Eleven years ago, I sat in Patrick Buchanan’s living room in McLean, Va. I asked about his work as a writer, and he told me about his routine. He and his wife, Shelly, sit together and read the morning’s newspapers — the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post — which he marked up with pen and pencil. In many ways, column-writing was not so different from preparing news briefings for Richard Nixon or memoranda for the Reagan White House. Then he went down to his massive study, with history books overcrowding the shelves, and he wrote.
Why was he so different from other conservative columnists? His writing was not spiffy like George Will’s, or sweetly decorated like Peggy Noonan’s. In some ways, his style seemed at odds with his own intellect. Buchanan is a pessimist about Western civilization, deeply haunted by Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. And yet, his writing evinced a boyish thrill at the cut and thrust of daily politics. “I don’t know that it is a style,” Buchanan told me, “I write and I cut, tightening and tightening and tightening it until it is pure dynamite, and then I send it out.” Even if in his heart, he believes that Western civilization was destroyed at the Battle of the Somme, he writes as if the whole pot is still waiting to be claimed.
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