The Crusader: The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat
Buchanan
By Timothy Stanley
(Thomas Dunne Books, 464 pages, $27.99)
On the dust jacket of Timothy Stanley’s The Crusader: The
Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan, Paul Gottfried
offers this “Advance Praise”: “Stanley’s biography of Pat Buchanan
combines meticulous research, including the fruits of multiple
interviews, with highly accessible prose and judicious judgments.”
The sheer heft of this 455-page volume, the first full-length
biography of the journalist, commentator, assistant to two
presidents, and three-time presidential candidate, seems almost
enough to confirm at least the first part of Professor Gottfried’s
assessment. The few paragraphs in the book that do not have at
least one endnote are mainly composed of one sentence. Taken
together, those notes fill 53 pages, followed by a 7-page
Bibliography.
The thoroughness of Stanley’s effort is even more impressive
when you consider that the bulk of the book covers only the last 20
years of the 73-year-old Buchanan’s life, from the time of his
first run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1992. It’s
not that the earlier years are unimportant—indeed, those decades,
more so than anything that has happened to him since 1992, made
Buchanan what he is today—but Stanley, an Oxford University
historian whose specialty is the United States, could have added
little to what Buchanan himself had to say about his life in his
1988 autobiography Right From the Beginning. In fact, when
he covers some of the same material—for instance, in his discussion
of a meeting held in the living room of Buchanan’s McLean,
Virginia, home in January 1987, when he was considering a run for
the Republican nomination in 1988—Stanley leans heavily on
Right From the Beginning, to the point where those who
have read both books may experience a sense of déjà
vu.
Stanley sees the 1992 campaign as a major turning point in
Buchanan’s life, though I would argue that the change wrought was
personal rather than political. As Stanley himself notes, Buchanan
decided to forgo a run for the nomination in 1988, when he might
have succeeded in uniting more of the conservative movement than he
did four years later, because “He was a private man who disliked
large crowds and strange faces.” Making the decision to run in 1992
required rising above that aspect of his personality.
Stanley, however, sees the change as primarily political, and
his judgment is summed up in the title of Chapter 12: “Pat Becomes
a Paleocon, Runs for President.” Life is never quite that simple,
as historians well know—and as other passages of Stanley’s own book
make clear.
In that chapter, Stanley pins Buchanan’s intellectual
conversion—from the right wing of mainstream conservatism to
paleoconservatism—on his reaction to George H. W. Bush’s “New World
Order” and the Gulf War. He emphasizes the growing friendship among
Buchanan and columnists Sam Francis and Joe Sobran, forged by their
mutual opposition to the war. While that friendship was of great
importance in helping Buchanan to clarify his thinking in the
run-up to the 1992 race, it reflected the evolution of Buchanan’s
thoughts on foreign policy in the wake of the fall of the Berlin
Wall and the collapse of communism (which Stanley treats in the
preceding chapter).
In Right From the Beginning, Buchanan had written that
“The raison d’être of any realistic (i.e., nonideological)
American foreign policy must be the preservation of the Republic.”
In 1988, that meant that “Containment Is Not Enough,” the title of
the chapter on foreign policy in Right From the Beginning;
three years later, it meant “Now That Red Is Dead, Come Home,
America,” the headline of the pivotal op-ed Buchanan published in
the Washington Post on September 8, 1991 (which does not make an
appearance in Stanley’s book). In between, and tying the two
together, came Buchanan’s contribution to the Spring 1990 issue of
the American Interest, “America First—and Second, and
Third.” Between 1988 and 1991, the circumstances had changed, but
the principle had remained the same.
Buchanan’s transition from a longtime supporter of free trade to
a more nuanced position of “fair” or “managed” trade likewise did
not represent a change of principle, though that may be hard to see
until we understand what principle was at stake. In Right From
the Beginning, at the end of a section in which he calls the
prospect of a “trade war” with Asian countries “an act of almost
terminal stupidity for the West,” Buchanan writes:
The Republican party should stand for traditional values, even
when that means standing against laissez-faire; we should
set our sights on something higher than the bottom line on a
balance sheet. The greatness of a country and the goodness of its
people are not to be measured by its GNP.
It is one thing to believe that the federal government should
not interfere with healthy competition; it is another to believe
that the federal government should make it easier for American
corporations to profit by transferring production and jobs
overseas. To insist on free trade when it has begun to harm the
American interest and the interest of the average American is to
turn a worthy ideal into an ideology.
Stanley repeats the oft-told story of Buchanan’s heart-wrenching
visit to a paper mill in New Hampshire, where, just days before
Christmas, all of the workers had been fired. By Buchanan’s own
account, the plaintive appeal of a worker, imploring Buchanan to
save their jobs, affected him deeply. But it is painting with too
broad of a brush to say, as Stanley does, that on that day,
“Buchanan the Republican was dead. Buchanan the populist was born.”
Up until then, Stanley writes, “For Pat, the trade issue had always
been an intellectual conceit.” But four pages earlier, he describes
a fundraising letter that Buchanan had written as “an attack on
free trade,” and traces the genesis of the letter back to a
conversation between Buchanan and Buchanan’s Uncle Bob 15 years
earlier, at the 1976 Republican convention.
Life is messy, and tracing the intellectual development of
someone like Pat Buchanan is undoubtedly hard. But The
Crusader sometimes reads as if Stanley sketched out the
narrative of the biography first and went searching for the
supporting details later. And considering the wealth of endnotes,
he gets a surprising number of details wrong. That Antiwar.com
editorial director Justin Raimondo is a Hispanic-American would
undoubtedly come as a surprise to his Sicilian grandparents. Paul
Gottfried is repeatedly described as a philosopher, though his
academic training is in history. Sam Francis certainly “lost about
twenty pounds,” but only before he went on to lose perhaps a
hundred more, in a diet that began more than a year earlier than
Stanley says it did. This particular paragraph about Francis
contains at least a half-dozen errors of fact (despite three
endnotes), and ends with a description of Francis’s death that is
appallingly abrupt. Joe Sobran receives similar treatment in the
very next paragraph.
A description of a meeting between Buchanan and Russell Kirk at
Kirk’s Piety Hill in the weeks leading up to the March 1992
Republican primary in Michigan leaves the impression that Kirk and
Buchanan barely knew each other and left the meeting estranged. But
the two men first met when Buchanan was serving in the Nixon White
House (Kirk, in his posthumously published memoirs, The Sword
of Imagination, describes Buchanan at that time as “the ablest
of the President’s inner circle”), and Buchanan secured a
Washington appointment for Kirk, who, though grateful, turned it
down because “he did not mean to be converted into a cultural
bureaucrat.” In the last years of his life, Kirk frequently, and
proudly, recalled his role as Buchanan’s Michigan campaign
chairman, and he describes Buchanan as a friend in the last pages
of his memoirs. Buchanan, for his part, dedicated his 2007 Day
of Reckoning “To Russell Kirk (1918–1994), Friend and
Teacher,” and describes Kirk as “the great conservative scholar and
author and chairman of the Buchanan Brigades in Michigan in 1992,”
noting that “he seems ever to grow wiser as I grow older.”
Stanley clearly relishes controversy, which leads him to place
undue emphasis on rather unimportant events, often not involving
Buchanan at all (or involving him only tangentially). By the time I
reached the final page of text—the Acknowledgments—it hardly seemed
surprising to read this line: “I didn’t know where to start my
research, so I googled ‘Buchanan right-wing activists crazy’…”
Still, it struck me as an odd admission from an Oxford
historian.
And yet, despite all of these problems, I would recommend
The Crusader to anyone interested in Pat Buchanan and the
brand of right-wing populism he exemplified in the last decade of
the 20th century. Professional historians all too often succeed in
meticulously documenting the details, while missing the big picture
(or getting it entirely wrong). But Stanley, despite his errors and
overgeneralizations, has largely captured the essence of Buchanan
and Buchananism. Approach The Crusader the way you would
view an Impressionist painting: If you spend too much time
examining the brush strokes, the work of art will get lost. Take a
step back, regard the canvas as a whole, and the broader truth of
the artist’s work comes into focus.
Remember, though, to take any particular details you read in
The Crusader with a grain of salt—even when they come with
an endnote.
