The Road To The White House -- Pat Buchanan: Just Provocative, Or Is He A Bigot?

WASHINGTON - Is Pat Buchanan a bigot or just more provocative than the bland politicians who dominate this television age?

Now that Buchanan is picking up support in his presidential campaign, the question, once largely of interest to fellow commentators, is of much greater importance.

Buchanan styles himself as a champion of traditional values tweaking the nose of a "politically correct" liberal establishment.

His critics see evidence of a white male-supremacist philosophy with anti-Semitic overtones.

William F. Buckley Jr., the icon of American conservatism, wrote last December that Buchanan has made statements that could be considered anti-Semitic, but that he is not prejudiced against Jews.

Several liberal or moderate journalists whom Buchanan regularly debated on television defend him against charges of anti-Semitism. While they disagree with Buchanan, they say he is being pilloried for an aggressive writing style once described as "a core of fact in a coating of hyperbole."

Here is an overview of his controversial statements:

ON RACIAL MINORITIES

"The question we Americans need to address, before it is answered for us, is: Does this First World nation wish to become a Third World country? Because that is our destiny if we do not build a sea wall against the waves of immigration rolling over our shores."

- Writing in 1990

Buchanan has defended Arizona for refusing to approve a memorial

day for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., arguing as he has since the 1970s that King was a flawed leader because of sexual flings and leftist leanings.

"Clearly, when Congress honored Dr. King with a federal holiday, putting him on a par with George Washington, father of our country, it was a textbook case of what happens when an affirmative action program gets out of control," he wrote in 1990.

Buchanan has defended recent white governments in South Africa as being more progressive than many black-ruled countries, and he wrote in 1990 that communist black groups have no right to call for one-man, one-vote elections in South Africa.

"But where did they get that idea? The founding fathers did not believe this. They did not give the Indians, who were still living a tribal existence, the right to vote us out of North America. When they created the republic they restricted the franchise . . . believing that not every man was qualified to rule . . . If the past 30 years have taught us nothing else, it has surely taught us that."

A memo to President Nixon on Aug. 26, 1971, suggests that Buchanan has an abiding skepticism about peaceful integration. It cited a magazine article doubting that people ever overcome their biological makeup.

If the article were true, Buchanan wrote, "a lot of what we are doing in terms of integration . . . is less likely to result in accommodation than it is in perpetual friction."

Similarly, Buchanan warned Nixon not to "fritter away" his second term in an "ill-advised governmental effort to forcibly integrate races."

The theme returns in Buchanan's warnings about uncontrolled immigration. He fears the country will become a battleground for unassimilated racial blocs.

Buchanan doubts that enough new immigrants share the Western values that underpin America:

"Who speaks for the Euro-Americans, who founded the United States? `Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's got to go,' was Jesse (Jackson)'s chant at Stanford (University), giving aid and comfort to leftist academics who are out to replace Western culture with what? Is it not time to take America back?" he also wrote.

Just before announcing his presidential campaign, Buchanan appeared on ABC and argued that "culture, language, background are legitimate criteria for us to discuss when we discuss legal immigration."

He continued, "I think God made all people good, but if we had to take a million immigrants in, say, Zulus next year, or Englishmen, and put them in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems . . .?"

Obviously, Buchanan's answer would be Englishmen.

ON JEWS

"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."

- Statement before

the Gulf War

While denying anti-Semitism, Buchanan does not apologize for harsh criticism of the Israeli government or of pro-Israel groups that he says have made Capitol Hill "Israeli-occupied territory."

But critics say Buchanan's involvement in issues offensive to Jews suggests something deeper.

Buchanan wrote in 1977:

"Though Hitler was indeed a racist and anti-Semitic to the core, a man who without compunction could commit murder and genocide, he was also an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier in the Great War, a political organizer of the first rank, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him."

The column warns against seduction by corrupt geniuses like Hitler. But one critic nevertheless found Buchanan's view of Hitler "disturbingly respectful."

More recently, Buchanan has defended Germany's claims to territory lost in World War II and has condemned the Nuremberg war-crime trials for glossing over Soviet atrocities.

Buchanan often uses comparisons with Nazis to point out contradictions he sees.

When the U.S. is so cozy with Chinese butchers, he says, why should the government maintain a special unit to track down "70-year-old camp guards," or single out Kurt Waldheim of Austria for his wartime association with Nazis.

"The assault upon Austria, and the ostracism of Waldheim, have about them an aspect of moral bullying and the singular stench of selective indignation," he wrote.

Buchanan also was among those White House aides who reportedly urged President Reagan not to back out of visit to a German cemetery at Bitburg where Nazis SS troops were buried.

And Buchanan has defended at least three people recently charged with being Nazi war criminals, because, he says, the evidence was supplied by suspect communist governments.

The cases remain controversial, although many are now urging a review of the case against John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian immigrant deported to Israel and convicted of being "Ivan the Terrible," a notorious death camp guard.

In another death camp controversy, Buchanan defended the establishment of a Catholic convent near Auschwitz, even though the church's leaders eventually agreed to close it because of Jewish protests.

Buchanan accused some Jews of appropriating the Holocaust to themselves:

"To orthodox Catholics, the demand we be more `sensitive' to Jewish concerns is becoming a joke," he wrote, later adding, "What is being resisted is a systematic campaign to exclude all others from the honor roll of the dead, to write us out." An estimated six million Jews and at least three million non-Jews were exterminated by the Nazis.

ON HOMOSEXUALS

"The undeniable truth (is) that the homosexual `lifestyle,' i.e., random and anonymous sex, has sent a host of diseases raging through the `gay' community."

- Writing in 1989

The most quoted evidence of Buchanan's "gay-bashing" is a 1984 article he co-authored with J. Gordon Muir, a North Carolina doctor. It charges that promiscuous homosexuality - namely anal intercourse with multiple partners - is dangerous and unnatural.

Homosexuals are referred to as "Sodomites" and sexually related diseases, including AIDS, are called "nature's retribution, God's will, the wages of sin, paying the piper, ecological kickback."

Muir, who claims to have written those passages, says the article was a plea to homosexuals not to listen to the destructive advice of gay leaders who endorse promiscuity.

It would seem that Buchanan stands by that article's gist.

Attacking the homoerotic photographs of the late Robert Mapplethorpe in April 1990, Buchanan said they depict "the very practices that led to his death of acquired immune deficiency syndrome."

And characteristically, Buchanan, a conservative Catholic, has wrapped his objections as much in religion as science, writing in 1989 of the "prejudice" against homosexuality:

"While most pick it up on a playground or schoolyard, it has roots in the Old and New Testament, natural law, and the inherited wisdom of the race."