As a boy, Pat Buchanan liked to play games. One of his favorites involved tossing golf balls at cars passing along the busy street that ran in front of his boyhood home.
The trick was to ping the car as it went by, and then, confronted by an angry motorist, angelically apologize for the accident, assuring the victim it was an innocent mistake.
To some extent, Buchanan never stopped winging golf balls. And he also never lost his almost uncanny ability to say “Who me?” after tossing verbal hand grenades.
It’s a posture he maintains even as critics paint him in broad strokes–fascist, bigot, zealot, homophobe.
“If everything my adversaries said about me were true, I wouldn’t vote for myself,” he said in a recent interview.
While he says he is misrepresented by his foes and the media, others, including some who have worked closely with him, point out that Buchanan has done little to distance himself from the caricature. In fact, they say, he revels in it and has no plans to change now, especially since he has secured the presidential nomination of one of the Reform Party’s dueling conventions being held this week in Long Beach.
“They are taking care and pain to make sure that image stays exactly as it is,” says Neil Bernstein, who was Buchanan’s spokesman until he was fired by Buchanan’s sister and campaign manager a few weeks ago.
Just this week Buchanan railed against “rampant homosexuality” and America’s moral decline, saying that “cultural decadence [goes] hand in hand with the death of republics and the end of empires.”
To his loyalists–the “Buchanan Brigaders” who startled Reform Party regulars throughout the primaries with shouts of “Lock and load!”–he continues a message that is simple and passionate, delivered in a riff.
“There are people who love this country and see it slipping away from them. They feel they have no control over their own destiny. That’s why voting is going down. In a sense it’s a little bit of professional wrestling, a little bit of a fake, a little bit of a fraud, a put on, and I think they are correct in that,” he says.
Through it all he remains defiant of those who don’t like him.
When he saw a parody of himself on “The Tonight Show,” shaking his hand in his trademark chop, German imposed over his own voice: “I almost fell out of bed. It was very funny. If you can’t take that, you shouldn’t be in the business.”
But others, including the Anti-Defamation League and leaders of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People find nothing funny about Buchanan. Over the years the ADL has put out several indictments of his statements, including a report of remarks they label anti-Semitic, called “Pat Buchanan in His Own Words.”
This year, when asked on a cable news show if Buchanan was invited to speak at the NAACP convention in Baltimore, Chairman Julian Bond said, “Bigots weren’t welcome.”
The man who came from a large, tightknit Roman Catholic family in Washington, D.C., has aged well. His chin sags, but the puppy-dog eyes–still slightly off-kilter from boyhood eye operations–remain the color of flat cola. The part for his hair has migrated southward over the years, now sitting just an inch or so up from his left ear, the hair expertly shellacked across his thinning crown.
On the set of Jesse Jackson’s CNN interview show here, “Both Sides,” Buchanan jokes around, calling the cameramen by name. He goads Jackson on purpose, proclaiming himself a proud member of the Sons of the Confederacy and saying the NAACP was discriminatory in its demand for the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Capitol.
Buchanan likes to stir it up, but Jackson, who has known him for years, pays him no mind–sort of like much of America. And Jackson concedes, their political differences aside, Buchanan is a likable man.
Even bitter ideological foes call him “charming” and “likable.”
“They’re correct,” Pat Buchanan says of the flattery with a chuckle.
“A cheerful irritant,” said Leonard Garment, a former Nixon attorney who served in that administration with Buchanan. Someone “worthwhile in this land of dozing-off politics.”
Summing up Buchanan can seem deceptively simple. There is the temptation to boil him down to a single anecdote. For instance, all you need to know about Pat Buchanan is this:
By age 8 he was proficient at boxing. Trained in a makeshift ring his father built for the boys in the basement. Required, on threat of corporal punishment, to hit the bag at least four sessions weekly.
Or this:
As an adolescent, he chose Francis Xavier as his name when he was confirmed in the Catholic church–honoring a Jesuit, as was the family tradition. But a nun told him he could only pick one name. He chose Francis.
His father was angry. He was worried someone might think his boy was honoring Francis of Assisi–the “pacifist with pigeons.”
But just when you thought there isn’t anything new to learn about Patrick J. Buchanan comes this:
“I liked Joan Baez. I had a crush on Joan Baez,” he says.
Yes, the folk-singing, Bob Dylan-dating, anti-war crusading Joan Baez.
“She’s a great singer,” he said. “I would go out to Washington University for those anti-war demonstrations and she would come out and she had a phenomenal voice and I would wish we had someone like that on our side.”
Buchanan’s side hasn’t changed throughout the years. He’s bashed immigrants, backed English-only propositions, called Adolf Hitler a “great man” and battled abortion rights at every opportunity.
But lately there has also been a twist, with Buchanan closer to his fellow third-party candidate Ralph Nader, the Green Party contender, on a few key issues than he is to mainstream candidates. It is a surprise to both; after all, Buchanan once suggested dynamiting Nader’s consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.
Common ground now is found in anti-NAFTA and anti-World Trade Organization sentiment. They also both oppose sanctions against Cuba and Iraq.
But along with the familiar images of Buchanan, a new one is emerging. Now in his third run for the presidency, Buchanan has been tagged by some as a “chronic” candidate, mentioned in the same breath as Harold E. Stassen and his record seven tries for the White House.
Buchanan has hovered below 5% in the polls, the mark he would need to qualify his party for federal matching funds in the next presidential cycle. And he lags far behind the 15% benchmark set by the committee overseeing the nationally televised presidential debates. He has sued to be included.
These days, Buchanan, who with his wife of 29 years, Shelley, have no children, says his legacy is something he contemplates.
Could he have compromised? Moved to the middle?
“I’ve never been about political expediency,” he says.
His old colleague Garment, who together with Buchanan stayed loyal to Nixon until the bitter end of Watergate, says Buchanan is just doing what he is driven to do.
“There are people who run because that’s the thing they do first thing in the morning–as a way exercising their minds,” Garment said.