which could have disqualified him. At the same time of Bohlen’s ordeal the State Department had quietly unloaded his brother in law.

Bohlen was opposed by former ambassador to Moscow, William Bullitt, and Arthur Bliss Lane, former ambassador to Poland.

Lane’s searing book, “I Saw Poland Betrayed: An American Ambassador Reports to the American People,” blasts Chip Bohlen in 1946 for pushing a $60,000,000 loan to communist Poland while the Poles were screaming don’t do it. Then it happened -- funding the hidden communist terror police (the mask came off so to speak) which committed mass murder in purging nationalists and deporting minorities to the USSR.

As one opposing senator Everett Dirksen said so well, “I reject Yalta, so I reject Yalta men.”

Edward Bennett Williams

Historian Nichols has another omission about as unforgivable as leaving out M Stanton Evans’ work. Little said about McCarthy’s famed attorney Edward Bennett Williams at the McCarthy censure hearings.

The senate kangaroo court was not a court of law. Edward Bennett Williams knocked down all the charges so there were none standing. After – yes, after -- the hearings concluded, the senate piled on one charge “conduct unbecoming” to make the “condemnation” stick.

Credit goes to historian Nichols for including, elaborating, on his source material that accidentally puts McCarthy in a good light. The networks grudgingly gave McCarthy airtime November 24, 1953, to defend himself against “Trumanism.” When, shockingly, Attorney General Brownell had exposed Truman, an accomplished liar, for lying about having appointed Soviet super agent Harry Dexter White to the International Monetary Fund ignoring FBI protests, Truman attacked McCarthy and the Republicans.

Here’s the best way to know the real Joe. Listen to the McCarthy speech take apart the lying Truman. Listen to McCarthy responses to Edward R. Murrow. Start with the Wheeling WV speech.

Inside those speeches, McCarthy points out unerringly in detail how the Communist Party and its organs made McCarthy public enemy number one. Establishment politicians sometimes incorporated the communist editorials verbatim in attacking McCarthy!

That Truman choose to not seek re-election in 1951 was largely influenced by McCarthy.

That the Republicans lost both houses of Congress to the Democrats in 1954 was largely attributed to the Establishment persecuting Joe McCarthy and trying to cover up for 35 red moles at Fort Monmouth complex.

Like Samson in the pagan temple, McCarthy took many with him on the way out.

Trump's ideal running mate: Pat Buchanan

A Donald Trump presidency would be defined by the company it keeps. Voters would expect his administration to deliver on immigration cleanup, America First economic nationalism, a re-evaluation of foreign aid and a reversal of the moral decline blamed on the Beltway critters. We could use a strong vice president to keep an eye on the chief executive. Somebody with solid right credentials, who knows the landscape, who can speak well with struggling Americans and help counter establishment attacks.

Enter my choice in Patrick J. Buchanan, a Republican icon and prolific commentator. He recently wrote that while the GOP appears headed for a train wreck in Cleveland, the principal ingredients of a Republican victory and a Republican future will all be present there: Ted Cruz conservatives and tea party types, Trump nationalists and populists, Rubio-Kasich-Bush centrists and moderates.

 

The big tent needs new acts and Buchanan has been working toward this most his life. He was a newspaperman championing the rising Barry Goldwater in 1964 when party leader lib-mods Rockefeller-Romney-Scranton withheld support. Out of the ashes of Goldwater's November defeat came the rebirth of conservatism. Buchanan as a speechwriter and adviser would go on to serve Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

 

I supported Buchanan in his three presidential insurgencies and remember how many conservatives were fearful of “wasting” a vote for an underdog. So look what we've had in office since 1992.