Patrick J. Buchanan was a Nixon loyalist until the bitter end. As the Watergate conspiracy unraveled and the impeachment tide lapped ever closer to the Oval Office, Buchanan, a speechwriter, was assigned to coach White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler on how to handle the press corps.
Buchanan, and other White House operatives, helped Ziegler rehearse the lies and half-truths he would feed reporters at the regular White House news briefings. Buchanan, according to evidence presented during the Senate Watergate hearings, anticipated that Ziegler would be questioned about Donald Segretti, one of a covert team of "dirty tricksters" hired by the Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP). They forged documents and infiltrated and disrupted the campaigns of Nixon's Democratic opponents.
Buchanan advocated an aggressive strategy to throw the reporters on the defensive. "Drip by drip, it really wears them down," Buchanan told Ziegler.
Later, Buchanan was summoned to testify before the Senate Watergate hearings. Still the bully-boy, full of bluster, he bragged of provoking racial, religious and regional hostility as part of Nixon's divide-and-conquer "Southern Strategy."
A Dec. 11, 1970 memo reported that after a White House news conference in which Nixon defended his escalation of the Vietnam War, Buchanan drafted 10 fake telegrams that were to be sent from around the country to Time and Newsweek, praising Nixon's war policy.
Other Watergate criminals served their jail terms and vanished into obscurity. Patrick Buchanan never served a day in jail. He has just won, narrowly, the New Hampshire primary for the Republican presidential nomination.
Buchanan was forced to distance himself from his campaign co-chair Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, linked to the white supremacist armed militias. Pratt took what he described as a "temporary leave" from Buchanan's campaign. But two days later, another white supremacist, Susan Lamb, was found in Buchanan's Florida campaign committee. Lamb, Duval County chairwoman of the Buchanan Committee is also Florida organizer of David Duke's National Association for the Advancement of White People.
Duke, head of the Ku Klux Klan, was trounced when he ran for Governor of Louisiana in 1991. But he endorsed Buchanan in the Louisiana caucuses, helping Buchanan win a victory over Texas Senator Phil Gramm. Gramm officials learned last week that a hate mongering publication, "The Truth at Last" was distributed in Louisiana with a picture of Gramm and his Korean-American wife and the caption, "He divorced a White wife to marry an Asiatic."
Pratt is co-editor of a bimonthly newsletter published by United Sovereigns America based in Del City, Oklahoma. The group preaches that the U.S. government is unconstitutional. The group's mailing house offers an array of extremist literature including the virulently anti-Semitic "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a Czarist-era forgery that purports to be the working plan for a takeover of the world by Jews. The group also sells the handbook of Posse Comitatus, a violent far-right group that engaged in shoot-outs with U.S. marshals and other law enforcement officers in the 1980s.
An expose of Buchanan in the Pittsburgh Gazette reveals that Pratt was the featured speaker at a "Constitution Restoration Rally" in Lakeland, Fla., Oct. 1, 1994, in which the main argument was that neither the 13th nor the 14th Amendment of the Constitution was ratified. These are the amendments abolishing slavery and extending full citizenship rights to African Americans. Present at that rally, according to militia leaders, was Timothy McVeigh. He is now on trial for bombing the Oklahoma City federal building.
Pratt shared the platform at the anti-gun control "Preparedness Expo" in Salt Lake City last year with militia advocate Mark Koernke, Green Beret extremist Bo Gritz, and Jack McLamb, a fired Phoenix Arizona police officer who authored a paramilitary manual titled "Vampire Killer 2000." The manual was found among McVeigh's belongings when he was arrested.
Buchanan, a syndicated columnist and co-host of Turner Broadcasting's Crossfire, denies he is a racist or an anti- Semite. Yet he took up the cudgels for John Demjanjuk of Cleveland who sneaked into the U.S. after World War II without revealing that he had served as a guard at Treblinka, the Nazi death camp. Survivors identified Demjanjuk as "Ivan the Terrible," a fiendish Nazi torturer and murderer. He was deported to Israel and stood trial for war crimes. Buchanan portrayed him as the victim of a witch hunt. With the help of closet-Nazi admirers like Buchanan, Demjanjuk escaped the hangman's noose.
Buchanan's speech to the 1992 GOP convention spelled out his fascist-like views. He called for a "cultural war" to "take back America, street-by-street." This was a code language declaration of war on African Americans, Jewish Americans, Latinos, immigrants and women.
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