'Where The Right Went Wrong' (Patrick J. Buchanan)- New York Times Book Review

Where The Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency. By Patrick J. Buchanan. 264 pp. Thomas Dunne Books/ St. Martin's Press. $24.95.

Underneath the pugnacious hide of Patrick J. Buchanan beats a heart of pure nostalgia. He longs to return to the high-tariff reign of William McKinley, mourns the passing of such budget-slashing icons as Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater and dedicates his new book to Ronald Reagan, who, he says, ''never took precipitate or rash action'' abroad. Buchanan's reverence for late, great conservatives is unbounded by epoch or nationality. He even praises Urban II, the ''extraordinarily eloquent'' French-born pope who inspired the First Crusade.

The former presidential candidate and longtime journalist has a mission, of course. He wants to marshal this glorious past against ''impersonators'' in and close to the Bush administration who have ''hijacked'' his movement. His enemies list of neoconservatives has unsurprising names: Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Irving and William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg. He detests them most of all for promoting the invasion of Iraq, for arrogantly believing it would spark a democratic revolution throughout the Middle East. But the self-described populist conservative is still fighting a war against un-Christian cultural elites. And he charges most of the same neoconservatives with abetting the godless enemy on nearly every major issue -- from gay marriage to abortion to immigration. To save the nation, the right must be cleansed.

Characteristically, Buchanan blasts away at more targets than he hits. His manifesto includes a stirring, if familiar, call to revive America's heavy industries; those who've allowed the manufacturing base to wither, he declares, are guilty of ''economic treason.'' Elsewhere, however, he writes that China poses little threat of war because its ''prosperity depends on us.'' That confident free trader needs to talk to his agitated protectionist alter ego. When not running for president, Buchanan is a regular participant in the shouting matches the networks call public affairs. In his many illogical moments, it shows.

Such belligerence weakens the main thrust of his book: a vigorous argument against the war in Iraq. A traditionalist to his core, Buchanan despises policy intellectuals who would ''define morality for all peoples for all times.'' He points out, correctly, that devout Muslims do not hate the United States because they envy our wealth and freedom, as President Bush would have it. They resist the erotic, feel-good popular culture Americans celebrate and sell around the globe and don't like being occupied by a military whose definition of evildoers clashes with theirs. But Buchanan's defense of the original crusaders negates his cautious relativism. The religious warrior makes an unconvincing apostle of peace.

Alert readers will have spotted another troubling flaw in Buchanan's worldview. His roster of warmongers is made up exclusively of Jews. But it was Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and the president himself -- good Christians all -- who sent all those armed Americans into Iraq. Aside from Wolfowitz, the Jewish neocons could only cheer them on from their op-ed pages, think tanks and talk shows.

Buchanan thinks he can explain this discrepancy between conservatives who decide and those who merely advocate. The neconservatives, he claims, saw that George W. Bush was ignorant about world politics and cleverly persuaded him to think like them. At one point, he compares Richard Perle's ''delight at first meeting the future president'' with Fagin's ''initial encounter with the young Oliver Twist.'' After four decades of close political combat, Buchanan seems unwilling to abandon such abusive rhetoric. It may be as essential to him as God and the flag, even while it confirms his status as a political pariah. Strangely, he doesn't realize that the president, a born-again Christian, needed no special prompting after the attacks of Sept. 11 to declare a new world war between good and evil.

Pat Buchanan's perpetual irritation with American Jews suggests a larger problem with his style of conservatism. The past to which he would like to return is full of imagined, often contradictory tales. High tariffs under the old G.O.P. were a giant subsidy to industrial companies and the regions they dominated, which is why most foes of big government abhorred them. And to claim that Reagan favored using force only to ''defend the country he loved'' ignores the proxy armies his administration sponsored in Nicaragua and El Salvador, Angola and Afghanistan and the 5,000 American troops who overwhelmed tiny Grenada.

Since the mid-1950's, when William F. Buckley Jr. created National Review, most prominent conservatives have sought to remake the world in the image of the America they cherish. The fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Market-Leninism in China and Vietnam seemed to vindicate their labors. To demand that they give up this habit now -- when the United States has many enemies but no true rivals -- is naive. Buchanan writes that ''a rebellion is brewing among principled and populist conservatives'' against the quisling hierarchy that rules the Republican Party. But who are these people and why is their revolt so quiet?

The ideologue is caught in a bind of his own choosing. Antiwar liberals can applaud when he writes: ''In 2003, the United States invaded a country that did not threaten us, did not attack us and did not want war with us, to disarm it of weapons we have since discovered it did not have.'' But we cringe at every aspect of his cultural politics. Christian traditionalists love his stands against abortion and gay marriage, but they burn, like President Bush, to convert the benighted. Buchanan is thus left with a casual audience in the millions but a following that is probably a good deal smaller than the 449,000 votes (including those excuse-me ones from Palm Beach County) that he drew in the 2000 election.

In his call to emulate an ideal right that never existed, this tough-talking Jeremiah neglects the practice of leaders from Disraeli to Reagan who managed to thrive in a modern age. Conservatives have prospered only when they adapted their principles to the flow of history. As Tancredi, the young aristocrat in Giuseppe di Lampedusa's great novel, ''The Leopard,'' put it, ''If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.''

Michael Kazin, the co-author of ''America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960's,'' is writing a biography of William Jennings Bryan. He teaches history at Georgetown University.

Buckley's Getting It Right Captures Intrigue of Conservative Movement's Origins

Young and Restless Conservatives by Lee Edwards Posted Mar 3, 2003 http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=198

Like Old Man River, William F. Buckley, Jr. just keeps rolling along. At an age when most writers can only repeat themselves or have fallen silent, the 78-year-old Buckley continues to provoke and entertain as he has since his first book, God and Man at Yale, published over five decades ago.

In his latest historical novel, Getting It Right, Buckley limns the conservative movement in its early years between the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and the Goldwater presidential campaign of 1964.

Buckley offers telling portraits of then-major figures such as Robert Welch, the bright but paranoiac founder of the John Birch Society (JBS); Ayn Rand, the bright but megalomaniacal founder of Objectivism; and Gen. Edwin A. Walker, the former military hero turned inarticulate activist who was nearly assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald.

Acceding to the marketplace, Buckley offers a love story between Woodroe Raynor, a former Mormon missionary in Austria, and Leonora Goldstein, the daughter of an anti-Communist union leader. After watching Soviet soldiers gun down Hungarian freedom fighters (and being wounded himself), Woodroe returns to America and joins the Birch Society, while Leonora, brilliant and idealistic, succumbs to the hypnotic rhetoric of the luminous-eyed Rand.

Although replete with bedroom scenes, the Woodroe-Leonora romance is essentially a device by which the author exposes the intellectual and personal flaws of the two absolutists who appealed to many conservatives in the late 50s and early 60s?Robert Welch and Ayn Rand.

Both Welch and Rand were possessed by an idea of their creation? Welch arguing that a Communist conspiracy reaching to the highest levels of the U.S. government was responsible for America's repeated losses and the Soviet Union's constant gains in the Cold War; Rand asserting that all collective activity (regardless of motivation) was "seditious" and only self-interest should guide an individual's thoughts and actions.

Buckley stresses how much alike the two figures were in their charismatic personalities and the certainty of their life-views and how that certainty appealed strongly to the young and not so young of the time.

In retrospect, it is amazing how out of touch with reality Robert Welch, who had attended the University of North Carolina, the Naval Academy, and Harvard Law School, was, stating not only that Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist but that America was 60-80% "Communist-dominated."

Woodroe finally resigns from the JBS after the palindromic Revilo Oliver wrote in the society's magazine American Opinion following the assassination of John F. Kennedy that "his memory will be cherished with execration and loathing." Even so, it was not until 1965 that the editors of National Review, in conjunction with Senators Barry Goldwater (R.-Ariz.) and John Tower (R.-Tex.), Russell Kirk, and other conservative icons formally read the John Birch Society out of the movement.

Buckley reserves his sharpest shafts for Ayn Rand, an imperious Caesar who must be obeyed in all things, philosophical and physical. A faithful disciple is expelled for making unauthorized changes in a few lines of a Rand play. Another is dismissed because he suggests that the source of certain ideas he is advancing is a medieval scholar and not the omniscient Rand.

And then there is the moge a quatre of Ayn Rand, who takes her successor-designate Nathaniel Branden, 25 years her junior, as her lover with the resigned acquiescence of her husband Frank O'Connor and her lover's wife, Barbara.

But the goddess of Objectivism reveals a subjectivist side of her nature when Branden admits a year later that he is no longer interested in sexual relations with Ayn and has fallen in love with a much younger and very beautiful woman. Rand's anger is like "a great tidal smashing everything in its path." Branden is thrown into the outer darkness as an enraged and betrayed Rand promises, "I'll destroy you!"

Woodroe's mentor, Princeton Prof. Theocritus Romney, explains why it was necessary to exorcise the two extremes: "The job at hand is to encourage an anti-Communist, conservative political party?the Republican Party, as history has worked it out?that is unburdened by mind-clogging distractions. The GOP can do better by repelling impurities."

There is much to enjoy and for those of a certain age to remember in Getting It Right. There are the defining moments such as the founding of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) at the ancestral manse of Bill Buckley in Sharon, Conn.; the 1962 YAF rally that drew 20,000 people to Madison Square Garden to hear Barry Goldwater and alerted President Kennedy that something new and important was stirring in American politics; the late November day when JFK died and the mass media kept pointing out that the President had been shot in the heart of "Goldwaterland," and the 1964 Republican National Convention that nominated Goldwater and confirmed the political maturation of the American conservative movement.

There are the people who helped build the movement?Marvin Liebman, conservative organizer extraordinaire; Robert Schuchman, the irrepressible first YAF chairman who died of an embolism at 27; M. Stanton Evans, author of the Sharon Statement and a thousand witticisms about Washington politics; Prof. Harry Jaffa, writer of Goldwater's acceptance address with the immortal line, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice"; chain-smoking Frank Meyer, senior editor of National Review and architect of fusionism; red-headed L. Brent Bozell, ghost-writer for Joe McCarthy and Barry Goldwater, including the pivotal book, The Conscience of a Conservative.

Buckley gets almost all of it right in this, his 17th novel although Karl Hess was not presidential candidate Goldwater's "press chief" but his chief speech writer, and Gen. Walker was at least in the minds of most young conservatives, a peripheral rather than a central character in their political considerations.

Getting It Right is a wonderful example of what British novelist Graham Green called "an entertainment"?a work meant to be enjoyed. But I believe it will also provide future historians with important insights into the movement that reshaped American politics in the last half of the 20th Century and into the 21st.

Mr. Edwards is the Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought at the Heritage Foundation. His forthcoming book is Bringing Justice to the People: The Story of the Freedom-Based Public Interest Law Movement (Heritage Books).

Pat Buchanan, His Fans, and Anti-Semitism By Jamie Glazov FrontPageMagazine.com | January 25, 2002 http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=223

MY RECENT REVIEW of Pat Buchanan’s new book, The Death of the West, has triggered some angry letters from Buchanan supporters.

Offended at various remarks that I made, my critics are mostly upset at my implication that Buchanan is a racist. One reader writes to me,

"Your paranoid feelings are coming out. I read Buchanan’s book, The Death of the West, and I do not get out of it any racial feelings."

For a person to read The Death of the West and not "get out of it any racial feelings" is unquestionably quite a feat. This is like spending an entire day hanging around with members of the flat earth society and never getting the hint that something might be a little bit, well, not altogether right.

I have studied Pat Buchanan’s philosophy of life for quite a while. Aside from his anti-communism and Catholicism, both of which I deeply respect, his views on other issues do more than just raise my eyebrows. There is one particular realm of Buchanan’s world vision that troubles me the most. I would like to take this opportunity to offer all the Buchanan supporters a summary of this realm. It will probably serve as a great inspiration to them.

Let’s begin with an illuminating fact: if you read the criticisms of my review in the Go Postal section, you will find that several Buchanan supporters keep accusingly inquiring if I am a Jew. What does this say about them?

Let me give you a clue:

Buchanan wrote a real charming book before The Death of the West. In A Republic, Not An Empire, he denied that Adolf Hitler had any malicious intentions toward the West, let alone toward the Jews living there. He also argued that Hitler was forced into pursuing the Final Solution because of British and American intervention in the war. Buchanan’s implication, in other words, was that Hitler wasn’t really responsible for what he did.

Buchanan has described Hitler as a "genius" and "an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier in the Great War."

What feelings or beliefs would motivate a person to make such a tribute to Hitler?

Buchanan’s words have always implied that, if Hitler had only entertained designs on Eastern European Jews for his Final Solution, and that as long as this did not affect American interests, then America had no obligation to intervene on purely humane grounds. That’s what Buchanan’s "America First" policy is all about.

I can’t help from wondering: what exactly is Buchanan saying about the Holocaust?

Buchanan has also shown an obsessive predilection for defending accused Nazi war criminals, every one of whom somehow appear to be innocent in his eyes.

What rests behind a man’s passion to distinguish himself in this light?

During his infamous defense of John Demjanjuk, Buchanan claimed that Demjanjuk was not the guard he was alleged to be at Treblinka. Buchanan turned out to be right: Demjanjuk was a guard in a different concentration camp.

The non-existence of a forthcoming Buchanan apology on Demjanjuk implied that Buchanan believed that he had actually won on this issue.

During his defense of Demjanjuk, Buchanan made the intriguing statement that the diesel gas fumes used at Treblinka could not have killed anyone. These diesel gas fumes were used not only at Treblinka, but also at a number of other death camps. Hundreds of thousands of Jews died in these camps. If these victims did not die from diesel gas fumes, then how and why did they die? Would Buchanan be willing to expose his family members, as well as himself, to the same fumes in order to demonstrate his point?

During Ronald Reagan’s presidential visit to the Bitburg cemetery in Germany, Buchanan wrote, for Reagan's controversial speech, that the Germans buried there, who included members of SS units and Nazis who participated in Hitler's extermination of the Jews, were "victims of the Nazis just as surely as the victims in concentration camps."

Fascinating.

Buchanan has also compared the Nazi camps with those set up by Gen. Eisenhower for German prisoners of war. This is a comparison between POWs being held because they are an enemy in war and a group of people who are liquidated because of their race.

Buchanan has drawn a parallel between Andrei Sakharov, the great Soviet dissident who was persecuted for, among other things, his courage in standing up for human rights in a totalitarian regime, and Arthur Rudolph, a German rocket scientist who admitted his involvement with slave labor and other atrocities of the Nazi regime.

Why would Buchanan do this?

During the Gulf War, Buchanan charged that the American intervention was caused by a Jewish conspiracy, which consisted of American Jews conspiring with the Israeli Defense Ministry. On other occasions, he has talked about the "Holocaust survivor syndrome" which, in his view, involves "group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics." During these particular interpretations, he put himself in the same league with Holocaust deniers and Holocaust perpetrators by using their favorite vocabulary.

Holocaust deniers consistently talk about the "Jewish conspiracy," that pathological fantasy that involves the Jewish control of the media and the banks, the Jewish assault on culture, the Jewish poisoning of the Aryan race, etc. We've heard this all before: in Mein Kampf and in the terminology of Nazi spokesmen who engineered Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald and, yes, Treblinka.

What is it that possesses a man to use this vocabulary when he knows full well the ugly context in which it has already been used?

After being confronted about the anti-Semitic implications of his words, Buchanan has stated, several times: "I don't retract a single word."

Not a single word? Not even a single one?

Why?

Perhaps Buchanan’s fans can enlighten me.

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Bill Buckley also took Pat B. to task publicly in the pages of Nat'l Review, using his own writings and speeches as I recall. It was a damning tour de force. Pat is posessed by his own inner demons and like a stopped clock is still right twice a day (but that doesn't mean you can set your watch by him).

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