THE MAKING OF BUCHANAN

By RICHARD STENGEL LITTLETON

THEY WERE KNOWN AS barnstormers, traveling players of deep voice and large gesture who declaimed on makeshift stages in small towns and villages in the 19th century. For one night only, they performed Hamlet's soliloquies and Tennyson's odes and transported the locals to a distant world. Last week, on a snowy New Hampshire evening, Pat Buchanan brought his one-man traveling show to the Victorian-era Opera House in the northern town of Littleton, a gemlike stage once graced by Mrs. Tom Thumb and Gorgeous George.

Just before he is to go on, Pat peeks through a narrow door in the balcony, the veteran thespian appraising his audience. He walks to a holding room across the hall. From downstairs, the music of Pat's rousing fight song, with the refrain "Go, Pat, go!" fills the small room. He pantomimes a softshoe, smiles at his wife and says, "Come on, Shelley, they're playing our song." But Shelley, hugging the wall, resists his overture, and moments later, Pat Buchanan, the old-fashioned footlights throwing dramatic shadows across his face, is onstage declaiming his dark poetry of the angry and the aggrieved.

"Feel like I should do a little Shakespeare," Pat says with a laugh, before telling his rapt audience just how he has come to be standing on this stage as the premier challenger to Bob Dole for the Republican presidential nomination. He recounts his achievements in Alaska, Louisiana and Iowa, ticking them off like battles from the Civil War. He pays tribute to "the rebels" of Lexington and Concord, "brave men who died for the idea of freedom." Buchanan, who loves costumes, is the only candidate who would not look strange in either Lincoln's stovepipe or Washington's tricorne. Onstage, he holds his head high, posing for Mount Rushmore.

To his audience this night, he paints a picture of a Norman Rockwell America that never existed for most of them. "My father worked for the same company for 50 years," he says. "We lived in the same neighborhood." It is that ethnic Washington neighborhood that Pat describes in his memoirs as the setting for a kind of good-natured Catholic sitcom, The Battling Buchanans, with basement brawls and dinner-table debates over corned beef and cabbage. William Buchanan--always "Pop" to his seven sons and two daughters--was a successful accountant. But the model he set for his third son Patrick was not of green-eyeshade bookkeeping but red-blooded combativeness. In the basement of the Buchanan household, Pop Buchanan rigged up a punching bag and made each of his sons pound it four times a week: 100 times with the left, 100 times with the right, 200 combinations. For Pop, as for his son Pat, the holy trinity was faith, family and country, and a fellow had to be able to defend them with fists as well as words.

At the dinner table, Pop preached an anticommunism that was as fervent as his Catholicism. He was an intimidating, authoritarian figure who revered Senator Joseph McCarthy and Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. The elder Buchanan proudly reminded his brood that they were the descendants of Mississippi Confederates who fought to save Old Dixie. Not for the Buchanans the Leave It to Beaver homilies of backyard-barbecue morality. Pop fostered a sense of clannishness, of us-against-them resentment that made his children ever vigilant. Pat attended Mass each day, prayed every night and made the sign of the Cross before basketball free throws. He studied hard and played hard and probably got into at least one fistfight a week. "I loved those years," Buchanan wrote in his 1988 autobiography. "Nothing since has matched the singular sweetness of their memory."

Pat seemed to fight for the sake of fighting. During his senior year at Georgetown University, Buchanan was escorting a date home and picked a tussle with two cops. "I stuck a size 10 1/2 cordovan where I thought it might do him some good," Buchanan writes. In addition to receiving a broken wrist, he was booted out of school, his scholarship was revoked, and only a sharp criminal lawyer got him off with a misdemeanor. Pop Buchanan went to the Jesuits at Georgetown and pleaded to make his son's suspension temporary, and they agreed. Pat eventually graduated cum laude with a degree in English and philosophy, and won a fellowship to the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, where he became familiar with the elite media he was later to criticize.

He found that journalism suited him--he could pick fights in print and not with his fists. He became an editorial writer on the Midwest's most conservative paper, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, writing blood-and-guts editorials in favor of Barry Goldwater and against the Great Society, decrying communism and the Red Menace. He pictured himself as a young version of the right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler--"standing flat on his feet, swinging for the belly," as he wrote home at the time.

In 1965 Buchanan attended a party for Richard Nixon given by a Globe cartoonist; after fortifying himself with several Scotches, he collared Nixon and reminded the former Vice President that he had once caddied for him at Maryland's Burning Tree Country Club. (As Buchanan recalls in his memoirs, "The whole time out, I stayed close to the Vice President. When he relieved himself in the bushes, I stepped up alongside and did the same, even though we caddies were supposed to go off separately or wait until we got back to the bench area.") A month later Buchanan was newly installed as Nixon's young factotum, writing speeches, preparing briefing books, supervising the In box, all in preparation for Nixon's presidential run two years later. Nixon became a political father to Buchanan, manipulative rather than autocratic, shrewd rather than certain, pragmatic rather than ideological. When asked by reporters in New Hampshire last week whether he was electable, Buchanan found solace in his old mentor. "Nixon and I used to talk," Buchanan recalled. "The argument was that Nixon was unelectable. He said to me, 'We will refute the naysayers by winning.'" That is Pat's logic as well.

Onstage Buchanan plays the Victorian gallant when introducing his wife Shelley. "I want to introduce the lady I intend to nominate to replace Hillary Rodham Clinton," Buchanan says. Shelley sits onstage with a dreamy, sphinxlike smile. It was during Nixon's 1968 campaign that Buchanan worked shoulder to shoulder with Nixon's shy but capable secretary Shelley Scarney. He married the only child of a Detroit ophthalmologist in 1971.

As a White House speechwriter, Buchanan was a kind of in-house agent provocateur, seeking to move Nixon away from the moderate center. His mission, then as now, was to make conservatism the dominant strain of the Republican Party. Buchanan sought to capture George Wallace's constituency for the Republican Party. As early as 1970, he was advising Nixon to exploit the roiling economic anxieties of the middle class for political gain, the same voters to whom he is singing his siren song now. "We should aim our strategy primarily at disaffected Democrats, at blue-collar workers, and at working-class ethnics," Buchanan told Nixon, according to Nixon's 1978 memoir. As a speechwriter, Buchanan used Vice President Spiro Agnew as a kind of ventriloquist's dummy for his white-hot resentments of the political and media establishment. "We would never trust such powers over public opinion in the hands of an elected government--it is time we questioned it in the hands of a small and unelected elite."

In 1971, as Nixon's re-election effort was booting up, Nixon aides John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson and H.R. Haldeman asked Buchanan to launch a secret "plumbers" squad to investigate the President's enemies. But Buchanan spurned the offer, saying it was better to duke it out face to face than deliver a sucker punch. "I have yet to be shown what benefit this would do for the President--or for the rest of us, other than a psychological salve," Buchanan wrote in a July 8, 1971, memo now in the National Archives. After leaving the White House, Pat returned to the typewriter, turning out a syndicated column and establishing an afternoon radio show with liberal Tom Braden that eventually metamorphosed into CNN's Crossfire. Buchanan did his sparring in print and on the air, and in the new era of Shout TV, Pat delivered his blows without guilt or restraint. By the mid-1980s, Buchanan recalls, "I was hitting the long ball," earning as much as $800,000 a year.

Buchanan returned to the West Wing at the beginning of President Ronald Reagan's second term as head of the White House speech-writing machinery. He bolstered Reagan with the Republican right wing, who worried that moderates like Jim Baker were restraining Reagan from being Reagan. But according to former Reagan press secretary Larry Speakes, Buchanan was more trouble than he was worth, and White House aides routinely spent hours cutting hard-line rhetoric from the speeches prepared by his shop.

Buchanan pushed hard for Reagan to support the contras in Nicaragua, and for the President to visit the military cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, despite calls by Jewish groups for Reagan to cancel the visit because of the presence of Waffen SS graves. Buchanan's outspokenness on the subject caused his star to fall, and he left the Administration in 1987, flirting with the idea of running his own insurrectionary campaign for the White House. He got into hot water again with Jewish groups in 1990 after he questioned President Bush's motives in the Persian Gulf War. "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."

Back at the Opera House, Buchanan does not so much feel the audience's pain as sense its anger. Pat's army of the aggrieved assumes that he's against whatever they're against. They listen with radiant, upturned faces. "We can make America the great and good country we grew up in," he says with vibrato in his hoarse and weary voice. Buchanan has mastered the actor's trick of reciting the same lines but giving them a different emphasis each night. When he finishes, there is a collective hush before the audience rises to its feet in applause. Buchanan inclines his head to the orchestra seats and the balcony, but strides off, head down, without taking a curtain call. Great actors do not have to believe what they say, but only seem to. Great politicians believe what they say and also seem to, and that is what resonates with the people who believe in Pat Buchanan.

--With reporting by Mark Thompson/Washington

With reporting by Mark Thompson/Washington