On Monday, March 20, 1995, Patrick J. Buchanan, the columnist and television commentator, appeared in New Hampshire before 200 supporters to declare he would run for president.
Buchanan, 56, was the roaring wind in the Republican Party. He had challenged President Bush in the 1992 Republican primaries, reminding everyone that Bush had broken his “Read My Lips” pledge and raised taxes. Buchanan had won 37 percent of the New Hampshire primary vote, though Bush beat him with 53 percent in New Hampshire and eventually captured the Republican nomination. Buchanan’s intense rhetoric and pointed critique had weakened Bush and undoubtedly contributed to Bush’s defeat in the 1992 general election.
“We may have lost that nomination, my friends,” Buchanan said, referring to 1992, “but you and I won the battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party.”
As he laid out his message, he made it crystal clear he was pointing his rhetorical missiles at both Democrats and Republicans. He would make “America first” again, he said, criticizing a weakened defense system and trade deals which he called the “sellout of the American workers.” The enemies were Wall Street and the bankers, the politically correct liberals who favored permissiveness in schools and the rewriting of history to “defile America’s past.”
Many journalists and political figures treated Buchanan as a fringe candidate, a protest vote in the making. I had known him going back more than 20 years to the Watergate scandal when he had been a top aide and speechwriter to President Nixon. I had always found Buchanan a strange mixture. He could crank out the hottest, most extreme rhetoric. He could also be a pragmatist. Buchanan was often just plain fun, and he genuinely enjoyed the give-and-take of politics. At times he also made truly stupid, inflammatory remarks with racist and anti-Semitic undertones.
In dealing with him, you always had to try to figure out which of the four Buchanans you were getting—the extreme, the pragmatic, the playful or the stupid. Or what mixture. Assessing his seriousness was always difficult.
For example, back in 1973, when it was revealed that Nixon had secretly tape-recorded his conversations, Buchanan had made a suggestion to his besieged boss. Destroy the tapes, Buchanan recommended in a memo, take them all out on the White House lawn and burn them—an idea which came to be known as the “bonfire” approach. All four Buchanans were reflected in this recommendation. The suggestion was indeed extreme, and it was practical. In hindsight, if Nixon had destroyed all his tapes and with them the devastating evidence they contained, he almost certainly would not have been forced to resign. The suggestion was also made part in jest so it was playful, but it appeared stupid to Nixon’s lawyers, who thought destroying the tapes might be illegal, an obstruction of justice.
Then when the famous smoking-gun tape surfaced that showed Nixon had led the illegal cover-up, Buchanan, who had been one of his most vehement supporters, showed his pragmatism. In Nixon’s final week at the White House, Buchanan made the case for the president’s resignation to Nixon’s daughter, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, and the rest of Nixon’s family. “Hell, I understand why he wants to stay on. But he’d be blackened, Julie. It’s a straight road downhill—for him, for the conservative cause and for the country. There comes a time when you have to say, ‘It’s finished, it’s over.’”
“The problem is not Watergate or the cover-up,” Buchanan continued. “It’s that he hasn’t been telling the truth to the American people.”
Five days later Nixon resigned.
Because of this strange mixture of personality traits, I was always perplexed by Buchanan as I watched and listened to him over the years. Often his words were outrageous, and strongly peppered with deep undertones that suggested racism, bigotry and sexism. He had to know the power of his words; he’d spent his life crafting them. Yet he also was a fighter, seemingly provocative at times just for the sake of a battle. Was he serious, or was he throwing mud in the eyes of the political and intellectual establishment, looking for a reaction? How would his words translate into action if he was ever elected?
“Rail as they will against ‘discrimination,’ women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism,” he wrote in a newspaper column after the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, suggesting that women were not psychologically equipped to compete with men in the workplace.
Homosexuals “have declared war upon nature,” Buchanan often said. “Homosexuality, like other vices, is an assault upon the nature of the individual as God made him.”
Of Adolf Hitler, Buchanan wrote in 1977, “Though Hitler was indeed racist and anti-semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an individual of great courage, a soldier’s soldier in the Great War, a political organizer of the first rank, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him.”
Holocaust survivors, on the other hand, had been shown in medical papers to have imagined their experiences, Buchanan claimed in 1990. “This so-called ‘Holocaust Survivor Syndrome’ involves ‘group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics,’” he said.
In discussing immigration, Buchanan had rattled a lot of nerves when he asked rhetorically, “If we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus next year or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?”
Even some of Buchanan’s ideological allies were alarmed by his rhetoric. William F. Buckley, the conservative commentator who was one of his role models, wrote emphatically in the National Review in 1991, “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism.”
Buchanan maintained he was not a racist. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. But I wondered, why had he time and again selected language that he knew would appeal to the worst in people instead of the best? Why Zulus?
Part of the answer was in his 1988 memoir, Right from the Beginning, about his Washington, D.C., childhood in the 1940s and 1950s in a Catholic family of nine children and an authoritarian father. In it, Buchanan voices his undying respect for and devotion to the late Joseph McCarthy, the senator from Wisconsin who gave his name to an era by making ruinous and unsubstantiated charges that government officials were Communists.
Buchanan noted that McCarthy was still highly popular with the public in the 1950s, even after most of his charges were disproved and he was censured by the Senate. People “supported him, I believe, not because of precisely what he said, but because of what they understood him to be saying. To the Americans who sustained Joe McCarthy for four years, he was saying that the governing American Establishment, our political elite, was no longer fit to determine the destiny of the United States.”
Buchanan’s goal was to set himself up as the little guy determined to overthrow the reigning establishment—with the backing of people who supported him not because of precisely what he said, but because of what they understood him to be saying.
“There is a simplicity that exists on the far side of complexity,” he had written in his memoir, “and there is a communication of sentiment and attitude not to be discovered by careful exegesis of a text.”
Five months before he announced that he would run, I drove out to see Buchanan at his sprawling white brick home in McLean, Virginia. The date was Monday, November 7, 1994. The next day the Republicans would win both the Senate and the House.
He had just returned from hosting his radio show when I arrived. A tall man with wayward brown hair, he had grown plumper since his Nixon days, but he still had that same impish face that could change from the stern and scolding father to the cunning and mischievous little boy. When Buchanan smiled, his brown eyes narrowed and almost closed, a gigantic grin overpowering his face often accompanied by loud, pumping laughter. We went into his book-lined den with his ten-year-old cat Gipper, named after Ronald Reagan. After Nixon, Buchanan had worked for both Presidents Ford and Reagan.
Buchanan said he did not know if he was going to run again.
“You’re a realist,” I said to him. “When you look at this situation, it would be real hard for you to win the nomination.”
He disagreed. “Winning the nomination,” he said, “it seems to me—and maybe I’m a roaring optimist—would be less difficult than winning the general because in the party I’ve got a constituency.” He noted he had received 3 million votes in 1992 and was well known. Like many political figures he at times referred to himself with the wrong pronoun, as if he were talking about someone else. “Let’s say you get into Iowa. Dole wins, let’s say. If I came in second in Iowa, I would have won Iowa.
“Then you go to New Hampshire,” he continued, “if you come out of there strong, if you win New Hampshire or come out there very strong, and you’re one of the last two or three standing, and you go South, I don’t know why I shouldn’t have as good a chance as anybody else. It depends on doing well. If I don’t do well in Iowa and New Hampshire, I think it’s all over.
“I mean, it’s a long shot but it’s a shot. Let me say this, I wouldn’t go into it unless I believed there was a shot, and if I conclude there isn’t any, I wouldn’t go.”
“But,” I said, “if the Republican elders sit down, wouldn’t they kind of say to themselves, look, we’ve got a real chance here to beat Clinton. We need to nominate somebody who’s conservative but not of the red-meat right because that’s where we’re going to get the votes—in the center.”
Buchanan waved me off hard. “The Republican elders can’t deliver a thing,” Buchanan said. “Nobody pays any attention to them.” He had been out talking, listening. “I don’t think they amount to a hill of beans in a place like New Hampshire and Iowa. No, I don’t. If they did, I mean, I wouldn’t even bother getting into it because I don’t think they’re in my camp.”
What about the critics who charge that you had helped defeat Bush?
“They say, you know, ‘Buchanan divided the Republican Party,’” he said. “I didn’t divide it, I just exposed the division that was there, and there’s no way I could have gotten 5 percent of the vote against Ronald Reagan.”
He noted that Texas billionaire Ross Perot had gone on the Larry King show and launched his own candidacy two days after Buchanan’s strong showing in the New Hampshire primary.
“You’ve got to have either JFK personality or McGovern/Goldwater issues I think are the only things that can beat clear front-runners like Dole,” he said.
Buchanan was high on Phil Gramm. “Gramm is smart, he is tough, he understands our movement.” He noted with a chuckle that both Gramm and he each were running about 3 percent in the latest polls. “I still believe that Gramm is the most underrated of the candidates.”
He said that Gingrich’s Contract With America was bloated with too many specifics. “It should be clean house, anti-Clinton, anti-tax. It’s strategically such a mistake.”
Buchanan turned to the future of the Republican Party, which he was trying to work out in his own mind. “You can’t go back to Ronald Reagan. Reagan was a great man, a wonderful man and a great president in my view. But the Cold War is over and his issues are. That era is over. It’s just like Democrats going back to FDR and Truman. It’s over.”
Buchanan naturally turned to the subject of fighting and fighting back, and he brought up Clinton’s performance in the New Hampshire primary in 1992.
“I thought he was finished in New Hampshire,” Buchanan said. “I said, that guy ain’t coming back. I’ve never seen a beating like that, like he took on the draft evasion and on the women thing. I just said the guy’s gone.
“I tell you I admire him. I admire him. He came back up there, he smiled through that beating, and all the crowds surround him and he came back.”
Buchanan said that every candidate was going to get a beating. “If you do well and you come out, come back to people, they’re going to say, wait a minute, let’s take a look at this guy. And you’ll have free media, you’ll have television, you’ll have radio, you’ll be able to stand up there and talk directly to the country and redefine yourself. You can do it. But, look, there’s no way I’m going to stop people from dumping stuff on me and calling me names.
“All the demonology, you know, you can overcome it in this day and age, and television is the reason, and so is talk radio and so are these direct shows where you get on, Larry King.”
Buchanan said he ceased being a believer in free trade, a traditional Republican position, after he looked at the loss of manufacturing jobs in the last 25 years—nearly 50 percent in Michigan and New York, for example. “Why do you think there’s such rage and anger out there?” he asked, his hands cutting the air in tiny chops. “The median income of the average American worker has gone down 20 percent while people who write books,” Buchanan said, nodding toward me, “and people who do talk shows and people who give speeches,” he added, pointing to himself, “our income has gone up.” The American worker was being forced to compete with $1-an-hour Mexican labor and 25-cent-an-hour Chinese labor. “I’ve got nothing against those countries or people.”
Buchanan said that if something was not done, people would be thrown out of work more and more, be forced into lower-wage jobs. “You’re risking social stability just so some of these corporations’ profits can be dramatically increased, they can move factories anywhere.
“I think I can make that case out there,” he said.
“Let me tell you,” he declared, “economic nationalism’s coming in Europe. It’s going to come to the United States. It is the future of this country just like the tough line on illegal immigration is the future, just like an anti-interventionist foreign policy. People aren’t going to run around the world, send American troops to Pat’s Crusade for Democracy. All these ideas are coming. They’re winners, every single one of them. I think they’re winning ideas in’ 96.”
Though he said he had not made up his mind, it was apparent he was going to run.
I suggested that if he was right about the jobs and the economic decline and the potential social unrest, it might not be apparent for another five or ten years, elections in 2000 or 2004.
“So I get clobbered,” he said. “So I get beat.”
It doesn’t bother you?
“It never did,” he said, laughing hard and deep, his eyes squinting. “I’ve never won one. I’ve got 33 straight losses.” He lost all the 1992 primaries. “You may be right, maybe it’ll be by 2000 or 2004, but I’m going to go out and say this is what I’m going to campaign on, this is what I’m going to say, this is what I believe, and if I go through and I get clobbered, I get clobbered. I’ve had a good life. I’ve got no complaints.”
Buchanan, a man of camaraderie, always loved the feeling of being on a team, driving against the establishment. I suggested that running again would enhance his public profile, implicitly raising the question of whether there might be another reason for making the run.
“I don’t need any more money, but this is what I believe, and if I can do it, why not do it? Why not this time? Because you’re going to get beat? Because you’re going to get pounded? So what, you know, when it’s over, you say, we got pounded the last time. I’m glad I did it. No apologies. No apologies, no regrets.”
Did he think he could get a fair shake from the media? I asked. Was it settled in his soul that the media had a leftist tilt?
“I think the national media is probably the greatest single bulwark that liberalism and the Democratic Party has left,” Buchanan said. “I think that the national press, the Washington press is viscerally hostile to my position. There’s no doubt about it. And if you ran against, if you happen to have a general election against Clinton, that would be our biggest problem.”
Buchanan said that the one thing that might keep him out would be if Ross Perot entered the race as a Republican, which Buchanan said he had once half expected. “If he got in as a Republican, I mean that would be a real reason for me to rethink it, because I mean it takes too much of your votes that you’re trying to put together. But it doesn’t look like he’s going to get in now on the Republican side, so he’ll get in third party. If he gets in third party, I think it hurts us badly because he’ll take off a huge chunk of the anti-Clinton vote and I think that hurts us very badly. The way for Clinton to win is to get a real bloodbath in the Republican Party that has not healed and Perot running third party.
“Dole I guess is leader of the party, but there’s no leader of the movement which is the heart of the party.
“I don’t look on Dole negatively at all,” Buchanan continued. “I like Bob Dole. If Dole is nominated, I’d support him all the way.” Buchanan said he would support almost any Republican who won the nomination and was trying to remove Clinton. “Look,” Buchanan said, “as long as they say, you know, that I’ll support Buchanan if he’s nominated, I’ll support them if they’re nominated.”
On March 23, 1995, California Governor Pete Wilson announced that he would set up an exploratory committee to run for president. It was the culmination of a two-month behind-the-scenes struggle by some of Wilson’s closest political advisers to talk him out of running.
Bob White, Wilson’s alter ego and chief of staff for 26 years, was adamantly opposed. Wilson had pledged repeatedly not to seek the presidency when he was running in a tough reelection battle for governor as recently as six months earlier. He had given his word, White argued, and he had to stick to it. Trying to fudge it wouldn’t work. Wilson should serve out his term as Ronald Reagan had done as California governor. The year 2000 would be Wilson’s chance.
Wilson disagreed. He had to seize the chance. If a Republican won in 1996 and it wasn’t him, the person would probably be reelected in 2000 and the office wouldn’t likely be open until 2004, when Wilson would be 69. That might be too late, he might be too old. Wilson and White had a real screaming match over it.
White said that it was a choice between a speculative quixotic adventure versus the opportunity to be a great governor, the best in this century.
His national role would fall into place naturally if he did the other job and kept his word. The intensity of White’s opposition only seemed to make Wilson more determined to set his own course.
White reluctantly agreed to help him, but Wilson failed to convince some of his key longtime advisers to join his presidential campaign. Larry Thomas, his first press secretary when he was the mayor of San Diego 24 years earlier, and a longtime member of Wilson’s inner circle, declined. Thomas, a small man with patient eyes and a radio announcer’s voice who had been in and out of politics, cited personal and family reasons.
But Thomas had deeper concerns. Breaking his pledge had raised the question of whether Wilson would keep his word, whether he was a truth teller. Thomas could see it would hurt Wilson’s reputation. It was becoming a character issue.
“It’s a fucking disaster,” Thomas began saying privately.
Within ten days after announcing, Wilson recruited a chairman for his campaign—Craig Fuller, 44, who had been Vice President Bush’s chief of staff from 1985 to 1988. Fuller was the vice president of public relations for the Philip Morris Company, making about $1 million a year. Wilson and White had taken Fuller on a Sunday night to the upstairs dining room of Frank Fats, a celebrated political hangout in Sacramento, and offered him the job of chairman and day-to-day manager of the campaign. Fuller, who had known Wilson for 20 years but had never been that close to him, was shocked. It had never crossed his mind that he would be offered the top spot. He almost needed oxygen. After Bush had been elected president in 1988, Fuller had lost out in the competition to be the White House chief of staff for Bush, and he had left politics. This was the call back from the political cemetery.
Bob White later told Fuller he was burnt out and he would not want to be White House chief of staff if Wilson was elected president, clearly dangling the prospect in front of Fuller. Fuller stopped him before any explicit deal was offered because he didn’t think the two jobs should be linked. Soon Fuller accepted the position.
In the meantime, Wilson underwent elective throat surgery to remove a small growth or cyst on his vocal cords. He had strained his voice speaking, and the growth caused his voice to break in a high pitch at times. The operation was supposed to be simple, with rapid recovery.
Fuller would, more or less, be supplanting George K. Gorton, Wilson’s campaign manager in four successful statewide races: two for senator and two for governor. A bearded 47-year-old student of Eastern religions and meditation, Gorton was often called “Mr. Zen” by those in the Wilson circle. He was an emotional man, who believed the essence of campaigning was television advertising. As manager of Wilson’s come-from-behind 1994 reelection victory, Gorton had immense standing in the California political community. Wilson had already had Gorton prepare a budget and feasibility study for a presidential race, and it was widely assumed that Gorton would be the boss.
Wilson told Gorton that not only was Fuller coming in as campaign chairman but that Gorton would have to report to Fuller. He would be the campaign strategist. Gorton went ballistic. It was a slap in the face. “I’m getting fucked here,” he said. “I’m a 25-year friend. I can’t believe this.” He left town and didn’t say where he was going or how long he would be away. He told some that he had “resigned” and was leaving permanently.
Finally, two days later, Don Sipple reached Gorton by phone.
Gorton was hurt and felt underappreciated. He let his ego splatter all over, recounting his achievements and his sacrifices for Wilson.
The presidential campaign strategist gets the credit in these things, not the chairman, Sipple said. “In ‘88, Atwater got all the medals, not Baker. In ‘92, Carville got the medals, not Kantor!” If Wilson won in ‘96, Gorton likewise would get the credit, not Fuller.
Gorton was not buying it.
Sipple reached Wilson, whose voice was still terrible from the surgery.
“Don,” Wilson said in a hoarse whisper that was more croak than human voice, “have you talked to George?”
Yes.
“What the fuck is the problem?” the governor inquired.
Sipple wanted Wilson to reach out to his longtime campaign manager. “Look, Pete, it’s as simple as this. I think this came out of the blue. The message to George is there’s been a precipitous decline in his authority and a precipitous decline in your confidence in him.”
“Oh, it’s an ego thing,” Wilson whispered.
Wilson met with Gorton for two hours. Then Fuller and Gorton had a long lunch.
The result was a campaign with divided authority. Gorton would handle strategy and message. Fuller, as chairman, would launch Wilson onto the national scene, and develop a communications plan. But Wilson’s voice got worse not better, and soon Fuller or Gayle Wilson, the governor’s wife, were out giving Wilson’s speeches.
Wilson was astounded by the level of media scrutiny of his past and his entire public career. Wilson proposed that Fuller handle the reporters who wanted to do the most comprehensive work, keeping them away from him. Fuller realized that Wilson always resisted penetrating coverage. George Bush likewise had complained that reporters wanted to put him on the couch for what amounted to psychiatric inquiry. It had been a large nuisance for Bush, who wanted to say what he believed and what he wanted to do and then leave it at that.
“Welcome to the world of presidential politics,” Fuller told Wilson. “If you offer yourself up to the country as somebody who deserves to be their president, the country is going to learn a lot about you.”