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Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
Media analysis, critiques and news reports
FAIR Report: Pat Buchanan-Equal Opportunity Maligner
In recent days, Patrick Buchanan has been blaming the news media for
dishonest reporting on his new book "A Republic, Not An Empire," which
raises questions about U.S. intervention in World War II.
Since Buchanan is vehemently denying that he is bigoted toward Jews or
anyone else, FAIR thought it was an appropriate time to reprint our 1996
compendium of Buchanan quotes documenting the presidential candidate's
broad-ranging bigotry.
==================================
FAIR Report: Pat Buchanan In His Own Words
February 26, 1996
Here is a sampling of Buchanan's views:
On African-Americans
After Sen. Carol Moseley Braun blocked a federal patent for a Confederate
flag insignia, Buchanan wrote that she was "putting on an act" by
associating the Confederacy with slavery: "The War Between the States was
about independence, about self-determination, about the right of a people to
break free of a government to which they could no longer give allegiance,"
Buchanan asserted. "How long is this endless groveling before every cry of
'racism' going to continue before the whole country collectively throws up?"
(syndicated column, 7/28/93)
On race relations in the late 1940s and early 1950s: "There were no politics
to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The 'negroes' of Washington
had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and
churches; and we had ours." ("Right from the Beginning," Buchanan's 1988
autobiography, p. 131)
Buchanan, who opposed virtually every civil rights law and court decision of
the last 30 years, published FBI smears of Martin Luther King Jr. as his own
editorials in the St. Louis Globe Democrat in the mid-1960s. "We were among
Hoover's conduits to the American people," he boasted ("Right from the
Beginning," p. 283).
White House advisor Buchanan urged President Nixon in an April 1969 memo not
to visit "the Widow King" on the first anniversary of Martin Luther King's
assassination, warning that a visit would "outrage many, many people who
believe Dr. King was a fraud and a demagogue and perhaps worse.... Others
consider him the Devil incarnate. Dr. King is one of the most divisive men
in contemporary history." (New York Daily News, 10/1/90)
In a memo to President Nixon, Buchanan suggested that "integration of blacks
and whites -- but even more so, poor and well-to-do -- is less likely to
result in accommodation than it is in perpetual friction, as the incapable
are placed consciously by government side by side with the capable."
(Washington Post, 1/5/92)
In another memo from Buchanan to Nixon: "There is a legitimate grievance in
my view of white working-class people that every time, on every issue, that
the black militants loud-mouth it, we come up with more money.... If we can
give 50 Phantoms [jet fighters] to the Jews, and a multi-billion dollar
welfare program for the blacks...why not help the Catholics save their
collapsing school system." (Boston Globe, 1/4/92)
Buchanan has repeatedly insisted that President Reagan did so much for
African-Americans that civil rights groups have no reason to exist: "George
Bush should have told the [NAACP convention] that black America has grown
up; that the NAACP should close up shop, that its members should go home and
reflect on JFK's admonition: 'Ask not what your country can do for you, but
rather ask what you can do for your country.'" (syndicated column, 7/26/88)
In a column sympathetic to ex-Klansman David Duke, Buchanan chided the
Republican Party for overreacting to Duke and his Nazi "costume": "Take a
hard look at Duke's portfolio of winning issues and expropriate those not in
conflict with GOP principles, [such as] reverse discrimination against white
folks." (syndicated column, 2/25/89)
Trying to justify apartheid in South Africa, he denounced the notion that
"white rule of a black majority is inherently wrong. Where did we get that
idea? The Founding Fathers did not believe this." (syndicated column,
2/7/90) He referred admiringly to the apartheid regime as the "Boer
Republic": "Why are Americans collaborating in a U.N. conspiracy to ruin her
with sanctions?" (syndicated column, 9/17/89)
On Immigrants And People Of Color
"There is nothing wrong with us sitting down and arguing that issue that we
are a European country." (Newsday, 11/15/92)
Buchanan on affirmative action: "How, then, can the feds justify favoring
sons of Hispanics over sons of white Americans who fought in World War II or
Vietnam?" (syndicated column, 1/23/95)
In a September 1993 speech to the Christian Coalition, Buchanan described
multiculturalism as "an across-the-board assault on our Anglo-American
heritage."
"If we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or
Englishmen, and put them up in Virginia, what group would be easier to
assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?" ("This
Week With David Brinkley," 1/8/91)
On Jews
Buchanan referred to Capitol Hill as "Israeli-occupied territory." (St.
Louis Post Dispatch, 10/20/90)
During the Gulf crisis: "There are only two groups that are beating the
drums for war in the Middle East -- the Israeli defense ministry and its
'amen corner' in the United States." ("McLaughlin Group," 8/26/90)
In a 1977 column, Buchanan said that despite Hitler's anti-Semitic and
genocidal tendencies, he was "an individual of great courage...Hitler's
success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an
intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness
masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood
in his path." (The Guardian, 1/14/92)
Writing of "group fantasies of martyrdom," Buchanan challenged the
historical record that thousands of Jews were gassed to death by diesel
exhaust at Treblinka: "Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to
kill anybody." (New Republic, 10/22/90) Buchanan's columns have run in the
Liberty Lobby's Spotlight, the German-American National PAC newsletter and
other publications that claim Nazi death camps are a Zionist concoction.
Buchanan called for closing the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special
Investigations, which prosecuted Nazi war criminals, because it was "running
down 70-year-old camp guards." (New York Times, 4/21/87)
Buchanan was vehement in pushing President Reagan -- despite protests -- to
visit Germany's Bitburg cemetery, where Nazi SS troops were buried. At a
White House meeting, Buchanan reportedly reminded Jewish leaders that they
were "Americans first" -- and repeatedly scrawled the phrase "Succumbing to
the pressure of the Jews" in his notebook. Buchanan was credited with
crafting Ronald Reagan's line that the SS troops buried at Bitburg were
"victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps." (New
York Times, 5/16/85; New Republic, 1/22/96)
After Cardinal O'Connor criticized anti-Semitism during the controversy over
construction of a convent near Auschwitz, Buchanan wrote: "If U.S. Jewry
takes the clucking appeasement of the Catholic cardinalate as indicative of
our submission, it is mistaken. When Cardinal O'Connor of New York seeks to
soothe the always irate Elie Wiesel by reassuring him 'there are many
Catholics who are anti-Semitic'...he speaks for himself. Be not afraid, Your
Eminence; just step aside, there are bishops and priests ready to assume the
role of defender of the faith." (New Republic, 10/22/90)
The Buchanan '96 campaign's World Wide Web site included an article blaming
the death of White House aide Vincent Foster on the Israeli intelligence
agency, Mossad -- and alleging that Foster and Hillary Clinton were Mossad
spies. (The campaign removed the article after its existence was reported by
a Jewish on-line news service; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 2/21/96.)
In his September 1993 speech to the Christian Coalition, Buchanan declared:
"Our culture is superior. Our culture is superior because our religion is
Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free." (ADL Report, 1994)
On Gays
In a 1972 memo to Richard Nixon, Buchanan referred to one of George
McGovern's leading financial contributors as a "screaming fairy." (Newsday,
2/8/89) Buchanan has repeatedly used the term "sodomites," and has referred
to gays as "the pederast proletariat." (Washington Post, 2/9/92)
"Homosexuality involves sexual acts most men consider not only immoral, but
filthy. The reason public men rarely say aloud what most say privately is
they are fearful of being branded 'bigots' by an intolerant liberal
orthodoxy that holds, against all evidence and experience, that
homosexuality is a normal, healthy lifestyle." (syndicated column, 9/3/89)
In a 1977 column urging a "thrashing" of gay groups, Buchanan wrote:
"Homosexuality is not a civil right. Its rise almost always is accompanied,
as in the Weimar Republic, with a decay of society and a collapse of its
basic cinder block, the family." (New Republic, 3/30/92)
"Gay rights activists seek to substitute, for laws rooted in Judeo-Christian
morality, laws rooted in the secular humanist belief that all consensual
sexual acts are morally equal. That belief is anti-biblical and amoral; to
codify it into law is to codify a lie." (Buchanan column in Wall Street
Journal, 1/21/93)
On AIDS, Buchanan wrote in 1983: "The poor homosexuals -- they have declared
war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution (AIDS)."
(Los Angeles Times, 11/28/86) Later that year, he demanded that New York
City Ed Koch and New York Gov. Mario Cuomo cancel the Gay Pride Parade or
else "be held personally responsible for the spread of the AIDS plague."
"With 80,000 dead of AIDS, our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally
hell-bent on Satanism and suicide," Buchanan wrote in 1990 (syndicated
column, 10/17/90). In the 1992 campaign, he declared: "AIDS is nature's
retribution for violating the laws of nature." (Seattle Times, 7/31/93)
On Women
"Rail as they will about 'discrimination,' women are simply not endowed by
nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to
succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism."
(syndicated column, 11/22/83)
"The real liberators of American women were not the feminist noise-makers,
they were the automobile, the supermarket, the shopping center, the
dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the freezer." (Right from the Beginning, p.
149)
"If a woman has come to believe that divorce is the answer to every
difficult marriage, that career comes before children ... no democratic
government can impose another set of values upon her." ("Right from the
Beginning," p. 341)
On Democracy
Attacking what he considers the "democratist temptation, the worship of
democracy as a form of governance," Buchanan commented: "Like all
idolatries, democratism substitutes a false god for the real, a love of
process for a love of country." (Patrick J. Buchanan: From the Right,
newsletter, Spring/90)
In a January, 1991 column, Buchanan suggested that "quasi-dictatorial rule"
might be the solution to the problems of big municipalities and the federal
fiscal crisis: "If the people are corrupt, the more democracy, the worse the
government." (Washington Times, 1/9/91) He has written disparagingly of the
"one man, one vote Earl Warren system."
In "Right from the Beginning," Buchanan refers to Spanish dictator Francisco
Franco as a "Catholic savior." He called Franco, along with Chile's Gen.
Pinochet, "soldier-patriots." (syndicated column 9/17/89) Both men overthrew
democracy in their countries.
Buchanan devotes a chapter of his autobiography -- "As We Remember Joe" --
to defending Senator Joe McCarthy. He advocated that Nixon "burn the tapes"
during Watergate, and he criticized Reagan for failing to pardon Oliver
North over Iran-contra.
Buchanan, shortly before he announced he was running for president in 1995:
"You just wait until 1996, then you'll see a real right-wing tyrant." (The
Nation, 6/26/95)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
For more of FAIR's critique, see "It's The Mexicans, Stupid: The Phony
Populism of Pat Buchanan" at:
http://www.fair.org/extra/9605/buchanan.html
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