Inside Buchanan's Bunker

Manchester, New Hampshire is a scrapper's town where survivors outnumber victors a dozen to one. The textile tycoons left here for cheaper hands south of the border. One of the world's largest shoe manufacturing operations is now a brick dinosaur. The out-of-luck and out-of-work sip coffee in Dunkin' Donuts, which locals call Drunken Grown-ups. There isn't a lot to smile about in Manchester, where the icy wind blows through sweaters and parkas, oak leaves zip by and the city tax collector auctions another fore-closed office building.

This is Pat Buchanan country. It was here, in 1992, that Buchanan vaulted the fence dividing political commentators and presidential candidates. Buchanan leaped into the campaign and immediately violated the Republican Party's Eleventh Commandment: Thou shall not speak ill of fellow Republicans. Later, with his acclaimed speech at the Republican convention in Houston, Buchanan helped elevate Bill Clinton to the White House. In that speech Buchanan said, "There's a religious war going on in this country, a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America." According to pollsters, thousands of voters abandoned the Republicans after that speech. Party leaders were widely criticized for allowing such divisive rhetoric. So when Buchanan announced his second presidential run in March 1995, the party elders recognized the danger in their midst. Warning signals echoed throughout the Republicans Party: How powerful is Pat? Who are these voters flocking to his America First campaign?

I wondered myself, and I figured there was one sure way to find out: I could join his campaign. I figured that if Buchanan can disguise himself as a friend of working-class America, then I could disguise myself as an angry white man who was out of work and eager to fight back.

I was born in Manchester and was keen to go back home---and back in time. So in late October I returned to this nondescript state where every four years, the nation inexplicably leases its political future.

•

I laugh at the license plates with the state motto: Live free or die. The plates are made by prisoners. Immediately I find the cheapest barber in town and shear off my curls, leaving only a Marine regulation flattop. Now Buchanan is the longhair. I buy a bronze Liberty Bell belt buckle the size of a baseball that shouts: America: let freedom ring in. The silver-Plated Winchester tie clip balances nicely with my conservative clothes. Carrying a copy of National Review, I set off for the campaign headquarters, where I spot an old Dodge Dart with the sticker I ? Assault Weapons.

Things don't look so good at the Buchanan campaign office. Pumpkins and hay bales are rotting, cold pizza sits in the refrigerator and a new volunteer is puking in the bathroom. Apparently he ate an old pizza without asking how long it had sat abandoned. Phone lines hang from the ceiling like spaghetti. On a wall is the campaign motto: The second winner is the first loser. Despite the cheesy, low-rent tint---or perhaps because of this vaunted underdog status---the campaign office buzzes with enthusiasm. This week's Time magazine cover, featuring Buchanan's mug, is everywhere. The cover line reads: Hell-Raiser: A huey long for the Nineties, Pat Buchanan wields the most lethal weapon in Campaign '96: Scapecoat Politics.

"Have you got any bumper stickers? I need one for my car," I ask the suited gentleman who walks over to greet me.

"Sure," says Peter Robbio, Buchanan's point man for the New Hampshire primary. "How many do you need?"

"Oh, you have position papers, too." I talk a little too loud and too enthusiastically, hoping to be noticed. "I'd like to volunteer. I have a few free hours if you have any extra work."

"Sure, there's always something to do," says Robbio, who looks like a Nixon doll shrunk into a Danny DeVi-to-size suit. He flips his Motorola cellular to his face and enters a second conversation at full speed. I hear him shout, "The number of tickets you buy will determine the clout you wield," in a voice that also says, "That's common sense, bub."

As I survey the office, three aides come over and introduce themselves: Shaun (a freckled Irishman from Massachusetts with a lobster-red face). Lee (the resident Southerner and the only person I saw in New Hampshire wearing cowboy boots) and Mike (a hulking, olive-skinned New Yorker). Each is ambitious, friendly and dedicated to Buchanan's charismatic campaign.

I don't have to wait long to hear aides mock Phil Gramm and Bob Dole as "leap-year conservatives"---Buchanan's line to recruit voters now packing the party's engorged right wing. Gramm is a bore, they tell me. Dole is dismissed as a worn-out retread with "one arm and no heart." Both Gramm and Dole will be defeated by fearless Pat, the aides tell me with adolescent enthusiasm.

We gather around a battered, malfunctioning Magnavox and cheer as Pat lands friendly jabs on his interviewer, a young woman from MacNeil Lehrer. We laugh as he deftly disarms her questions. Win or lose, Buchanan perpetually dominates these shows, grabbing the spotlight and boosting ratings. He's a natural entertainer.

Minutes after Buchanan assures his nationwide audience that "the cultural war is being won," I hear a whoop. Buchanan's driver, a young aide named Roger, is surfing the World Wide Web. He's sitting to my right and sputtering, "I did it, I downloaded it. This is so cool."

I expect to see the Rush Limbaugh home page or the Oliver North Web site. Instead, it's MTV page. The network's logo glides open and up pop Beavis and Butt-head. Revving up a chainsaw, Beavis announces, "I sentence you to death" and shreds Butthead's finger---blood spurts liberally and Roger laughs as he struggles to download another file. Soon the entire office gathers around the PC: Beavis and Butt-head are here.

Behind his Plexiglas divider, Robbio shrieks into his cell phone, "It's two p.m., and I need his schedule!" Buchanan's aides are busy organizing a Young Republican costume party. Lee---who dismisses the others as Yankees whenever they screw up---plants to dress as a Confederate soldier. The Confederacy will not be disappointed, Lee promises, as he jokes about battling Union soldiers outside the Halloween party.

Mike ignores us as he works the telephone, mining New Hampshire for political trends. He's an experienced campaigner who volunteered for Buchanan in 1992. This time around he is one of a dozen paid staffers, canvassing New Hampshire for Buchanan. His job title is N.H. deputy director, but he would probably call himself a glorified, over-qualified gofer. On the campaign trail he staples signs to telephone poles and mans the computers.

"I have never seen Pat before in person," I say to Shaun, the Irishman from Massachusetts. "Do you think I can meet him?"

"The more you help, the more you get to be with Pat," Shaun says. Shaun's job title is volunteer coordinator, which in this campaign is a delicate task. The Buchanan campaign regularly encounters hermits who are angry, enthusiastic, but not all employable---even as volunteers. It is Shaun's job to find productivity in whomever walks through the door, even the crazy ones.

My first task is to help carve Buchanan's portrait into some pumpkins. But the artistic talent in this campaign is zero, so Shaun offers a new plan: "We carve out the letters, one in each pumpkin, to spell out Buchanan for President." Soon we are elbow-deep in pumpkin seeds, reliving Beavis and Butt-head. It's a long way, I think, from here to the White House.

I volunteer to call names from a list of 7500 New Hampshire Republicans. Who is not pro-Buchanan and could possibly be swayed by a phone call? Who claims that ending abortion is important but doesn't realize that Buchanan is the most ardent anti-abortion candidate?

Shaun announces the latest analysis from his phone calls: Half the Republican Party has little interest in the current crop of candidates. When asked to name their favorite candidate they hesitate, talk about someone who should be running and finally declare themselves undecided.

One man tells me assertively: "I will vote for anyone who could get that clown Clinton out of the White House." A woman with a listless voice says, "I don't know. I just wish someone would call me up and tell me who to vote for."

When a voter says he is unsure but "probably backing Dole," Shaun smiles. "Can you imagine getting all fired up over Bob Dole?" Shaun then picks up the phone and dials the offices of Republican presidential candidate Bob Dornan. Posing as an outraged supporter of the right-wing California congressman, Shaun lectures the Dornan campaign---why don't they leave that Buchanan guy alone? So what if Buchanan's been married for more than 20 years and has had no children? Lay off. After he hangs up Shaun lets us know that Buchanan is "not a homo" but is truly a faithful Catholic with "a biological problem.

"Come here", Shaun calls. "I need to tell you something." We cross the room and go into the hallway. "There's a guy coming here tonight---he's a bit kooky, so I'll need you to keep an eye on him."

His name is John and he talks like he's been drunk for days. His mind is so slow you can almost hear the thoughts individually grinding out. Improvising from the script Shaun has given him, he says "Hello, my name is John and I'm calling every registered Republican voter in New Hampshire and I was wondering who you plan to vote for."

"You can't personally call every Republican," Shaun brusquely explains, "There are more than 200,000 You have to say that we are calling every Republican."

John dials again: "Hello, my name is John and I'm calling every registered Republican voter in New Hampshire."

Shaun grimaces.

•

Republican party leaders are peeved at Buchanan for ignoring their plan designed to upset Bill Clinton in 1996. By sticking his sharp tongue in places most Republicans wouldn't dare, Buchanan continues to stand out from the growing pack of Republican candidates. While Dole, Steve Forbes and Gramm wing around New Hampshire in private jets, Pat Buchanan paints himself as a populist, cruising in a rented Winnebago he calls Asphalt One.

In this campaign, in a calculated switch, Buchanan abandoned cultural values as the central issue of his campaign and instead focused on an ultranationalistic economic populism. "When I am elected president of the United States, there will be no more Nafta sellout of American workers," says the latest incarnation of candidate Buchanan. "There will be no more GATT deals done for the benefit of (continued on page 138)Buchanan(continued from page 76) Wall Street bankers, and there will be no more $50 billion bailouts of third world socialists who live in Moscow or Mexico City."

Buchanan attacks Colin Powell for abandoning the party on affirmative action, gun control, abortion and prayer in school. He calls Powell's supporters "infantile."

In person Buchanan is congenial, exceptionally polite and willing to listen. How can this be the same man who brutally offends millions of Americans with his divisive, derisive rhetoric? Remember his now-famous analysis of the AIDS epidemic? "The sexual revolution has begun to devour its children. The poor homosexuals---they have declared war on nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution."

How long can this rogue stay in the Republican armada? Buchanan relishes the idea of a head-on collision. When asked about his conflicts with pro-choice Republicans (who, according to polls, amount to two thirds of the party) Buchanan said, "When that crowd comes to the San Diego convention and comes in to tear the right-to-life plank out of the Republican platform, it is going to have to come over Pat Buchanan. And I don't think it can do that."

"We have to begin by understanding that there is no prospect of Buchanan's upsetting Bush for the nomination," noted William F. Buckley in 1992. "Therefore he enjoys the maximum luxury of any candidate whose designs are for something other than victory."

That's true for the 1996 campaign as well. Now that his political career has eclipsed his role as CNN's domesticated pit bull, Buchanan's true intentions are as shadowy as those of any other professional politician. Since his days with Richard Nixon he has thrived as the Republican party's good-humored hatchet man. Will he now rebel like a renegade soldier and bomb the institution that trained him? If the Republican hierarchy still believes that Buchanan's 1992 convention speech was a once-in-a-lifetime nightmare, it must have left before the end of it, when he promised, "We'll be back in '96."

•

Along with Mike, Lee and Shaun, I am assigned to the advance squad. From six a.m. to ten P.M. our life is dedicated to Buchanan. If we stop to eat, it's a Big Mac. As advance men our job is to stay one stop ahead of Buchanan, preparing the way for each day's 16-hour schedule. We hammer signposts for miles leading up to Buchanan's events, hang banners from a railroad trestle and scout out a gymnasium---where students are wearing red ribbons to show their fidelity to the antidrug crusade---for a major campaign event.

We examine the podium, the electricity, the microphone. Everything is in order. As the supporters filter in, Shaun and I pass out literature and gossip with the crowd.

"I am so scared," says Diane, a woman wearing a go pat go hat. Her eyes well up with the fear and hope of a true believer. I have seen this face several times now. Concerned, scared and unable to pinpoint the cause of America's spiritual malaise, Diane accepts Buchanan's enemies list as the most plausible. "I think our enemies are about to take over the country."

"It doesn't look too good," I agree.

"I really think that they'll throw me in the gas chamber, probably right after they get Pat," Diane says, shaking her head hopelessly. "I stay awake at night worrying about all this."

I meet James, a contractor eagerly awaiting Buchanan. His hands are savaged and scarred by decades of manual labor, but his clothes are neat and clean. "Pat is the epitome of truth. Everything he says is true," he tells me. As evidence he cites Rush Limbaugh. "America is like one of those colonial houses you keep adding to until you no longer have the essence of what you began with," James explains. "If you take out too many support beams, the whole house is compromised. That's what is happening in America."

James and I talk about Pat's devotion to the conservative cause and work ourselves into a lovefest of accolades that ends only when James scribbles off a $300 check. "Here, give this to Pat. I'd give every last dime if I thought it would guarantee Pat Buchanan was elected."

Buchanan is late so Lee and I decide to leave and put up a last few signs. Lee is dressed sharp, in a dark blue suit and tie. Standing outside the campaign's rented Ford Ranger pickup, I joke about his tailored suit. It's the color and style of those worn by guys who talk into their cufflinks when the president comes to town. "It looks like you're working security today."

Lee whispers, "Listen, can you keep a secret?"

I think he is going to tell me about a secret opposition to Buchanan, some extremist group plotting on the fringes of the Christian right. I lean forward to hear him out.

Lee twirls his hand behind his back and brings out a huge black pistol. "I'm not a great shot, but good enough--- and I'll return fire."

"I'll get behind you when the shooting starts," I say.

"Better not, that's the last place you want to be. Oh, keep this quiet, I don't think Peter even knows about this." He looks repentant, as if he hadn't meant to share his Secret Service fantasy.

•

I drive slowly along Route 1 in Portsmouth, stopping to take notes as I listen to Buchanan on a local talk show. His voice has the practiced cadences of a preacher's. "The people have to be reconverted," declares Buchanan. "If citizens would abide by biblical truths all these problems could be solved."

Like a journeyed storyteller, Buchanan draws out the suspense and is the first to laugh at his own jokes. "I don't consider Kuwait a country," he says. "I consider it an oil company with a seat at the United Nations."

One caller asks about potential violence from militia survivalists. Buchanan flips the question and warns, "The Crips and Bloods are spreading prostitution and drugs into small communities across the nation." Responding to a question about nuclear waste and an Indian tribe's refusal to let the waste pass through its territory, Buchanan declares, "With due respect to the Indians, they lost the war."

Pulling into a Rotary Club parking lot, I see a man with two notepads. He is sullen, serious and foreboding. He has been sent to be---as Shaun says--- "the eyes and ears of national for a day." The national campaign is managed by Pat's sister, Angela "Bay" Buchanan, who looks and sounds like her brother stuffed into a dress. As the brains behind the campaign, she is wary of her brother's high jinks and regularly sends observers to New Hampshire.

Today is a key day for Buchanan's New Hampshire team. An eight-person film crew has been commissioned to produce television commercials for the campaign. The crew will film ten hours of Pat and distill them into four 30-second spots. Leading the film crew is a man from Massachusetts named Jay, who drives a Jaguar and claims to have filmed "200 campaigns in seven (continued on page 158)Buchanan(continued from page 138) nations." Jay is accompanied by a blonde assistant who gets extras to sign a release allowing their images to be used in national television ads. One Buchanan staffer stares at her ass and tells me, "I'd love to pork her a few times, a nice older woman like that. She's fine."

Shaun and I work the door, handing out go pat go stickers to the Rotarians entering the lunch hall. As they approach, I ask politely, "Would you like a sticker?" Many say yes; then, when they see the name Buchanan, they hesitate and leave the sticky decals hanging off their fingers, unsure how to proceed.

A gray-haired man shoves a finger in my shoulder. "You have no right telling a woman what to do about abortion."

Another man lowers his face to mine. "You guys and Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition scare me more than the ayatollah."

I laugh. "Maybe a sticker on the way out?"

"Are they giving you a hard time?" Shaun has come to reinforce me.

"No, they just haven't heard Pat yet," I respond.

Shaun suggests that I work with the film crew.

"This will be your 15 minutes of fame," the production assistant says.

"This will be your 15 minutes of fame," the production assistant says.

"More like my 15 seconds," I say before I practice shouting the chant "Go Pat go, go Pat go, go Pat go" that will accompany that will accompany the candidate as he enters the Rotary Club meeting.

"When Pat leaves the door, the drill begins," Jay instructs us. He waits until Buchanan has left the Comfort Inn and begun to cross the asphalt lot. "Here he comes," Jay announces.

Shaun points at my cigarette and shakes his head urgently---no one promotes cigarettes in Buchanan's television commercials. I scan Buchanan's face as he approaches---his cheeks have a rosy glow, as if they are rouged. I could swear he's wearing lipstick. His loyal wife Shelley, as always, is by his side.

Pat takes my hand firmly. "Are you with the campaign?"

"I'm a new volunteer. I've been working in the Manchester office," I answer.

"Thanks for coming out today, we appreciate the help."

Buchanan is late for his speech, so he cuts short the 15 minutes scheduled to meet and greet the crowd and takes the microphone confidently. He introduces his wife Shelley as "the woman I nominate to replace Hillary Rodham Clinton." His speech is filled with appeals to the pocketbook, not the heart. This is Buchanan Lite---the campaign's newest gimmick. Apparently his political handlers have impressed upon him the need to borrow from Clinton's "It's the economy, stupid" strategy. He even bashes big business for its failure to protect the American worker.

Buchanan leans forward, bending his six-foot frame at the hips and clasping his hands together like a sympathetic priest. His right eye squints shut. With his foot on a chair and his arm on his thigh he looks like an overzealous junior varsity basketball coach. His eyebrows furrow gently and radiate an empathy for whomever he addresses, then he straightens and fires his eight-cylinder voice at Colin Powell. "When has General Powell ever been a great leader?" Buchanan asks his audience. "General Powell, from what I understand, was a reluctant warrior during Desert Storm. There is nothing wrong with that, but this is not Douglas MacArthur or George Patton we are talking about. Are we going to hand over power to the man who was recently considered as Bill Clinton's running mate?"

Shaun and I leave before the speech ends and grab a quick lunch before heading to a picturesque New England pier, where a stream of trawlers and sailboats bobs in the bright sun. As Pat chats with the dockworkers, a net bulging with haddock and cod is winched onto the pier. These are the bottom scrapings of a dying way of life, and Buchanan seizes the opportunity to compare the New England fishermen to Northwest loggers. "You are both equally endangered species," he tells the cameras. Pat defines the problem in one word: foreigners. It's all the fault of foreigners who fish too fast, too much. His solution? Let the New England fishermen and Northwest lumberjacks---not some pointy-headed scientist back in Washington---decide how much fish and timber should be removed.

•

Buchanan's pretensions to be the anti-Washington, antimedia champion are ironic for a man who began his career as a journalist unusually friendly to the government. Buchanan was no muckraker. Instead, he used his job to shill for J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Buchanan was privy to some of the FBI's most sensitive missions, including one to smear Martin Luther King Jr. "The FBI channeled us constant information" on local communists, radicals and "national civil rights leaders," Buchanan brags in his autobiography. "We knew their schedules as well as they did." Whenever the bureau found---or invented---a particularly juicy story, it was funneled to newspaper writers such as Buchanan, who then wrote for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. By the time a white racist assassinated king, Buchanan was no longer on the anti-King beat. He was on his way to the White House, where he would design campaign strategy for Richard Nixon.

Buchanan counseled President Nixon to approve funding for a splinter black presidency campaign led by Shirley Chisholm. In one memo he wrote, "There is nothing that can so advance the president's chance for reelection as a realistic black campaign. We should continue to champion the cause of the blacks within the Democratic Party, elevate their complaints as taken for granted."

Buchanan's final words on the 1972 campaign are an ode to negative campaigning. "If the country goes to the polls in November scared to death of McGovern, thinking him vaguely anti-American, then they will vote against him---which means for us. What we have done thus far, and fairly well, is not put the president 34 points ahead---but McGovern 34 points behind."

Near the end of Watergate, Buchanan referred to the White House as "the bunker" and served as de facto house psychologist for the distraught Nixon clan. When the ship finally sank and Nixon resigned, Buchanan lobbied unsuccessfully to be U.S. ambassador to the Republic of South Africa.

•

Buchanan's last speech of this October campaign swing is the highlight of the two-day New Hampshire blitz. A New Hampshire pol named Mike Hammond warms up the crowd.

"When the history of this campaign is written---and believe me, it will be written---there will be a chapter on the collapse of Bob Dole," Hammond begins. "The story of how he floundered and how he finally made the gaffe that cost him the campaign. The chapter will be entitled 'If It's Tuesday, I Must Be a Conservative.'

"There will also be a chapter on Phil Gramm and the millions he spent. The man who thought money could buy him the nomination spent and spent until he was left with neither money nor principles. That chapter will be entitled "The Incredible Shrinking Man.'

"Finally, there will be a chapter on the campaigner who confounded all the pundits in the liberal media and went on to win not only the nomination but also the presidency of the United States. That chapter will be entitled 'Pat Buchanan---An American Hero.'"

The crowd rises to a standing ovation and begins screaming "Go Pat go! Go Pat go! Go Pat go! Go Pat go!" Buchanan starts with an attack on the UN and "abortionists."

Buchanan asks his audience: "Did you know that the UN says there are five genders represented at the Beijing women's conference?"

Buchanan looks up to his crowd and stops. Holding out his hand he raises one finger. "Heterosexual---I understand that."

Raises a second finger. "Homosexual-----" Buchanan pauses while nervous laughter fills the room. "I've read about that."

He raises a third finger. "Transsexual-----" He slows down. "Now, I don't even want to know about numbers four and five."

The crowd howls approval as Buchanan continues: "No taxpayer dollars are going to fund these dingbat conferences on women's rights in Beijing. When I am elected president in November, we'll court-martial Bill and Hillary Clinton and send them back to wherever they sent Joycelyn Elders."

Warming to the reception, Buchanan lets fly another volley: "I promise to appoint a right-to-life vice president, a right-to-life cabinet and right-to-life Supreme Court justices. When I am president, the White House will be a bully pulpit for the unborn."

I decide to get a drink and let all this sink in. Buchanan is running for the White House---not some governor's seat in the hinterland.

I seek refuge with Mike, who is an astute campaigner. We joke about Gramm and Dole.

"Who would be a good VP for Pat if he gets the nomination?" I ask.

Mike is high on Norman Schwarzkopf. "He'd be excellent. He's far more conservative than people realize."

"He wouldn't exactly balance the ticket," I answer.

Mike laughs at my naivete. "Pat's not a balancing kind of guy."

Our conversation drifts back to March 1995, when Buchanan announced his candidacy. Protesters had disrupted Buchanan's speech and I knew Mike had been there. "What happened that day that Pat announced? Who were those people who started screaming 'Buchanan is a racist!?"

"You mean the protesters?" Mike responds. "We dragged them away, with their heads banging on every step. I don't think they liked their welcome very much."

"Did you have them arrested for disturbing the peace?"

"No, they filed charges against us! For beating them up!" Mike is indignant. "And I know they will be back," he glumly notes.

•

Right after that speech, I left the campaign. If enthusiasm among a handful of faithful followers could elect a man president, Buchanan would be a shoo-in. Of course, it can't. And on some level, everyone involved in the Buchanan campaign---and I assume Buchanan himself---knows that. Even though I saw nothing of substance accomplished during my brief tenure, I was reminded of Buchanan's real power about ten days later when Colin Powell announced he would not seek the GOP nomination. Few would dispute that one of the key factors in Powell's decision was the vocal opposition on the part of hard-core Republican conservatives to Powell and his beliefs. No one was more vocal than Buchanan in threatening Powell with a nasty, bruising battle for the soul of the party. In his speech announcing his decision not to run, Powell admitted there were certain candidates in the race he could never, under any circumstances, support. He didn't name Buchanan, but everyone knew whom he was talking about.

Buchanan had done it again. Four years ago, he mortally wounded George Bush and paved the way for Bill Clinton. Now he had taken perhaps the best chance the Republicans had to unseat a Democratic president and helped scuttle it. It's one thing for Pat Buchanan to choose the role of spoiler as a career path. But it's another to watch his hardworking staff and dewy-eyed supporters pour time and money into his odd vendetta. None of the men or women I met saw themselves as spoilers. They just wanted to improve America---in their sometimes twisted way---and they couldn't have been more well-meaning or sincere.

I couldn't help but think that they deserve better than Pat.

"I don't consider Kuwait a country. I consider it an oil company with a seat at the United Nations."