Buchanan, The Biter, Bitten

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Columnists walk a tightrope. To be either too bland or too savage usually erodes their following and, ultimately, their livelihood. One pundit who never errs on the side of niceness is Patrick Buchanan, a former aide to Presidents Nixon and Reagan. He earns a reported $500,000 a year from a column in 180 newspapers, lectures and daily TV exposure on CNN's Crossfire and the syndicated McLaughlin Group and Capital Gang. Blending unyielding right-wing views with incendiary rhetoric, he stirs deep passions. Last week Buchanan was teetering on the tightrope. His latest outbursts had even longtime allies accusing him of virtual or actual anti-Semitism.

What set them off most was a typical Buchanan crack, which wrapped a core of fact in a coating of hyperbole. On McLaughlin, he decried the prospect of military action against Iraq: "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." To underscore the point, he wrote that war would result in Americans "humping up that bloody road to Baghdad . . . kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales and Leroy Brown." In sharp contrast to that litany of normally Christian surnames was his attack in another column on four advocates of action against Iraq, all identifiably Jewish.

This proved too much for A.M. Rosenthal of the New York Times, the paper's former top editor and now a conservative columnist. Rosenthal wrote that Buchanan's words amounted to "blood libel," an implication that Jews have "alien loyalties for which they will sacrifice the lives of Americans." Rosenthal later insisted he had not overstated the case: "Buchanan can dish it out; let him take it a little." Others hastened to join in. The conservative Post, Buchanan's publisher in New York City, editorialized that "when it comes to Jews as a group . . . Buchanan betrays an all-too- familiar hostility." William F. Buckley deemed Buchanan "insensitive."

Doubtless the Israelis want the Iraqi war machine dismantled. And doubtless the pro-Israel lobby wields considerable power in Washington. Other journalists have found that to criticize Israel, or even to note its disproportionate foreign aid, can draw charges of bigotry. But potential use of force against Iraq has also been backed by many prominent non-Jews.

More troubling is that for years Buchanan has appeared to go out of his way to rile Jewish sensitivities. He argued the innocence of accused and convicted Nazi executioners and suggested that in any case the hunt for old, enfeebled men was of dubious moral value. An outspoken Roman Catholic, he enmeshed himself shrilly in a controversy between Jewish protesters and a convent they wanted removed from the former Auschwitz concentration camp.

Buchanan remains predictably unrepentant: "I don't retract a single word. The reaction was simply hysterical and is localized to New York." In the truest tradition of the columnist, he vows to have the next, if not necessarily the last, word on the whole topic. A future piece, Buchanan says, will address how out of touch New York City and its media are with the rest of America.

With reporting by Leslie Whitaker/New York