Is Pat Buchanan Anti-Semitic?
By Newsweek Staff On 12/22/91
In late 1965, when 27-year-old Pat Buchanan got the job interview with Richard Nixon that would change his life, there was one matter on which he would not compromise. He writes in his autobiography that Nixon expected him to say he was not as conservative as William F. Buckley. Buchanan was anxious to work for Nixon, but he wouldn't budge. "I have a tremendous admiration for Bill Buckley," he said. In fact, Buchanan considered Buckley's National Review to be his "spiritual guide" in polities.
Last week, as Buchanan announced his candidacy for president, Buckley didn't exactly return the favor. In a 40,000-word National Review essay on anti-Semitism among intellectuals, Buckley suggests that Buchanan's columns on the gulf war were anti-Semitic. While apparently free of prejudice against individual Jews, Buchanan has a real problem. His 1992 campaign slogan-"
America First"-echoes more than just pre-World War II isolationism. The America First Committee, headed by Charles Lindbergh, was also discernibly pro-German and anti-Semitic, as Buchanan (whose father was a supporter) well knows. Worse, many of his columns have shown a peculiar obsession with Nazi revisionism.
"There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East-the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States," Buchanan said on TV last year, singling out A.M. Rosenthal, Charles Krauthammer, Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle, all Jews. Why, Buckley asks, didn't he mention any similarly credentialed Christian war supporters, such as James J. Kilpatrick, George Will, Frank Gaffney and Alexander Haig?
Buchanan also wrote that if the United States went to war, the fighting would be done by "kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown." Buckley, in his usual opaque writing style, argues that this amounts to charging Jews with starting a war they wouldn't fight in a genuine slur against them. He adds: "I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it: most probably, an iconoclastic temperament."
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