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Summary
Summary
In his inaugural address, Nixon held out a hand in friendship to Republicans and Democrats alike. But by the fall of 1969, massive demonstrations in Washington and around the country had been mounted to break his presidency.
In a brilliant appeal to what he called the "Great Silent Majority," Nixon sent his enemies reeling. Vice President Agnew followed by attacking the blatant bias of the media in a fiery speech authored and advocated by Buchanan. And by 1970, Nixon's approval rating soared to 68 percent, and he was labeled "The Most Admired Man in America".
Them one by one, the crises came, from the invasion of Cambodia, to the protests that killed four students at Kent State, to race riots and court ordered school busing.
Buchanan chronicles Nixon's historic trip to China, and describes the White House strategy that brought about Nixon's 49-state landslide victory over George McGovern in 1972.
When the Watergate scandal broke, Buchanan urged the president to destroy the Nixon tapes before they were subpoenaed, and fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, as Nixon ultimately did in the "Saturday Night Massacre." After testifying before the Watergate Committee himself, Buchanan describes the grim scene at Camp David in August 1974, when Nixon's staff concluded he could not survive In a riveting memoir from behind the scenes of the most controversial presidency of the last century, Nixon's White House Wars reveals both the failings and achievements of the 37th President, recorded by one of those closest to Nixon from before his political comeback, through to his final days in office.
Author Notes
Patrick J. Buchanan, 1938 - Pat Buchanan was born November 2, 1938 in Washington, DC. He attended Georgetown University and received his Bachelor's of Arts degree in English and Philosophy in 1961, and his Master's in 1962 from the Columbia School of Journalism.
After graduation, Buchanan got a job as an Editorial Writer for the St. Louis Globe-Dispatch, from 1962 till 1966. He was a syndicated news columnist from 1975 to 1985, and from 1987 to 1999, as well as co-host of CNN's Crossfire talk show from 1987 to 1991, 1992 to 1995 and 1996 to 1999.
In 1966, Buchanan began his political career, becoming Executive Assistant to former Vice President Richard Nixon, a position he held until 1969. He then became President Nixon's speechwriter until 1974, when he was nominated by President Ford to be US Ambassador to South Africa, which was later withdrawn. He was the White House Director of Communications from 1985 to 1987, Founder and Chair of The American Cause from 1993 to 1999, and an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican nomination for President in 1992 and 1996. In October of 1999, he quit the Republican Party and joined the Reform Party.
Buchanan is also a renowned author. His books include The New Majority: President Nixon at Mid-Passage (1973); Right from the Beginning (1988); A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny (1999); Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency (2004); Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart (2007); Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World (2008); and Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? (2011).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
New York Review of Books Review
PATRICK J. BUCHANAN is a merry troglodyte, a naughty provocateur. He still calls homosexuality "sodomy," just to get the goat of a community he will only reluctantly call "gay." He writes that he wanted to be named ambassador to South Africa by President Ford so he could support the apartheid government. He thinks public television is "an upholstered playpen" for liberals. He considers "The New York Times" an epithet. His stump appearances in his outlaw 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns were a guilty pleasure for the reporters who followed him, a hilariously clever, and prescient, exhibition of right-wing populism. "Buchanan," Richard Nixon once told him, "you're the only extremist I know with a sense of humor." And it is Buchanan, not Nixon, who emerges as the central - and most intriguing - character in "Nixon's White House Wars," an entertaining memoir of that benighted presidency. Buchanan's Nixon is a familiar figure: distant, awkward, smart, defensive and damaged, caring a bit too much what the Establishment - a word Buchanan uses frequently - thinks of him. The not-so-tricky president is a policy moderate; he has surrounded himself with brilliant, if mainstream, experts like Henry Kissinger and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. There is also a retinue of traditional moderate Republican aides like Ray Price and Leonard Garment, and technocrats like H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Buchanan, the house wing nut, finds all this moderation frustrating; he began as a peripheral figure in the Nixon White House, a political gunslinger perhaps a bit too hot for the high-rent nuances of governance. Over time, however, Nixon realized that the "liberal establishment" was unwilling to cut him a break - even as he created the Environmental Protection Agency and maintained many Great Society programs - and a gunslinger could have his uses. Buchanan's pen provided the ammunition for Vice President Spiro Agnew's attacks on the media (which seem downright civilized compared with current presidential standards). But Nixon sensed that Buchanan was onto something much bigger than vitriol, a new grand strategy for the Republican Party, a new majority anchored by the white working class, not just in the South, but also in the Northern ethnic, mostly Catholic, enclaves. This philosophy has been the driving vision of Buchanan's life. It has made him one of the most consequential conservatives of the past half-century. Indeed, he's a reactionary who was also an avatar: the first Trumpist. Buchanan was born in Washington, D.C., in 1938, although his family's roots are in Mississippi. He celebrates ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, but his most enduring loyalty is to the conservative Catholic Church of the 1950s - the church schools he attended, the Knights of Columbus, the Legion of Decency, Sodality and the Holy Name Society. His people are the white ethnic "unfashionable minorities," as opposed to the "media minorities." He was kicked out of Georgetown University for a year after a drunken fight with the Washington police: "I was ahead on points, until they brought out the sticks." But he attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism - one of his few Eastern elitist credentials, which he used to become an editorial polemicist for the conservative St. Louis Globe-Democrat. He was astonished by the 1960s. Well-offdraftdodgers offended him; the New York construction workers who beat up the protesters were his team. Teddy Kennedy's ability to "survive" Chappaquiddick was a confirmation of Buchanan's worldview. Nixon, he believed (correctly), would have been crucified if he'd done something similar. He and Nixon "were like working-class kids in an elite university who, caught smoking pot in the dorm, would be expelled and disgraced for life, while the legacy students would be confined to campus for the weekend." It was the "legacy" students in the C.I.A. and on John F. Kennedy's staffwho had started the war in Vietnam - and "legacy" students who opposed it; the children of Irish pipe fitters had to fight it. Despite the war's provenance, Buchanan was an unabashed hawk who believed Vietnam was necessary to stem the tide of Communism. He continued to believe this even as Nixon proved that Communism wasn't monolithic by embracing the Russians in détente and going to China - Buchanan was along for the Beijing trip, appalled. Still, Buchanan's assessment of the impact of the defeat in Vietnam on American society has real power to it: "The American establishment that led us to victory in World War II . . . would never recover from Vietnam, never regain the confidence of the nation. For Vietnam was not an unwinnable war for a country that had reduced the Japanese empire to smoldering ruins in four years. . . . The simple truth is the American establishment lost the war in Vietnam because it lacked the will to win it." This is where Buchanan's philosophy begins. The country that Nixon inherited in 1969 was "no longer one nation and one people, but a land divided by war and race and culture and politics." The Establishment was feckless, guilt-driven, hypocritical. Buchanan saw school busing to achieve racial integration as a domestic Vietnam. It was social engineering imposed by a liberal judiciary upon white ethnic communities - the Irish, Italians, Poles - who had nothing to do with slavery. Once again, the rich kids weren't drafted to ride the buses. Buchanan advised Nixon that the administration's position should be: "outlawing all segregation, but not requiring racial balance." This line extends to affirmative action, which he calls "racial injustice." These are the opening battles of Buchanan's culture war. His case is primal and compelling. These issues are not merely about tribal racial prejudices; they are about class. Buchanan's political calculus is that the "silent majority" is larger than the "fashionable minorities," who include violent antiwar protesters - nearly five bombings a day in 1971-72! - racial agitators, limousine and lifestyle liberals. In fact, the only real weapon that the counterculturalists have is the elite media, which he described, in a memo to Nixon, as their true adversary: "The Nixon White House and the national liberal media are as cobra and mongoose." Does any of this sound familiar? Nixon won the 1972 election in a historic landslide, using Buchanan's strategy, but lost the war. Buchanan was boggled by Watergate, which he considered stupid. Why bug the Democrats when Nixon's new majority is about to win bigly? Somehow he managed to skate through the scandal, compartmentalized, kept out of the loop, but asked for cleanup advice - and famously told Nixon to "burn the tapes." It is easy to be horrified by Buchanan's gleeful excesses, but that is the reaction he's hoping to elicit. Humorless uppercrust liberalism is the fattest of targets. Beneath the vitriol, though, Buchanan has spent his career raising important questions that our society has never seemed willing to discuss forthrightly. What should be the limits of identity politics? In a democracy, should courts or legislatures decide basic policies like abortion, busing and campaign finance? Should we trade the higher prices that will come from protectionism for the increased stability that might come from keeping more blue-collar jobs at home? These are the issues that Buchanan has been thumping for the past 50 years, and that Donald Trump exploited in 2016. They cannot be dismissed. We are, for the moment, living in Pat Buchanan's world. 0 It is Buchanan, not Nixon, who emerges as the most intriguing character in this entertaining book. JOE KLEIN'S books include "Primary Colors," "Woody Guthrie" and, most recently, "Charlie Mike: A True Story of Heroes Who Brought Their Mission Home."
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 Left Behind Until he has been part of a cause larger than himself, no man is truly whole. --President Nixon, Inaugural Address, 1969 The morning after the election, I found an empty room and crashed at the Waldorf after the Illinois returns came in, and did not awake until noon. Nixon had made his victory statement and was on Air Force One on his way to Key Biscayne, with H. R. (Bob) Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. The ten weeks from election to inauguration were the most dispiriting of my years with Nixon. After his vacation at Key Biscayne, the President-elect established his transition headquarters at the Pierre hotel, two blocks from his apartment on Fifth Avenue. The researchers and writers from the campaign were all left behind at the campaign annex known as the "Bible Building" at 450 Park Avenue. A suggestion came from the President-elect that I might want to hold off coming into the White House to write a book about his comeback, as I was the staff member who went back furthest and knew this story best. I was taken aback. I had gone to work for Richard Nixon because I had dreamed of working in his White House. Ray Price, chief speechwriter, and I were among the first to be named special assistants to the future President on November 16. But all orders now came through Haldeman. Tanned, fit, brusque, in his early forties, Bob wore his hair in a fifties crew cut, had been an Eagle Scout, and had been Nixon's campaign manager against Pat Brown. He could pass for a drill sergeant at Parris Island. Yet he was not without graciousness. After I was named special assistant, Bob pulled five dollars out of his wallet and said, "Why don't you and Shelley go down to the bar and have a couple of Bloody Marys." On December 18, after hearing reports that the President-elect was about to offer Gene McCarthy the post of ambassador to the United Nations, I wrote Nixon in protest. While it may have seemed insolent to be sending a protest note to a new President-elect, my anger and alarm were growing. "Here," I wrote of the Democratic senator who had mortally wounded LBJ in New Hampshire, then refused to endorse his fellow Minnesotan, Humphrey, until the final days of the campaign, is an arrogant mystic with a messianic streak, who left his good friend dangling on a hook for months and perhaps cost him the election, merely because HHH caviled over a few words in a party platform. . . . If he had no loyalty to his old friend HHH, what kind of loyalty would he have to RN? On November 20, an explosion in Farmington, West Virginia, had taken the lives of seventy-eight miners. I wrote Nixon that we were missing one opportunity after another to "build the majority we failed to win," with our 43 percent of the vote: RN visited the UN which probably made [New York Times editorial editor] Johnny Oakes' day, but if RN had flown to West Virginia, and without fanfare, had talked quietly with those women whose husbands had just been entombed in that mine, it would have spoken eloquently to millions of Americans whom RN and the Republican Party [have] never reached before. Is there anyone around RN, with a little soul, thinking in terms like this? I warned Haldeman of the problems certain to arise from the "para-military pyramidic structure" he was setting up. To no avail. For what was being done by Bob was being done with the approval of the man the nation had elected. From Eisenhower days, Nixon had in mind the staff structure he wanted for his presidency. Access to the Oval Office was to be tightly controlled and restricted. Hence, Nixon denied Rose Woods, who had been with him for twenty years, the presidential secretary's office outside the Oval. He had Haldeman move her down the hall. To insulate himself from intrusions and keep staff conflict and advocacy at a distance, Nixon had isolated himself, an isolation that would contribute to his downfall. Yet our staff system, the House That Haldeman Built, would prove a model for future presidents. The Reagan White House where I served was a replica. On a pre-inauguration trip to D.C., our staff met with the outgoing White House staff of LBJ, and I went through a receiving line to shake hands with the President. Nixon stood beside Johnson as I introduced myself. "Mr. President, I'm Pat Buchanan," I said to the man I had spent three years spearing in Nixon's statements and speeches. Inches taller than me, LBJ stared down, and, in an icy voice, hammering home each word, said, "I know who you are!" If the thirty-sixth President meant to intimidate me, he had succeeded. By inauguration day, the writing-research team from the campaign had been broken into pieces, its members dispatched to disparate shops. My office was in the old Executive Office Building, on the Seventeenth Street side. And any hopes I had that this would be the conservative administration of my aspirations were fading away. Henry Kissinger, a Harvard professor with a reputation for being a brilliant and ambitious courtier, Nelson Rockefeller's man, was our national security adviser. Pat Moynihan, a liberal Democrat who worked in LBJ's Labor Department, was counselor to the President for urban affairs. I had never met either. Both began to build large staffs loyal to themselves, little dukedoms inside President Nixon's White House. Haldeman, now White House chief of staff, and Ehrlichman, counsel to the President, were seen, not altogether correctly, as interchangeable twins, ideological agnostics, and bureaucratic allies. Both had been advance men in 1960, and both began to build staffs, with Haldeman's men controlling access to the Oval Office. Ehrlichman was a Seattle lawyer and Haldeman an ad executive with J. Walter Thompson. Both were Christian Scientists, friends since college at UCLA, but strangers to me when they arrived in mid-1968. Journalists called them "the Berlin Wall." To some veterans of 1966 and 1968, these late arrivals, given their Prussian aspect, were simply "the Germans." In Pat Nixon: The Untold Story, a loving memoir of her mother, Julie Nixon Eisenhower points to May 28, 1968, as the day the music died: The night of the Oregon primary victory, Bob Haldeman joined the Nixon staff and rapidly the hectic but intimate atmosphere of the primaries acquired a businesslike, no-nonsense tempo. Hobart Lewis, a personal friend of the family who traveled with the Nixon campaign whenever he could squeeze time from his job as an executive editor of the Reader's Digest, spent three days with the staff shortly after Haldeman became chief of staff. Once home, he brooded for forty-eight hours before finally telephoning Rose Woods to ask bluntly, "What's happened? The fun's gone." The conservative staffers who had played major roles in Nixon's comeback were scattered. Alan Greenspan, our research chief, got no offer that appealed to him. Dick Allen, foreign policy chief in the campaign, was named deputy to Henry Kissinger, who exiled him to the Executive Office Building, or EOB. He would resign by year's end. Martin Anderson, who had headed up domestic policy research, became the top aide to the other counselor, Dr. Arthur Burns. But Burns lacked the presidential access of Moynihan and by year's end was on his way to the Federal Reserve. Marty would soon depart. The shop where conservatism was not seen as a suspect cult was the legislative liaison staff of Bryce Harlow, who had held the same White House post under Ike. Tom Huston, Bill Gavin, and I, conservatives all, were sent to speechwriting, to be balanced by liberals Bill Safire, Ray Price, and Lee Huebner, a former head of the Ripon Society. Speechwriting was headed by Jim Keogh of Time magazine, a Nixon biographer, moderate Republican, and genuinely nice man. Bill Gavin would recollect in his memoir Speechwright: At least once a week . . . the writing staff, headed by Jim Keogh, would meet in his large office at the end of the first-floor EOB hallway. After getting assignments from Jim, we would . . . commiserate with each other, because under the new organizational system imposed by H. R. Haldeman, the previous close, informal relationship between Nixon and his writers had been replaced by a technically more efficient--but, in my view, ultimately less satisfying--process. What we made up in flow-chart organization we lost in human contact. On the campaign trail the writers could be called to the front cabin of Tricia [Nixon's plane] at any time. Before the inauguration, I was told by Haldeman that the President wanted me to set up a special news summary and have it on his desk at 7 a.m. I was also to prepare his briefing books, predicting the questions the President would be asked, and writing the answers he should give, for all press conferences. I was to attend all congressional leadership meetings and write up for the President's files what was said and decided. And I was to handle speechwriting assignments that would be coming through Jim Keogh. Though I had only just turned thirty, I came into the White House with advantages over many of my colleagues. The first was a personal friendship with the President, at whose side only Rose and I had been for all three years of his comeback. We had been through many battles together. I had been a confidant with whom he could share drinks, speak in candor, and trade jokes. I was a friend of the First Lady, with whom I had worked in that closet of an office outside his at Nixon, Mudge. My future wife, Shelley, had long personal ties to the First Family, having worked for Vice President Nixon a year out of college, traveled with him in the 1960 campaign and in the Goldwater campaign, then rejoined him in January 1967. After the West Wing was remodeled at Nixon's direction, Shelley would become the receptionist to the President and all White House aides in the West Wing. Crucially, I had been given by the good Lord a gift, developed in three years of editorial writing and three years of working intimately with Nixon. I could write swiftly, tersely, wittily, and well memos that Nixon loved to read, on matters he cared about most: politics, policy, and personalities. As this book reveals, Nixon asked for and welcomed my missives. It became our primary means of conversation. Over the Nixon White House years, I would send him a thousand. Lastly, Nixon knew I was the most reliable representative in his White House of the conservative wing of his party and his coalition, allies whom he often viewed with skepticism and suspicion. Within weeks of the inauguration, my channel to the Oval Office and the Mansion, via phone calls day and night and memos crossing and recrossing West Executive Avenue, had been reestablished. I had broken through the wall. In an early column, the White House correspondent for The New Republic, John Osborne, a keen observer of palace politics, wrote of the loss of proximity and access to the President of the writers who had helped shape the campaign and develop the issues that had won Nixon the election. Singling out my assignment to set up a news summary, Osborne wrote: Pat Buchanan's considerable talents would seem to be wasted on such a chore. . . . Buchanan . . . and other veterans of the staff rank third in the pecking order of "assistants," "deputy assistants," "special assistants," and staff assistants to the President. The theory is that they will contribute to the evolution of policy in their assigned fields, but one gets the impression around the White House that they find themselves farther from the President and less involved in the policy process than they had hoped to be. Osborne had understated the demotion. Counselors to the President held Cabinet rank, while the Special Assistant title had been depreciated by inflating the number and creating three titles above it. Three dozen aides, some of whom I had never met, had titles as high as or higher than mine. Yet, as Osborne was writing this in his column, my relationship with the President, whom younger aides began to call "the Old Man," was being restored. Excerpted from Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever by Patrick J. Buchanan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Nixon in the Sixties | p. 1 |
Chapter 1 Left Behind | p. 15 |
Chapter 2 Storm Warnings | p. 21 |
Chapter 3 "The Great Silent Majority" | p. 62 |
Chapter 4 Agnew's Hour | p. 69 |
Chapter 5 American Kulturkampf | p. 90 |
Chapter 6 The Nixon Court | p. 96 |
Chapter 7 The Second Reconstruction | p. 115 |
Chapter 8 Converting the Catholics | p. 142 |
Chapter 9 Cambodia and Kent State | p. 153 |
Chapter 10 The Seven Weeks War | p. 181 |
Chapter 12 Nixon in China | p. 225 |
Chapter 13 "Turn all the dogs loose" | p. 250 |
Chapter 14 St. George and the Dragon | p. 267 |
Chapter 15 Watergate erupts | p. 306 |
Chapter 16 "Burn the Tapes!" | p. 313 |
Chapter 17 Before the Watergate Committee | p. 334 |
Chapter 18 Saturday Night Massacre | p. 351 |
Chapter 19 Final Days | p. 370 |
Chapter 20 Ex-President, 1974-1994 | p. 384 |
Appendix | p. 403 |
Acknowledgments | p. 421 |
Bibliography | p. 422 |
Index | p. 425 |