He certainly did. Also affirmative action.
I learned long ago not to waste my time with character assassins. David Frum made a name for himself doing that, and unlike those on the Right who hailed Frum as a great conservative journalist I saw through him right from the start.
I watched the Buchanan-is-a-Nazi crowd start the game in Commentary Magazine back in the 80s. Commentary’s main Buchanan attacker was a former leader of the communist front Young People’s Socialist League named Joshua Muravchik.
Part of the game was a Catholic-Jewish fight and being neither I just watched it as an observer. One of first ‘fights’ was a Jewish demand that Catholics remove a nunnery from the grounds of one of the Nazi camps where Polish Catholics had been exterminated alongside Jews.
People who weren’t around to read the attack on Buchanan as it developed don’t know that the Buchanan haters were also attacking Ronald Reagan at the same time. They claimed that Buchanan had Reagan lay a wreath on an SS grave at Bitburg and attacked both Reagan and Buchanan for being sympathetic to Nazis.
Of course Buchanan had nothing to do with the Bitburg ceremony, memory tells me that it was Dick Darmon, but that has never stopped the Buchanan haters from repeating the same story over and over. And I never saw any apology for their smear of Reagan, who was honoring the German dead as a sign of good will to our Cold War allies.
And then there was the elderly auto worker who was charged with being a Nazi camp guard based on Soviet documents. The fact that the Israeli Supreme Court didn’t buy the accusations any more than Buchanan did gets ignored as well, but who knows, maybe they were closet Nazis. Everyone who gets in the way is a Nazi.
But the whole subject is tiresome, it’s all the same sort of smear job and facts are of little interest to the haters anyway. They have an agenda and for them the end justifies the means.