Ha! I suppose I was thinking of him as a columnist rather than as an author. Right from the Beginning is a treasure in part because it is a rare book that describes post-war America with the affection so many people felt for it at the time, and it does so persuasively. I think my favorite stories from it are the anti-porn efforts of the young Buchanan brothers. One, taking a job as a mail carrier, threw all the issues of Playboy into a dumpster. In a D.C. shop, the Buchanan boys light a rack of girly magazines on fire and flatter themselves as having done “Catholic Social Action” in the process. Only Buchanan would make censorship seem like piratical, hair-raising fun.
Speaking of good Buchanan fun, I see that YouTube has his entire Watergate testimony.
Buchanan memorably did the testimony without the help of a lawyer and often had the gallery in stitches. Samuel Dash, the chief counsel for the Senate Watergate Committee, is impressed with the fiery rhetoric of Buchanan’s memos to the president and others in the White House about the dangers of Democrats’ getting elected. Dash then begins to wonder what kind of tactics Buchanan would recommend. The exchange takes you back to a different era.
Mr. DASH. I am just asking you, in the memorandum, where you have indicated the nature of the danger that you saw to the country, and the importance that the forces of the Republican Party including the White House be aimed at knocking out the front-runner, Mr. Muskie, how far would you go to do that? What tactics would you be willing to use?
Mr. BUCHANAN. What tactics would I be willing to use? Anything that was not immoral, unethical, illegal, or unprecedented in previous Democratic campaigns. [Laughter.]
Mr. DASH. We will leave that general definition and see whether or not some of this we might be able to define a little more clearly. Did you have any discussion with anyone at the White House about the possibility of hiring someone like a Donald Segretti?
Mr. BUCHANAN. We certainly did. As you know, Mr. Richard “Dick” Tuck is the well-known Democratic prankster; we enjoyed some of his tricks against us as well as, I am sure, he did. I recall in just three, briefly, three of his favorites; one of them was in 1962 when Mr. Nixon began to deliver a major address from the back of a railroad train, he put on an engineer’s cap and signaled the engineer to drive off, leaving Mr. Nixon standing there.
Another of his favorites was during a major political speech just as the speaker reaches the denouement, he drops the fire escape on him.
The third was, we were at the Hotel Hilton down there in Miami Beach, and out front demonstrating — I thought it was welfare mothers or we heard it was welfare mothers at the time — they were all black, they were all pregnant, and they were all carrying placards that said “Nixon’s the one.” [Laughter.]