Buchanan, Patrick J.

▪ American journalist and politician

in full  Patrick Joseph Buchanan 

born November 2, 1938, Washington, D.C., U.S.

      conservative American journalist who held positions in the administrations of three U.S. presidents and who three times sought nomination as a candidate for the presidency of the United States (presidency of the United States of America).

      Buchanan attended Catholic schools and in 1961 received an A.B. degree in English from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. In 1962 he received a M.S. degree from the School of Journalism of Columbia University in New York City. Later that year he began his career as a journalist with the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. In 1966 he took a position as an assistant and speechwriter to Richard M. Nixon (Nixon, Richard M.), who was then preparing to make a second run for the presidency. When Nixon was elected in 1968, Buchanan became special assistant to the president. He was named special consultant to Nixon in 1972, and when the president resigned in August 1974, he stayed on for a time in the administration of President Gerald R. Ford (Ford, Gerald R.). In 1975 Buchanan began to write a syndicated newspaper column and to establish a career as a radio and television commentator. He became the director of communications for President Ronald Reagan (Reagan, Ronald W.) in 1985.

      A harsh critic of President George Bush (Bush, George), Buchanan sought the nomination of the Republican Party in 1992, when Bush was running for reelection. Buchanan received 22.6 percent of the vote in the primaries and, to stave off a party revolt by his supporters, was granted an opportunity to address the convention. He ran again in 1996 but did less well, and in 1999 he announced his third try for the nomination. He criticized U.S. attempts to broker peace in the world and what he saw as the undue influence of Israel on U.S. foreign policy. He advocated curbs on free trade and a temporary moratorium on immigration. He decried the feminist and homosexual rights movements (gay rights movement) and was adamantly opposed to abortion. He denounced as futile Republican attempts to win elections by moving toward the middle of the political spectrum.

      Having grown increasingly disaffected from the mainstream Republican stance, Buchanan quit the party in October 1999 and the following year, after a highly contentious convention, won the Reform Party's nomination for president and its $12.5 million in federal funds. A forceful, articulate writer and speaker, he often set forth his beliefs in blunt, memorable language. Critics called him a right-wing isolationist, a mercantilist, a nativist, and a populist, and some Republicans—those who emphasized free-market economics, for example—questioned his credentials as a conservative. Others, however, saw him as a champion of traditional values that were in need of reclamation. In the 2000 presidential election, he fared poorly, receiving some 445,000 votes.

      Buchanan expounded his beliefs in a number of books. The New Majority, which was privately published in 1973, was influential in advancing the idea that the views of so-called Middle Americans, not those of the media, represented the thinking of most U.S. citizens. Among his other writings are The Great Betrayal (1998), on the social effects of free-trade policies, and A Republic, Not an Empire (1999), which discusses his views on foreign policy.

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