Buchanan: The Apodiabolosis that Failed
wheeler, Richard
and political suspicions, "common agreement" had been reached among North Koreans, Chinese, North Vietnamese, and the Communist forces in Cambodia and Laos, in respect to "treating the whole...
...Tu quoque...
...The tactic does not expiate guilt, but it pulls the accusers into the dock with the accused...
...The preachers were chilled...
...Buchanan's contribution was to restore the grays...
...That a Peking which continues to proclaim that "We shall certainly liberate Taiwan," as well as urge the need for "complete victory" in the "national liberation" struggles of the Third World, will also persist in its policies to make that complexion conform to its interests is equally certain...
...As was their custom, they leaked a few mendacious stories to the press, by way of prelude, and then invited the sinner to defend himself...
...It was enough to arouse an American burgher to apoplexy, for there on his TV was a clearly innocent man in the hotseat, telling all the world that his accusers were by no means political virgins...
...Buchanan was something of a hero when he returned to the White House...
...Tu quoque...
...And when Buchanan was accused of the horrible felony of getting onto Democratic mailing lists, Buchanan shot back that the tactic was, after all, endorsed in Democratic Chairman O'Brien's campaign manual...
...The fact that he is a principled man puts a great chasm between him and his colleagues (although he would surely protest such an assertion...
...The Communist forces in Cambodia (among them some 30,000 to 40,000 North Vietnamese) are not a homogeneous force to be sure...
...But up until Buchanan spoke, no one had made similar distinctions in the realm of politics, least of all the impresarios who, lacking all sense of gray, had divided the world into sinners and saints...
...Thus he doused the whole sawdust-andsweat road show in ice water...
...He faced them alone with a clearer conscience than any of his accusers...
...But of the ideological complexion of the regime they seek to establish, with or without Sihanouk, there can be little doubt...
...It is, after all, acutely embarrassing when a squalling victim is reminded that he himself is a famous victimizer...
...Buchanan's technique was doubly effective because he actually was innocent, by all accounts, of the entire Watergate episode...
...In moral theory one makes distinctions between, say, hookers, mistresses, amateurs, the inexperienced, the wayward, the much-married, the married, the untempted, the raped, and the virgins...
...Unlike the pragmatists of the Nixon regime (and the Kennedy and Johnson regimes before), Buchanan not only recognized a clear value system, but showed that he had lived by it as well...
...Meanwhile, in a United States weary of and sick at heart with its Vietnam venture, the "why die for Danzig" syndrome is now well in plade, and its validity as policy can only be tested by the passage of time...
...Tu quoque...
...Even the Right Reverend Sam Dash met his match: "What tactics would I be willing to use...
...Recent Chinese editorials, as well as pronouncements by Prince Norodom Sihanouk in the North Korean capital, underscored this convergence which, certainly in a strategic sense, and so far as the remaining committed anti-Communists in the Southeast Asian region are concerned, is far more important than occasional outbursts of hostility between Cambodian Reds and their North Vietnamese allies over available supplies of rice at the front, or between the Pathet Lao and the underground Thai Communist movement over control over the Thai-Laotian border areas...
...Buchanan's testimony marked the beginning of an important deflation of the whole Watergate embroglio, and a return to normalcy...
...It was a performance so favorable to the Nixon Administration that the TV networks abruptly canceled further Watergate telecasts (alleging, of course, that they were now boring...
...There remains, however, one currently popular rationalization for this syndrome that needs to be disposed of in closing...
...But Buchanan had a powerful understanding of what such an argument achieves in a political arena...
...Richard Wheeler 8 The Alternative December 1973...
...In politics the tu quoque has explosive power, especially in the milieu of a holy inquisition...
...But it is true, nonetheless, that Buchanan had within him through his entire service to Richard Nixon a clear inner vision that enabled him to draw the boundaries of honor and stay within them...
...We have the Prince's own conviction on record that "Cambodia will become Communist, and it is only right that it become Communist because the revolution that the Khmer Rouge have made in the liberated areas [in Cambodia] has succeeded...
...He had, moreover, the maturity to recognize that all the dirty tricks in the world had upon the course of events no more than the weight of a feather...
...But the valueless, pragmatic technicians of the Nixonian Era still do not understand the source of Buchanan's confidence...
...This, a more sophisticated version of the old argument that (1) there is a Southeast Asian---or Vietnamese, or Laotian, or Indonesian, etc...
...and political suspicions, "common agreement" had been reached among North Koreans, Chinese, North Vietnamese, and the Communist forces in Cambodia and Laos, in respect to "treating the whole of Indochina as one common Communist cause...
...The net effect of Buchanan's testimony was to restore sanity and moral order to the national consciousness...
...And so in the end, a young conservative, hastily prepared, alone in the hotseat, and fighting calumnious advance leaks, without visible support from his august employer or his pragmatic minions, faced a battery of hanging judges, lascivious lawyers, and politicians whoring after power...
...Horatio had defended the bridge...
...Buchanan separated political tactics into four categories ranging from the perfectly legal and ethical to the illegal and outrageous, thus lending proportion to the whole issue...
...It is remarkable, then, that in some American quarters a return of Sihanouk to power in Phnom Penh is believed to be the only solution to Cambodia's problems...
...In 1968, Buchanan noted, Tuck had hired a group of pregnant blacks to parade before the GOP convention with posters saying "Nixon's the One...
...Buchanan reminded the Lords Spiritual that in 1962 Democratic trickster Dick Tuck had bamboozled the engineer of the Nixon campaign train to chug off in the middle of a Nixonian homily...
...Tu quoque...
...The tent revival was looking for sinners, and having run out of the third and fourth cousins of any principals in the Watergate affair, they fastened upon the President's conservative speechifier as one who had all sorts of sinful possibilities...
...to say that, after all, subscribing to your opponent's mail list had no evil in it, but that phony letters aimed at dividing the opposition were worse, and that bugging or furtive character assassination were worse still...
...to drain away the revival-tent sanctimony of those pillars of pulchritude, Sam Dash, the Honorable Ervin, and the Connecticut Windturmel...
...Buchanan readily acknowledged the moral weakness of the tu quoque: two wrongs don't make a right...
...Anything that was not immoral, unethical, illegal, or unprecedented in previous Democratic campaigns," said Buchanan...
...And so, when the preachers of the Gospel of Political Virginity bored in on Buchanan, the feisty defender of the Nixon regime bored back, relentlessly reminding the preachers of their own dalliances...
...Now in morals this is the weakest of defenses, but in politics it takes on a different nature...
...And he carried the day...
...Simply put, this is the argument that the United States had and has no business in Vietnam or Southeast Asia because what Americans presumably want for the region (freedom of political choice and expression, democratic elections, self-determination in modern nationhood, and so on), either was not understood, or was resented, or in any case was and is a matter of indifference to the inhabitants of the region...
...mind," and (2) that it is too mysterious to understand and, anyhow, ought not to When the Watergate traveling tent revival meeting, still conducting faith healing down on Pennsylvania Avenue, suddenly invited Patrick Buchanan, the White House conservative, to the baptismal font, Buchanan was ready for them, although in this glorious age of due process he had received the barest possible notice...
...Buchanan's response was not to dwell at length upon his innocence--although he pronounced it for the record---but rather he introduced the matter of tu quoque, or "you, too...
Vol. 7 • December 1973 • No. 3
