[The Watergate Committee’s] public death blow was dealt by Pat Buchanan.

—RICHARD NIXON, 1978

Buchanan routed his interrogators with a hitherto unmatched display of bravado and cynicism.

—JOHN OSBORNE, The New Republic, October 20, 1973

In mid-August 1973, I got a call from the Watergate Committee. They wanted to interview me. A White House lawyer accompanied me to the Hill, where I was interrogated in a basement office by Terry Lenzner, the deputy to Chief Counsel Sam Dash, and by Dash himself. It was a long and contentious session and, at its end, I asked Lenzner if the handful of memos we had discussed were all he had. He said they were. It was not more than half a dozen. On the way back to the White House I asked the lawyer how I had done. You told them too much, he said. The lawyer had not interrupted me once to say I did not have to answer.

Suddenly, in mid-September, the networks and front page of the Post and a dozen other major newspapers, including the New York Times, blossomed with stories about how Nixon speechwriter and confidant Patrick Buchanan had been the “architect” of the White House dirty tricks strategy, and would appear in public testimony the following week. Surely the work of my basement inquisitors, this was a hatchet job to smear me before I appeared before the committee.

The smear succeeded. Four days after the story broke alleging I was the architect of the sabotage and dirty tricks of 1972, Kissinger was to be sworn in as secretary of state in the East Room by Chief Justice Burger. The President was to speak. Arriving early with Shelley to get a good seat, I noticed we were being shunned by guests and staff. Only John Whitaker, an old Nixon hand, now number two at Interior, walked over to sit with us. Another friend noticed, walked over, sat down, and began to chat—the new senator from North Carolina, Jesse Helms, and the gesture was in character. “Count your friends when you’re down,” Nixon had often told me.

I also had reason to believe the committee staff had lied to me about how many memos of mine they were holding. For my memos to Nixon, Haldeman, and Mitchell dealing with campaign strategy and tactics had been sent on to Magruder and CRP, and then on to the archives where the committee had accessed them. The archives sent me copies of the memos copied by the committee aides.

I was forewarned. And as I had written these memos, I had to know them better than any senator on the committee or staff member, who could not conceivably have devoted the scores of hours to studying them as I had to writing them. They were going to be interrogating me—about a textbook I had written. The night before I was to testify, minority counsel Fred Thompson called and read off the titles of all the memos to be used against me. There were dozens. But all Fred had to do was mention a memo, and I recalled it. At one point, he began to read from a memo from Buchanan to Haldeman and Ehrlichman, congratulating them on a successful break-in. We got a laugh out of that one. As Fred talked, I sat on the kitchen floor sipping Scotch.

Rather than take a lawyer with me, I asked brother Crick to come down to my apartment at 6 a.m., and we would go to the White House for breakfast, and from there to the Watergate Committee. I had him sit behind me, rather than beside me, as lawyers for Watergate witnesses did. I thought that the presence next to me of someone who appeared to be a lawyer would suggest to a national television audience that I needed legal assistance or had something to hide.

The Watergate Committee met in the Caucus Room of the Old Senate Office Building, which had just been renamed for Senator Richard Russell. This was the room where the Teapot Dome and Army-McCarthy hearings had been held, and where John F. Kennedy had declared for president. After being sworn in by Senator Sam Ervin, I read an opening statement that began with a counterattack on the committee staffers who had leaked the false and derogatory information:

In the hours immediately following my well-publicized invitation there appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune, and on the national networks, separate stories all attributed to committee sources alleging that I was the architect of a campaign of political espionage or dirty tricks….

In the Times the charge was that the committee had a series of Buchanan memorandums suggesting “political espionage and sabotage….”

One wire service stated that Mr. Buchanan would be questioned about “blueprints and plans concerning the scandal.”

In the Chicago Tribune, the headline read “Nixon Speechwriter Blamed for Muskie Plot.” The story read, and I quote: “Senate investigators have evidence that Patrick J. Buchanan, one of President Nixon’s favorite speech writers, was the secret author of a political sabotage scheme.”

In the Baltimore Sun, under a major front page headline reading: “Buchanan linked to 1972 Dirty Tricks,” the story ran thus:

“Patrick J. Buchanan, a Presidential consultant, may emerge as yet another architect of the 1972 dirty tricks strategy, according to congressional sources.”

Following this recitation, I spoke directly to Senator Ervin:

Mr. Chairman, this covert campaign of vilification carried on by staff members of your committee is in direct violation of rule 40 of the Rules of Procedure for the Select Committee….

So it seems fair to me to ask how can this Select Committee set itself up as the ultimate arbiter of American political ethics if it cannot even control the character assassination in its own ranks.

My statement went on to concede that while we had targeted Senator Muskie and concentrated our resources against him, that was not why he had lost his party’s nomination:

Senator McGovern was nominated because his men wrote the rulebook; his men were in the field earliest and worked hardest; his campaign was precisely targeted on the primaries they could win, and because he was possessed of the best political organization the Democratic Party has seen in at least a dozen years….

The McGovern people won their own nomination—and they lost their own election.

As for the “dirty tricks” of the campaign of 1972, I quoted Theodore H. White, who had written that they had had “the weight of a feather.”

When I finished my statement, Chief Counsel Sam Dash deplored the leaks and said, “I know of no staff member who has done it….” After the chairman and Senator Baker also deplored the leaks, there began the first two hours of questioning by Professor Dash. I sensed that I had won the first set six–love. We had put Dash on the defensive. He began his questioning by referring me to a large pile of memoranda on the table in front of me. Expressing astonishment, I went back on the attack:

Mr. Dash….The other night, when I had my discussion with you and Mr. Lenzner, I asked you candidly, at that time, if there were any memorandums in your possession which I could look at and study in preparation for discussion before this committee. You and Mr. Lenzner showed me something like, somewhere between 4 and 6 memorandums. There are a good deal more than 4 or 6 memorandums here. There are dozens of them of tremendous length….

Mr. Dash, I don’t think I need a counsel; I need a librarian….

Dash sought to explain how they had gotten the memos and why I had not been shown them all before being questioned about them under oath in a televised hearing. Senator Ervin immediately offered to adjourn the hearing to give me time to read the file. I suggested that we proceed: “We will do the best we can.”

—

Dash’s hours-long interrogation consisted of reciting what he felt were damning quotes from memos written by me, then asking for my explanation. He began with Ellsberg. When I admitted that I had been asked to direct the investigation of Ellsberg and had turned it down, he asked why. “I felt…[it] was a waste of my time and abilities,” I said.

When Dash pressed, I told him that my preference was, rather than attack Ellsberg by backgrounding or briefing columnists, that the White House launch a nationwide address attacking the Times and Post, which had published the stolen secret documents. Dash then quoted from my “attack strategy” memo, where I had urged that we use McGovern’s admission against him that he had encouraged Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon Papers in the campaign. I readily conceded the point.

Dash got around to my view that tax-exempt institutions like the Ford Foundation used their resources to advance liberal causes and candidates. He asked if I had sought to tie Senator Muskie to Ford. I certainly did, I said, as Muskie had gone on two junkets and perhaps more at the expense of the foundation whose head, McGeorge Bundy, had been national security adviser to Kennedy and Johnson. The Ford Foundation, I added, had also provided stipends “for eight of Senator [Robert] Kennedy’s campaign assistants.”

Dash wanted to know if I had recommended an investigation of the foundations. Not only did I recommend an investigation, I told Dash, I had conducted one of my own for weeks on end, going through public records. Moreover, I had produced two speeches to be delivered from the White House that would expose the ties between Ford, Brookings, the Fund for the Republic, and the Institute for Policy Studies, and attack the liberal bias of Ford, and the linkages among them all.

I had urged we get new and tougher men at the IRS to crack down on tax-exempt foundations that engaged in politics. I pointed out that LBJ had threatened the tax exemption of the Sierra Club for lobbying. I admitted to urging the creation of a conservative “MacArthur Institute,” and that we should direct “discretionary” grants to friendly foundations and deny them to hostile ones.

Then Dash, after getting me to admit that I had urged in my “Muskie Watch” memo a near-exclusive focus of our political resources against the Maine senator, came in for what he presumed was the kill: “Is it not true, Mr. Buchanan, that you personally believed that the 1972 election was more than an ordinary Presidential election but had a direct relationship for the safety of the country?” I conceded that I felt that a victory for Muskie, given his views on Southeast Asia, “would have been little short of a catastrophe….”

Dash then brought out the smoking gun that would show the extreme mindset of both me and the White House:

MR. DASH: Let me just read you the language that you had: We ought to go down to the kennels and turn all the dogs loose on Ecology Ed. The President is the only one who should stand clear, while everybody else gets chewed up. The rest of us are expendable commodities; but if the President goes, we all go, and maybe the country with us.

MR. BUCHANAN: …The exaggerated metaphor is really the staple of American political language. In the campaign of 1972, I recall Mr. Gary Hart said publicly: “If the Nixon people do to us what the Humphrey people did to us, which is underestimate us, we will kill them.” I am sure Mr. Hart did not mean physical violence on us, and when I said we are going down to the kennels, the reference was not to King Timahoe. [Laughter]

King Timahoe was Nixon’s Irish setter.

Dash then cited John Mitchell as saying he would “practically do anything” to reelect the President, and turned to me:

MR. DASH: I am just asking you, in the memorandum, where you have indicated the nature of the danger that you saw to the country, and the importance that the forces of the Republican Party including the White House be aimed at knocking out the front-runner, Mr. Muskie, how far would you go to do that? What tactics would you be willing to use?

MR. BUCHANAN: What tactics would I be willing to use? Anything that was not immoral, unethical, illegal, or unprecedented in previous Democratic campaigns. [Laughter]

Dash then brought up Donald Segretti, whom I had never met nor heard of before his name surfaced in the Post, and asked if I had anything to do with setting up an operation like that. “[C]ertainly did,” I told Dash, and then described the famed Democratic operative Dick Tuck, who had achieved immortality for tricks he had pulled on Richard Nixon. One of Tuck’s tricks, I told the committee,

was in 1962 when Nixon began to deliver a major address from the back of a railroad train he put on an engineer’s cap and signaled the engineer to drive off leaving Nixon standing there….

[Another] was [when] we were at the Hilton Hotel…in Miami Beach and out front demonstrating—I thought it was welfare mothers or we heard [they were] welfare mothers at the time, they were all black, they were all pregnant, and they were all carrying placards that said, “Nixon’s the One.” [Laughter]

Chairman Sam Ervin was shaking with laughter.

Dash brought up an item in my “Dividing the Democrats” memo where I recommended that the President name a “highly qualified Southern conservative nominee to the Supreme Court,” as this would force Senate Democratic “northern liberals” to vote either to anger and alienate their southern base, or anger and alienate their labor and black voter base.

I told Dash I had been recommending such an approach, naming “strong conservative judiciary officials” to the Supreme Court, to President Nixon since I first joined him, and if “the side effect of that is to be divisive within the National Democrats; that is an ancillary benefit with which I am delighted.”

Dash brought up a suggestion of mine to the Committee to Re-Elect, that, as Democrats were starting up a “72 sponsors club,” where members could join for seventy-two dollars a month, we should get someone to join up to collect all the information on strategy and issues the club was sending its members. Had I recommended such a thing? Dash wanted to know.

MR. BUCHANAN: Yes, sir, that idea is taken out of Larry O’Brien’s campaign book. He has recommended…that it is a good thing for Democrats to get on the mailing list for all Republican materials they could find.

I told Dash we not only wanted to be on all Democratic mailing lists we could afford, but that the President’s news summary paid dues to the liberal lobby Common Cause because we wanted the President to know what they were saying. Dash wanted to know if this constituted “political infiltration.” The political naivete of the man was astonishing.

Dash then asked about my role in a pamphlet Ken had written and I had edited that purportedly was being issued by Citizens for a Liberal Alternative, which attacked Ed Muskie from the left as a gun owner and hunter. About this, I was cautious, as the pamphlet had been put out without the name of anyone on it, as required by law on campaign literature. It was Dash’s big moment. And he was preening.

MR. DASH: All right. Do you know that the fact is that there is no such organization as Citizens for a Liberal Alternative?

MR. BUCHANAN: Right. The error in this—from my understanding—is that it failed to have on it the proper identifying name of an individual who belonged to the organization, which is not an unroutine shortcoming in a Presidential campaign. As a matter of fact, I have brought with me, Mr. Dash, as I said I would the other night, a 47-page diatribe against Senator McGovern which was released all over the Democratic convention and which similarly lacks identification. From Time magazine; I understand the author of this is Mr. George Meany and the sponsorship is Mr. [Alexander] Barkan. I trust that if we could introduce that one into your evidence, they will go through the same 3 hours of discussion of that as we are going through material like this.

After this, I asked Senator Ervin to include the Meany-Barkan document in the record along with the pamphlet from “Citizens for a Liberal Alternative.” Meany was head of the AFL-CIO, and Barkan was his political director.

Dash now wanted to know where I got the Meany-Barkan attack document. I told him someone sent it to us, whom I declined to identify.

From there we broke for lunch. After we came back, Ervin undertook the questioning himself. He noted that I had asked the attorney general of the United States, John Mitchell, to evaluate political strategies I had recommended and political statements I had written for release, while he was serving as the highest law enforcement officer of the United States. The senator was disturbed by an attorney general engaging in politics like this:

SENATOR ERVIN: It does strike me, as a strict constructionist, that it is rather peculiar to have an Attorney General pass upon the wisdom of issuing press releases, while he is still in that office.

MR. BUCHANAN: Senator, I am not a lawyer, but there is a precedent for that in Attorney General Robert Kennedy….

SENATOR ERVIN: The fact that Bobby Kennedy may have done this did not justify Attorney General John Mitchell doing it.

MR. BUCHANAN: No sir. Tu quoque [You’re another] is the weakest of all arguments.

Senator Ervin asked about my recommendation that discretionary research funds go to foundations that supported a conservative philosophy, which led to this exchange:

SENATOR ERVIN: Well, I suppose that is a practical application of the “If you scratch my back, I will scratch yours” philosophy.

MR. BUCHANAN: Well, it is not uncommon in American politics. It is not unethical or wrong, I believe, either, Senator.

SENATOR ERVIN: One reason I am a Democrat is because Andrew Jackson said the Government should emulate the example of heaven’s rain and shed its benefits equally on all people.

MR. BUCHANAN: Senator, I believe President Jackson was the father of the spoils system.

SENATOR ERVIN: Yes, but he ran things pretty well under the spoils system. [Laughter]

When I told the chairman that my recommendations for political strategy and tactics were “not necessarily coterminus with administration policy,” the chairman was most gracious:

SENATOR ERVIN: Well, I have to say I admire the Buchanan recommendations. They are very forthright.

MR. BUCHANAN: Thank you, Senator.

SENATOR ERVIN: I do not fully approve of all of them, however. [Laughter] I think you have a sense of humor and I am glad I have one, because I do not know how you would get over the rough spots of life without one.

The senator went on to describe the salacious pamphlets put out by the Segretti operation against Senators Humphrey and Jackson, and how they “went beyond the pale,” to which I responded:

MR. BUCHANAN: That crosses the line, Senator. My own view is that there are four gradations. There are things that are certainly utterly outrageous and I would put that in with the kind of demonstrations against Vice President Humphrey in 1968 which denied him an opportunity to speak for almost a month. Then, there [are] dirty tricks, then there is political hardball, then there is pranks.

Here, the ranking minority member on the Watergate Committee stepped in:

SENATOR BAKER: This is really a fascinating line of inquiry, Mr. Buchanan, and you are a fascinating witness in that you not only have a clear perception of your role in the political realm of the United States, but the verbal agility to express them most clearly and forthrightly….I do greatly admire your descriptions of the gradations of political activity.

From Baker, the questioning went to Senator Herman Talmadge of Georgia and Senator Edward Gurney of Florida. Both were interested in my charges about the Ford Foundation using tax-exempt dollars to finance political activity. This gave me an opportunity to lay out all the issues I had wanted to present in that Agnew speech in 1970, which had been shelved by the West Wing. Gurney wanted to know what I meant in my memo on the foundations by the word establishment, a term that encompassed and identified the institutions and individuals I most passionately opposed.

MR. BUCHANAN: [I]n my own view, there is existent in the country in essence an intellectual and political establishment to which the major networks, the Ford Foundation, some of your major public policy institutes, the dominant media on the eastern seaboard, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in the Senate and others can be said to belong….I think there is a prevailing line set by these groups and they are in control of significant political assets….I think it is essentially…the dominant political establishment of the country against which you might set to be simplistic, Mr. Nixon and his Middle American constituency….

There [are] tremendous interlocking directorates. If you take a look at Mr. Kaysen’s institute at Princeton, the Brookings Institution, the Ford Foundation…the Kennedy Center for the study of politics and things like that, I think you will find the same individuals who move on these various boards of directors and, I think, it is not unfair to characterize that as—and the term is not necessarily pejorative—as a national establishment.

Senator Gurney, in complimentary echo of Senators Ervin and Baker, said, “Mr. Buchanan, you certainly have been the most knowledgeable witness we have ever had before the committee….”

Dash interrupted to say the Ford Foundation had called to challenge my facts. That the foundation could get through to the committee during televised testimony of a White House witness, and have its chief counsel deliver Ford’s dissent, seemed to underscore my point about its power.

The Pontificator

The most hostile interrogator was the last, Senator Lowell Weicker, a Republican from Connecticut elected in 1970 who was building a reputation as the moral scourge of the Nixon White House. What bothered me about Weicker was an incident in the 1970 campaign, when I was with Agnew and we had gone into Hartford to help Congressman Tom Meskill, running for governor. I could recall Weicker showing up at our hotel scratching for an endorsement from the then-popular Vice President. I thought him an opportunist and an ingrate, a portrait in sanctimony for his questioning of Watergate witnesses. Weicker began his questioning by reading from my September 12, 1972, memo to Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Colson:

If the country goes to the polls in November, scared to death of McGovern, thinking him vaguely anti-America and radical…they will vote against him—which means for us. What we have done thus far, and fairly well, is not put the President 34 points ahead—but McGovern 34 points behind.

Weicker seemed sickened by the negativity. “Was there a lack of positive material?” he wailed. After I explained how you build a 60 percent majority, where the last votes you receive are less for you than against the other candidate, he zeroed in on the phrase that most offended him: “What is it in the course of a campaign that makes an incumbent President try to paint his opponent as anti-American? I do not quite understand that one….What does that mean?” he asked. I replied:

Mike Wallace on election night said there were polls taken that indicated people went to the polls and voted for the President as opposed to McGovern on two issues, as he said: “Patriotism and morality.” Walter Cronkite got angry and said: “What do you mean? George McGovern is not anti-American and he is not immoral.”

Then Mike Wallace said, “Wait a minute. What we are talking about is the voters’ perception of the candidates.” When Mr. McGovern said he would go to Hanoi, would crawl if necessary, and beg for the release of American prisoners, for example, in the mind of the people this is anti-American. I do not say Senator McGovern is anti-American, but the perception in the voter’s mind was that Senator McGovern was not a figure whom they wanted to put in the Presidency of the United States because he did not share their views with regard to patriotism….

SENATOR WEICKER: Why do you think that this perception came about on their part?

MR. BUCHANAN: I think Senator McGovern contributed to it more than anybody else in the country.

SENATOR WEICKER: Do you think…now that…maybe you took that lawlessness, that restlessness, that violence which the American people were leery of, that maybe you took it out of blue jeans and put it into blue suits?

MR. BUCHANAN: Are you referring to me, sir?

SENATOR WEICKER: No….

Weicker’s prosecutorial style was to enumerate, embellish, and bewail all the crimes and misdemeanors of Watergate, then demand to know whether I thought these were legitimate tactics in a campaign.

SENATOR WEICKER: …Now, you have four categories: utterly outrageous, dirty tricks, political hardball, and pranks.

The use of the Department of Justice, the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, for political purposes by an incumbent administration. Which category would that fall into?…Is that pranks?…

The Ellsberg break-in coverup. What does that fall into? Is that pranks, political hardball, dirty tricks, or utterly outrageous?

Senator Joseph Montoya of New Mexico then undertook the questioning and the hearing seemed to be winding down, but Weicker wanted another shot. Ervin gave him the floor. He went off on a tear.

SENATOR WEICKER: All right, Mr. Buchanan, if you will try to continue down the list—I will try to shorten it—of various activities and your evaluation of them.

Perjury, subornation of perjury, obstruction of justice, is this something that should form part of a campaign?

MR. BUCHANAN: Senator, this is the famous Weicker litany of wrongdoings….I know you have got the definition down of every illegal act and things like that but what—to me they amount to…is that people in our campaign made a grievous error and then they went and compounded the error and made mistakes. In the process of this thing,…conceivably they committed wrongdoing amounting to crimes and illegalities, but I think that, by and large, the sins were of the head and not of the heart. They thought that they wanted to make sure the President of the United States was reelected, and a lot of mistakes and bad things, and erroneous things were done….

But these people…have got a right to a fair trial and I don’t think I am in a position to sit up and moralize or pontificate upon their ethics or their morality.

Senator Weicker came back around to what he felt was his strongest argument against me.

SENATOR WEICKER: How about anti-American? How about that phrase?…[T]hat was your phrase, it is your memorandum.

MR. BUCHANAN: What you are doing is you are precisely taking particular minor phrases out of memos written in the heat of a campaign and that statement, Senator, is far less offensive to me, even now in public, than is Senator McGovern’s statement comparing the President of the United States to Adolf Hitler, and…he made that publicly, not in some confidential memorandums….

Weicker rushed to say he, too, thought that McGovern’s comparing the President to Hitler was “despicable.”

With that, it was over. When Crick and I got back to the White House and EOB, there were handshakes and backslaps all the way down the long corridors to my office. The phone rang, and I was asked to come over to the second floor of the White House mansion, where Mrs. Nixon grabbed me and waltzed me around the room and the President and the girls were all smiles congratulating me. A telegram arrived from Senator Barry Goldwater: “You did a beautiful job today before the committee. I am very proud of you.” The next day, the networks announced that gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Watergate hearings would end. Shelley and I went to lunch at Sans Souci, and, from a nearby table, JFK’s press secretary, Pierre Salinger, sent a note across partisan lines to say I had served my president well. That evening, Major Jack Brennan, the President’s military liaison, hosted a staff party in the Executive Dining Room of the White House mess and presented me with Marine Corps cuff links. I was invited to do CBS’s Face the Nation but turned it down, telling the President I could not improve upon my performance before the committee, and to let it stand.

—

All five hours of my testimony had been carried live by CBS, with Daniel Schorr doing commentary. All the evening news shows covered it. The next morning, every major newspaper had a page-one story, some of them running for a thousand words or more. I had never received this kind of publicity. I was suddenly a national figure. And the reviews were almost universally positive.

“A Hard-Nosed Lesson in Politics,” ran the headline on Newsweek’s story which said the Watergate Committee “took a turnabout drubbing from a pugnacious White House speechwriter named Patrick J. Buchanan. ‘That session’ groaned one staffer later, ‘was a disaster.’ ” “What Buchanan had to offer,” said Newsweek, “was a postgraduate seminar on advanced political strategy and tactics.”

Turned out like a pin-striped Irish pug spoiling for a fight, Buchanan came on as the toughest administration scrapper since John D. Ehrlichman. He blasted the committee for hauling him before the microphones on only six days notice. He also accused committee staffers of orchestrating a campaign of news leaks that portrayed him as the master architect of the White House political sabotage in 1972. “How can this select committee set itself up as the ultimate arbiter of American political ethics,” he snapped, “if it cannot control the character assassins within its own ranks?”

Wrote Time: “Quick-witted and fast talking, Buchanan took the offensive from the moment he assailed the committee in his opening statement until the Senators excused him with relief more than five hours later. He was easily the Administration’s most effective witness to date.”

In a Boston Globe column, “The True Believer Had a Ball,” Marty Nolan said the committee members and counsel “self-destructed,” and when I returned to the EOB, “the place looked like Orly Field in Paris when Lindbergh landed.” Bill Buckley’s column, “Deflating the Watergate Moralizers,” said my appearance had done for the Watergate Committee investigation what Joseph Welch’s “At long last, Senator, have you no sense of decency?” had done to Joe McCarthy’s investigation of the Army. “Everyone recognizes the singular poise of Patrick Buchanan, and his enormous forensic ingenuity,” said Buckley.

COMMITTEE MEETS ITS MATCH: ONE BRAVE IRISHMAN was the headline over the column by my friend Nick Thimmesch. “The humiliation visited upon the Senate Watergate Committee by presidential speechwriter Patrick J. Buchanan’s virtuoso performance,” wrote Evans and Novak, was not the fault of Senator Ervin but of Dash and Lenzner, “a leftist ideologue who was fired from the Nixon administration’s Legal Service program….” Politically naive, the pair believed the memos were “dynamite,” and the “result was Buchanan’s meticulous demolition of Prof. Dash.”

Harriet Van Horne of the New York Post, however, was beside herself:

Because of his reverence for the Constitution and the Holy Bible, I shall retain my affection for Sen. Ervin. But after watching the tender regard he accorded witness Patrick J. Buchanan, I may just burn my Senator Sam T-shirt….

I refer to such dastards as Mr. Buchanan, who treated the committee with unveiled contempt and won its servile apologies.

Here was a man involved in the meanest, foulest campaign in American history, a man who admitted to responsibility for several episodes that shocked the nation, but all he had to say was, “It is not uncommon in politics” to leave his inquisitors speechless.

Van Horne found an ally at the New York Times, whose editorial on my appearance was titled ANATOMY OF A SMEAR and zeroed in on my tying the Ford Foundation to the radical Institute for Policy Studies. Ford only gave IPS $7,800, said the Times:

Regrettably the committee lacked the will or sophistication to challenge Mr. Buchanan’s contemptible diversionary tactics….The Senators appeared too enthralled by Mr. Buchanan’s amoral political joviality to question his arrogant insistence that even the most outrageous election abuses perpetrated by the President’s surrogates were nothing more than politics-as-usual.

While the Watergate Committee plodded on, gavel-to-gavel coverage by the Big Three networks stopped cold. Yet, as with Agnew at Des Moines, the networks had done me a signal service. As my friend Rich Koster wrote in the Globe-Democrat of his colleague from St. Louis days, the five hours before the Watergate Committee had made me a national figure:

The reaction to Buchanan’s testimony has come to him in floods. There have been more than 1,000 letters plus telegrams and phone calls too numerous to tab….

From Senator James Buckley came a note scrawled in his wife’s lipstick—written as they watched on television. It read: “You were BEAUTIFUL!”

Democratic senator Harry Byrd sent his “congratulations from both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill.”

Rick Stearns, Senator George McGovern’s delegate counter in his run for the Democratic nomination, wrote his compliments, as did some other members of the McGovern team.

There was a letter from Barry Goldwater. And then William F. Buckley called….

So Pat Buchanan has come out of the background. He is no longer a White House subterranean. He has always been more than he shrewdly admitted, and much more than the public believed.

Senator Sam Ervin would retire in 1974. Later he called to urge me—I was then a syndicated columnist—to get more active in battling the Equal Rights Amendment. While the chairmanship of the Watergate Committee was the apex of his public service, it had begun in distinction sixty years before, at Cantigny, when twenty-one-year-old Sam Ervin of North Carolina went into action with the first American unit to see battle in World War I. He fought at Soissons as well and came home with a Distinguished Service Cross, a Silver Star, and two Purple Hearts.

A Moynihan Brief for Bundy

Three weeks after my testimony, I got a long letter from Pat Moynihan, now US ambassador to India. He was writing out of “friendly tribal feelings,” and wanted to address the roots of the antipathy between people like me, and people like McGeorge Bundy. These people detest you, Moynihan was saying, because of who you are:

If I may inject a personal note…the hostility I perceive in those people is not directed to your politics as much as to your caste. You are a lower middle class Irish Catholic: a form of life for which the kind of people who establish and run foundations have an antipathy so instinctual as by now to be almost wholly subconscious. They are only human. Think of the kind of people you and I instinctively, and for the most part, unwittingly despise….

You…are a poor Irishman well into a career of writing speeches for conservative millionaires and their proteges. I am probably an even poorer one…in a career of writing speeches for liberal millionaires and their proteges. I have got some good meals out of it but damn little else.

As Michael Kinsley, who reviewed a book of Moynihan’s letters, wrote, “Moynihan made this appeal to ethnic working-class solidarity in the course of asking Buchanan to stop picking on the Ford Foundation. Its president, the blue-blood McGeorge Bundy, was a friend.”

By the time I got Pat’s letter, however, the window of opportunity to make the case about the ideological agenda and raw political power of the big foundations had closed. The vice president who had wanted to work with me to make that case had resigned. Still, from Moynihan’s letter, surely prompted by McGeorge Bundy, to whom Pat sent a carbon copy, the establishment revealed how apprehensive it was of the people “out there.”