Right From the Beginning
Buchanan, Patrick J.
RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING Patrick J. Buchanan/Little, Brown/$18.95 David Brooks s a toddler Patrick J. Buchanan took to correcting his elder brothers as they struggled through their bedtime...
...He was listening to popular music, cruising, and drinking beer (about a six pack a night), as he and his gang prowled the streets of Washington...
...It was one of those tough, nakedly competitive Jesuit institutions that served as a particle accelerator for young Catholic men...
...Who, by conviction, background, character, and belief, should rightly determine the destiny of the great Republic, and which is the illegitimate usurper, incompetent to identify and protect America's true interests from her real enemies...
...Father rushed in and saw blood and milk all over Hank's arm, and a gash across Pat's forehead...
...As he grew older Buchanan grew even rowdier...
...The stories Buchanan tells of Gonzaga, and his fierce pride in the institution, are reminiscent of the tales you hear in New York about City College in the 1920s and thirties, when that rugged institution was hardening and honing young, mostly Jewish minds...
...Conservatives who don't feel that their family structure is under assault tend to be more interested in other issues even though they understand intellectually that, say, education vouchers would indeed be efficient and parents should have a greater voice in raising their kids...
...The truth is," he writes, "we loved to party and drink and fight guys we didn't know and didn't like...
...Buchanan was arrested for a gas station brawl, for invading Soviet territory (he crashed the Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street in a stationwagon), and more seriously, for responding in kind when two police officers beat him up...
...To them, the purpose of an open mind was to close on something—and that something was the truth...
...Patrick high-tailed it home, but Evil Eye's phone call was quicker, and father was waiting...
...The Jesuits were in no doubt as to who they were and what their mission was," Buchanan writes of his teachers at Gonzaga, "and they were unconcerned with our fourteen- and fifteenyear-old opinions as to how we should be educated...
...Conservatives fight so hard that we sometimes imagine that they are hard men...
...His father was a fan of Joe McCarthy and General MacArthur, absolutely dedicated to Catholicism, intensely patriotic—rock-ribbed Republicanism made flesh...
...and faith and tradition taught us what it was...
...Some people you could know for years and unless you "talked issues," you would never know where they stood...
...And on the other side there is Buchanan and the down-to-their-bones conservatives, with their faith in God and the wisdom of the ages...
...So it is no surprise that Buchanan's explanation of his conservatism should be about the way he was brought up...
...he was the living embodiment of what used to be called the manly virtues...
...Here is one conservative who did not spend his adolescence reading Russell Kirk...
...Buchanan's conservatism is manly and full of life...
...Many Americans, in their "parenting techniques," and especially in the social programs they endorse, seek to insulate citizens from every conceivable pain from every conceivable source...
...The fierce dualism of Buchanan and his colleagues on the New Right issomething that frightens liberals and makes a lot of us non-New Right conservatives uncomfortable...
...Not every pain should automatically be replaced with comfort...
...The brothers were less enchanted, and one night the elder Hank maneuvered his crib next to Pat's, jerked Pat's milk bottle from his mouth, and smashed it over his head...
...And Gonzaga was not just any school...
...The memoir, one of the best to emerge from the Reagan Administration, doesn't actually cover the Reagan years...
...This book humanizes him, and teaches lessons not immediately apparent, the way William Buckley's sailing books sneak up and teach you about comradeship...
...We had been sent there to be taught, not to teach...
...Loyalty to friends, loyalty to family, loyalty to faith...
...But it is not apolitical, for Buchanan's life, from toddler to Communications Director, has been all of a piece, and his upbringing explains and exemplifies Reaganism, or at least what many members of the New Right thought Reaganism was supposed to be about...
...On the one side you have the degradation of a Gary Hart: "Caught in flagrante violating the traditional moral code, he appealed to the higher morality of this capital city, plaintively asserting he had faithfully refused to take PAC money for his presidential campaign...
...Right From the Beginning reminds us otherwise...
...As a result, his children were not timid...
...and, from centuries of experience, the Jesuits knew how to educate...
...Buchanan's was a childhood that had its moments of pain, not emotional pain but physical pain...
...Buchanan demonstrates that life is diminished, and in the long run damaged, in such a padded world...
...But with Buchanan life and politics are inseparable...
...They found it in a hated neighbor dubbed "Evil Eye," who screamed at them through an open window...
...The New Right's core issues—abortion, prayer in schools, day care, education vouchers—all involve children and child-rearing...
...Patrick's friend wheeled and fired the harmless but loud monster, sending Evil Eye diving for cover...
...Secretary of Education William Bennett, by the way, is also a Gonzaga man...
...And he was strict when they misbehaved, using the strap when necessary...
...and dammit, raising hell at eighteen, nineteen, and twenty can be great, great fun...
...Although many conservatives will feel a cultural divide between Pat Buchanan and themselves, there is one quality in Buchanan which all conservatives should feel at home with...
...Buchanan doesn't trivialize suffering or death—his account of his brother's death is extremely moving—but he does distinguish between tragedy and trial...
...For Buchanan, and his father, political friends and enemies were determined on the basis of fundamental questions: "Who is the legitimate moral authority in America...
...David Brooks is book editor of the Wall Street Journal...
...Pop was the personification of loyalty," Patrick recounted in a eulogy last year...
...Patrick was not by any means the only contentious Buchanan, and yet his mother made their home comfortable and stable...
...You pretty much have to have been born into a traditional household to have a fierce interest in preserving its methods of transmitting truths to the young...
...Robust, he is comfortable with tribulation...
...Buchanan certainly has other interests, but he seems centrally concerned with preserving a world that will allow people to raise their children in the same manner he was raised...
...And it is no surprise that such a childhood memoir should be intensely political (in contrast with, say, Russell Baker's account of his boyhood, which is warm and fun, but signifies little...
...Our politics now have the savagery of religious wars, Buchanan says, because "they are religious wars...
...For that reason it was a very happy childhood...
...The lesson never took," the now grown Buchanan writes in Right From the Beginning...
...In those days it was possible to have a normal childhood in D.C., and not have to worry from first grade who was leaking what to David Broder...
...It comes as no surprise when Buchan46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1988 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1988 an reports that he felt a certain affinity for Prince Hal in Henry IV Part I. Patrick hung out with the jocks and the brawlers in high school, but he graduated first in his class from Gonzaga with a 98 average...
...Because the New Right is so inaccessible it will remain merely a faction among conservatives, forever neglected by the President it helps elect...
...Buchanan had a taste for brawling, and he spent a not insignificant portion of his childhood getting arrested...
...RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING Patrick J. Buchanan/Little, Brown/$18.95 David Brooks s a toddler Patrick J. Buchanan took to correcting his elder brothers as they struggled through their bedtime prayers, a habit that charmed the parents of this precocious little boy...
...Buchanan is describing mostly his childhood and adolescence here...
...It is the fierceness of parents protecting their young...
...Buchanan was a mischievous little kid, and he recounts his adventures with relish...
...Buchanan made his sons hit the punching bag 100 times each night from age seven, empowering them for a lifetime of achievement and steadfastness...
...M he moral certitude, the toughness, 1 the acknowledgment that pain and suffering are part of a fully lived life—these qualities constitute the basis of Buchanan's politics...
...The problem with the New Right is that it is hard to convert into it...
...The New Right arose as a reaction to liberal social-engineering that threatened the way children were traditionally raised...
...Buchanan's parents were devoted to their children to a degree that, by today's standards, is unusual...
...He had a friend whose father had given him a toy cannon, two feet long, that had a roar that could be heard a quarter-mile away, and one day Patrick and company prowled the neighborhood looking for prey...
Vol. 21 • August 1988 • No. 8
