Pat Buchanan: A hero who deserves Trump’s Medal of Freedom
Pat Buchanan took no prisoners.
His aim was to defend America’s superiority. And if his political nemeses got their feelings hurt during his riddling, tough.
Sound familiar? Sure. Buchanan was Donald Trump before the president’s rocket ride to the White House.
America First. Keep countries from screwing us on trade. Speak English. Build the wall. Stop the invading hordes from defacing our country’s mighty culture.
Those were Buchanan staples before he quit writing and commenting on TV a couple of years ago.
Now if he’s up to it at age 86, he should be up for a titanic reward: the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Trump should be honored to deliver the first such medal of his second term to one of the truest patriots of the past half century.
Buchanan would be receiving it in the White House, where he was a communications master for Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
Pat tried to win the presidency in his own right three times, but he was too far ahead of his time, especially on the immigration front. Trump grabbed his baton two decades later, rebranded it MAGA and won. Now he can thank Buchanan by placing the top civilian medal around his neck.
I would pay to hear Buchanan’s acceptance speech. He’s that humorous and compelling.
It would bring back memories of his days at MSNBC, where his brilliance forced the lib channel to can him. He simply got a promotion to my namesake channel, Fox News, where we caught the deepest, cleverest commentator in the biz.
Here’s the truth among libs: They paid attention to him. Why? Because Pat Buchanan could flat-out write. His prose was entertaining like no one else in the newspaper, magazine, blog arena. Period. Paragraph.
Those last two words are stolen from Pat. Along with a rare grasp of geography, names, politics and history, Buchanan had old-school lines that made his columns and books sing. Such as: “headed for the tall grass.” Meaning chickened out.
Buchanan could’ve done stand-up.
He said he wouldn’t criticize Dan Quayle, the veep under Bush I, because “I don’t want to be accused of child abuse.”
When asked what he thought about gun control, he replied, “I think it’s important to have a steady aim.”
No wonder Nixon hired him. He found a thoroughbred in 1966 and rode Buchanan’s speech-writing and rockin’ ideas all the way to the presidency two years hence.
The stunning gallop was captured in Pat’s book “The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose From Defeat to Create the New Majority.”
Being the Nixon and Buchanan cheerer that I am, I bought the tome the minute it went on sale. And a ticket to see the man who in his 20s had the guts to join the former vice president when all anyone else saw was a loser of 1960 and ’62.
During what Nixon called his wilderness years in New York, Buchanan was just about the whole staff. And he talked all about it in a riveting speech and Q&A at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California, in 2014.
He had plenty to talk about. That book is right up there with fellow Nixon scribe Bill Safire’s “Before the Fall” as the coolest political productions you could ever read.
Favorite takes:
- “Years later, after I had dropped off a speech draft in the Oval Office, [Nixon] read it and muttered, ‘For God’s sake, Buchanan, get some lift into it!’ As I reached the door, he said loud enough to hear, ‘Why can’t I get speechwriters like Wilson’s?’ Not until I was outside the Oval Office did I retort, sotto voce, ‘Wilson wrote his own speeches.'”
- “[Martin Luther] King had moved so far out of the mainstream that black columnist Carl Rowan had penned an attack on him in Reader’s Digest. Bill Buckley wrote that King was becoming ‘the Harold Stassen of the civil rights movement.’ That there would be a national holiday for King was unimaginable in that spring of 1968, as would the claim by 21st-century conservatives that Dr. King was somehow one of us.”
Marvelous stuff from Buchanan. He followed with another classic volume, “Nixon’s White House Wars,” detailing the Vietnam War-ending, all-volunteer-Army-starting, Israel-rescuing, moon-landing Nixon presidency of 1969 to ’74.
Toward the end of that final Pat book was a reliving of the funeral for Spiro Agnew, who as vice president roared with Buchanan’s prose to become a hero of the right. Millions cheered Agnew. Now on this 1996 day he drew a scant crowd. But Buchanan didn’t desert him.
As The Baltimore Sun wrote, “The closest thing to a national celebrity [at graveside] was Patrick J. Buchanan, the populist former Republican presidential candidate who long ago co-wrote the speeches that made Agnew a sensation, alliterative anthems that may forever define his legacy.”
Buchanan is a loyalist to the hilt, as he also displayed throughout Trump’s political career. The president could return the favor and remind America of Pat’s big, beautiful legacy by locking in that Medal of Freedom.